of a speaker, and Lucy clicks on the volume and turns it up as the figure in the video recording disappears down the dark street in front of Jaime’s building. “I guess you know by now Kay is here and will be helping with a case of mine. We just had dinner, and I’m afraid she got perturbed with me. Always the lioness when it comes to you, and that didn’t help. Jesus God, it never helped. An unfortunate triangulation is putting it kindly. Somehow I always felt she was in the room no matter what room. Lights out, hello, Auntie Kay, are you there? Oh, well. We’ve been through all this ad nauseam …”
“Stop,” I tell Lucy, and she pauses both files. “Did she call you on your new number? When did she do that?” But I have a feeling I know.
Jaime’s voice is halting, and she is slurring her words. She sounds very much like she did last night when I left her, but slightly more impaired and nastier. I look at the BlackBerry plugged into the charger on the desk.
“Your old phone,” I say to Lucy. “You didn’t change your number, you simply got a new one when you switched to an iPhone.”
“She didn’t have my new number. I never gave it to her, and she never asked,” Lucy says. “I don’t use it anymore.” She indicates the BlackBerry.
“You kept it because she’s continued to call it.”
“That’s not really the only reason. But she’s called it. Not often. Mostly late at night when she’s had too much to drink. I save all of the messages, download them into audio files.”
“And you listen to them on your computer.”
“I can listen to them anywhere. That’s not the point. The point is to save them, to make sure they’re never lost. They’re all pretty much the same. Like this one. She doesn’t ask me anything. Doesn’t say she wants me to call her back. She just talks for a couple of minutes and abruptly ends it without saying good-bye. Sort of the way she ended it with us. Pronouncements and her talking at me and not listening, and then disconnecting.”
“You save them because you miss her. Because you still love her.”
“I’ve saved them to remind myself why I shouldn’t miss her. Or love her.” Lucy’s voice quavers, and I hear her grief and frustration and rage. “What I’m trying to tell you is she didn’t sound sick or in physical distress.” She clears her throat. “She just sounds like she was drinking, and that was a half hour after you were gone. So she probably didn’t sound even as bad as that when you were still with her.”
“She didn’t mention she felt bad or strange. She didn’t mention anything.”
Lucy shakes her head. “I can play all of it if you want, but she doesn’t say anything like that.”
I imagine Jaime in her maroon bathrobe, walking from room to room in her apartment, sipping expensive Scotch and looking out the window at Marino’s van driving off. I don’t know the precise time we left, but it was no more than thirty minutes later that she called Lucy’s old phone number and left the message. Clearly, her symptoms didn’t become severe until later, and I envision the nightstand with its spilled drink and empty base unit, the phone under the bed, and also what I saw in the master bath, medications and toiletries scattered everywhere. I suspect Jaime might have drifted off to sleep and possibly around two or three a.m. woke up short of breath and barely able to swallow or speak. It was probably at his point she frantically searched for something to take that might relieve her terrifying symptoms.
Symptoms, it occurs to me, that were eerily similar to what Jaime described when we were talking about Barrie Lou Rivers and what may be in store for Lola Daggette if she is executed on Halloween. Cruel and unusual, an awful way to die, and, according to Jaime, deliberately cruel. I thought she was trumping up a dramatic story to make her case, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe there is more truth to what she was alleging than she knew. Not scared to death but scared of it.
“Your mind is awake, but you can’t talk. You can’t move or make the slightest gesture, and your eyes are shut. You look unconscious. But the muscles of your diaphragm are paralyzed, and you’re aware as you suffer the pain and panic of suffocation. You feel yourself die, and your system is in overdrive. Pain and panic. Not just about death but about sadistic punishment,” I describe what Jaime was saying about death by lethal injection and what happens if the anesthesia wears off.
I think about how a killer might expose someone to a poison that stops breathing and renders the person unable to talk or call for help. Especially if the intended victim is incarcerated.
“Why would anyone send an inmate twentysomething-year-old postage stamps?” I get out of my chair.
“Why not sell them?” I ask. “Wouldn’t they be worth something to a collector? Or maybe that’s where they came from. Maybe they were recently purchased from a collector, a stamp company. No lint, dust, dirt, nothing stuck on the back, not wrinkled or grungy like they might be if they’d been in a drawer for decades. And allegedly sent by me in a counterfeit CFC envelope that included a forged letter on my counterfeit letterhead? Possibly, maybe? She seemed to think I’d been generous with her when I hadn’t been. A big envelope allegedly from me, and extra postage. Something else in it. Maybe stamps.” Lucy finally gives me her eyes, and I can see what’s in them. A deeper green, and they are immeasurably sad and glinting with anger.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her, because of how dreadful it is to imagine Jaime’s death the way I just described it.
“What kind of stamps?” she asks. “Tell me exactly what they looked like.”
I tell her what I found in Kathleen Lawler’s prison cell, tucked inside a locker at the base of her steel bed, a single pane of ten fifteen-cent postage stamps issued in an earlier era when glue on the back of them, and on labels and envelope flaps, had to be licked or moistened with a sponge. I describe the letter to Kathleen that I didn’t write and the strange party stationery that she couldn’t have gotten from the commissary. Someone sent her stamps and stationery, and it very well may have been me or, more precisely, someone impersonating me.
Then the stamp is on the computer screen. A wide white beach with sprigs of grass, and an umbrella with red and yellow panels is propped against a dune beneath a seagull flying through the cloudless sky over bright blue water.
31
It is midnight, and we are picking at a dinner that Benton has managed to overcook and wilt, but no one is particular at the moment or preoccupied with food, at least not in a good way. Right now I can easily imagine not wanting to eat ever again, as everything I look at turns into a potential source of disease and death.
Bolognese sauce, lettuce, salad dressing, even the wine, and I’m reminded that a peaceful, healthy coexistence on this planet is shockingly fragile. It takes so little to cause disaster. Shifting tectonic plates in the earth that create a tsunami, clashing temperatures and humidity unleashing hurricanes and tornadoes, and worst of all is what humans can do.
Colin Dengate e-mailed me about an hour ago with information he probably shouldn’t be releasing to me, but that’s who he is, a redneck, as he describes himself. Armed and dangerous, he likes to say, roaring around in that ancient Land Rover of his in the blistering heat and afraid of nothing, including bureaucrats, or bureausaurs, as he calls people who let policies, politics, and phobias get in the way of doing what is right. He’s not going to shut me out of any investigation, certainly not when efforts to frame me are blatant enough to bury any reasonable doubt that I’m the one running around poisoning people.
Colin let me know that Jaime died in good health, just as Kathleen Lawler did. There was nothing on gross examination to show what caused Jaime’s death, but her gastric contents were undigested, including pinkish, reddish, and white tablets or pills that he and I suspect are ranitidine, Sudafed, and Benadryl. He explained that Sammy Chang passed along lab results that probably don’t mean anything unless it’s possible Kathleen died of heavy metal poisoning, and Colin certainly doesn’t think so, and he’s right, she didn’t. Specifically, he wanted to know if trace elements of magnesium, iron, and sodium might hold any special meaning for me.
“I understand that.” Benton paces back and forth past windows overlooking the Savannah River, lights scattered along the opposite shore, where shipyard cranes are etched faintly against the distant dark sky. “But what you need to understand is the following. They could be deadly poisonous,” he is saying to Special Agent Douglas Burke from the FBI’s Boston field office.
I can tell from what I’m overhearing that Douglas Burke, a member of the task force that has been working the Mensa Murders, is resistant to answering Benton’s questions beyond confirming the statement that
