“Well, I’d jump at it if I was asked. But nobody wants to watch tissue processing. I guess the coolest part is removing the specimens from the body, you know what you get to do. Although finding the perfect fixative and knowing which one to use with what is kind of exciting.”
“How long have you worked with Colin?”
“Since 2003. The same year the GBI started becoming paperless. So you’re lucky or not with the Jordan cases, depending on how you look at it. Everything now is electronic, but it wasn’t back then in January 2002. I don’t know about you, but I still like paper. There’s always that one thing someone decided not to scan, except when it’s Colin. He’s crazy obsessive-compulsive. He doesn’t care if it’s a paper napkin that got mixed in with the paperwork, it goes into the file. He’s always saying the devil’s in the details.”
“And he’s right,” I reply.
“I should have been an investigator. I keep asking him to send me to a death-investigation school like the one at the New York City OCME, where you used to be, but it’s all about money. And there’s not any.” She reaches for the BlackBerry and earphones on the table. “I should let you get to work. Let me know if you need anything.”
I remove the top case file from the stack of four on the end of the table closest to the door, and a quick look affirms what I might have hoped for but certainly didn’t expect. Colin has offered me collegial respect and professional courtesy, and quite a lot more than that. By law he’s required to disclose only those records he directly generated, such as the medical examiner’s report of initial investigation, preliminary and final autopsy reports, autopsy photographs, and lab and special studies requests.
He could be stingy with his personal notes and call sheets if he’s of a mind to be, and conveniently overlook almost any documents he chooses, forcing me to ask for them and possibly to butt heads with him. Worse, he could treat me like a member of the public or the media, compelling me to write an official letter of request that will have to be approved and responded to with an invoice for the services and costs involved. Payment would have to be received before the documents can be mailed, and by the time all is said and done, I would be back in Cambridge and it would be the middle of July or later.
“Suze did the tox on Barrie Lou Rivers.” Marino’s big voice precedes him as he enters the conference room and stares at Mandy O’Toole sitting at the far end of the table. “Didn’t know anybody else was in here,” he adds, and I can always tell when he likes what he’s looking at.
She takes off her earphones and says to him, “Hi. I’m Mandy.”
“Yeah? What do you do?”
“Path tech and more.”
“I’m Marino.” He takes a chair next to me. “You can call me Pete. I’m an investigator and more. I guess you’re the watchdog.”
“Don’t mind me. I’m listening to music and catching up on e-mail.” She puts her earphones back on. “You can say anything you want. I’m just the wallpaper.”
“Yeah, I know all about wallpaper,” Marino says. “Can’t tell you how many cases get blown because of wallpaper leaking information.”
I barely listen to them as I take a survey of what Colin Dengate has made available, and I’m appreciative and relieved. I almost want to find him to thank him, and in part it might be a reaction to my being deceived and mishandled by Jaime Berger, and how demeaning and upsetting that feels. Colin easily could have resorted to any number of maneuvers and ploys to make reviewing anything inconvenient if not impossible. But he didn’t.
Regardless of any personal opinion he might have about Lola Daggette’s guilt, he’s not trying to force on others what he perceives as justice. Based on the girth of the files he’s left for me to peruse, he’s doing quite the opposite. He hasn’t vetted much, if anything, including records one might argue he shouldn’t disclose, and that thought leads to others. He wouldn’t be this generous without getting the approval of Chatham County District Attorney Tucker Ridley, and I wouldn’t have expected Ridley to budge an inch beyond his legal obligations as mandated by the state’s open-records act. I could have been offered nothing more than the most basic medical examiner reports when what I’m most interested in is the rest of it.
Police, incident and arrest reports, even criminal or medical histories or witness statements — it could be absolutely anything that might find its way into a decedent’s case record because the detective happened to hand over copies to the medical examiner, and if the ME is like me, every scrap of paper, every electronic file, is preserved. All such documents I assumed would be excluded. When Colin walked me to this conference room, I anticipated finding very little to review and within the hour wandering back down the hall to his office so he could fill in the blanks if he was so inclined.
“Anything that goes on around here, I know about it anyway.” Mandy has taken off her earphones again.
“That right?” Marino blatantly flirts. “What do you know about Barrie Lou Rivers? Any rumors about her floating around? You involved in her case?”
“I did the histology, was in and out of the autopsy room collecting tissue sections while Colin was doing her post.”
“You must have come in after hours,” Marino says, as if he’s investigating Mandy O’Toole for something. “And you weren’t listed as an official witness. Some prison guard named Macon and a couple other people. I don’t remember seeing your name.”
“That’s because I wasn’t an official witness.”
I rearrange my chair to face a view of tall, spindly pines and buzzards floating high above them like black kites, and I decide it could be argued that the Jordan case is no longer active and all direct litigation is final. This might explain why the district attorney made a calculated decision not to impede me in any way. When an investigation is terminated, its documents are subject to disclosure, and as I follow my reasoning a little further, it occurs to me that Tucker Ridley might very well be done with Lola Daggette. Despite Jaime’s retesting of evidence, in Tucker Ridley’s mind and maybe in Colin Dengate’s, the investigation was terminated when Lola Daggette’s appeals were exhausted and the governor refused to commute her sentence to life.
“He always this difficult?” Mandy says, and I realize she’s talking to me about Marino.
“Only if he likes you,” I reply, as I think about public perception.
For the sake of it alone, the district attorney isn’t going to get in the way of someone of my rank and reputation, so he’s opened up the country store and invited me to help myself. Why? Because it doesn’t matter anymore. As far as Tucker Ridley is concerned, Lola Daggette has an appointment with death on Halloween. He has no reason to believe she won’t show up. Or maybe the opposite is true, I consider.
Maybe the new DNA results have been leaked and it doesn’t matter what I look at because Lola’s sentence will be vacated soon, and maybe my other fear is legitimate, too. Dawn Kincaid knows she’s about to face new murder charges in Georgia, where, unlike Massachusetts, she could get the death penalty. So she’s orchestrating something, possibly an escape from a Boston hospital that can’t possibly offer the level of security a forensic facility like Butler has.
“I’m just trying to figure out who was around when her body came in,” Marino continues to badger Mandy O’Toole. “Because the case bugs me. You ask me, there’s something not right about it. It’s a little unusual for a histologist to be working at nine o’clock at night, and that’s bugging me, too.”
“The night Barrie Lou Rivers died, I was working late in my lab, on deadline for a journal article about types of fixatives,” she says.
“I thought that’s what old people use to keep their dentures glued in.”
“The advantages of glutaraldehyde for electron microscopy, and the problems of mercurials.”
“I don’t like mercurial people, either. They’re a pain in the ass.”
“Disposing of the tissue is problematic, since mercury is a heavy metal.” She’s toying with him, too. “You know, maybe better to use Bouin’s solution if what you’re after is nuclear detail. Course, when I work with Bouin’s I end up with yellow fingers for a while if I forget and touch something without gloves.”
“Bet that’s hard to explain on a date.”
“When Colin got the call from the prison I was still here, right down the hall,” she gets back to that, “and I told him I’d hang out and get his table set up, help in any way needed. But I wasn’t a witness.”
“What about rumors,” Marino again says. “What was the word about what happened to her?”
“Originally it was thought that Barrie Lou Rivers choked on her last meal. But no evidence of that. No rumors I’ve heard in recent memory. Nobody was talking about the case anymore until Jaime Berger started looking into it. I would offer water, coffee, but I can’t leave the room. You want something, just tell me and I’ll make a call.” She directs this at me. “If you want something,” she says, smiling at Marino as she puts her headphones back on, “get it
