Red Mist (20 page)

“Well, you don’t want to be driving this.
How about I park it right over there by that big palm tree and I’ll get it first
thing in the morning so I can take it in for repairs.”

“Are you a guest here?”

“A regular VIP.
I left the Bugatti at home.
Too much luggage.”

“We’re not really supposed to—”

“It’s about to die.
You don’t want it dying with you in it.”

The van chugs and moves in fits and starts as Marino parks off to one side of the brick drive.
“Anna Copper is an LLC that
Lucy created about a year ago, I guess,” he says.
“It was her idea, and she didn’t exactly do it for a nice reason.
It happened
after she and Jaime had a disagreement.
Well, by then they’d probably been having a lot of them.”

“Is it Lucy’s LLC or Jaime’s?”
I ask, as he turns off the engine and we sit in the silent dark.
The air blowing through our
open windows is still very warm for almost two a.m.

“Jaime’s.
Lucy basically created a smoke screen for Jaime to hide behind.
It was supposed to be funny in a mean sort of way.
Lucy went on one of these Internet legal sites, and next thing you know, Anna Copper LLC was filed, and when she got the paperwork
in the mail, she wrapped it up in a big fancy box with a bow and gave it to Jaime.”

“This is according to Jaime?
Or did Lucy tell you?”

“Lucy did.
It was a while back when she told me, around the time she moved to Boston.
So I was surprised when I realized Jaime
is actually using that LLC.”

“And the reason you found out?”

“Paperwork, a billing address.
When I was helping set up her security system I had to know certain information,” Marino says,
as we get out of his van.
“That’s the name she’s using on everything down here, and I admit it’s a little unusual—at least,
I think it is.
She’s a damn lawyer.
It wouldn’t take her five minutes to create a new LLC.
Why would she use one that has
certain memories associated with it?
Why not forget the past and move on?”

“Because she can’t.”

Jaime can’t give up Lucy, or at least the idea of Lucy, and I wonder if Benton is thinking the same thing.
When he text-messaged
me that Anna Copper’s “rep is tarnished,” I wonder if he was referring to Jaime.
If so, he must have run a check on her apartment
building and come across a resident named Anna Copper LLC, and then run another check and realized who it was.
He likely wouldn’t
accept it as an accident of fate that Jaime has resurfaced in our lives, and he might know something about the trouble she
got into that caused her to abandon her life in New York.

We walk through the bright lobby, where at this hour there is a solitary clerk at the desk, only a few people in the bar.
When we reach the glass elevator, Marino taps the button several times, as if it will make the doors open faster.

“Shit,” he says.
“I left the damn groceries in the van.”

“Did Lucy ever tell you what Anna Copper means?
Where she got the name?”

“All I remember is it had something to do with Groucho Marx,” he says.
“You want me to drop off some water for you?”

“No, thanks.”
I’m getting into the tub.
I’m making phone calls.
I don’t want Marino stopping by my room.

I board the elevator and tell him I’ll see him in the morning.

I
t was still hot when the sun came up, and by eight a.m.
I’m sweltering in black field clothes and black ankle-high boots as
I sit on a bench in front of the hotel, drinking a venti iced coffee I got at a nearby Starbucks.

The bell in the City Hall tower rings in the first day of July, deep, melodious peals echoing in brassy reverberations as
I watch a cabdriver watching me.
Rawboned and weathered, with pants hitched up and a beard as scruffy as Spanish moss, he
reminds me of characters I’ve seen in Civil War photographs.
I imagine he hasn’t migrated far from the birthplace of his ancestors
and still shares traits in common with them, like so many people I notice in cities and towns insulated from the outside world.

I’m reminded of what Kathleen Lawler said about genetics.
No
matter what we strive to become in life, we’re still who and what the forces of biology shape us to be.
Hers is a fatalistic
explanation, but she’s not completely wrong, and as I recall her comments about predetermination and DNA, I have a feeling
she wasn’t referring only to herself.
She was also alluding to her daughter.
Kathleen was warning me, perhaps attempting to
intimidate me, about Dawn Kincaid, with whom she claims to have no contact, yet according to a number of sources, it simply
isn’t true.
Kathleen knows more than she’s letting on, has secrets she keeps that likely are related to why Tara Grimm moved
her into segregation at the same time I was lured down here.
I believe Jaime Berger has caused real trouble.

