Red Mist

“Did he ever help out at Liberty House?” I get up to adjust the temperature in the room.

“Not that I know of.”

“Liberty House is gone, I assume. Let me know if you get too warm in here.” I sit back down, noting that Mandy O’Toole is ignoring us, or appears to be.

“A homeless shelter for women run by the Salvation Army. Nobody from the old days there anymore, and it doesn’t look the same, either,” Marino says. “You read this stuff, and what goes through your mind is Lola Daggette wasn’t smart enough to kill anyone and get away with it.”

“She didn’t get away with it. But we don’t know that she killed anyone.”

“The devil wore her clothing and then left it in her bathroom after the fact,” he says. “And she won’t tell anybody who the devil is except the name Payback?”

“Seems she started thinking about paybackwhen she was caught in the bathroom literally red-handed, washing the bloody clothing,” I reply, arranging more paperwork in front of me. “Someone was paying her back, someone from her drug days on the street. Seems she might have been thinking that she was set up, and maybe Paybackis how she began to refer to whoever is responsible.”

“You really think she had nothing to do with it and doesn’t know who did?”

“I don’t know what I think. Not exactly, not yet.”

“Well, I sure as hell know how it sounds,” Marino says. “Sounds the same now as it did at the time. Makes no friggin’ sense. Plus, you’ll see when you get to the DNA part that it’s everybody’s. Lola’s clothes have the blood of the entire Jordan family on them, so I’m telling Jaime from day one, I don’t know how you explain that away.”

“It gets explained away by Jaime the same way it was by Lola’s original defense team. Lola’s DNA wasn’t recovered from the Jordan house or from their bodies or whatever clothing they had on when they were killed,” I reply, as I come to a section in the transcript that includes photographs. “Her DNA was recovered from the clothing she was washing in the shower, and nowhere else. Only from the corduroys, sweater, and Windbreaker, but so was the DNA of the victims. To a jury, that’s quite incriminating, although scientifically it raises questions.” I don’t say what questions.

Not in front of Mandy O’Toole, who gives no sign she can hear us or is interested as she types on her BlackBerry with headphones on, purportedly listening to music.

“She’s naked in the shower, washing the clothing,” Marino says. “Seems like she’d leave her DNA on it just from that. She’s touching everything. And her DNA probably was on the clothing to begin with, since they were the street clothes she had on when she first arrived at Liberty House.”

“Correct. So no matter where the clothing came from, she’d certainly contaminated it with her own DNA by the time she was ordered out of the shower,” I agree. “That her DNA was recovered from her own clothing isn’t necessarily significant. Now, if another individual’s DNA was recovered in addition to Lola’s, that would have been a different story,” I add, as I think of Dawn Kincaid, whom I’m not going to mention. “If another individual had worn her clothing, and that person’s DNA was recovered from the pants, sweater, and Windbreaker left on the bathroom floor?” I’m careful what I say as I probe for information.

I won’t take the chance that Mandy O’Toole might overhear any allusions to new DNA results. According to Jaime, Colin Dengate doesn’t know. Scarcely anybody does, and I don’t understand how she can feel so sure of that, unless it’s what she wants to believe and her wish is her reality. In my opinion she should have filed a motion to vacate Lola’s sentence weeks ago. Then the truth would be known and there would be nothing to leak. It would have been safer for the case but not safer for Jaime. She couldn’t have hoodwinked me into coming to Savannah if I’d known about her new career and her big case down here.

She wasn’t off the mark last night when she doubted I would have volunteered to be her forensic expert if I’d had time to think about it, if she’d been up front with me instead of lying and manipulating and setting me up to be sitting where I am right this minute. The more I’ve mulled over everything that’s happened, the more certain I am that I would have said no. I would have referred her to someone else, but not because I would have worried about Colin’s response to my reviewing his findings and possibly second-guessing him. I would have been worried about how Lucy would react. I would have felt that anything I did with Jaime would be tainted by an unpleasant past and would be a bad idea for almost every reason imaginable.

