by Carrie Smith
She nodded. “It’s gonna be a long night for me. See you tomorrow.”
When he was gone, she looked past the officers in the lobby. Outside were flashing lights and cameras. She stepped through the front door and spotted McGowan. He shook his head in disgust when their eyes met. She fished in her pocket and felt for her shield. Would he make her relinquish it right in front of the cameras?
She reached him just as a Channel Two reporter stuck a microphone in her face. “Can you give us a statement, Detective? Is it true you’ve arrested Julia Merchant for the murder of her mother and the Park Manor staffer?”
“That’s correct.”
“How did you solve the case so quickly?”
And then Codella turned to McGowan. He was waiting to see what she said, and in that moment, she knew what she had to do. “The lieutenant should answer that,” she said staring into his eyes. “This was his plan. His strategy. He deserves the credit.” She smiled at him, stepped away from the microphone, and got into her car.
CHAPTER 76
The lights outside her office were dim. Heather had gone home two hours ago. Hodges debated whether to answer the phone. It had been ringing off the hook since the press conference. She wanted to get out of this place, go home, and pour a real glass of something. She lifted the phone reluctantly. “Park Manor.”
“Ms. Hodges?”
She recognized Codella’s voice. “Yes, Detective?”
“You’ll be hearing it on the news soon. I thought I should tell you myself. Julia Merchant has been taken into custody. She just attempted to murder her father.”
Hodges felt her heart speed up. She willed herself to speak in a calm and detached voice. “What happened?”
“We need to sort out the details, but we think she gave him a narcotic.”
“Does that mean she’s also the one who killed Mrs. Merchant?”
“We believe she’s involved in the deaths of Lucy Merchant and Baiba Lielkaja. I can’t really tell you more than that right now.”
“And Thomas? Will he be all right?”
“The paramedics revived him. The ambulance took him to New York Presbyterian.”
Hodges closed her eyes and sighed quietly.
“I’m curious about something, Ms. Hodges.”
“What’s that?” Hodges sensed more than simple curiosity in the detective’s tone.
“I’m curious about why he asked for you while he was lying on the stretcher.”
“He asked for me?” As soon as the words were out, Hodges realized she had said them with a little too much enthusiasm. “I don’t know,” she added quickly.
Codella was silent for several seconds.
She knows I’m lying, Hodges thought. “Look, he’s a flawed man, Detective. But I knew he wasn’t a murderer. I just never imagined that Julia could do this. I didn’t see it.”
“We see what we want to see,” said Codella. “This is a good reminder to all of us. Let the facts tell the story. I’ve got to go.”
Hodges heard her break the connection. She got her coat from the closet beside Heather’s desk and walked through the first floor of Park Manor, smiling at the residents drinking cocktails and listening to a pianist play show tunes as if nothing else mattered. On Madison Avenue, the cold air made her shiver. She hailed a cab. Thomas had asked for her. All those years ago, she had known they would somehow end up back in each other’s lives. She was stronger and smarter than Lucy Merchant. She was a much better match for Thomas. He needed her, and she would help him. And in return, he would help her. Everything would be all right, she told herself as she climbed into the taxi.
CHAPTER 77
Julia had not asked for an attorney, but Codella expected Pamela Martinelli to burst through the door at any moment, and if she did, the interview would be over and all the threads she wanted to unravel would stay tangled up forever in a defense attorney’s fiction. She gestured to Julia’s bandaged hand. “Does it hurt?”
“Don’t pretend to be kind.”
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
“I’m not an idiot.” Julia shot her a withering look.
“Of course not. But it must be hard for you.” Codella purposefully spoke in a soft, soothing tone.
“Hard?”
“To think clearly,” said Codella. “To remember things.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Your memory,” said Codella as if this were perfectly obvious. “I assume you’re already showing the signs of your mother’s condition?”
Julia glared. “How dare you say that to me! There’s nothing wrong with my memory.”
“No?” Codella allowed confusion to play across her face. She felt Julia’s eyes watch her carefully, suspiciously. “You see, when we spoke in my office on Monday afternoon—when you came here and claimed to know me—you also claimed you installed a surveillance camera in your mother’s room right after she came to Park Manor—that very same week, you said. Do you remember that?”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m getting at the fact that there was a different clock in your mother’s windowsill when she first moved in. A different clock was there for at least two months before you made a switch. I know because I saw a time-stamped photograph. I have it right here.” Codella reached into her jacket pocket. She brought out the photo of Lucy Merchant that she had removed from the bulletin board outside Baiba Lielkaja’s office. She slid it slowly across the table.
Julia glanced into the prescient eyes of her mother staring up from the glossy print. She looked away. “So?”
“So maybe you got confused about the facts because of your condition.”
“I don’t have a condition, Detective.”
“Then you lied to me?”
“May I have a glass of water?” Julia asked.