She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with, because she isn’t as rationally motivated or as in touch with herself as she believes.
While her selfish reasoning may very well have been precipitated by her clashes with New York police and politicians, most
of what drives her is related to my niece, and now none of us have ended up in a good place, certainly not a safe one.
Not
Benton, not Marino, not Lucy, not me, and least of all Jaime, although she might not see it or believe it if I pointed it
out.
She’s completely deluded herself, and I’m along for the ride and reminded of what an old Diener used to tell me during
my Richmond days:

You have to live where you wake up, even if somebody else dreamed you there
.

When I woke up this morning after very little sleep, I realized I can’t afford to waiver in my resolve.
Too much is at stake,
and I don’t trust Jaime’s analysis of most matters or have faith in her approach, but I will do what I can to help.
I’m involved
not because I volunteered.
I was drafted, practically abducted, and that’s of no
consequence anymore.
My sense of urgency isn’t about Lola Daggette or Dawn Kincaid and her mother, Kathleen Lawler.

It’s not about nine-year-old murders or the recent ones in Massachusetts, although these cases and those involved in them
are critically important, and I will make investigative sense of them as best I can.
What overrides all of it is Jaime’s meddling
with the people closest to me.
I feel she has endangered Lucy, Marino, and Benton.
She has threatened our relationships, which
have always been intricate and complicated, held in place by fragile threads.
The network that we are is sturdy only when
each of us is.

These people Jaime trifles with are my family, my only family, really.
I don’t count my mother or my sister, I’m sorry to
confess.
I can’t rely on them, and frankly wouldn’t think of entrusting myself to their care, not even on their better days,
the few they have.
There was a time when I was happy to widen my inner circle to include Jaime, but what I won’t permit is
for her to range about on the perimeter and dislodge the rest of us from our moorings or change who we are to one another.
She abandoned Lucy in a way that was cold and unfair, and now Jaime seems determined to redefine Marino’s career, his very
identity.
In short order, she has managed to inflame his jealousy of Benton again and imply that my husband has betrayed me
and is indifferent to my safety and happiness.

Even if there weren’t old murders connected to recent ones that seem to share the common denominator of Savannah, I wouldn’t
leave right now.
I extended my hotel reservation and booked a room for Lucy, who took off in her helicopter with Benton at
dawn.
I said I needed their help.
I told them I usually don’t ask, but I want them here.
Marino’s white cargo van turns into
the hotel’s brick driveway,
still loud but at least not bucking and shaking, and I get up from the bench.
I walk toward the cabdriver with the scruffy
beard and smile at him as I drop my Starbucks cup into the trash.

“Good morning,” I greet him, as he continues to stare.

“You mind me asking who you’re with?”
He eyes me up and down, leaning against his blue taxicab parked beneath the same palm
tree where Marino left his crippled van some seven hours earlier.

“Military medical research.”
I give the taxi driver the same meaningless answer I’ve offered other people this morning who
wondered aloud why I’m wearing black cargo pants, a long-sleeved black tactical shirt with the CFC shield embroidered in gold
on it, and boots.

The go-bag I found in my room when I walked in at close to two a.m.
had all of the essentials I might need on the road working
a case but nothing suited for the civilian world, certainly not one located in the subtropics.
I recognize Marino’s handiwork.
In fact, I have no doubt he packed the go-bag himself, removing items from my office closet and bathroom and also my locker
in the morgue changing room.
As I’ve continued reconstructing these past several months and especially the two weeks since
he’s been gone I recall being puzzled when certain items seemed to be missing.
I thought I had more uniform shirts.
I was
sure I had more cargo pants.
I could have sworn I had two pairs of boots, not just one.
The contents of the go-bag suggest
that from Marino’s point of view, I’m going to spend my time down here in labs or a medical examiner’s office, or more to
the point, with him.

Had Bryce packed for me, and that’s the usual routine when an emergency rushes me out of town or I’m stranded somewhere, he
would have included a suit bag with blazers, blouses, and slacks
generously padded and wrapped with tissue paper so nothing gets wrinkled.
He would have picked out shoes, socks, workout clothes,
and toiletries, his choices made with far more thoughtfulness and flair than if I’d packed myself, and most likely he would
have stopped by my house.
Bryce doesn’t hesitate to help himself to anything he anticipates I might need, including lingerie,
which is of no personal interest to him beyond his occasional comments about various labels and fabrics, and which detergents
and dryer sheets he prefers.
But he would not have sent me off to Georgia in the summer with three sets of cold-weather field
clothes, three pairs of men’s white socks, a flak jacket, boots, one deodorant, and an insect repellent.

