Red Mist

help themselves. They steal.

I did what I was told and published the recipes — my recipes — and gave no credit to anyone, including me, that’s the fucking irony. I’m the one cheated. All of you pouting, sulking, eating your slop in cold silence when I’m around as if you’ve been wronged. There’s no room at your table when I get there because the seat is saved.

Don’t think I don’t know the source. Lemmings led into the sea.

Lights out in five. And again the darkness comes.

Mindful of eyes and ears beyond the open door of the cell, I say nothing about what I’ve just read. I do not comment that at least one notepad seems to be missing, possibly a diary, maybe more than one that Kathleen had been keeping since June 3, and, more important, since she was moved to Bravo Pod. I don’t believe she abruptly stopped writing, certainly not after she was transferred into segregation.

During the past two weeks, I would have expected her to have written more, not less, having little to do twenty-three hours a day except to sit inside this tiny cell with no view and its terrible television reception, cut off from other inmates and her job in the library, and no longer having a magazine or e-mail access. What might she have recorded in writings that someone doesn’t want us to read? But I don’t ask, and I don’t mention how struck I am by her metaphor of lemmings led into the sea.

Are lemmings other inmates, and if so, who has led them? I envision Lola Daggette giving Tara Grimm the finger a few minutes ago, and it very well may have been Lola who instigated the kicking of the cell doors. Full of bravado and hostility and with no impulse control and a low IQ, she was someone Kathleen feared. But Lola Daggette isn’t the reason Kathleen is dead on her bed. Lola’s not the reason inmates in the general population of medium security started shunning Kathleen in the chow hall, either. How would inmates in other pods have a clue what Lola Daggette thinks or says, or whether she has a problem with someone? She is as isolated and confined in her upstairs cell as Kathleen was in this one.

I suspect Kathleen was referring to someone else, and I’m reminded of Tara Grimm’s explanation that Kathleen had to be moved into protective custody because word got out that she was a convicted child molester. What word? What got out? Information the warden could blame on others, something that was on TV, caught by another inmate, by someone, she wasn’t sure who, and I didn’t believe her when she offered this explanation in her office yesterday, and I don’t believe her now.

I suspect I know who has been doing the influencing. Provoke inmates into being angered over something as petty as credit in a magazine, and nothing got published in Inklingsthat Tara Grimm didn’t approve. She had the final say about recipes with no names attached, and inmates felt slighted and it’s true that small slights can be huge, and Kathleen got moved. Maybe in her paranoid and agitated state she came up with the reason: Lola Daggette was behind an unprecedented loss of freedom that must have felt like punishment. Or perhaps a suggestion was made to Kathleen. Guards like Officer Macon may have informed her, taunted her, teased her into believing that Lola was making threats, and maybe she was. It doesn’t matter. Lola didn’t kill her.

I don’t let on to Marino that anything is unusual when he rustles past me in white and places a digital thermometer on the foot of the bed to record the ambient temperature. He hands a second thermometer to Colin for the temperature of the body. Despite witness accounts that place the time of death at approximately twelve- fifteen p.m., we will calculate it ourselves based on postmortem changes. People make mistakes. They are shocked and traumatized, and get the details wrong. Some people lie. Maybe everybody at the GPFW does.

I look around some more, entertaining the possibility that a notepad for June will turn up in here somewhere as I scan gray walls taped with the handwritten poems and passages of prose Kathleen mentioned to me in e-mails. The poem titled Fatethat she sent me is directly over the small steel ledge of a desk anchored to the wall. Near a steel stool bolted to the floor is another transparent plastic basket, this one large and stacked with undergarments, a uniform neatly folded, and packs of ramen noodles and two honey buns Kathleen must have gotten from the commissary. She told me she had no money because she no longer had her library job, yet she seems to have made purchases. Maybe they aren’t recent. I’m reminded she’s been in the segregation of Bravo Pod only two weeks. I poke the honey buns with my gloved finger. They don’t feel stale.

At the bottom of the plastic basket are copies of Inklings,several dozen of them, including the one for June that Kathleen referred to in the journal entry I just read. On the magazine’s front cover are artistic renderings of the contributors, Andy Warhol — like portraits of each woman who is famous for a month because something she wrote will be read by inmates at the GPFW and whoever else has access to the magazine. On the back cover are credits for the staff: the art director, the design team, and of course the editor, Kathleen Lawler, with special thanks to Warden Tara Grimm for her support of the arts, “for her humanity and enlightenment.”

“She’s still quite warm.” Colin is squatting next to the steel bed and holding up the thermometer. “Ninety- four-point-six.”

“It’s seventy-three in here,” Marino says, as his thick gloved fingers hold up the thermometer that was on the foot of the bed. He looks at his watch. “At two-nineteen.”

“Allegedly dead two hours and she’s cooled around four degrees,” I observe. “A little rapid but within normal limits.” That’s the best I can say.

“Well, she’s clothed and it’s relatively warm in here,” Colin agrees. “All we’re going to get is a ballpark.”

He’s implying that if Kathleen has been dead thirty minutes longer or even an hour longer than we’ve been led to believe by those giving us information, we aren’t going to know by postmortem indicators such as her temperature or rigor mortis.

“Rigor’s barely starting in her fingers.” Colin manipulates the fingers of Kathleen’s left hand. “Livor’s not apparent yet.”

“I wonder if she could have gotten overheated outside in the cage,” Marino says, looking around at the writings taped to the walls, taking in every inch of the cell. “Maybe she got heat exhaustion. That can happen, right? You come back inside, but you’ve already got a problem.”

“If she’d died of hyperthermia,” Colin says, as he stands up, “her core temperature would be higher than this. It would be higher than normal even after several hours, and her rigor likely would have sped up and be disproportional to her livor. Also, her symptoms as described by the inmate in the cell across from this one are inconsistent with a prolonged exposure to excessive heat. Cardiac arrest? Now, that’s quite possible. And that certainly can happen following strenuous activities on a hot day.”

“All she did was walk in the cage. And she rested every lap or two,” Marino repeats what’s been said.

“The definition of strenuous is different for different people,” Colin replies. “Someone who is sedentary inside a cell most of the time? She goes outdoors and it’s very hot and humid, and she loses too much fluid. Blood volume decreases, and that causes stress to the heart.”

“She was drinking water while she was outside,” Marino says.

“But was she drinking enough water? Was she drinking enough water inside her cell? I doubt it. On an average day the average person loses about ten cups of water. On an extremely hot, humid day, you can lose three gallons or more if you sweat enough,” Colin says.

He walks out of the cell, and I ask Chang if he has any objections to my continuing to examine what’s on the shelves and on the desk, and he indicates he doesn’t. I retrieve a transparent plastic basket of mail as I’m again reminded of the letters Jack Fielding supposedly wrote, describing how difficult I am, how awful I am to work for. I look for any letters from him or from Dawn Kincaid and don’t find them. I find nothing from anyone that might be important, except for a letter that appears to be from me. I stare in disbelief at the return address, at the CFC logo printed on a ten-by-thirteen-inch white envelope that Bryce orders in quantities of five thousand for the CFC:

Kay Scarpetta, MD, JD

COL USAF

Chief Medical Examiner and Director

Cambridge Forensic Center

The self-sealing flap has been slit open, probably by prison personnel who scan all incoming mail, and inside is a folded sheet with my office letterhead. The note is typed and supposedly signed by me in black ink:

June 26

Dear Kathleen,

I very much appreciate your e-mails to me about Jack and can only imagine your pain and it’s impact during