ETs were photographing the car’s interior, the body, and the surrounding area. One of the techs interrupted Mark’s musings. “How much you want us to do?” she asked.
Mark knew the kit she carried contained tools to pick up everything from fingerprints to fibers. “Keep it simple. There’s probably nothing here,” he said. “But they want us to have a look-see because of that other death here a few days ago. Just to be safe, we’ll impound the car. Look at it later if we have to.” He turned to Bailey. “Anybody notify the victim’s family?”
“Estranged wife,” he said. “We’re locating her now.”
Mark put money on this being a heart attack or stroke, despite the victim’s relatively young age. There was nothing to suggest otherwise—no
gun shot, no head trauma—nothing looked out of place. Well, other than the fact that the guy was dead.
By the time the sun came up, Damon Tarabulus’s body was wrapped, loaded, and ready for transport to Sarasota Memorial Hospital for autopsy. Mark resisted the urge to tuck a note for Claire under one of the body bag’s tight straps.
“Follow the victim to the morgue,” Mark told Bailey. “I guess I better talk to some of the people who knew him.”
For it being so early in the morning, Tuscany Bay was bright and bustling. A forty-something nurse named Brenda ushered Mark in through the back door. “Come on in, Detective,” she said. The gray corridor was lit by narrow fluorescent overhead fixtures. “I just can’t believe it,” she continued in a hushed voice. “I mean, Damon seemed so robust.” She turned. “He wasn’t mugged or anything, was he? The paramedics said they thought it might be his heart.”
Mark started to answer, but she interrupted.
“I mean, why are you coming in to talk to us? Why a detective? What is it you’re not telling us?”
“Just procedure,” he began, but she’d pushed open double doors. A group of elderly people stared up at him. Some leaned on walkers, others sat in wheelchairs and on sofas. Despite the room’s brightness and its cheery butter-yellow color, Mark smelled the potent combination of mustiness, disinfectant, and stale body odor.
“Word spreads like the plague around here,” Brenda whispered close to his ear. “They’ve been up since Damon’s body was discovered. Most of them watched out the window.”
The group shifted closer. Too close.
“Before you go,” Mark said, eager for any opportunity to retreat, “was Damon well liked?”
Brenda wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t care for him. No one did.”
He jotted that down. “What about the nurse who died here a few weeks ago?”
“Lisa? She and I worked different shifts so I never got to know her. But if
you come in later you can talk with some of her friends. In the meantime, these are the people who know everything that goes on here. Ask them.” She winked, and left.
The elderly patients parted to allow Mark into their midst. Hands clawed at him, pressuring him toward the room’s center. He had a flash-forward vision and wondered if he and Claire would live out their final years in a place like this. Despite the tasteful décor and the expensive furnishings, he had an inexplicable urge to run fast and far before the grasping arms of old age could squeeze the life out of him.
Across the room, a large woman with dyed black hair worked knitting needles, an orange scarf puddled at her feet. Mark figured it was already two yards too long. Near the window two women gazed out at the Florida greenery, wistful expressions on both their faces.
One of the taller men shuffled up to Mark and introduced himself. “I’m Ace,” he said. “My nickname. Used to own an Ace Hardware.” He pointed to the wing chair. “Sit here.”
Ace called over to one of the window women. Small-boned and hunched, she had thick gray hair, and watery eyes. Both hands gripped the handles of a walker, and a red rosary dangled from the right. While she made her way over, Mark sat, finding himself at eye level with all the residents. He flipped a page of his notebook and clicked his pen a couple times just to avoid their vacant stares.
“Why are you here?” a woman asked. Her fingers tapped a Parkinsons-like rhythm against her lips. “Was Damon murdered? Do you know who did it?”
“I don’t think . . . ” Mark began.
“And what about Lisa Hume?” another woman asked.
A voice from behind Mark: “Yeah, what killed her?”
The woman with Parkinsons placed a shaky hand on his arm. “Nobody ever tells us anything. What happened to her? Is somebody going to kill us too?”
Mark raised his voice just a little. “That’s what I’m here to ask you about.” They silenced and waited for him to continue. Just like little kids, he thought.
