Red Mist Read Free

whose heinous acts have been presented at professional
     meetings I attend. I resist looking around or letting on that I’m aware of anyone watching as I wonder which dark slash of
     a window is hers.
    How emotional this must be for Kathleen Lawler. I suspect she has thought of little else of late. For people like her, I’m
     the final connection to those they’ve lost or killed. I’m the surrogate for their dead.

2

    T ara Grimm is the warden, and her office at the end of a long blue hallway is furnished and decorated by the inmates she keeps.
    The desk, coffee table, and chairs are lacquered honey-colored oak and have a sturdy shape and for me a certain charm because
     I almost always would rather see something made by hand, no matter how rustic. Vines with heart-shaped variegated leaves crowd
     planters in windows and trail from them to the tops of homebuilt bookcases, draping over the sides like bunting and tumbling
     in tangled masses from hanging baskets. When I comment on what a green thumb Tara Grimm must have, she informs me in a measured
     melodious voice that inmates tend to her indoor plants. She doesn’t know the name of the creepers, as she calls them, but they could be philodendron.“Golden pothos.” I touch a marbled yellow-green leaf. “More commonly known as devil’s ivy.”
    “It won’t stop growing, and I won’t let them cut it back,” she says from the bookcase behind her desk, where she is returning
     a volume to a shelf,
The Economics of Recidivism.
“Started out with one little shoot in a glass of water, and I use it as an important life lesson all these women chose to
     ignore along the path that landed them in trouble. Be careful what takes root or one day it will be all there is.” She shelves
     another book,
The Art of Manipulation.
“I don’t know.” She scans vines festooning the room. “I suppose it’s getting a bit overwhelmed in here.”
    The warden is somewhere in her forties, I deduce, tall and svelte and strangely out of place in her scoop-neck black dress
     that flows mid-calf with a gold coin lariat wrapped around her neck, as if she paid special attention to her appearance this
     day, perhaps because of the men just leaving, visitors, possibly important ones. Dark-eyed, with high cheekbones and long
     black hair swept up and back, Tara Grimm doesn’t look like what she does, and I wonder if the absurdity occurs to her or others. In Buddhism, Tara is the mother of liberation, which one might argue this Tara certainly is not. Although her world is grim.
    She smoothes her skirt as she sits down behind her desk and I take a straight-backed chair across from her. “Mainly I needed
     to go over anything you might intend to show Kathleen,” she informs me of the reason I was directed to her office. “I’m sure
     you know the routine.”
    “It’s not routine for me to visit people in prison,” I reply. “Unless it’s in the infirmary or worse.” What I mean is if an inmate needs a forensic physical examination or is dead.
    “If you’ve brought reports or other documents, anything to go over with her, I need to approve them first,” she lets me know,
     and I tell her again that I’ve come as a friend, which is legally correct but not literally true.
    I am no friend to Kathleen Lawler and will be deliberate and cautious as I extract information, encouraging her to tell me
     what I want to know without letting on I care. Did she have contact with Jack Fielding over the years, and what happened during
     episodes of freedom when she was on the outside? An ongoing sexual affair between a female offender and her younger male victim
     certainly has occurred in other cases I’ve researched, and Kathleen was in and out of prison the entire time I knew Jack. If there were continued romantic interludes with this woman who molested him as a boy, I wonder if the timing of them might
     be related to those periods when he went haywire and vanished, prompting me to find him