by Carrie Smith
“And if you need more facts,” Julia Merchant continued, “this morning the same caregiver went into my mother’s room after she was dead. He kissed her forehead and talked to her for about two minutes. It’s on the video. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
Codella thought about that. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“I think he stole something, too—a little charm she had in her bedside table drawer, a little gold dancer. You can’t see that part of the room on the video, but the charm was in the drawer yesterday, and this morning it wasn’t.”
“Have any other things gone missing while your mother’s been at Park Manor?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, I never thought to check.”
“You’ve had the surveillance camera in your mother’s room for how long?” Codella studied the sleek black piece of hardware sitting on her desk next to Julia Merchant’s iPad.
“Eighteen months. Since she moved there.”
“And in all that time, have you ever recorded anything else that disturbed you? Is this the first time you’ve seen a nurse and a caregiver together in your mother’s room?”
“No, but—” Julia Merchant paused. “I only watched the recordings a couple of times.”
“Just a couple?”
“Right after she moved in.”
And now Codella waited again. She knew when to probe and when to let silence do the work. You posed your questions to lead a person to the brink of some unrehearsed revelation, and then you sat back in the demanding silence and observed the drama that unfolded.
“I was angry when my father put her in there,” Julia Merchant confessed. “I wanted it to be a bad place, okay? So I bought this camera—top of the line, motion sensitive—and I hoped it would show them neglecting her. I wanted to prove he was wrong. I watched the video two or three times, but then I gave up.”
“Because you saw no evidence of mistreatment.”
“Because I knew he had won. He always wins. But that’s history. What matters now is this.” She pointed to the sticky carpet fibers. “What if that nurse and caregiver are a team of mercy killers who go into rest homes and euthanize people?”
“Have any other Park Manor residents died unexpectedly while this nurse and caregiver have been on staff?”
“Not that I know of, but . . .” Julia Merchant folded her arms. “Look, my mother was only fifty-six years old, and she didn’t remember my name most of the time, but at least she was there. At least I could be with her, feed her, talk to her. Something bad has happened. I know it, even if I can’t prove it. My mother can’t speak for herself. I have to do it for her. She was always there for me; now I need to be there for her. You’re a daughter too, Detective. Put yourself in my shoes. Wouldn’t you want to know what they made her drink?”
Codella bristled at the presumed parallel between their lives and emotions. She leaned forward and spoke emphatically. “Discuss this with your father. Ask him to arrange a postmortem exam.”
“I already did. He doesn’t want one.”
“Then request one yourself.”
“He wants me to drop the issue. He made it clear.” She paused, and then added, “But maybe you could talk to him.”
Talk to him, Codella thought, or investigate him? She had enough complications to deal with right now, and she certainly didn’t intend to become a pawn in whatever family drama was playing out between a grieving daughter and a powerful New York bank chairman. “No,” she said. “You speak to him again. Share your concerns. Explain that an autopsy would help you accept your mother’s death and move on.”
“But—”
“I’m sorry.” Codella pushed out her chair to signal that the conversation was over. “But the facts you’ve described just don’t raise enough red flags to warrant a police inquiry. My advice to you is to ask for the autopsy.”
The young woman stood, obviously displeased by Codella’s response. “I expected more from you, Detective,” she said with the brittle, arrogant tone of people used to getting what they wanted. And then she turned to leave.
When she was gone, Codella shut her door and immediately checked her voicemail. As usual, Dr. Abrams had not left her scan results on his message. He never did that. Good results or bad, you had to get them live. She phoned his office, but her call went straight to the after-hours message. She banged her fist against her desk. Fuck.
Then she stared at the nest of carpet fibers Julia Merchant had left behind. You’re a daughter, too, Detective. Put yourself in my shoes, the young woman had said. Wouldn’t you want to know what they made her drink? Why did people always assume you felt the same things they did? Why did they act as if filial connection was encoded into everyone’s genome? Codella tried to summon an image of her own mother now, but the pixels of her memory were degraded by time. She had not seen her mother in eighteen years, and in that time, her mother had become a mere idea. If I passed her on the street, she wondered, would I even recognize her?
She shook her head, but she couldn’t shake the thoughts. She had consoled the daughters and sons of true murder victims many times and never felt this pull toward her own past. For some reason, Julia Merchant’s words had picked the lock on a maximum-security section of her brain where all the memories she didn’t want to face were stored. Was it because she was nervous about the scan results? Was thinking about her mother easier than thinking about Haggerty and how she felt about him? She pounded her fist on the desk. She didn’t give a damn about her mother.
She concentrated on the beige fibers glued together with yellowish coagulated syrup. Then she picked up the phone and dialed Detective Eduardo Muñoz. She didn’t give him time for small talk. “You were a narc, Muñoz. You know how to do presumptive drug tests, right? Can you get your hands on some test kits right now?”