Codella ignored the request. “You didn’t go to Park Manor the morning of your mother’s death just to say good-bye to her. You went there to retrieve the camera and slip her necklace charm out of the drawer. You knew the camera would show Brandon giving medicine to your mother—you’d done your homework. And you knew the missing charm would cast suspicion on him—and you needed to cast suspicion on someone to get this whole investigation started.”
“I need a glass of water,” Julia demanded again.
Codella still ignored the request. “You didn’t find a spill in your mother’s carpet that morning, did you? Your mother hadn’t slapped the cup hard enough to cause a big spill. You poured the oxycodone onto the carpet. That was part of your plan, too, so you could bring the suspicious fibers to my office.”
Codella stared into Julia’s insolent eyes. They were heavy with mascara. “You were setting me up. You wanted me to investigate your mother’s murder. But you didn’t want me to find out that you had done it. You wanted someone else to ultimately take the blame. You wanted to frame your father.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“I don’t have to,” said Codella. “You confessed it all to Brandon in the basement of your father’s building.”
Julia crossed her arms. “It’s his word against mine.”
“Not quite,” said Codella. “I was right outside that door. I heard everything you said.”
“Yeah? Well, who believes cops anymore? You all tell lies. And that photo’s irrelevant. I got the alarm clock camera shortly after it was taken.”
Codella shook her head. “I think you bought it within the last few weeks.”
Julia twisted the band of her Rolex.
“And I’ll prove it,” Codella added. “I’ll pour over every receipt, credit card statement, and online transaction you’ve ever made. We’ll contact the clock manufacturer and find out when your unit was built and where it was sold. And we’ll find out when you bought it. You used premeditation in the murder of your mother and Baiba Lielkaja, and I’ll make sure the DA can prove that to a jury.”
Julia repeated, “I need some water.”
<
br /> Codella got up and left the room. Muñoz was waiting outside the door. “You been watching?” she asked him.
He nodded. “I got here five minutes ago.”
“Did you get the warrant?”
“Cooper and a team are there now.”
“Did they find anything?”
“She was grinding oxycodone pills in a little spice grinder.”
“What about the charm?”
“It was right where you saw it—in the miniature Coliseum on the bookshelf.”
She got a glass of tap water and returned to the interrogation room. As she watched Julia sip, she thought of Lucy Merchant swallowing the adulterated diazepam, Baiba sucking a deadly smoothie through her straw, and Merchant sipping a tainted Starbucks latte—all at the hands of Julia Merchant. “Did you really think you’d get away with this?” Codella asked.
“I deserved to get away with it,” Julia answered. “You have no idea what it was like to live under my father’s thumb. He thinks he has the right to control everything. Where I live. Where I go. Who I see. What I spend. He has billions of dollars, but all he gives me is a little monthly stipend. Last winter he threatened to write me out of his will if I didn’t get tested for the Alzheimer’s genes. He would have done it, too. I had to go along or get cut off. And guess what? Now I have to live with the fact that I have the same mutation my mother did.”
Her eyes filled with tears. Codella could see the terror in them. “How do you think it feels to watch your mother’s mind disintegrate and know that the same thing is probably going to happen to you?” Julia didn’t wait for an answer. “After that, I hated looking at her. And I despised him.”
Codella thought of her cancer. Would she have wanted to know decades in advance that malignant cells would stealthily proliferate inside of her one day? She leaned forward. “Is that when you started to plan your revenge?”
“I had to make it believable,” Julia said with a hint of pride. “Obviously my father could never have killed her alone. Someone at Park Manor would have to have helped him. And when he started fucking Baiba Lielkaja, the whole idea fell into place.”
“How did you know he was fucking her?”
“I know my father, Detective. I’ve seen so many of his little sex toys. He used to bring them home at night when my mother was out of town. She’d be touring or in LA or London. He’d introduce them to me and say they were working. He’d shut them up in that guest suite and a little while later he’d come into my room with a glass in his hand. Daddy has a drink for you, he’d say. Daddy’s drink will make you sleep better.”
“How old were you?”
“Five, seven, ten. It went on and on. I’ve slept through all kinds of things, Detective. Who knows what I’ve slept through.”
Her laugh was a hard wall of rock. But then a reservoir of tears broke through. She tried to wipe them away, but more tears erupted and flowed down her cheeks.
“It’s a terrible thing to suffer at the hands of a parent.” Codella spoke softly. “If we can’t trust a parent, who can we trust, right?”
Julia didn’t speak.
“You wanted him to pay,” said Codella sympathetically. The guilty needed permission for their crimes.
The young woman nodded. “I just had to wait for my moment.”
“The moment when you could get into the dispensary,” said Codella. “It was you who went in there Sunday night, wasn’t it? Not Baiba. You caused Dottie Lautner to fall so there’d be a big commotion.”
“No. You’re wrong about that. The old lady fell on her own. I watched it happen. It was like a gift from the gods, a sign that I was supposed to act.”
Codella nodded appreciatively. The guilty wanted to believe they had fooled you. “You managed to get in and out of Baiba’s apartment without anyone seeing you,” she noted in a congratulatory tone. “She must have been pleased that you brought her one of her favorite Juice Generation smoothies.”
