Codella flashed her shield at the guards just inside the New York Presbyterian revolving doors. She opened her leather jacket to reveal the Glock in its holster, and the guards made way for her to step around the metal detector. It occurred to her that they probably thought she was here on a case. She wished she were here on a case.
She passed the waiting area, admissions office, and information desk. She glanced into a small glassed-in cafeteria where nurses, orderlies, and doctors stood like zombies in front of the caffeine options. She would have liked to stop and sip a green tea. Instead, she rode the elevator to the fifth floor and pushed open the door to the nuclear medicine department. She knew this drill all too well: check in at the desk, take a seat, and wait for the pitcher.
She chose the same couch she had occupied in October. Her scan then had been clean, and she was not immune to the superstitious belief that repeating her steps of that day might bring another good result. She looked out on the always-congested York Avenue and the East River just beyond. During her treatments, she had occupied rooms with views of the river and had watched for hours as cigarette boats, barges, tugs, and Circle Line tours plied the river’s heavy currents. She had followed the movements of pedestrians on the footpath on Roosevelt Island. She had even found herself thinking, I wish I could be taking a walk on that island right now, although in precancer days and now, she dismissed that island as a depressing concrete outpost cut off from the lifeblood of Manhattan.
She checked her e-mails and opened a text from Haggerty. Thanks for last night. She still couldn’t quite believe last night had actually happened, and she didn’t want to think about what it meant to her or what Haggerty would think it meant. Not now. She looked out the window and searched her mind for something else to focus on.
She would have liked to distract herself in the tangled threads of a complex investigation, but she hadn’t had a challenging case for three very long months. Dennis McGowan, her lieutenant, was making sure of that. When she had accepted the promotion to Manhattan North Homicide—just months before her cancer diagnosis—she’d felt like the teenager who finally graduated to the grown-ups’ table. But the grown-ups weren’t all that grown up, she had discovered, and they weren’t enthusiastic about sharing their table with the detective who had solved a case they’d let go cold.
Four years ago, Elaine DeFarge, a nurse at Columbia Presbyterian, never made it home to her apartment in Fort Greene after her shift. Waste disposal workers found her body two days later, covered by rotting mangoes and bananas in a dumpster behind the uptown Fairway Market. The initial call came into the 171st, and Detective Marty Blackstone caught it. But Captain Reilly knew his detective squad didn’t have the manpower to handle the case alone, so it was shifted up to Manhattan North, and Dan Fisk led a task force that worked the murder for six months without finding DeFarge’s killer.
The files gathered dust for another year, and then Codella asked Reilly if she could study the file. She spent her evenings reading the reports. Manhattan North detectives had investigated family, friends, and hospital staff meticulously. They had considered and ultimately ruled out any connection to the unsolved murders of three other New York City hospital workers killed in the prior five years. Codella didn’t retrace their steps. Instead, she zeroed in on a detail the detectives hadn’t been able to explain and that they had ultimately dismissed as insignificant to the investigation—a three-inch-long lock of Elaine DeFarge’s hair that was missing at the back of her head. Had she cut it off herself, or had someone else snipped a souvenir and left a signature the detectives hadn’t been able to read?
Codella called up cold case murders from every database she could access. She ran keyword searches and looked for any link to the hair. She knew she was searching for a needle in a haystack, but if the needle were there, she was determined to find it. And then one night she had a breakthrough. Six years earlier, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department had found the body of a woman whose hair appeared to have been snipped in the back—the forensic team had found strands of her cut hair next to the body. The victim was a rental manager at an apartment complex two blocks away from St. Vincent Hospital. The only link to DeFarge Codella could think of was the hospital, so she requested St. Vincent’s employee records from that time period and cross-checked them with the staff working at Columbia Presbyterian when DeFarge had disappeared. A name came up—one name—Wainright Blake, a contract nurse in the postanesthesia care units of both hospitals.
When Codella discovered the connection, Blake had already moved on and was working at White Plains Hospital in Westchester County, twenty-five miles north of Manhattan. When she and county police showed up at his apartment with a warrant, she found a cigar box under his bed with six locks of hair—a souvenir from each of his victims. DNA from those locks helped police in five states put cold cases to rest. New York magazine dubbed her “a genius of deductive reasoning.” The Washington Post featured her in a story on analytical detective work and the need for more integrated crime databases. The LA Times ran a three-part exposé focusing on all the uncorroborated conclusions that had led the original Manhattan North detectives to their dead end. And one night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow asked her how it felt to bring closure to six families’ grief. The NYPD brass really had no choice but to hand her the promotion Captain Reilly recommended.
So she had joined the “big leagues”—for a little while, at least, until cancer took her on a ten-month detour. And then she’d made her comeback solving the murder of Hector Sanchez. When McGowan had thrown her the body of that dead school principal, he hadn’t counted on the case giving her the equivalent of a Broadway stage on which to make her comeback from cancer oblivion. He had assumed he was throwing her the smelly, days’ old corpse of some unlucky New Yorker who had choked to death on his Seamless order or collapsed from cardiac arrest all alone in his West Side apartment. A detective had to go to the scene, and nobody wanted that job, so he had given it to her. But Sanchez had been anything but a natural death, and the case made not only the tabloids but also the front page of the New York Times. Three months later, op-ed writers were still debating whether Hector Sanchez was a flawed hero or a tyrant. And magazines like People and Vanity Fair had staked their claim on the story because it involved the box office star Dana Drew. McGowan’s attempt to cast Codella as an insignificant extra in his homicide squad had been royally fucked, and now he was doing his utmost to make sure she never got on any stage again.
The pitcher of contrast arrived. The technician who delivered it was the same one who had prepped her for her October scan, and she decided this was another hopeful sign. “Your cocktail, Madam,” he said as he lowered the plastic vessel to the coffee table with a flourish and handed her a paper cup.
“Did you spike it for me?”
“Don’t think you’re the first one to ask me that.” He winked.
She poured some of the unpleasant liquid and held it up to him. “Here’s to boring results.”
Then he was gone, and she was left with her anxiety and the liter of liquid to drink. What if lymphoma cells lit up the scan this time? What if she had to go back to round one and begin the fight all over?
“Take off your jewelry,” a nurse instructed her forty-five minutes later as they walked to the locker area. “Earrings, necklaces, rings. No metal.”
Codella just nodded. Only the uninitiated came to scans naively adorned. She peeled out of her clothes, put on the blue hospital gown, and tucked her service revolver and backup gun below her other belongings in the tiny locker. Then she followed the nurse to a small room with three desks, the kind in high school classrooms. She slipped into a seat, propped her arm on the narrow desktop, and watched the focused, efficient nurse tie a tourniquet around her left bicep. While her veins expanded under the pressure, the nurse lifted the lid on a lead-lined box, removed the syringe within, and flicked it several times as she held it toward the light. Then she untied the elastic and pressed needle into flesh. Codella felt the electric prick. She watched the plunger push the radioactive tracer into her vein. She visualized the ionized particles heating her whole arm and spreading through her circulatory system, marking the scenes of any crime her B cells had committed in the last four months.
The nurse led her to a tiny room where she lay on her back while the tracer circulated. Thirty minutes later, she entered the chilly, windowless room that housed the state-of-the-art scanner. She knew this drill, too. Swing your legs up. Lie back. Hands over your head. Do not move. The technician pushed a button and the slab she was on retracted slowly. At this juncture in the familiar routine, she always had the impulse to pray. Instead, as usual, she closed her eyes and whispered, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”