CHAPTER 14
Brandon felt the woman’s eyes on him as soon as she stepped on the train. She was looking for clues. That’s what people did when they saw him. First they stared into his eyes, as if his pupils were apertures that would reveal absolutes. Then they examined the shape of his eyebrows, the size of his nose, the outline of his lips. And when those features failed to deliver a verdict, their gaze dropped. Now he felt the woman’s eyes pat down his chest, assess the veins on his hands, measure the size of his feet. He was, he supposed, an optical illusion to her—from this angle, man, from that angle, woman. And people, he had noticed, rarely tired of staring at optical illusions.
As the J Train groaned to a stop at Canal Street, the woman’s eyes collided with his and he smiled at her. He always smiled at the people he caught midstare. Once in a while the overture disarmed them; their expression would soften, and he would feel as if he had affected a small change in their perceptions. But this woman quickly averted her gaze. When she got off at Delancey Street, Brandon closed his eyes and tried not to think as the train rattled over the Williamsburg Bridge.
The neighbor’s baby was crying when he unlocked the door to his walk-up. He dropped his backpack just inside and crossed the small living room and kitchen alcove to his even smaller bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed and plugged his phone into its charger. At this hour on a Monday, he would normally be at Park Manor. But he wasn’t going to Park Manor ever again. He could have stayed in the library and done his homework there, but he hadn’t felt like doing homework. He hadn’t felt like doing anything. He still couldn’t get Hodges’s words out of his head. You fed her ice cream? On whose authority? And he couldn’t stop thinking about Josie’s betrayal or her contemptuous remark. You call yourself a man?
Fuck Josie, he told himself now. So what if he had cried about Lucy? Who was Josie or anyone to define the appropriate response to grief for a man or a woman? Who was she to categorize him?
He ran his palm against his jaw. He hadn’t shaved for two days, and the scratchy stubble on his chin was a reassuring reality that counterbalanced the discomfort he felt when he lifted his shirt over his head, struggled out of his uncomfortable com
pression T-shirt, and confronted the reality of his breasts. After years of binding, they were like two deflated balloons.
He got in the shower. As the hot water beat against his hair, he told himself he would call Dr. Silverman’s office first thing in the morning. He was supposed to make that call. Lucy’s death was a sign that he needed to move forward in his journey. All the paperwork was done. Every penny he’d saved—along with Baiba’s three thousand dollars—was sitting in a bank account waiting for him to make the call.
His phone was ringing as he turned off the shower. He yanked a towel off the rack and wrapped it around his hips as he went to answer. Baiba’s voice in his ear said, “Brandon, where are you? I’ve been calling you all day.”
“My phone died.”
“I heard what happened in Ms. Hodges’s office. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He put the phone on speaker and set it on the bed so he could dry himself. “I’m glad it happened. Glad to be out of there. I only stayed for Lucy.” As soon as he spoke the words, he realized his unintended slight. “And you, of course,” he added, “but we’ll still be friends, won’t we?”
She didn’t need to know that he wanted to be more than her friend. He could never tell her how he really felt about her. She might treat him differently if she knew that sometimes at night in his room, he imagined lying in bed with her. That he would sometimes touch himself while imagining her touching a part of him that didn’t even exist. Baiba would never want him in that way, he supposed.
“Of course we’ll still be friends,” she said. “But you don’t have to leave Park Manor like this.”
“I turned in my badge, Baiba. And you know how Hodges feels about me anyway. She’s not going to have me back, and besides, I don’t want to come back.”
“But I talked to her,” Baiba said quickly. “I told her things don’t run nearly as well when you’re not there. I told her you’re the best person we have in Nostalgia. That I need you—”
“You don’t need me. You’ll find someone else just as good. Park Manor is every caregiver’s dream job—if you can stand wearing those burgundy polo shirts.” He thought that would make her laugh, but it didn’t.
“I don’t want someone else. I want you. Please come back. Please.”
Brandon pulled boxers out of his drawer. He stared down at himself and replayed her words. I don’t want someone else. I want you. If only she were saying those words about him, about her personal feelings for him. But she wasn’t, of course. She wanted him back because of his competence and dependability, his willingness to do whatever she needed him to do. She knew her job would be much harder without him there. “How can you ask me that, Baiba?”
And then Baiba began to cry. She blurted out the whole story about Julia Merchant, her hidden camera, and what the camera had recorded. Brandon stopped dressing and sat on the edge of the bed.
“She thinks you gave medicine to her mother last night.”
“Well, I did. You know that. So what?”
“So Julia Merchant is making a big deal out of it. Hodges is afraid she’ll go to the press and say bad things about Park Manor. She told Julia there was only water in the cup. And she got Cheryl to promise that she’ll go along with that story.”
“And now she wants me to lie, too? Why would I do that for her?”
Baiba spoke very softly now. “Because I’m going to lose my job if you don’t.”
“She threatened you?”
“It was awful, Brandon. She knows I’ve been looking the other way while you helped Cheryl. And she knows I unlocked Lucy’s room for you this morning. That was on Julia’s video too. If Park Manor fires me after I’ve been there five years, where am I going to go? No other facility will touch me.” She started to cry again.
She needed him right now, he thought, and he felt impelled by deeply ingrained protective instincts to respond to her need. He wished he could transport himself through the phone, hold her in his arms, and stroke her hair. She would let him do that, he thought. “Don’t cry,” he said. “Please. Just tell me what you need me to do.”
