Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell Read Free Book Online

depressively,
     resentfully. “But maybe I’d be sitting right here anyway. Maybe God decided while my mama was pregnant with me,
This one’s going to lose everything. Some have to, may as well be her.
I’m sure you understand what I mean. You see it enough in the morgue.”
    “I’m not a fatalist,” I answer.
    “Well, good for you, still believing in hope,” she says snidely.
    “I do.”
But I don’t believe in you,
I think.
    I slip the plain white envelope out of my back pocket and slide it across the table to her. She takes it in small hands with
     translucent white skin that pale blue veins show through, and her unpolished nails are pink and clipped short. When she bows
     her head to look at the photograph, I notice the gray in the mousy new growth of her dyed short hair.
    “I’m guessing this one was taken in Florida,” she says, as if she’s talking about more than one photograph. “That might be
     a gardenia bush I’m seeing in the background, through the spray of water from the hose he’s using? Well, hold on. Hold on
     one damn minute.” She squints at the photo. “He’s older in this. It’s more recent, and those little white flowers are meadowsweet. There’s a lot of meadowsweet around here. You can’t walk a city block without seeing meadowsweet, and now I’m thinking Savannah. Not Florida but right here in Savannah.” After a pause, she adds in a strained tone, “You happen to know who took this?”
    “I don’t know who took it or where,” I reply.
    “Well, I want to know who took it.” Her eyes change. “If it’s Savannah or somewhere around here, and that’s what it looks
     like to me, well, maybe that’s why you’re showing it to me. To upset me.”
    “I have no idea where it was taken or by whom, and I’m not trying to upset you,” I tell her. “I had the photograph copied
     and thought you might like it.”
    “Maybe right here. Jack was here with that car of his and I didn’t know.” Pain and anger sharpen her tone. “When I first knew
     him, I told him how much he would love Savannah. What a nice place to live, and I said he should join the Navy so he could
     be stationed nearby at the new submarine base they were building at Kings Bay. You know at heart Jack had a wanderlust, was
     someone who should have sailed around to exotic parts of the world or taken up flying and been the next Lindberg. He should
     have joined the Navy and gone around the world on ships or in planes instead of being a doctor to dead people, and I wonder
     whose influence that was.”
    She glares at me.
    “I wonder who the hell took this picture and why I wouldn’t have known he was here if he was,” she says acidly. “I don’t know
     what you think you’re up to, springing something like this on me, making me think he would come here and not try to see me. Well, I do know, too.”
    I wonder where Dawn Kincaid was five years ago, around the time I speculate the photograph was taken, and how often she might
     have come to Savannah to see Kathleen, and might Jack have come here to see Dawn but wasn’t interested in seeing her mother while he was in the area? Now that I’m confronted with Kathleen
     in the flesh, this woman I’d heard so much about but had never met, I seriously doubt Jack was driving his Mustang here or
     anywhere to see her as recently as five years ago or even ten years ago. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine that after
     a point he would have loved Kathleen Lawler anymore or bothered with her. She is remorseless and pitiless, completely lacking
     in empathy for anyone, and decades of substance abuse and self-destructive living and incarceration have taken their toll. She hasn’t been charming or beautiful in a very long time, and that would have mattered to my vain deputy chief.
    “I don’t know where the photograph was taken or any of the details,” I repeat. “It was a photograph in his office, and I thought
     you’d like a copy, and this one is