“Well, if someone borrowed Lola’s clothes so this person could commit multiple murders, why wasn’t that person’s DNA recovered from the pants, sweater, the Windbreaker?” This is Marino’s way of confirming that neither Dawn Kincaid’s nor any other individual’s DNA was recovered from Lola’s clothing.

“Washing with hot soapy water could have eradicated another donor’s DNA if we’re talking sweat and skin cells. Maybe not blood, but it depends on how much, and if it was a small amount, perhaps from being scratched by a child, the blood might have been washed off in the shower,” I contemplate out loud. “Especially in early 2002, when the testing wasn’t nearly as sensitive as it is today. Did anybody look at Lola Daggette’s shoes?”

“What shoes are you talking about?”

“She must have had shoes. Were they issued by Liberty House?”

“I don’t think the wards were issued shoes. Only jeans and denim shirts. But I really don’t know,” Marino answers me, as he continues looking at Mandy O’Toole, who isn’t looking at him. “Nobody’s ever said anything about shoes that I’m aware of.”

“Someone should have looked for blood on her shoes. I see nothing here to indicate Lola was cleaning a pair of shoes in the shower. Or undergarments, for that matter. If clothing is saturated, the blood soaks through onto panties, undershirts, bras, socks. But she was washing only the pants, sweater, and jacket.”

“You and shoes,” Marino says.

“Because they’re really important.”

Shoes are happy to tell me where a person’s feet were at the time of a terminal event. At a homicide scene. On the brake pedal or accelerator. On a dusty windowsill or balcony before the person jumped or was pushed or fell. On the body of a victim who was stomped and kicked, or in one case I had, in wet cement when a murderer fled the scene through a construction site. Shoes, boots, sandals, all types of footwear have tread patterns and unique flaws that leave their mark, and they deposit evidence and carry it away.

“Whoever killed the Jordans would have had blood on his or her shoes,” I say. “Even if it was trace amounts, something would have been there.”

“Like I said, I haven’t heard anything about shoes.”

“Unless Colin has them in the lab, stored with the other evidence, it’s too late now,” I reply, as I look through photographs included in Lola Daggette’s bid for clemency last fall.

The first few pages are portraits and candid shots intended to humanize the victims and inflame the governor of Georgia, Zebulon Manfred, who ultimately denied clemency to Lola Daggette. He is quoted in a photocopied newspaper article included in the transcript as stating that efforts to spare her life are based on evidence already heard and rejected by a jury of her peers and the appeals courts. “We can ruminate about this heartless act of human depravity until the cows come home,” he said in a public statement, “and it all comes back to the same horror acted out by Lola Daggette, who was in a mood to massacre an entire family on the early Sunday morning of January sixth, 2002. And she did. With no motive whatsoever except that she felt like it.”

I can only imagine the governor’s outrage when he looked at a studio portrait of the Jordan family during the last Christmas season of their lives, just weeks before their brutal deaths. Clarence Jordan, with his shy smile and kind gray eyes, was dressed festively in a dark green suit and tartan plaid vest, his wife, Gloria, sitting next to him, a plain-looking young woman with dark brown hair parted down the middle, demure in green velvet and ruffles. Their five-year-old twins are seated on either side of their parents, towheads with rosy cheeks and big blue eyes, Josh dressed exactly like his father, Brenda like her mother. There are more photos, and I flip through them, getting the point all too well as they draw whoever is looking at them deeper into the nightmare that begins on page seventeen of the transcript.

A child’s bloody bare arm dangles off a blood-soaked bed. The wallpaper is Winnie-the-Pooh and the sheets have a western pattern of lassos, cowboy hats, and cacti, all of it spattered with elongated drops of cast-off blood, and drips and large dark stains, and what appear to me to be wipe marks. Dawn Kincaid enters my mind without my inviting her, and I see her inside that dark bedroom, pausing during her frenzied attack, using the sheets and bedspread to clean off her hands and the weapon. I feel her lust and rage and hear her breathing hard and fast as her heart hammers and she stabs and slashes, and I wonder why she would slaughter two children, two five-year- olds.

Twins, a boy and a girl who looked almost exactly alike at that young age, pretty blue-eyed blonds. Had she