anywhere in any of the pictures I review, not a cut branch or side shoot or sucker in sight, the garden bleak and in need of a winter cleanup it never got.
When Marino questioned Lenny Casper, the former next-door neighbor who happened to notice Mrs. Jordan in her garden the Saturday afternoon of January 5, Casper made no mention of her appearing to have hurt herself. Maybe he didn’t notice, but most people taking their dog out or looking through a window might be aware of someone hurrying back into the house, dripping blood. A casual observation by a neighbor and drops of Gloria Jordan’s blood that didn’t make sense in the context of such gory homicides led to the conclusion that she cut her thumb earlier in the day. She returned to the house, forgot to clean up the sunporch and the hallway near the guest bath, and didn’t bandage her injury or let her physician husband tend to it when he arrived home from the men’s shelter. I just don’t believe it.
According to her toxicology report, when Mrs. Jordan died she had alcohol and clonazepam on board, higher blood levels than her husband’s, and she was taking the antidepressant sertaline. After the murders, these prescription drugs were collected from the master bathroom, from what appears to be her side of the sink, and I look at them again in their evidence bag, noticing a detail that eluded me earlier.
“You want to help me with something?” I ask Mandy, who is observing everything I do with her cobalt blue stare.
“You bet.” She’s already out of her chair.
“The Barrie Lou Rivers case file? I believe it’s electronic, not printed, because her death occurred after the office became paperless.”
“Want me to print it?” she asks.
“Not necessary. But I’m interested in a document, if you can find it in her file.”
“Can you wait one minute so I can get my laptop?”
“I’ll stand in the hallway.” I step outside the conference room.
33
Mandy O’Toole returns from the histology lab with a laptop and begins a search of Barrie Lou Rivers’s records while I search Lola Daggette’s clothing for anything that might have been missed.
I examine the Windbreaker, the blue turtleneck and tan corduroys that she was washing in her shower, an incriminating act that was the sole basis for her being charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Much of the blood was washed away, only traces of a pattern left, areas of dark discoloration on the thighs of the pants, and drips and smears on the cuffs and on the front of the Windbreaker and its sleeves. Lola would have had blood on her shoes, and my thoughts keep going back to that.
“Got her file. Tox and other lab reports, autopsy records,” Mandy says, sitting in the chair by the window, the computer in her lap. “What are you looking for, exactly?”
“Something you might not have but Jaime Berger did. A one-page document included with the autopsy protocol and tox reports,” I reply. “A chain-of-custody form from the GPFW relating to the execution drugs. The prescription was filled but never used because Barrie Lou Rivers died before they could execute her. Just a strange piece of paper that doesn’t belong with the autopsy record but somehow ended up in there.”
“My favorite thing,” she says. “Details that aren’t supposed to be included. But they are.”
As I continue looking at Lola Daggette’s clothing, I think about what the victims had on when they died and how much blood there was. The crazed trail of footwear prints on the black-and-white checkered kitchen tile and the fir wood floor indicate that the killer was tracking blood throughout the house or someone was or more than one person was. Not all of the tread patterns look the same. Contamination by people disrupting the crime scene after the police got there, or did Dawn Kincaid have a partner in her hideous crimes?
It wasn’t Lola. Had she been walking around the Jordans’ house that early morning, her shoes would have been bloody. Yet she wasn’t washing shoes in the shower when the volunteer healthcare worker walked in. She wasn’t washing her underwear or socks. She was never examined for injuries, such as scratches, and it wasn’t her DNA or fingerprints recovered from the victims’ bodies or the scene, and it’s tragic no one paid attention to these facts. Dawn Kincaid’s DNA but her fingerprints aren’t a match, and I remember what Kathleen Lawler said about giving her
“Paydirt,” Mandy says, and I think of
A monster most assume Lola made up.
“Yes, exactly what I’m looking for,” I reply, as I read the form on the screen, a lethal prescription filled by a pharmacist named Roberta Price, the drugs delivered to the GFPW and signed for by Tara Grimm at noon on the day of Barrie Lou Rivers’s execution, two years ago, March first.
Boxes checked on the form and blanks filled in indicate the sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide were stored in the warden’s office, then moved into the execution room at five p.m. but never used.
“Mean something? You’re looking like you’re thinking something,” Mandy can’t resist asking, as I hand the computer notebook back to her.
“As far as you know, these are the only items of clothing belonging to Lola Daggette?” I answer her question with one of my own, as I pick up the evidence bag of prescription drugs, checking labels on the orange plastic bottles. “In other words, no shoes.”
“If this is what Colin’s got, what the GBI still has stored, then that’s all there was, I feel sure,” she says.
“As bloody as the killer would have been, impossible to think the shoes weren’t bloody, too,” I comment. “Why wash your clothes in the shower but not your bloody shoes?”
“One time Colin scraped gum off the bottom of a high-heeled shoe that came in with the body and recovered a hair, then the DNA of the killer. We had T-shirts made. Colin Dengate the Gum Shoe.”
“Would you mind finding him? Tell him I’ll meet him outside. I’d like to take a ride. Do a retrospective visit, if possible.”
Lola Daggette didn’t wash her shoes in the shower, because a pair of shoes wasn’t included with the bloody clothes planted in her room. She didn’t murder anyone, and she wasn’t inside the Jordans’ antebellum mansion the early morning of the murders or on any occasion. I suspect the troubled teenager would have had no reason to meet the distinguished and wealthy Clarence and Gloria Jordan or their beautiful blond twins and probably didn’t have a clue who they were until she was interrogated about their murders and charged with them.
I strongly suspect Lola also didn’t have a clue who to blame, a person or persons motivated by more than drugs or petty cash or the thrill of killing, a monster or a pair of them with a grand plan that a mentally impaired teenager in a halfway house wouldn’t have had any reason to know about. Or if she did, she’d probably be dead, too, just as Kathleen Lawler and Jaime are. I suspect there was an orchestrated scheme that included framing Lola, just as someone is trying to frame me now, and I don’t believe these manipulations are the sole handiwork of Dawn Kincaid.
I dig my phone out of my shoulder bag and enter Benton’s number as I emerge from the lab building, finding a spot near bottle-brush bushes with brilliant red blossoms where I’m eye to eye with a hummingbird, and the blazing sun is a relief. I’m chilled, even my bones are cold from being inside the air-conditioned conference room surrounded by evidence so obvious it seems to shout its grotesque secrets, and I’m not sure who’s going to respond.
I can count on Colin, and, of course, Marino and Lucy will pay attention, and I’ve sent both of them text messages asking if the name Roberta Price means anything, and asking what else can we find out about Gloria Jordan? There’s very little about Mrs. Jordan in news stories I’ve read, few personal details and nothing to suggest there were problems, but I’m sure there were, and the timing couldn’t be worse.
If Benton weren’t my husband, I have no doubt he wouldn’t listen to what will sound like a tale of horror, a sensational yarn, something made up. What I strongly suspect happened nine years ago isn’t going to be of interest to the FBI or Homeland Security right now, and I understand why, but someone needs to hear me out and do something about it anyway.
“Sounds like your friends from Atlanta arrived,” I say to Benton, when he answers his cell phone, and voices
