“We don’t know that someone else did that,” I reply. “She might have gone through it herself.”
“For what besides pills?”
“We don’t know that she’s an overdose.”
“She make it a habit to carry a lot of cash in her wallet?”
“I have no idea what’s in her wallet or how much cash she carries routinely,” I reply.
“If she does, that could be a motive.”
“We don’t know that anything’s been stolen.”
“Possible she was strangled or smothered?”
“No ligature mark or petechial hemorrhages,” I answer. “Nothing to make me think that from what I’m seeing. But she needs to be carefully examined. She needs an autopsy. Right this moment, we don’t know why she’s dead.”
“What do you know about her relationship with her friend?” He means Marino.
“He used to work for her when he was with NYPD and has been helping her very recently as a consultant. Understandably, he’s upset.”
“NYPD?”
“Investigations. He was assigned to the sex crimes unit, to her.”
“So maybe something was going on with them,” he decides. “Maybe our first priority should be to find out if she placed an order for sushi last night,” I reply. “Instead of assuming the obvious. That maybe it’s someone close to her who maybe had something going on and maybe did something terrible.”
“It usually is, though.”
“Usually? I’d say often but not always or usually.”
“Really, though.” He’s sure of himself. “You look in the backyard first.”
“You look where the evidence takes you,” I reply.
“You’re joking about sushi, right?”
“No.”
“Oh, I thought you were implying raw fish did it. Me? I won’t touch the stuff. Especially now. Oil spills, radioactive water. I may quit eating fish. Even cooked.”
“There will be take-out containers, a bag, a receipt in the trash. Leftovers in the refrigerator,” I inform him. “Please make sure that neither you nor your partner touches anything. I advise you to stay out of the kitchen and let Investigator Chang handle it or Dr. Dengate. Or whoever they direct.”
“Yeah, Sammy’s the investigator, not me, and no way I’m messing with his scene. Not that I couldn’t. I might put in for it one of these days because I think I’m a good fit. You know, attention to detail, that’s the most important part, and I’m anal about detail. I’ve worked with him before, the OD I was just telling you about.” Officer Harley gets on his radio and transmits, “Could be an exposure. Don’t touch anything in the kitchen or trash or anywhere.”
“A what?” his partner’s voice replies inside the bedroom.
“Just don’t touch anything. Nothing at all.”
“Ten-four.”
I decide not to say anything else about sushi or my suspicions. I’m not going to describe my time with Jaime last night. I’ll save it for Chang, for Colin, for whomever. I know Marino and I will have to give statements independently, possibly to a detective from
Savannah’s homicide unit, but not to Officer J. T. Harley, who is nice enough but naive and much too invested in playing detective. Chang will make sure that Marino and I are questioned by the appropriate party, depending on who takes jurisdiction, and likely it will be a joint investigation. The GBI and the local police will work this together, and the FBI will be next. If Jaime’s death is connected to what’s happened in Massachusetts — specifically, the alleged poisoning of Dawn Kincaid — then the cases have crossed state lines and the FBI will become involved in what’s going on in Savannah and possibly take charge just as it has up north.
I nudge aside the drawn drapery, looking down at the street in front, where Chang is getting his crime scene equipment out of his SUV. Rain pelts the building’s roof as if small pebbles are hitting it, and lightning shimmers over the low skyline of homes and historic buildings and trees. Thunder sounds like a distant kettledrum or the artillery fire of a faraway war, cracking and splitting the air, and I know what I would do if Cambridge weren’t a thousand miles from here.
I would direct that the truck, our mobile containment autopsy facility, be driven to Savannah right now. But the distance makes such a plan impractical if not impossible, because Colin Dengate isn’t going to wait two days to do the autopsy, and he shouldn’t. We don’t want to wait. We mustn’t wait. We need serum. We need tissue specimens. We need gastric contents. Of course, there is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, in nearby Atlanta, but Colin probably won’t wait for their truck, either, and we’ve been exposed and are okay. A number of people have been exposed and seem to be fine. I was inside Katheleen Lawler’s prison cell. I touched her and breathed the air and smelled what was in her sink, and I’ve been exposed to her blood and gastric contents, to her inside and out. I don’t feel sick. Marino, Colin, and Chang don’t, either. There are no warning signs at all that we might be at risk.
Whatever killed Kathleen or Jaime or poisoned Dawn Kincaid, assuming it is all the same toxin, works relatively swiftly. It shuts down digestion and interferes with breathing. Something that paralyzes, I consider. In food or drink. And I remember the way Jaime looked before I left her around one o’clock this morning. Her eyelids were heavy. She was slurring her words and having difficulty speaking. Her pupils were dilated. I assumed she was intoxicated and drowsy, but the antacid on the kitchen counter suggests her stomach was bothering her, and that’s the same complaint Kathleen had, if the woman in the cell across from her was telling the truth.
“You know they work all our crime scenes now since they’ve been getting training at that forensic academy in Knoxville where the Body Farm is …” Officer Harley says.
He is talking and I’m barely listening as I continue to look out at the stormy late afternoon, at trees thrashing in the wind, at headlights shining down Abercorn Street. Then the Land Rover comes into view.
“Every GBI investigator’s been trained there, every single one, meaning we got the best-trained crime scene people probably in the entire United States,” Officer Harley boasts, as if he has no feelings about the body on the bed, as if there is nothing extraordinarily monstrous about what has occurred.
Officer T. J. Harley didn’t know Jaime Berger. He has no idea who she is or who any of us are or what we are to one another, and I feel something change in me as Colin parks and extinguishes the headlights. I feel a flat calm, a detachment, the way I get when something is too much and yet I must function and in fact function at the highest level. I know what I’m in for, only a fool wouldn’t know that, and I slide my hands into the pockets of my cargo pants as I envision Jaime’s silhouette passing behind the drawn drapes in this room late last night.
Marino and I were sitting in his van on the street below, and her shadow moved back and forth as if she were restlessly pacing. Then she got undressed. The clothes she was wearing when we were with her are on a chair by the dresser as if she dropped or tossed them, the way one does when drunk, upset, in a hurry, not feeling well. She put on the maroon robe she eventually would die in and was looking down at us from a window in the living room as we drove off, and I didn’t know. I had no clue what had been done and the role I likely played in it.
26
Iturn away from the window, and Jaime Berger’s stiff unnatural position remains the same, draped over the side of the bed like a Dali painting.
Her biological existence has ended, and flesh and blood have begun breaking down like a set being struck after a drama has been played out and is over. She is gone. Nothing can undo it. Now the rest of it must be dealt with, and that is what I know how to manage, and I’m strongly motivated to help. But there are serious complications.
“I’m not going to touch anything or do anything else unless appropriately instructed,” I tell Officer Harley. “Dr. Dengate just pulled up, but I need you to stay right where you are. Or if I walk into any other area of the apartment, you need to be with me,” I remind him again. “I must be accompanied by you or Investigator Chang,