Ace hurried to help the woman with the walker into an adjacent wing chair. “This is Rita Petrizzo,” he said to Mark. “Her husband is one of the people who you recently found.”
Mark’s mind raced. He didn’t recall a third death. Not from here. But he wanted to be polite. Leaning forward, he took the elderly woman’s tiny hand in his. “I’m very sorry,” he said.
“My husband good man.” Mrs. Petrizzo’s old-country voice cracked. “But he not so good up here. . . . ” she tapped at her temple. Wide tears shimmered in her rheumy eyes. “My Angelo. Why nobody bring him back here? Why he die alone? He no want to die alone. He supposed to stay with me.”
Oh jeez. Mark did remember that one. Since it hadn’t been a homicide the matter hadn’t ever come under official scrutiny. Once it had been determined that the old guy had been under a doctor’s care and had passed away apparently peacefully on an idyllic afternoon, Mark had erased the incident from his mind. “I don’t have an answer for you,” he said.
Mrs. Petrizzo turned away in disgust, clutching her rosary. Fingering one of the red beads, she sat in the chair mouthing silent prayers, twisting over her shoulder long enough to glare. “I pray you die, you sum-a-bitch,” she said, then spat on the floor.
For fifteen minutes Mark fielded more questions than he asked. Although some of the residents were lucid—Ace and the knitting lady, for instance—most asked him wild and unanswerable questions, talking about kids who never visited and loved ones who’d died.
As he rose to leave, he saw Mrs. Petrizzo start after him, her rosary clacking against the walker’s metal framework as she inched forward in fits and starts. As much as he would have preferred to bolt, he turned and made his way back to her.
“Mrs. Petrizzo, let me say again how sorry—”
“Shut up you mouth,” she said. “You no see what ’dey do to us. Dey kill my Angelo.” She waved a hand upward. “Dey try kill us all.”
“Who?” Even as the word popped from his mouth, he regretted it.
The hand holding the rosary came up, quivering. She crooked her index
finger and gestured him to come closer. She kept her hand aloft and he could see how much the effort cost by the blue-white grip her other hand maintained on the walker. “You find dem,” she whispered hoarsely, shaking the rosary near his nose. The prayer beads were so close they looked like red eyes, with angry black pupils staring straight into his face. “God punish dem.”
“I’m sure—”
She pointed her finger hard. The rosary shook. “You find who take my Angelo out to die.” Mrs. Petrizzo narrowed her eyes, then tapped Mark on the cheek, almost affectionately. “You find dem, and den I pray for you soul.”
When Brenda rescued Mark a few minutes later, he asked her about Mrs. Petrizzo’s outburst.
“They get a little loopy sometimes,” Brenda said. “And she’s been lost since her husband died.” She gave a half hearted shrug as she led him back into the administrative section. “Did you get any good information in there?”
He flipped his notebook closed. “Hardly,” he said. “But I do know they hated Damon.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“Tell me why you didn’t like him.”
“He was mean. Ridiculed the patients when he thought no one was looking, made them ask for every little thing, and he drank. A lot.”
“And he wasn’t fired . . . because?”
“He was on review for coming in drunk. But management’s hands are tied. The staff complained about his work habits, but heaven forbid he get fired.” She rolled her eyes. “Our management team is pathetic. They’re so afraid of lawsuits of any kind. And let me tell you, Damon would’ve figured out a way to sue them.” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “He took them to the cleaners once for an on-the-job injury. Management was afraid to touch him.”
“But they’re not afraid of residents’ lawsuits because of how they are treated?”
“Right,” she said. “The residents were afraid to speak out against him. They knew Damon would retaliate if they did. And who listens to these old folks anyway? Beside us nurses, I mean.” Brenda seemed completely oblivious to the irony of her earlier “loopy” comment with regard to Mrs. Petrizzo. “We do what we can to keep things nice around here. But with a wimpy management and no formal complaints, what else can we do?”
“That’s just wrong.”
“Yeah,” she said as though he’d just pointed out that the floors were green.
An hour later, Mark had talked with the staff on duty, and had made arrangements to come back to meet with the night shift. As he left the facility, he shook his head. From the looks of the body at the scene, this was a natural, albeit unexpected death. But the fact that so many people disliked the guy made Mark just a little extra curious.
