“IEDs and the devastating injuries, in some cases almost complete annihilation,” I add. “The challenges of identification when all that’s left is a mist of contaminated blood on a shred of fabric or a fragment of burned bone. I know AFDIL has the technology to analyze epigenetic phenomena, using methylation and histone acetylation for making DNA comparisons not possible with other types of analyses.”
“Why would we need to do something like that in these cases?”
“Because identical twins may start out in life with identical DNA, but older twins are going to have significant differences in their gene expression if you have the technology to look for these differences, and the more time twins spend apart, the greater these differences become. DNA determines who you are, and eventually who you are determines your DNA,” I explain, as I open the passenger’s door, hot air blasting out of the blower.
34
The man who answers the door is sweating, the veins standing out like ropes in his big tan biceps, as if he was in the middle of a workout when we showed up unannounced.
He is visibly displeased to find two strangers on his porch, one of them in range pants and a GBI polo shirt, the other in a khaki uniform, an old Land Rover parked in the shade of a live oak tree next to trellises of jasmine separating this property from the one next door.
“I’m sorry to disturb you.” Colin opens his wallet, displaying his medical examiner’s shield. “We’d really appreciate a few minutes of your time.”
“What’s this about?”
“Are you Gabe Mullery?”
“Is something wrong?”
“We’re not here on official business, and nothing’s wrong. This is a casual visit, and we’ll leave if you ask us to. But if you’d give me a minute to explain, we’d be most grateful,” Colin says. “You’re Gabe Mullery, the owner of the house?”
“That’s me.” He doesn’t offer to shake our hands. “It’s my house. My wife’s all right? Everything’s okay?”
“As far as I know. Sorry if we scared you.”
“Nothing scares me. What do you need?”
Quite handsome, with dark hair, gray eyes, and a powerful jaw, Gabe Mullery is in cutoff sweatpants and a white T-shirt emblazoned with
I don’t think it was pruning, and I want to know why she returned to her garden very early the next morning, possibly to the old root cellar, possibly because she was forced back there in the pitch dark about the time she and her family were murdered. I have an imagined scenario that is based on my interpretation of the evidence, and information Lucy e-mailed to me during the drive here only strengthens my conclusion that Mrs. Jordan wasn’t an innocent victim, and that’s putting it kindly.
I suspect that on the night of January 5 she may have spiked her husband’s drink with clonazepam, ensuring he would settle into a hard sleep. At around eleven, she went downstairs and disarmed the alarm, leaving the mansion and her family vulnerable to a break-in that she couldn’t have anticipated would end the way it did. What she probably had in mind was wrong, and most of all it was foolish, not so different from a lot of schemes devised by unhappy people who want out of their marriages and are seduced into believing they’re entitled to take what they think they deserve.
Mrs. Jordan probably never meant for her children to be harmed, and certainly not herself, and possibly not even her husband, whom I suspect she’d come to resent deeply, if not hate. She may have been determined to get away from him, but probably what she wanted was a secret source of cash, something of her own, and not necessarily for him to be dead. A simple plot, a simple burglary on a January night after a day of intermittent thunderstorms and chilly blustery winds, Lucy let me know the weather back then. One doesn’t decide to clean up the garden in such conditions, not that there’s any evidence Mrs. Jordan actually pruned so much as a branch stub or a watersprout the afternoon before her death.
What was she doing by the crumbled walls and depressed earth, what looked to me in photographs like the ruins of a root cellar from an earlier century? Maybe attempting to outsmart her accomplice or accomplices, and the grim irony is she wouldn’t have survived even if she’d been honorable. She didn’t recognize the devil she’d befriended and come to trust, and must have assumed all would be forgiven if a fortune in gold I suspect she’d promised to share was nowhere to be found because she’d decided to keep all of it for herself and had hidden it.
“Look, I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to be bothered about this,” Colin is saying on the hot front porch, with its stately white columns and view of a cemetery that dates from the American Revolution. Puffs of hot wind carry the scent of cut grass.
“Not that damn case,” Gabe Mullery says. “You and reporters, and the worst are the tourists. People ringing the bell and wanting a tour.”
“We’re not tourists, and we don’t want that kind of tour.” Colin introduces me, adding that I’m returning to Boston in the next day or two and want to take a look at the garden in back.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but what the hell for?” Mullery says, and past him, through the open doorway, is the fir wood staircase, and the landing near the foyer where Brenda Jordan’s body was found.
“You have every right to be rude about it,” I reply, “and you’re not obligated to let me look.”
“It’s my wife’s thing, and she completely redid it. Her office is out there. So whatever you think you’re going to see probably doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t understand the point.”
“If it’s all right, I’d like a quick look anyway,” I reply. “I’ve been reviewing some information….”
“About that case.” He exhales loudly in exasperation. “I knew it was a mistake to get this place, and now with her execution coming up of all times on fucking Halloween. Like we can be in town for that. Close up the fucking place and call in the National Guard, would if I could, and wait it out in Hawaii, you got that straight. All right.”
He steps aside to let us in.
“Ridiculous having this conversation at all,” he continues irritably, “but not outside in this heat for all the world to see. Buying this damn place. Jesus Christ. I shouldn’t have listened to my wife. I told her we’d be on the tour route and it wasn’t a good idea, but she’s the one here most of the time. I travel pretty much constantly. She should live where she wants, it’s only fair. You know, I’m sorry people died in here, but dead is dead, and what I hate is people violating our privacy.”
“I can understand that,” Colin says.
We walk into the grand foyer of a house that looks so familiar it’s as if I’ve been in it before, and I imagine Gloria Jordan on the stairs, barefoot and in her blue floral-printed flannel gown, padding toward the kitchen, where she waited for company and a conspiracy to unfold. Or perhaps she was in some other area of the house when the door’s glass shattered and a hand reached in to unlock the dead-bolt with the key that shouldn’t have been there. I don’t know where she was when her husband was murdered but not in bed. That’s not where she was when she was stabbed twenty-seven times and her throat was slashed, overkill, what I associate with lust and rage. Most likely that attack took place in the area of the foyer where she stepped barefoot in her own blood and in the blood of her slain daughter.
“You probably can tell I’m not from here,” Mullery is saying, and at first I thought he might be English, but his accent sounds more Australian. “Sydney, London, then to North Carolina to specialize in hyperbaric medicine at Duke. I ended up here in Savannah long after the murders, so stories about this place didn’t mean much to me or I sure as hell never would have gone to see it when it went on the market a few years ago. We looked, and it was love at first sight for Robbi.”
