Julia Merchant tapped Pause and pointed to the image on her iPad screen. “Right there. You see? The nurse hands him the cup. Then she looks toward the door. You can tell she’s afraid someone’s going to come in.”
Codella considered. Could you really tell that? Julia Merchant believed that her mother was the victim of a crime, and so she saw malice in a potentially innocuous turn of a nurse’s head. “Maybe she just heard a noise. Maybe someone called her name.”
“At Park Manor only a nurse gives out medicine. That’s the rule, and I’ve seen how careful they are to keep the caregivers away from the nurse while she’s dispensing. I’m telling you. This nurse knew she was doing something wrong.”
“Did you share your concern with someone in charge?”
“The director. Constance Hodges. And she made up a lame story about how my mother gets dehydrated and the caregiver was only giving her water.”
“How do you know it’s a lame story?” Codella studied the young woman’s spotless twenty-something skin, her highlighted hair, and the intricate links of the expensive gold chain around her neck. “Isn’t dehydration a legitimate concern with people who can’t take care of themselves?”
“I have other evidence.” Julia Merchant reached for the Hermes bag hooked to the back of her chair. The bag’s gold hardware gleamed as she set it on her lap and carefully extracted a bulky wad of paper toweling. She lay the toweling on the desk between them and slowly unraveled it to reveal beige balls of fuzz matted with a viscous substance. “This is what they poured down my mother’s throat.”
Codella waited for the explanation she knew was coming.
“After my father and I met with Constance Hodges, I went back to my mother’s room, to the exact spot where the nurse and caregiver are standing in this video, and when I looked down, I saw a spill in the carpet—and not an old dried-up spill. Whatever they gave her last night is in these carpet fibers, and it isn’t water, Detective.”
Codella eyed the clotted beige fibers resting in the nest of toweling. Julia Merchant did not have enough evidence, she knew, on which to base her deduction. “Just because this was on her carpet doesn’t mean it was in the caregiver’s cup,” she said.
“No, but isn’t it likely?”
“And even if it’s from the cup, that doesn’t mean it had anything to do with her death.”
“But it could, and given the circumstances, aren’t you being a little dismissive?”
“I’m not being dismissive,” said Codella. “I’m being objective.”
As she said this, her iPhone lit up and her oncologist’s name appeared. He was a single cell tower connection away from her Manhattan North office, she thought. He was ready to give her the results of her scan. All she had to do was swipe the surface of her screen. She rubbed her eyes. She weighed Julia Merchant’s demand for attention against her own need for reassurance. Goddammit. Then she turned the phone facedown and forced her focus back to the moment. “Let’s review the facts,” she said. “Just the facts. A caregiver found your mother in her bed around four this morning.”
“Right.”
“And no one performed CPR.”
“Because my father signed a Do Not Resuscitate Order.”
“And the Park Manor physician who certified her death attributed it to natural causes.”
“He said her heart had simply stopped. But how could that be? Hearts don’t just stop. She was perfectly healthy when I fed her dinner yesterday.”
“To the best of your knowledge,” Codella pointed out.
“What do you mean by that?” The young woman pressed her lips together.
“I mean you’re not a doctor.”
“Obviously. But I know my mother. I would know if something were wrong with her.”
Would you? Codella wanted to ask. Are you sure about that? A year and a half ago, hadn’t she been equally confident about her own diagnostic skills? Hadn’t she dismissed the pain in her abdomen as a simple virus and delayed seeing a doctor for weeks and weeks because it never occurred to her that an aggressive lymphoma could be wrapping itself around her intestines? She glanced at her iPhone. She wanted those scan results. She wanted them now.
“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?”