Flipping open his cell phone, Mark hit speed dial number one. She answered after two rings.
“You at work yet?” he asked.
“Just got in,” Claire said. “And I see we got your guy from Tuscany Bay.”
“Good. Keep him on ice till I get there. I want in on this one.”
“You got it.”
Three hours later, Claire peeled off her latex gloves and shook her head. “Danny,” she called to her assistant. “Have we gotten those tox reports back from a couple of weeks ago?”
“Reports?” He jumped up from the corner where he’d been waiting for his next task. “Yeah. I think they came today,” he said with enthusiasm before leaving the autopsy room.
“What are you looking for?” Mark asked.
Claire pointed inside Damon Tarabulus’s body cavity. “Two weeks ago I found the same sort of hemorrhaging in the body of a nurse from Tuscany Bay.”
“You think there’s some virus going around there?”
“I think they both ingested a poison,” she said as Danny returned with the tox screening.
“Poison? Like what?”
Claire flipped through the reports. “Negative, negative, negative . . . ” She blew out a breath of frustration and looked up. Danny’s and Mark’s faces were expectant, eager. “I screened for all the normal stuff,” she said. “Unless I know what to look for, I don’t know what additional tests to order.” Biting her lip, she turned to Mark. “I need to take another look at what both victims ate.”
“Must be something only they shared,” he said. “None of the residents have gotten sick, so it probably isn’t in the cafeteria food.”
“Except for Mr. Petrizzo,” she said. “We just assumed he died of natural causes, because of his age.” She pursed her lips, thinking. “We’ve done autopsies because relatively young staff members died, but if the older folks are dying too, and those aren’t considered suspicious, we wouldn’t necessarily know, would we?”
Mark’s face told her he was following her train of thought. “Let me check with Tuscany, see if they’re seeing more deaths than usual.”
When Mark visited Tuscany Bay this time, he came through the front door. A windowed sunroom occupied the space to the right, and he smiled at the two women sitting there. One of them was the heavy-set, dark-haired woman, but this time the knitted item in her lap was bright blue. The woman next to her napped in a wheelchair, until the knitting lady shoved her with an elbow. “Look, it’s the detective. Hallo, detective!” she shouted.
The wheelchair woman jerked. She looked around, then dragged the back of a speckled hand across her mouth as she nodded hello. A moment later, she’d drifted back to sleep.
Brenda met him at the juncture to the office hallway. She held papers in her hand and a somber expression on her face. “I’ve got that information you asked for,” she said. “Let’s head over to the staff lounge, and we’ll go over it.”
On their way to the facility’s far reaches, they walked through resident corridors. Quite a few doors were open. “These don’t look like hospital rooms,” Mark said as he craned his neck to see better. “They’re huge.”
“This is an assisted-living facility, not just a nursing home.”
Mark shook his head.
“Come here.” She walked back a few yards to what would be a corner unit and knocked at the open door of room 1100.
“Bright,” Mark said, toeing the fire-engine red carpet inside the threshold.
“Residents have total control of their apartments.” She glanced down at the garish rug and stuck out her tongue. “I’m glad we have professional designers for the common areas of the place.” She knocked again. “Mrs. Petrizzo?”
Not Mrs. Petrizzo again. “I don’t want to bother anyone,” Mark said.
“May we come in?” Brenda asked, her voice high and polite. Then to Mark, “It’ll be fine. They love company. And this apartment is one of the nicest we have. The view of the garden is breathtaking.”
At that moment, Mrs. Petrizzo rounded the corner in herky-jerky walker movements, the ever-present rosary clutched in her right hand. When she made it to the doorway, her face scrunched, then recognition dawned. “You find who take Angelo away?” she asked.
“He’s here to investigate.” Brenda answered, very slowly and a little louder than necessary. “He needs to get more information.”
Petrizzo turned her back.
Mark grimaced. This could turn into the visit from hell.
Brenda walked straight in, following the old woman. “These are self-contained apartments,” she said, oblivious to his discomfort.
“You visit her often?” He nodded his head toward Mrs. Petrizzo.