Two guys from the coroner’s office stood murmuring in the corner of a bedroom. They nodded when we walked in. A huge four-post bed dominated the room. The wood was dark and polished to a proud shine. In the center of the bed, a tiny brown woman lay under an enormous antique quilt. Thin wisps of gray hair fanned out on the pillow beneath her head. Her mouth was pulled in slightly at the corners, as if she were smiling at some pleasant memory. Mrs. Rose Erwell looked for all the world to be asleep.
There was a small nightstand beside the bed, and it was filled with prescription drug bottles. The coroner guys were watching me now. I looked at them and raised my eyebrows. The one in charge, a gray brush cut named Marty, flipped though his notebook.
“Decedent is one Rose Mary Erwell, age seventy-nine.” Flip. “Chondrosarcoma, advanced. Treatment was basically pain management at this point. Mrs. Erwell wasn’t responding particularly well to either the treatment or her ultimate prognosis. Her primary care guy,” more flipping, “a Doctor Bainbridge … recommended antidepressants.” Marty looked serious. “Patients facing end-of-life conditions sometimes have problems with depression.”
Tucker rolled his eyes.
I said, “Please tell me no one is surprised that the terminally ill don’t go out singing and tap-dancing.”
Marty smirked and shoved the notebook in his shirt pocket. “Cause of death was likely an overdose of something strong, like the others, but we’ll need the autopsy to confirm.”
I pointed to the bottles on the nightstand. “Could it have been this stuff?”
Marty shrugged. “It could have been. Any of her pain meds would’ve stopped a rhino. But the home nurse …” he pulled out the notebook again, “Shauna Collins, company is General Hospice … says all the heavy stuff is accounted for. Right down to the pill. The lab guys were here and they dusted everything. Said the only prints on the bottles belonged to the decedent and the nurse.”
“Where did the lab guys go?”
“Had another stop. Said to call them if you need details, otherwise their report will be ready tomorrow.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
They zipped up Mrs. Erwell and carted her to the van outside.
We poked around for a minute, then I looked at Tucker.
“Where’s the nurse?”
Tucker shrugged.
We caught Marty before he pulled away. Nurse Collins had called her company to report the death and they’d sent out a car to pick her up.
“The guy behind the wheel said he was her supervisor. Said she’d already given you guys a statement, and gotten your okay to take her in for a company deposition. Some internal procedure thing.”
I didn’t say anything.
Marty looked stricken. “Oh shit. I bought a line, didn’t I?”
Tucker tried not to appear exasperated.
I gave Marty a sympathetic smile. He felt bad because he should know better. “Don’t worry about it. They’re doing corporate CYA, but this will cost them.” I waved him on.
Tucker called in and sent a couple of squad cars over to collect the nurse and her supervisor. General Hospice wouldn’t like that, but interfering with a police investigation is serious. You step on the playing field, you’re in play.
Ms. Combs was crying softly when Tucker gently touched her shoulder. She shook her head and pulled away. “All right. Ask me the damn questions.” Mrs. Combs was angry about being questioned, but she told the truth like all the others. She was not present when her sister died (doctor appointment). She had not met the priest yet (planned to do so), as his visits began only recently (last two weeks). She only knew that the priest had been “recommended” by someone whose identity Mrs. Erwell would not divulge to her sister. After eight of these, it was sounding like a script. But not fiction; the thing was set up so the relatives didn’t get their hands dirty, and therefore couldn’t be charged as accessories. An act of kindness for those left behind to deal with the mess. It almost made me feel warm inside.
We thanked Mrs. Combs and walked out to the car. As we pulled away, I could see her in the rearview, holding herself on the front porch and frowning in the cold gray afternoon. Another old woman whose world had just gotten smaller by one. I looked away from the mirror and drove.
It turned out that General Hospice had a compelling reason to try and sequester Shauna Collins: She was not actually a nurse. Instead of hiring actual RNs or licensed hospice workers, General Hospice recruited former retail workers through a company website and sent them out to medicate their terminal clients. Armed with three days training and a cheap cell phone, Shauna was to follow the medication schedule provided by the company. If things got dicey, she was to call in to the actual trained medical personnel at headquarters. For this, she was paid ten dollars an hour; no benefits. Not surprisingly, General Hospice was making record profits. In the end, a whole bunch of GH executives were arrested at their beautiful homes in Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe.
You should have seen their faces.
We spent the morning of the next day in the police headquarters. I pushed paper around my desk for a while, then Tucker and I grabbed an unmarked and headed out to question Mrs. Erwell’s neighbors. Outside, the sky was the color of a fading bruise.
“Snow coming,” said Tucker.
The cell phone chirped just as we were headed for the 375 entrance ramp. There was a homicide over off Gratiot, on the city’s near east side. Since we were the closest detective car we picked up the slack. I made the siren whoop a couple of times while Tucker cut off a bunch of gesturing commuters. We hit the grill lights and rocketed out Gratiot.
Gratiot was the old artery out to the east side and its storefronts were sturdy monuments to the durability of the past, even as they died slowly in the present. Ugly signs defaced the old buildings, offering nothing more than pagers, liquor, or the sucker bet of the Lotto. Former neighborhood banks anchored major intersections, but now they were charismatic churches or strange shadow-economy shops that seemed to fade in and out with the seasons. Some of the places had been empty for most of my tour of duty. And that’s further back than I want to think about.
We turned north on Joseph Campau street. Most of the homes in this neighborhood were over a hundred years old. They sagged, slowly sinking into the ground, exposed wood graying in the cold wind coming off the river. Many were simply gone; replaced by vacant lots, trees, and the tall weeds known locally as “ghetto palms,” their fronds brown until spring. Driveways went nowhere, broken sidewalks marked off irrelevant property lines, light poles supported winter-dead creepers. In the summertime, the vegetation would make this urban neighborhood appear rural. Detroit was slowly reverting to the landscape that the French settlers knew, and I wondered how long it would be before the residents began farming again.
It started to snow. Thick flakes floated down, and I knew a blizzard was coming without being told. You grow up in Michigan, you get to know these things. Two cruisers were parked outside a two-story wood frame that was sloughing off the dark green paint of forty years ago. Three uniforms, all women, stood chatting next to one of the cruisers. They stopped talking as we walked up.
Tucker and I flipped our badges.
“What’s up?”
A uniform by the name of Biggs spoke up. She was pretty, with big brown eyes and freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her hair was pulled into tight braids under the uniform cap. She was all business.
“The call came in as a 187. A Gerald Holloway. But a neighbor who apparently knew Mr. Holloway stopped us on the way in and told us it was not a homicide but a suicide.”