Free Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell Page A

hangover is back.
    You should get as far from here as possible.
It’s too late to fly out of the Savannah–Hilton Head Airport, but I could drive to Atlanta, where I’m sure I can get a flight
     to Boston tonight. In this damn cargo van? I envison myself broken down on the roadside near a swamp in the middle of nowhere
     and decide my wisest course is to stay in Savannah as planned.
Don’t do anything rash. Be deliberate and logical,
I tell myself, as I drive in the rain, the van chugging and misfiring, slowing down and speeding up on its own while its
     worn-out wiper blades smear the glass with loud rubbery swipes. My head is aching like a bad tooth, and I’m out of Advil,
     having taken the last of it earlier today when I was traveling.
    I roar past a truck dealership and an auto body shop, and every place I pass feels isolated and impenetrable and ominous,
     as if the world is in a lockdown. I’ve not noticed another car in miles and have the same eerie feeling I get right before something bad happens. A stillness, a shifting of reality, a sense of foreboding
     that always precedes a tragic announcement, a brutal case coming in, a horror of a scene in the room just ahead. My thoughts
     find their way back to Lola Daggette.
    I don’t remember much about the murders of the Savannah doctor and his family, only that they were savage and that there are
     still lingering questions to this day about whether there was one perpetrator or two, or if whoever is to blame had some connection
     to the victims. I remember I was staying in a hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut, when I first heard about the family murdered
     “in their sleep,” as it was described all over the news. January 6, 2002. It was a time when I was between just about everything
     one could be between. Careers, relationships, residences, and the world prior to 9/11 and the one we’ve been left with since. It was a terrible phase, really, about as destabilized and depressing as any I can recall, and I was watching the evening
     news and eating dinner in my room when I heard about slayings in Savannah believed to have been committed by a teenage girl. I remember her young face repeatedly shown on the TV screen, and the victims’ Federal-style brick mansion, its portico festooned
     with yellow crime scene tape.
    Lola Daggette.
    I remember she was smiling into television cameras at her arraignment and waving at people in the courtroom as if she didn’t
     have a clue about the trouble she was in, and I was struck by the silver braces on her teeth and the teenage blemishes on
     her plump cheeks. She seemed like a harmless kid dazed by the attention and drama but enjoying it, and I was reminded that
     people rarely look like what they do. No matter how often I’m confronted by examples of that fact, I’m still surprised and chilled by how easy
     it is to make judgments based on appearances. Most of the time we’re wrong.
    I slow down and chug off the road into the parking lot of the first open businesses I’ve seen around here, a True Value hardware,
     a pharmacy, and a guns-and-ammo store where there are several pickup trucks and SUVs, and a pay phone next to an ATM. Of course,
     there would be a pay phone and an ATM at a business where the sign in front is a body diagram inside a red circle with a slash
     across, and the logo:
Don’t be a victim. Buy a gun.
Through plate glass I see a wall of rifles and shotguns, and a showcase where several men are congregated, and to the left
     of the front door, a black pay phone is cradled inside a stainless-steel box attached to the wall.
    Reaching for my briefcase, I get out my iPad as rain falls steadily, drumming the metal roof, and I flip off the monotonous
     wiper blades and headlights but leave the windows cracked and the engine running. Clicking on the browser, I log on to the
     Internet and search Lola Daggette’s name and read a story published in
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
last November:
SAVANNAH