Julia smirked. “She actually thought I was there to commiserate with her.”
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Codella said in a “help-me-out-here” tone. “If you wanted to frame your father, if you wanted to make him pay for his cruelty to you, why did you kill him?”
Julia lifted the water glass and stared into it as if it were an expensive goblet of reserve Bordeaux. She inhaled a deep breath through her perfect nostrils. “He called me today. He wanted me to stand beside him at that charade of a press conference in front of Park Manor. When I said no, I expected him to get furious and threaten to cut me off again, but he didn’t. He got very quiet instead. He just said, ‘All right, Julia. We’ll talk when it’s over. We have a lot to talk about, don’t we? Come see me.’ Something had clicked in him. He knew. I could hear it in his tone. He knew. And when I watched his speech, I knew something else, too. I knew you were never going to arrest him for the crime. There wasn’t enough evidence, and he would call in favors and manipulate public opinion the way he always does. I’d never get out from under him.”
“So you decided to make him the next suicide?”
“I had to get free. What did I have to lose? I’d either be in his prison or I’d be in yours, and there was always the chance I’d get away with it.”
Codella watched a tear roll slowly down her left cheek. We never get free from the past, she wanted to say. It just doesn’t happen that way.
Julia gazed at something in front of her eyes. A spot on the drab wall? Her reflection in the one-way mirror behind which Muñoz and McGowan were watching? A scene from the distant past? She had executed her act of revenge, but the act had not set her free. She would spend the next few decades in a cell even smaller than this interrogation room, and her memories would eat away at her mind long before her genes activated any self-destruct script.
Codella got up from the table. “I’m sorry you couldn’t think of another way out.”
Julia shrugged. “Just arrest me. Let’s get this over with.”
FRIDAY
THE LAST DAY
CHAPTER 78
Codella met him at nine AM in the narrow coffee shop on Greenwich Street behind the Borough of Manhattan Community College. There was really no need for the meeting—Brandon had already given a detailed statement at Manhattan North—but Codella wanted to see him one last time. They sat across from each other in a tight booth for two, and he waited for her to speak first.
“I let myself suspect you for a little while,” she confessed.
He shrugged. “It’s understandable. I held the cup, and I didn’t tell you I’d gone back to Baiba’s that night. I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s not important. But I wanted to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For saving my life.”
He looked surprised.
“You did. Just before Julia hit me over the head, I heard the elevator coming. She must have heard it, too. Who knows what she would have done to me if you hadn’t come downstairs. So I owe you my life.”
He looked down shyly.
“I’m thanking you,” said Codella. “You’re supposed to say you’re welcome.”
He smiled.
“You have a great smile. You could show it more.”
The waiter came. Codella ordered tea. Brandon ordered coffee.
“You saved Thomas Merchant too, you know. He probably would have died without the Naloxone. I’m not sure whether or not you’re happy about that.”
They both laughed.
“Ironically, I read about Naloxone while I was in Baiba’s apartment that afternoon,” he said. “I was trying to study for a test next week, and I couldn’t concentrate at all, except for that sidebar. I found it interesting, and I read it twice.” He rubbed his bristly chin. Was he trying to grow a goatee, she wondered. “I wish I could have saved her instead of him,” he added.
“I know. But we don’t get to choose who we save, and we can’t save people from the needs that compel them to do self-destructi
ve things.”
“I did love her,” he blurted out like a guilty confession. His throat sounded dry.
“I know. And it’s good to admit your feelings. It’s liberating.” She thought of that night long ago when Haggerty had told her about the woman he’d loved and how she had humiliated him. She thought of all the shameful history she had kept to herself until Haggerty had teased it out of her.
Brandon nodded. “What’s going to happen to Merchant?”
Their drinks came. “Nothing, I suppose.”
“Shouldn’t he be arrested for what he did to Baiba?”
“Should he? Yes. But there’s no proof. All we know is that they were together on Monday night and he went to see her on Wednesday. The rest is he-said-she-said. His punishment will come in the form of Pamela Martinelli. She might have been on Merchant’s side two days ago, but last night she showed up as Julia’s pit bull and that woman will tear out anyone’s throat. She’ll make sure Julia has the best defense attorney money can buy, and the public isn’t likely to forgive and forget about Merchant’s transgressions when they get done spinning stories of Julia’s traumatic childhood.”
She watched Brandon add sugar to his coffee. “What will you do now, Brandon?”
His spoon circled the inside circumference of his cup. “I’m going to have my surgery in three weeks,” he said. “Before all this happened, Baiba gave me three thousand dollars. At first I wasn’t going to use it because I figured it probably came from the jewelry Merchant gave her. How else would she have had that kind of money? But then I decided if that was true, if she went to the trouble of selling the jewelry, then she was at least trying to get free from him. And she wanted me to have it. If I use it, a little bit of her will stay with me.”
Codella nodded.
“And after I recover from the surgery I’ll do my hospital internship, and hopefully they’ll hire me on.”
“You’re very courageous.”
