related to Lowcountry summer weather. Heat stroke. A heart attack. High cholesterol. Kathleen never had taken care of herself worth shit, Chang was told.
According to Officer Macon, Kathleen reported nothing unusual earlier in the day, wasn’t ill or out of sorts when her breakfast tray of powdered eggs, grits, white toast, an orange, and a half pint of milk was passed through the drawer of her cell door at five-forty a.m. In fact, she seemed cheerful and chatty, reported the corrections officer who delivered her meal and later was questioned by Officer Macon.
“He told Sammy that she was asking what it would take to get a Texas omelet with hash browns. She was joking around,” Colin says. “Apparently of late she’d become more obsessed than usual with food, and it’s Sammy’s impression from what’s been said to him that she might have been assuming she wasn’t going to be at the GPFW much longer. Maybe she was fantasizing about her favorite things to eat because she was anticipating having whatever she wanted, and I’ve seen this syndrome before. People block out what they’ve been deprived of until they believe it’s within their reach. Then that’s all they think about. Food. Sex. Alcohol. Drugs.”
“Probably all of the above, in her case,” Marino’s loud voice sounds from the backseat.
“I think Kathleen was under the impression a deal was in the works if she was cooperative,” I say to Colin, as I write a text-message to Benton. “Her sentence was going to be reduced and she was on her way back to the free world.”
I explain to Benton that he and Lucy might not be able to reach us when they land in Savannah, that I’m on my way to a death scene, and I tell him whose. I ask him to let me know as soon as possible if there is anything new with Dawn Kincaid and her alleged asthma attack.
“Has anyone bothered to mention to Jaime Berger that she has shit for clout with prosecutors and judges around here?” Colin looks in the rearview mirror, directing this to Marino.
“I can’t hear too good in this wind tunnel,” he answers loudly.
“Well, I don’t think you want the windows up,” Colin yells.
“Whether Jaime has clout or not around here, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of organized protest, especially these days, because of the Internet,” I remind Colin of the damage Jaime Berger can do. “She’s perfectly capable of mounting a campaign of social and political pressure, similar to what happened in Mississippi recently when civil- and human-rights groups pressured the governor into suspending the sentences of those two sisters who’d gotten life sentences for robbery.”
“Damn ridiculous,” Colin says in disgust. “Who the hell gets life for robbery?”
“I can’t hear a damn thing back here.” Marino is perched on the edge of the bench seat, leaning forward and sweating.
“You need to buckle up,” I say over the hot wind rushing in through open windows, the engine loud and growling, as if the Land Rover wants to claw across a desert or up a rocky slope and is bored and restive with the tameness of a paved highway.
We are making good time, on 204 East now, passing the Savannah Mall, heading toward Forest River and the Little Ogeechee, and marshland and endless miles of scrub trees. The sun is directly overhead, the glare as intense as a flashgun, blindingly bright as it beats down on the square nose of the white Land Rover and the windshields of other traffic.
“My point,” I say to Colin, “is Jaime’s perfectly capable of going to the media and making Georgia look like a stronghold of bigoted barbarians. In fact, she’d enjoy it. And I doubt Tucker Ridley or Governor Manfred wants that.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” Colin says. “It’s moot.”
He’s right, it is, at least in Kathleen Lawler’s case. She won’t be getting a suspended sentence or even a reduced one, and she’ll never taste free-world food again.
“At eight this morning she was escorted to a recreation cage for her hour of exercise,” Colin says, and he explains that he was told the one hour allowed for exercise is set early in the morning during the summer.
Supposedly Kathleen walked inside the cage more slowly than usual, resting frequently as she complained about how hot it was. She was tired, and the humidity made it difficult to breathe, and when she was returned to her cell at a few minutes past nine she complained to other inmates that the heat had worn her out and she should have stayed inside. For the next two hours, Kathleen continued to complain on and off that she wasn’t feeling well. She was exhausted. She found it difficult to move, and she was having a hard time catching her breath.
She worried that breakfast hadn’t agreed with her and she shouldn’t have been walking around in the heat and humidity that was bad enough to kill a horse, as she reportedly put it. At around noon she said she was having chest pains and hoped she wasn’t having a heart attack, and then Kathleen wasn’t talking anymore and inmates in other cells nearby began shouting for help. Kathleen’s cell door was unlocked at approximately twelve-fifteen. She was discovered slumped over on her bed and could not be resuscitated.
“I agree it’s strange she said what she did to you,” Colin remarks, weaving around traffic as if responding to a scene where it’s not too late to save someone. “But there’s no way an inmate on death row could have gotten to her.”
He’s referring to Kathleen Lawler’s claim that she was moved to Bravo Pod because of Lola Daggette and that Kathleen was afraid of her.
“I’m simply repeating what she told me,” I reply. “I didn’t necessarily take her seriously at the time. I didn’t see how it was possible for Lola Daggette to, quote, ‘get’ her, but Kathleen seemed to believe Lola intended to harm her.”
“Bizarre timing, and I’ve certainly seen my share of it,” Colin says. “Cases where the decedent had some sort of premonition or prediction that didn’t make sense to anybody. Then next thing you know, boop. The person’s dead.”
Certainly I’ve had family members tell me that their loved one had a dream or a feeling that presaged his or her death. Something told the person not to get on the plane or into the car or not to take a certain exit or go hunting that day or out for a hike or a run. It’s nothing new to hear such stories or even to be told that a victim issued warnings and instructions about an imminent violent end and who would be to blame. But I can’t get Kathleen Lawler’s comments out of my head or push aside my suspicion that I’m not the only one who heard them.
If our conversation was covertly recorded, then there are others who are privy to Kathleen’s complaints about how outrageous and unfair it was to move her to a cell where danger was directly overhead, as she described it not even twenty-four hours ago.
“She also commented on the isolation of Bravo Pod and that the guards could do something bad to her and there would be no one to witness it,” I tell Colin. “She worried that by being moved into segregation she’d been made vulnerable. She seemed sincere, not necessarily rational but as if she believed it. In other words, I didn’t get the sense she was saying it for effect.”
“That’s the problem with inmates, especially those who’ve spent most of their lives locked up. They’re believable. They’re so manipulative it’s not manipulation anymore, at least not to them,” Colin says. “And they’re always saying someone’s going to get them, mistreat them, hurt them, kill them. And of course, they’re not guilty and don’t deserve to be in prison.”
When we turn off Dean Forest Road, passing the same strip mall where I used a pay phone the day before, I ask about the blood droplets in the photographs I was in the midst of reviewing when Sammy Chang called. Is either Colin or Marino aware there was blood in the Jordans’ sunporch, in their backyard and their garden? Someone was bleeding, and it’s possible this person was leaving the house, perhaps exiting the property through the garden and a stand of trees that led to East Liberty Street. Or perhaps the person was injured in the backyard and dripped blood while returning to the house. Blood that wasn’t cleaned up, I add, which makes me wonder if it was left at the time of the murders.
“A steady drip,” I explain. “Someone bleeding from an upright position while moving, possibly walking in or out of the house. For example, if someone cut his or her hand and was holding it up. Or a cut to the head or a nosebleed.”
“It’s curious you’d mention a cut hand,” Colin replies.
“I don’t think I know about this.” Marino is loud in my ear again.
“I would imagine the bloodstains I’m talking about were swabbed for DNA,” I add.
“I don’t know about blood on a porch or in the yard,” Marino says. “I don’t think Jaime’s got those photos.”
