offers me a small box of slippery-elm throat lozenges. “You ever had these?”
I take one because my mouth and throat are parched.
“Best thing since sliced bread if you’ve got to give a talk or testify. Popular with professional singers, which is how I know about them.” He takes the box back from me and pops a lozenge into his mouth.
“I didn’t call you, Colin, because I wasn’t aware I was scheduled to see you until last night.” I talk around the lozenge, which has a slightly rough texture and pleasant maple flavor.
He frowns as if what I just said is impossible, and his chair creaks as he leans back in it, not taking his eyes off me, the throat lozenge a small lump in the side of his cheek.
“I came to Savannah because I had an appointment at the Georgia Prison for Women to talk to an inmate named Kathleen Lawler,” I start to explain, as I wonder where to begin.
Already, he’s nodding. “Berger told me,” he says. “She said you were coming down here to meet with an inmate at the GPFW, which is all the more reason I didn’t understand why you didn’t call me yourself to at least say hi and maybe let’s have lunch.”
“Jaime told you I was coming,” I repeat, as I wonder what she has said to him and others, and how much of it was tailored to suit her purposes. “I’m sorry I didn’t call and suggest lunch. But I really thought I would be in and out.”
“She’s called here enough,” he says, about Jaime. “Everybody in the front office knows who the hell she is.” The lozenge slips from one cheek to the other as if there is a small animal moving around inside his mouth. “Good stuff, huh? Also a demulcent. Tried ones before, more than I can shake a stick at, that purport to be a demulcent but aren’t. These work, really soothe the mucous membrane. Sodium- and gluten-free. No preservatives and importantly, no menthol. That’s the misnomer out there. That menthol is the cure-all for the throat, when in fact what it does is cause temporary loss of the vocal cords.” He savors the lozenge, looking up at the ceiling as if he’s a sommelier tasting a complex grand cru. “I’ve started singing in a barbershop quartet,” he adds, as if that explains everything.
“In summary, I was to be here in Savannah very briefly for another reason and was informed last night that an appointment was made for me to come to your office. I gather you aren’t being cooperative in a way that suits her,” I say to him. “I told her you’re slightly stubborn and not a redneck.”
“Well, I am a redneck,” he says. “But I think I’m understanding why you didn’t call me yourself, and that makes me feel better, because I did feel a little dissed. Maybe that’s stupid, but I did, it was so out of the blue hearing from her and not you. Regardless of anything personal, I think I get what’s going on more than you might imagine. Jaime Berger is somewhat histrionic, and it fits her script if I’m the redneck bigoted medical examiner in Savannah who stone-walls her because I’m intent on Lola Daggette getting the needle. You know, kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out. That’s the way everybody thinks south of the Mason-Dixon Line. And west of it.”
“Jaime says you didn’t come out to greet her when she was here. That you ignored her.”
“I sure as hell didn’t greet her, because I was talking on the phone to a poor woman who didn’t want to be told that her husband’s death was a suicide.” His eyes narrow, and he gets louder and more indignant. “That his gun didn’t accidentally go off while he was outside drinking beer and mending his crab pots. And just because he hugged her and seemed to be in an unusually good mood and said he loved her before he went outside that night didn’t mean he didn’t have suicidal thoughts, and I deeply regretted that what I filled in on the autopsy report and his death certificate means she won’t get his life insurance. I’m right in the middle of having to tell someone shit like that when Berger shows up here dressed like Wall Street. Then she’s hovering in my damn doorway while the woman is crying uncontrollably on the other end and I sure as hell wasn’t going to hang up on her and offer some pushy New York attorney coffee.”
“I can see you have no feelings about her,” I say wryly.
“I’ve got the Jordan cases for you, including photographs of the crime scene, which I think you’ll find helpful. I’ll let you look and get your own impressions, and then I’m happy to discuss anything you want.”
“There’s a perception you are convinced that Lola Daggette committed the murders and did so alone. As I recall from your presentation of this case during the NAME meeting in Los Angeles, you seem pretty firm in your opinion.”
“I’m on the side of truth, Kay. Just like you.”
“I must admit I find it unusual that DNA supposedly from blood and skin under Brenda Jordan’s fingernails wasn’t a match for Lola Daggette. And it didn’t match a family member. An unknown DNA profile, in other words.”
“
“I might conclude from the DNA that it’s possible more than one assailant or intruder was involved,” I add.
“I don’t interpret the lab reports or decide what they mean.”
“I’m just curious if you have an opinion about it, Colin.”
“Brenda Jordan’s hands were incredibly bloody,” he says. “Yes, an unknown DNA profile was related to my swabbing under her nails when I did the autopsies, but I don’t know what that means. It could have been from an unrelated source. Her own blood was under her nails. Her brother’s DNA was under her nails.”
“Her brother’s?”
“He was in the bed next to hers, and I’m guessing his blood was transferred to Brenda’s body, to her hands, when the killer attacked her, probably after murdering Josh first. Or maybe the killer stabbed Brenda first. Maybe the killer thought she was dead and started on the brother, and Brenda wasn’t dead and tried to run. I don’t know exactly what happened and probably never will. Like I said, I don’t interpret lab reports or decide what they mean.”
“I feel compelled to emphasize that an unknown donor of DNA at that scene should have caused the police to consider more than one assailant might have been involved.”
“In the first place, the scene wasn’t contained all that well, and a lot of people ended up in the house who shouldn’t have been there.”
“And these people who shouldn’t have been there touched the bodies?”
“Well, not that, thank God. The cops know better than to let anyone near my bodies or they’ll have hell to pay from me. But more to the point, at the time it just wasn’t accepted as a possibility that someone other than Lola Daggette was involved.”
“Why?”
“She was in a halfway house to deal with anger management and her problems with drugs. Within hours after the murders, she was discovered washing clothing that was stained with the Jordans’ blood. And she was local. I remember there was some talk at the time that she might have read or heard about Dr. Jordan in the news and realized he had a lot of money, was a successful doctor from an old Savannah family that had made a fortune from cotton. His mansion was an easy walk from the halfway house, where she’d been for more than a month when the murders occurred. She’d had plenty of time to gather intelligence, including figuring out that the family didn’t always bother with the alarm system.”
“Because they’d had a number of false alarms.”
“Kids,” he says. “A big problem with alarm systems is kids accidentally setting them off.”
“What seems to be nothing more than conjecture,” I point out. “It’s also conjectured that burglary wasn’t the motive.”
“No evidence of it, but who knows? An entire family dead. If something was missing, who’s going to say?”
“Was the house ransacked?”
“It wasn’t. But again, if everyone is dead, who’s to say if something was looked through or moved?”
“So the DNA results didn’t concern you at the time. I don’t mean to keep pushing you on this. But the results bother me.”
“Push all you want. Just doing my job. I’ve got no dog in the fight,” he says. “The DNA was commingled. As you well know, it’s not always simple to decide what sample the result is from. Was the unknown DNA from blood or skin cells or from something else, and when was it left? It could have been from a source that has nothing to do with the case. A recent guest in the house. Someone Brenda had been in contact with earlier in the day. You know what they say. Don’t put your case in a lab-coat pocket. DNA doesn’t mean crap if you don’t know how it got there and when. In fact, it’s my theory that the more sensitive the testing gets, the less it’s going to mean. Just because
