At the Scene of the Crime (18 page)

“Actually this is my first time in here since she and her husband switched to this unit,” Brenda said. “I tend to avoid the cranky ones.” She winked, then spoke loudly once again as they all made it into the main room. “It’s incredibly expensive to live here—I couldn’t afford it—but we’ve got a
waiting list a mile long.”

Mrs. Petrizzo turned. “My Angelo say ‘Nothing but the best!’ He good man.”

Brenda continued the tour, “And another thing we offer here—”

“Shut up you mouth,” Mrs. Petrizzo shouted. “You no tell me who took away my Angelo.”

“I told you before, Mrs. Petrizzo,” Brenda said soothingly, “we think your husband walked away on his own. Nobody would have taken him off the grounds.”

Mrs. Petrizzo harrumphed. “Why you come here?” she asked them.

Brenda answered again, a little less patiently. “Detective Corbett here is investigating the recent deaths.”

The old lady seemed to consider that. She shuffled off to the kitchen while Brenda continued the tour. Behaving more like a realtor than a nurse, Brenda made her way through the rooms, first pointing out the kitchen with its top-of-the-line appliances, then the living room, the bedroom, and finally the bathroom: safe, secure, and all handicapped accessible.

When they returned to the kitchen, Mrs. Petrizzo beckoned them forward. “I make coffee,” she said. “Sit.”

Mark would have much preferred to get out of the woman’s apartment and back to his office, but he wanted to get the resident information from Brenda before he left. To his great dismay, she smiled at the old woman and said, “I’ve passed my limit for today, thanks. But I’m sure the detective here would like some.”

He tried to protest. “No—”

“Sit, sit,” Mrs. Petrizzo said, gesturing with her spoon toward a chair . “I no have company long time. Sit.”

It just seemed wrong to let an old woman wait on them while they sat and talked, but she seemed pleased to have visitors. Biting the insides of his cheeks in frustration, Mark took the chair opposite Brenda’s. “So what did you find?” he asked.

“I don’t know what all this means,” Brenda said, as she spread the papers
across the tabletop. She took pains to lower her voice. Mrs. Petrizzo was humming and not paying them any attention. “Statistically speaking, we have seen a bump in resident deaths, but nothing crazy.”

“How many?”

Brenda whispered. “In a facility this size, we can expect one to two losses per month. The past six months we’ve averaged over two per month.”

Mrs. Petrizzo leaned over the table, placing a basket of cookies on the table before them. A moment later, she added a bowl of candy. “Help you-self.”

Mark and Brenda paused their conversation momentarily until Mrs. Petrizzo shuffled back to the counter.

He ran his finger down the names of the deceased. “Is there anything these people might have had in common?”

“Nothing I can think of,” she said. “Umm . . . let’s see. About five months ago we did have one weird coincidence. Mr. Gomez passed away, and a day later, his wife followed him.” She raised her voice and turned to Mrs. Petrizzo. “Do you remember Mr. and Mrs. Gomez?” she asked over her shoulder.

The old woman grunted an affirmative reply.

Brenda said, “They say Mrs. Gomez died of a broken heart. Isn’t that sweet?”

Mark swallowed. He had a sudden urge to rush home and grab Claire and take her on that trip to Paris she’d always been dreaming of. Today. Right now. Before chubby middle-aged nurses could say things like how sweet it was that they’d died together. He cleared his throat. “Can I get copies of these?” he asked, standing.

“These are copies,” Brenda said. “You can take them with you.”

Mrs. Petrizzo placed a mug of coffee on the table before Mark just as he gathered his papers to leave. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Thank you for your time. But I really need to get back.”

She pointed a gnarled finger at him. “Wait. You come with me.”

Mark followed her to a brass étagère whose style went out in the last
century. She lifted a rosary away from its draped position over a corner of an eight-by-ten portrait, and pulled the picture up.

“This my Angelo.”

