Red Mist

don’t like it.

“Last I checked, you worked for me, not Jaime. Your loyalty is supposed to be to me, not to her or anyone else.” I sound angry, but what I am is hurt. “I wish you’d sit down.”

“If I’d said I want to help out Jaime, that I want to do some things a little different from the way I’ve been doing them, you would have told me no.” Leather creaks loudly as he settles in the deep armchair.

“I don’t know what you’re referring to or how you could know what I might say.” I feel he’s accusing me of being difficult.

“You don’t have the slightest idea what all is going on, because nobody’s in a position to outright tell you.” He leans forward, his big arms on his bare knees, which are the size of small hubcaps. “Some people want you destroyed.”

“I think it’s been established that there are—” I start to say, but he won’t let me talk.

“Nope.” He shakes his bald head, and stubble on his tan, heavy jaw looks like sand. “You may think you know, but you don’t. Maybe Dawn Kincaid can’t touch you while she’s locked up in the cuckoo’s nest, but there are other ways and other people. She has plans to bring you down.”

“I can’t imagine how she would communicate illegal or violent intentions without the staff at Butler knowing, without the police knowing, without the FBI knowing,” I say logically, coolly, trying to get the emotion and heat out of my mood, trying not to feel wounded to my core about what Jack and Marino joked about twenty years ago, about how they really felt about me, how they ridiculed and isolated me.

“That’s easy.” His eyes are locked on mine. “Her scum-bucket lawyers, for starters. They can communicate with her in private the same way Jaime has with Kathleen Lawler. If you’re worried about being monitored or recorded, you communicate in writing. You pass notes. You write it on a legal pad, and your client reads it and doesn’t say anything.”

“I seriously doubt Dawn Kincaid’s lawyers have hired a hit man, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“I don’t know if they’d hire a hit man,” he considers. “But they want you destroyed and in prison. You’re in a lot of danger any way you slice it.”

I can tell he completely believes what he just said, and I wonder how much of it came from Jaime. What has she contrived and why?

“I suspect I was at graver risk driving that van of yours than being taken out by a hit man,” I retort. “What if I’d broken down out in the middle of nowhere?”

“I would have known if you were broke down. I know exactly where you were all day, right down to the gun store one-point-four miles north of Dean Forest Road. I have a GPS tracking device on my van and can see where it is on a Google map.”

“This is ridiculous. Who orchestrated all this, and what’s the real reason?” I ask. “Because I don’t believe it was your idea. Jaime’s down here talking to Lola Daggette? What could that possibly have to do with me? Or with you? What is it she really wants?”

“About two months ago, Jaime called the CFC,” he says. “I happened to be in Bryce’s office and got on the phone with her, and she said she was following up on information relating to Lola Daggette, who happens to be in the same prison as Kathleen Lawler. All Jaime was interested in, supposedly, was if I happened to know anything about Lola Daggette, if there was any reason her name has come up during the Dawn Kincaid investigation—”

“And you never passed this on to me,” I interrupt him.

“She asked to talk to me, not you,” he said, as if Jaime Berger is the director of the CFC, or maybe Marino is. “It didn’t take me long to figure out that her calling wasn’t what it appeared to be. For one thing, caller ID didn’t come up as the DA’s office. It came up as unknown.She was calling from her apartment in the middle of the day, which I thought was unusual. Then she said, ‘Things are so deep I need to decompress before I come up for air.’ When I used to work for her, that was our code, meaning she needed to talk to me in private and not over the phone. So I went straight to South Station and took the Acela to New York.”

Marino’s not apologetic, he’s so sure of what he’s doing and saying. He has no qualms about what he’s withheld from me for two months because the skillful, shrewd Jaime Berger has moved him around like a plastic pawn. She knew exactly what she was doing when she called him and spoke in code.

“It just amazes me,” he then says, “that you live in the same damn house as the FBI and you don’t know your phones are being tapped.”

He settles deeper in the leather chair and crosses his thick legs, and I can see remnants of a past strength in them that had to be formidable. I remember photographs I’ve seen of him when he was a boxer. A heavyweight and a brute, nothing civilized about him. How many people are walking around with concussive head injuries because of him, how many people did he brain-damage, how many faces did he smash?

“They’re going through your e-mail,” he says, as I notice pale scars on his big knees and wonder how he got them. “They may be tracking you, tailing you.”

I get up from the couch.

“You know how it works.” His voice follows me into Jaime Berger’s well-appointed kitchen, which looks unused. “They obtain a court order to spy on you and then let you know after the fact.”

9

Idon’t offer him anything to drink. I offer him nothing as I open the refrigerator, scanning glass shelves. Wine, seltzer, Diet Coke. Greek yogurt. Wasabi and pickled ginger and low-salt soy sauce.

Opening cabinets, I find little inside them, just the rudimentary dishes and cookware one might expect in a furnished rental. A salt-and-pepper set but no other spices, a fifth of Johnnie Walker Blue. I help myself to a bottle of water in the pantry, where there are more diet drinks, and an assortment of vitamins, analgesics, and digestive aids, and I recognize the desolate patterns of a life that’s stopped. I know what is in the cupboards, pantries, and refrigerators of people who are terrified of loss. Jaime hasn’t gotten over Lucy.

“How the hell does he keep something like this from you?” Marino won’t shut up about Benton. “I wouldn’t have. I don’t give a shit about protocol. If I knew the feds were after you, I’d tell you, give you a friggin’ heads-up, which is exactly what I’m doing while he sits around and is the good Bureau boy, playing by the rules, not doing a damn thing while his own damn agency investigates his wife. Just like he didn’t do a damn thing the night it happened. Sitting in front of the fire having a drink while you wander outside in the damn dark by yourself.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“He knew Dawn Kincaid and maybe others were on the loose, and he lets you go outside alone at night.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“It’s a miracle you aren’t dead. I blame him, damn it. In a blink it could have all been over with because Benton couldn’t bother.”

I walk back to the couch.

“I won’t forgive him.” As if it is for Marino to forgive, and I wonder what Jaime has managed to stir up in him about Benton.

How much has she encouraged the jealousy that is always there, ready to lunge or strike with the slightest provocation.

“He didn’t want you to come down here, but he didn’t volunteer to come with you, now, did he?” Marino says loudly and hotly, and I think about the letters, about how insecure and selfish he can be.

When I was first appointed the chief medical examiner of Virginia and Marino was Richmond’s star detective, he couldn’t have been more unhelpful and unkind. He did what he could to run me off the job until he realized he was better served by having me as an ally and a friend. Maybe that’s what really motivates him, after all. My authority and the way I’ve always taken care of him. Better to have me on his side. Better to have a good job, especially when good jobs are few and far between and he’s not getting any younger. If I fired him, he’d be lucky to get hired as a damn Pinkerton guard, I think furiously, and then instantly I feel beaten up inside and on the verge of tears.

“I wouldn’t have wanted Benton to come to Savannah with me, and he certainly couldn’t have gone into the