Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page A

yours to keep. I didn’t always know where he was during the more than twenty years we worked
     together on and off.” I offer an opening for her to give me more information about him.
    “Jack, Jack, Jack,” she says and sighs. “All you did was move. Here one minute and gone the next, while I stayed in the same
     damn black hole. I’ve been right here in one cell or another most of my life, all because I loved you, Jack.”
    She looks at the photograph, then at me, and her eyes are harder than sad.
    “I can’t seem to last on the outside for long,” she adds, as if I came here today to learn all about her. “Like any other
     addict who keeps falling off the wagon, only the wagon I fall off of isn’t abstinence. It’s the wagon of success. I’ve never
     been able to allow myself the success I’m capable of because it’s not in the cards for me to have it. I set myself up for failure every time. It’s what I mean about genetics. Failure is part of my DNA, what God decided for me and
     everyone who comes after me. I did to Jack what was done to me, but he never blamed me. He’s dead and I may as well be because
     the things that matter in life have a mind of their own. Both of us victims, maybe victims of the Almighty Himself.
    “And Dawn?” Kathleen goes on. “Well, I knew she wasn’t right from day one. She never had a chance. Born prematurely, a tiny
     little thing tethered to lines and leads and tubes in an incubator, or so I was told. I didn’t see it. I never held her, and
     how’s a little thing like that going to learn to bond with other human beings when she spends the first two months of her
     life in a Crock-Pot and Mama’s in the big house? Then a series of foster families she couldn’t get along with, finally ending
     up with a couple in California who got killed in a car wreck, went over a cliff, something tragic like that. Fortunately for
     Dawn, by that point she was already at Stanford on a full scholarship. Then Harvard, and that’s where she ended.”
    Dawn Kincaid was at Berkeley, not Stanford, before transferring to MIT, not Harvard. But I don’t correct her mother.
    “Like me, she had all the possibilities in the world, and her life is over, ended before it began,” Kathleen says. “No matter
     how it turns out in court, just being a suspect is all anyone will remember about her. Her goose is cooked. You can’t have
     the kind of jobs she did in top secret labs, not if you’ve been a suspect in a crime.”
    Dawn Kincaid is more than a suspect. She’s been indicted on multiple charges, including first-degree murder and attempted
     murder. But I don’t say a word.
    “And then what happened to her hand.” Kathleen holds up her right hand, her eyes boring into me. “The kind of technology she’s into, where she has to work with nanotools and whatever
     else? She’s permanently impaired now because of losing a finger and the use of her hand. Seems like she’s gotten her punishment. I imagine it must make you feel kind of bad. Maiming someone.”
    Dawn didn’t lose a finger. She lost the tip of it and suffered tendon damage, and her surgeon thinks she will regain total
     functioning of her right hand. I block out the images as best I can. The gaping black square where the window had been and
     the wind blowing in, and a rapid shifting of the dark, frigid air as something slammed me hard between my shoulder blades. I remember losing my balance as I wildly swung the metal flashlight and feeling it crack against something solid. Then the
     garage lights were on and Benton was pointing his pistol at a young woman in a big black coat, facedown on the rubber flooring,
     bright wet blood drops near the severed tip of an index finger with a white French nail, and near it, the bloody steel knife
     that Dawn Kincaid tried to stab into my back.
    I felt sticky all over, smelling and tasting blood as if I’d walked through a cloud of it, and I was reminded of accounts
     I’ve heard