She blew her nose. “I need you to come back,” she said. “Only until this blows over. And tell anybody who asks that you gave Lucy water in that cup. I’m sorry, Brandon. I’m really sorry.”
Brandon closed his eyes and sighed. “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll do it. I’ll come back tomorrow. But I’m doing it for you, Baiba. Not for her.”
CHAPTER 15
Codella hadn’t been in the detective’s squad room of the 171st since the Sanchez case, but she still knew it as well as her own living room. To her left, immediately beyond the door, was the nondescript metal desk she had occupied for seven years before her promotion to Manhattan North Homicide. Now that desk belonged to Detective Sunil Ragavan. The small, handsome detective was hunched over the computer where he did his best forensic work. On the opposite side of the room, Vic Portino, the old man in the squad, was leaning back in his chair. He waved to her as he spoke into his phone, and she waved back. He was wearing one of his many Men’s Wearhouse suits, and he hadn’t lost an ounce of weight even though he’d supposedly gone on a diet since the last time she’d been there. He might have even gained a pound or two, she thought.
Detective Eduardo Muñoz stood up from his desk against the far wall. “It’s good to see you, Detective.” He gave her a big grin.
“Good to see you, too, Muñoz.” She smiled up at him. His wavy black hair was short on top and faded at the temples. He had the broad shoulders and flat stomach of someone who worked out regularly. When she had first met him—at the Sanchez murder scene—she’d been a little unnerved by his height and build. That had been her first case after cancer treatment, and it was Muñoz’s first case as a precinct detective after two years in undercover narcotics. She’d had to prove she was still in the game, and he’d had to prove he was more than just a buy and bust guy. To make matters worse, Marty Blackstone, the bully of the 171st, had christened him Rainbow Dick because he was gay. Luckily, Codella and Muñoz had recognized each other’s vulnerabilities and helped each other.
“You have the tests?”
“Yes. For a range of narcotics. If it’s something other than that, you’ll have to send it to the lab.” He pointed toward the door. “I’ve set things up in interview room A.”
They walked across the hall. Muñoz had everything carefully arranged on the table. She watched him roll his shirtsleeves to the elbows, exposing thick honey-brown forearms. He slid his large hands into stretchy nitrile surgical gloves. Only then did he open the evidence bag with the fibers Julia Merchant had brought to Codella’s office. He removed a clump with sterile tweezers and set it carefully on a clean paper surface. Then he opened the box of presumptive test kits and took out one of the clear plastic tubes containing a test ampule. He removed the ampule from its plastic tube, peeled off the protective paper over the tip, and carefully dabbed the sticky tip against the rug fiber. Then he replaced the ampule inside the clear tube, sealed the cap, and squeezed hard against the tube to break the ampule and release the test solution.
They watched the liquid change to violet. Muñoz moved the tube close to the test kit’s color chart on which each small swatch signaled a different opiate. “I think we’re looking at oxycodone here,” he said. “What do you think?”
CHAPTER 16
Four inches of snow had fallen by the time Felipe pulled up in front of her building. He climbed out, came around the back of the Escalade, and opened the rear curbside door. She slid into the familiar passenger seat. The SUV had been warmed to a stifling degree, and she immediately wished that she were still standing on the street in the arctic winds. She closed her eyes. As Felipe drove, each surge of the accelerator, depression of the brake, and jerk of the steering wheel vibrated through her body as if she were melded with the vehicle’s transmission. Why was she going back to Merchant when she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t?
At his Fifth Avenue build
ing, the night doorman helped her out and escorted her into the lobby. I am like a FedEx shipment moving through a distribution chain, she thought. The doorman announced her arrival and led her to an oak-lined elevator. A few seconds later, the elevator doors opened directly into Merchant’s vast three-floor apartment and he received his “package” with a satisfied smile. “You see.” He kissed her cheek. “A little snow isn’t going to keep you from me.” His palms traced the outline of her waist and hips, and she felt a twinge of revulsion. He must have sensed it, she thought, because he lowered his hands, and his look turned harder. His voice seemed cool when he said, “Go get comfortable. I have to make a call. I won’t be long.”
She felt his eyes follow her down the corridor to the room they shared each time she came here. She had never explored the other corridors of his residence. He had never invited her into those passageways or up the stairs to different levels. He had always steered her—confined her, she thought now—to this one particular room. The first time she’d entered it, she had judged it to be twice as large as her entire studio apartment. To the right was an elegant sitting area with two inviting love seats facing a working fireplace. A fire was lit tonight, she noticed, and on the coffee table between the love seats, two facedown glasses sat on a tray next to a champagne bottle in an ice bucket.
Her eyes moved left. In a room of these dimensions, even the king-size bed looked small. She turned away from it uneasily and stared at the windows on the wall opposite the door. She walked to the center window and pressed her forehead against the cold glass pane. The snowflakes falling through the darkness seemed to have soundproofed the city below. The lanterns lining Fifth Avenue illuminated spindly black branches of the trees in Central Park. I shouldn’t be here, she thought.