He took the frame from her hands. “He must have been a—” The words died on his lips. The corpulent face staring up at him was familiar. But the name was all wrong. Angelo, yes. But not Petrizzo. This was Angelo Gilardi, the mobster from Chicago. Everybody on the force knew this face. When the well-known criminal relocated to Sarasota, Mark’s department had been put on alert. Gilardi, however, who’d been in his seventies at the time, never made a move. It was as if, after all those years of butchering people up north, he’d decided to live a quiet, law-abiding life in this fair-weather haven. Eventually the department lost interest, and subsequently lost sight of the guy. He’d been here, living under a different name, and nobody had ever known.

Mrs. Petrizzo’s moist eyes blinked up at him.

“Thank you,” Mark said placing the picture back on the shelf. “This helps a lot.”

“Angelo no want to die alone,” she said in a soft voice. Mark thought she might start crying but her voice grew hard and she pointed to the kitchen. “Bitch in there no tell me nothing. She know who take Angelo away. Take him away to die alone.” She shook her head and tears gathered in her eyes again. “Strangers find him. Strangers.” As Mark started to move away, she gripped his arm with a bony hand. “You understand?”

“I do,” he said.

 

When Mark’s cell phone rang two days later, he was sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, sound asleep. Claire’s head was on his lap, and his fingers were tangled in her hair. “Für Elise” jarred them both awake, but at least this time he’d kept the handset within reach.

“Shit,” he said, disbelievingly when he got the news. “I’ll be right there.”

Claire sat up. “What happened?”

“Tuscany Bay again. But this time it’s somebody I know.” He boosted
himself up and checked his watch. “I may not make it back tonight. But I’ll be there first thing tomorrow. Don’t start without me.”

 

“You look terrible,” Claire said when Mark made it into the medical examiner’s office the next morning.

“Thanks, honey. I love you too.”

“What’s going on at that nursing home, anyway?”

“Hell if I know. And because the victim was rushed to the hospital this time, we’ve got less physical evidence than we would if she’d been found dead. I’ve got the crime lab taking a look—” He stopped himself, remembering that he’d asked the lab to keep Damon Tarabulus’s car impounded. “Hang on a second.” Still talking as he dialed, he asked, “You think these people were poisoned, right?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense right now, why?”

“If they all came across the same substance, there might be some spillage or residual on their clothing or—”

When the crime lab answered, Mark asked for additional tests to be run on each victim’s clothing and on Damon Tarabulus’s car’s upholstery. “You never know,” he mouthed to Claire.

The tech on the phone said he’d do his best, but cautioned they might not have kept enough from the first victim, the nurse in the basement. “We didn’t have any reason to suspect a problem, so I don’t know how much we saved,” he said. “But I’ll check.”

“Thanks,” Mark said, and hung up.

Claire came around her desk and rested a hand on his shoulder. “I waited till you got here. You sure you’re up for this?”

“Not really.” He rubbed his hands over his face, then stood. “Let’s get it over with.”

In the cool autopsy room, Claire adjusted the neckline of her sterile gown to give her enough leeway to comfortably lean into the corpse. She settled her shoulders and spoke into the microphone as she worked.

Arms folded as he watched, Mark shook his head. What was going on at that crazy place?

“Take a look,” Claire said after she’d removed the ribs. “This is what I’ve been talking about.”

“That’s a lot of blood.”

“Whatever killed those other two killed this woman too. What was her name?”

Mark pulled his lips tight before answering. “Brenda.” He’d been to enough autopsies to treat them with casual indifference, but he’d never watched when he’d known the victim before. Using the tips of his gloved fingers, he pulled his T-shirt high up to his mask-covered nose, and took a big breath.

“You okay?” Claire asked.

The overwhelmingly pungent smell, like summer garbage left out in the sun too long, was getting to him. “Yeah,” he lied. He looked at Brenda’s face. Thought about her comment about people dying together. About how sweet that was.

Deep in the body cavity, Claire’s hands stopped moving. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah.” He shifted his weight. “You finding anything unusual?”

“Well,” she said, stringing the word out thoughtfully, “the one thing I’ve noticed is that all three victims have more undigested matter than I would expect to find.”

“They ate a big meal before they died?”

Claire shook her head. “No. They haven’t digested properly. I noticed it with the first one, Lisa Hume. I thought it odd that she hadn’t digested more fully. All the reports suggested she tried to sleep for several hours before she died.”

“What does that mean?”