“I didn’t know if you ate yet,” Marino says, as I open the van’s door, and right away I notice the interior is much cleaner
than it was when I was in it last.
I smell citrus-scented air freshener and butter and deep-fried steak and eggs.
“They got
a Bojangles’ a couple miles from here near Hunter Army Airfield, which gave me an excuse to do a test run.
The van’s good
as new.”

“With the minor exception of air-conditioning.”
I buckle up and notice the bulging bag on the floor between our seats as I
roll the window down all the way.

“Would need to get a new compressor for that, but the hell with it.
I mean, you wouldn’t believe the deal I got on this thing,
and you sort of get used to not having air.
Like the old days.
When I was growing up, a lot of cars didn’t have it.”

“Or shoulder harnesses or air bags or antilock brakes or navigational systems,” I reply.

“I got you a plain egg biscuit, but there’s a few steak, egg, and cheese ones, too, if you’re hungry,” he says.
“And there’s
water in
a cooler.”
He pokes a thumb toward the backseat.
“No olive oil at Bojangles’, so you just have to make do.
I know how you
feel about butter.”

“I love butter, which is why I stay away from it.”

“Jesus.
I don’t know what the hell it is about craving fat.
But I just go with it now.
I’m learning not to fight some things.
If you don’t fight them, they don’t fight you back.”

“Butter fights me back when I try to button my pants.
You must have stayed up all night.
When did you find time to get this
thing fixed and give it a bath?”
I ask.

“Like I said, I found a mechanic, got his home number off the Internet.
He met me at his shop at five this morning.
We swapped
out the alternator, balanced the tires, cleaned out the wheel wells, tightened the plug wires, and I replaced the wiper blades
while we were at it, and cleaned it up a little,” he says, as we drive along West Bay, past restaurants and shops of stucco,
brick, and granite, the street lined with live oaks, magnolias, and crepe myrtles.

Marino is dressed for the field, but he was sensible in what he selected for himself, the CFC summer uniform of khaki cargo
pants and beige polo shirt in a lightweight cotton blend, and he wears tactical nylon mesh and suede trainers instead of boots.
A baseball cap protects the top of his bald head and the tip of his sunburned nose, and he has on dark glasses and sunblock
that is watery white in the deep creases of his sweaty neck.

“I appreciate your thinking to pack my field clothes,” I say to him.
“I’m wondering when you did that?”

“Before I left.”

“That much I deduced on my own.”

“I should have brought you the khakis.
You must be hot as hell.
I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Probably that you would take what you could find when you rummaged, and it’s been a bit too chilly in Massachusetts for warm-weather
uniforms, since we’ve had an unusually cold spring.
My khakis are in a closet at my house.
If you had asked Bryce …”

“Yeah, I know.
But I didn’t want him involved.
The more involved he gets, the harder it is for him to keep his mouth shut,
and he makes such a big thing out of whatever it is.
He would have turned packing into a fashion show and sent me down here
with a steamer trunk.”

“You packed for me before you left,” I repeat.
“And when might that have been, exactly?”

“I pulled a few things together the last time I was in the office.
I don’t know, the fourteenth or fifteenth, not that I was
positive what would happen when I got down here.”

He turns onto US-17, heading south, the air blowing through our open windows as hot as an oven.

“I think you were absolutely positive what would happen,” I correct him.
“Why don’t we just come clean about it?”

I open the glove box for extra napkins and spread them in my lap before retrieving our breakfast from the bag between our
seats.

“It would be helpful if you’d admit that when you decided to take a last-minute vacation, you knew you were coming down here
to assist Jaime,” I say to him.
“You also knew I soon would follow without the benefit of the real reason why and would arrive
with little more than the clothes on my back.”

“I’ve tried to make you understand why you couldn’t know in advance.”

“Yes, you’ve tried, and I’m sure you’re convinced of your reasoning even if I’m not.
In fact, I shouldn’t call it your reasoning.
It’s Jaime’s reasoning.”

“I don’t know why you don’t care if the FBI’s spying on you.”

“I don’t believe it.
And if they are, they must be bored.
Now, which one of these am I opening for you?”
I examine warm biscuits
in yellow wrappers slick with butter.

“They’re all the same except yours.”

“Okay, I think I can figure out mine, since it’s half the weight of the others.”
I open more napkins and drape them over Marino’s
thigh.
“I would like a little clarity.
And not about the FBI but about you.”

“Don’t get pissed again.”

“I’m asking for clarity, not a disagreement or a fight.
Had you already rented your apartment in Charleston before Jaime called
the CFC two months ago and you took the train to New York to have a secret meeting with her?”

“I’d been thinking about it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”