my thoughts return to the former root cellar behind the lovely old house where Roberta Price helped murder an entire family when she was only twenty-three. “Or I’ll never eat or drink anything again or buy anything off the shelf,” I add.
I don’t know if she ever used the weapon that was found, a stainless-steel folding knife with a three-inch blade and a winged eagle knuckle guard that is consistent with the wound measurement and strange linear contusions in the Jordan slayings. But I imagine stabbing people to death was her twin sister Dawn’s specialty, while Roberta preferred to murder hands-off from a distance. I suspect the knife was kept as a souvenir or an icon all these years, preserved in a rosewood box belowground in an elaborately constructed space with temperature and humidity control and special ventilation.
Inside the converted root cellar, accessible by a door in the office floor hidden by a rug, was a stunning inventory of generic cigarettes and meals ready to eat, and auto-injectors and other products Roberta Price chose to tamper with as she placed regular orders to several companies in China that sell botulinun toxin serotype A with few if any questions asked. HazMat teams found, among other awful things, old envelopes and postage stamps with glued backs that require moistening, not just ones with party themes and beach umbrellas but a variety of stationery and outdated stamps she ordered over the Internet.
Most of these items were destined for inmates, I’ve decided, stamps and stationery, no matter what type, coveted by people locked up and desperate to communicate with the outside. We probably will never know how many people she killed, choosing a means of agonizing death that mimicked the severe asthma attacks suffered not only by her but also by the twin sister she didn’t know, both starting life on April 19, 1979, only a few miles from the GPFW at Savannah Community Hospital. Separated in infancy, neither knew the other existed until soon after 9/11, when Dawn set out to learn the identity of her biological parents, which led to the discovery that she had an identical twin.
In December 2001, they met for the first time in Savannah, both of them cursed with what Benton terms severe personality disorders. Sociopathic, sadistic, violent, and incredibly bright, the two of them had made eerily similar choices in life. Dawn Kincaid talked to an Air Force recruiter about enlisting after college, interested in cyber-security or medical engineering, and thousands of miles east a twin sister was investigating scientific training programs in the Navy.
Separately and independently on opposite coasts, Roberta and Dawn were rejected because of their asthma, and they enrolled in graduate programs. Dawn studied materials science at Berkeley, while Roberta attended the College of Pharmacy in Athens, Georgia, and in 2001 she began working at the Rexall drugstore near the Jordans’ house. On weekends and holidays she dispensed methadone at Liberty Halfway House, where she would have encountered Lola Daggette, a recovering heroin addict.
Recent statements Lola has made to investigators are consistent with what she said to Jaime. Lola had no personal knowledge of what happened on the early morning of January 6, a Sunday, when Roberta was scheduled to dispense methadone from the medical clinic, which happened to be on the same floor as Lola’s room, and none of the residents’ rooms had locks.
A drug addict with significant intellectual limitations and problems with anger management was an easy target for framing, and although it isn’t possible to reconstruct exactly what happened, it is theorized that Roberta entered Lola’s room at some point and took a pair of corduroys, a turtleneck sweater, and a Windbreaker from her closet, which she or Dawn wore during the commission of the murders. Afterward, Roberta entered Lola’s room while she was sleeping, left the bloody clothing on the bathroom floor, and by eight a.m. was dispensing methadone in the medical clinic.
“Death is an intensely personal and lonely enterprise, and no one is really prepared for it, no matter what we convince ourselves of otherwise,” I’m saying to Benton, as I sit back down with my coffee. “Easier for Marino to focus on everything he thinks is wrong with Lucy right now. Or to be obsessed with making sure his cupboards are overflowing.”
“He’s in the bargaining stage.”
“I guess so. If he stocks his kitchen, has plenty of food and accoutrements, he’s not going to die,” I reply. “If I do A and B, then C won’t happen. He had skin cancer, and suddenly he decides to become a private contractor and basically quit his job with me. Maybe that was bargaining, too. If he makes a big life change, it means he still has a future.”
“I think Jaime was the bigger factor.” Benton checks e-mails as he talks. “Not his skin cancer. She always had a way of making Marino see the pie in the sky. The best thing hasn’t happened to him yet. Something magical is yet to come. Being with her validated his self-deluded belief that he doesn’t need you, Kay. That he’s not spent half his life following you from pillar to post.”
“That’s a shame if I don’t make him see pie in the sky,” I muse, as the doorbell rings. “It’s worse if he feels he’s wasted half his life because of me.”
“I didn’t say he’s wasted it. I know I haven’t wasted anything.” Benton kisses me.
We kiss again and hold each other, then go to the door. Colin is there with a baggage cart that we don’t need, because Lucy’s already taken our luggage to load on the helicopter.
“I don’t know about this,” Colin says, as he pushes the empty cart toward the elevator. “I’ve gotten mighty used to having you around.”
“Hopefully next time we’ll bring something better to town,” I reply.
“You northerners never do. Turn our church bells into cannonballs, burn up our farms, blow up our trains. We’re taking a slight detour, going to SCH instead of the airport. Realize it’s not much closer, but Lucy doesn’t want to deal with the tower and all the people running around in pickle suits, which I imagine she doesn’t mean literally.”
“Military,” Benton says.
“Okay, flight suits, green ones, I guess. I wondered what she meant when she was talking a mile a minute about it, and I was imagining people dressed like pickles,” Colin continues, and I’m not sure if he’s being funny. “Anyway, I guess things are pretty buttoned down, there and at Hunter. Apparently they’re doing ramp checks, and she’s already been ramp-checked once and wants out of there but has instructed me to let her know when we’re close. She doesn’t want to wait at the hospital and have to move if a medflight comes in. Which isn’t likely at SCH, but better safe than sorry.”
We board the elevator, and our glass car begins to glide down, passing below balconies draped with vines, and I envision women inmates working in the prison yard and walking the greyhounds, all of them ghosts of their former selves, abusers and the abused, and then warehoused in a place engaged in a secret enterprise of death. I imagine Kathleen Lawler and Jack Fielding first laying eyes on each other at that ranch for troubled youths, a connection that set in motion a series of events that has changed and lost lives forever, including their own.
“You get tickets for the Bruins or, better yet, the Red Sox, and I just might visit sometime,” Colin says.
“Well, if you ever think of leaving the GBI.” We pass through the lobby, on our way to heavy heat and a hot, windy ride.
“I wasn’t hinting about a job,” he says, as we climb into the Land Rover.
“You always have an invitation at the CFC,” I reply. “We’ve got good barbershop quartets up there, and this thing certainly has heat,” I add, as he turns on the blower. “It probably would do just fine in snowdrifts, blizzards, ice storms.”
I get Marino on the phone, and I can tell from the noise that he’s still in his van, riding toward Charleston or maybe away from it, I have no idea what he’s up to.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“About thirty minutes south,” he says, and he sounds subdued, maybe sad.
“We should land in Charleston by two, and I need you to be there,” I reply.
“I don’t know….”
“Well, I do, Marino. We’ll have a late dinner, celebrate the Fourth up north with something good to eat and get the dogs back from the nanny, all of us together,” I tell him, as the old hospital comes into view.
Founded not long after the Civil War, Savannah Community Hospital, where Kathleen Lawler delivered twins thirty-three years ago, is red brick with white trim and provides full-service but not acute care. It’s not often helicopters land here anymore, Colin says. The helipad is a small grassy area with a rather ragged orange wind sock in back, surrounded by trees that thrash and churn as the black 407 thunders in and sets down lightly on the heels of its skids.