“At first I didn’t think it meant anything. You know as well as I do that witness accounts of time aren’t always accurate. But then Damon Tarabulus’s autopsy gave me a similar finding, and now Brenda’s here does too.” She talked a little faster. “I’m starting to suspect that whatever killed them also slowed their digestive processes. In fact,” she said, bending over
the corpse again, “I’m going to send this out for more comprehensive tests.”

To Mark, the stomach contents looked like little more than unappetizing mush. “How can they find anything in there?” he asked.

“It helps if we know what to look for,” she said, poking through the material in the stainless steel pan Danny held. “But I can tell you a few things just by looking. For instance, this is almost completely undigested.” She held up what looked like a shell fragment. When Claire swiped at it with her gloved finger, Mark noticed it was red, about the size of a jellybean.

He pointed. “That’s . . . ”

“That’s what?”

“I’ve seen something like that before.” Mark wracked his brain trying to place the little bean in context.

Claire flipped up her eye shield and studied the shell, then searched the remaining matter in the bowl. “Here’s another piece,” she said. “And another one. It looks like a seed. A big seed. Danny,” she called. “Go see if we’ve got any books on poisonous plants.”

 

Ten minutes later, Claire looked up from the book Danny had hustled to find. “Got you, you little bugger!” she said, triumphantly. “
Abrus precatorius
. That’s what we’re looking at. Listen . . . ” she read the plant’s description aloud to Mark and Danny. “Also known as the Jequirty bean. It’s a non-native, invasive plant here in Florida. If the shell is compromised, then ingesting a single pea can be fatal. And the poison, abrin, slows the metabolism as it kills.”

“Nasty stuff.” Mark said.

“This is probably the most dangerous plant we know of in this country. There’s almost no chance of surviving once a bean has been ingested. But poisonings are so rare we don’t normally test for abrin. No wonder we didn’t find it in the tox screenings.”

“So you think this is from a plant that grows on Tuscany’s grounds?”

She stared off into space for a long moment. “Yeah, but I can’t imagine all
of these people picking beans off a plant and eating them. Can you?”

A memory tap-danced just out of reach and hard as Mark tried, he couldn’t access where he’d seen the little red bean before. “Let me take a look at the book,” he said.

Claire was still reading as she twisted the text to face him. “Interesting. Another name for the bean is the Rosary Pea because people use them—”

“Holy shit,” Mark said.

 

When Mark visited Tuscany Bay again, he headed straight for apartment 1100 and knocked on the open door. “Mrs. Petrizzo?” he called. “It’s Detective Corbett.”

He waited and a minute later, she made her way slowly toward him. She called out, “You find who take my Angelo away?”

“No.”

Stopping in her tracks, she fixed him with an angry glare. “Wha’ good are you?” Turning away, she labored to turn her walker back the way she’d come.

“I have a few questions for you, Mrs. Petrizzo.”

She ignored him, making her careful way into the living room.

“Why didn’t you tell me your husband was Angelo Gilardi?”

She answered over her shoulder. “Wha’ difference it make? Somebody take him away. You find who take him.”

“Who do you think took him?” Mark asked.

Her skinny shoulders shrugged.

“Do you think it was Lisa Hume?”

Mrs. Petrizzo spat. “Bitch,” she said. “She give my Angelo bad medicine.”

“And Damon Tarabulus,” Mark said, following her toward the out-of-date étagère again. “You didn’t like the way he treated you or your friends.”

Another shrug.

“What I don’t understand is what you had against Brenda,” Mark said.

“Why you ask me?”

“I think you killed Lisa Hume, Damon Tarabulus, Brenda Pikorski, and
Roberto and Felicia Gomez.” He spread his hands. “There may be more.”

The old woman threw her head back and laughed. “How do a little lady like me kill so many people, hah?”

“Where is your rosary, Mrs. Petrizzo?”

Her shrewd glare dissolved, replaced by a sympathetic expression he’d never seen on this woman before. “I no kill nobody,” she said softly. “You work too hard and you see things,” she said. Suddenly, she winced.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, but her eyes clenched shut. “My heart no so good no more.” Her skinny arm flailed out and she pointed to the nearby kitchen. “Help me sit.”