Page 46 of NYPD Red 7: The Murder Sorority

He thought for a few seconds. “I don’t know,” he said. “She seems nice enough, but Mr. Sheffield didn’t like her—said he couldn’t trust her.”

“Did he say why?”

“He just said be careful. She can kill you with kindness—tell you what you want to hear, get you to trust her, and then fuck you over.”

It was a goodheads-up.

Mrs. Millstein had sounded pissed on the phone when Theo suggested that one of her residents had been murdered. Once he walked in with a pair of homicide detectives in tow, I figured she would go from a 7 on the anger scale to awhite-hot, raging 10.

But she didn’t. As soon as we ID’d ourselves, she welcomed us into her office as if we were a troubled family with a demented old granny and a fat checkbook.

Millstein was somewhere north of fifty, with a rosy smile and a pair ofsteel-blueprobing eyes. “Coffee?” she offered, stalling for time while she sized us up from behind her desk.

“No thanks,” I said. “We came here to have a chat with Mr. Sheffield, but we just learned that he passed. Can you tell us the circumstances?”

“Of course, but first let me extend my condolences to this incredible young man,” she said, turning to Theo. “I know Mr. Sheffield meant a lot to you, and I hope you know how much you meant to him. He didn’t have a family, but the day he met you, the quality of his life improved dramatically.”

Theo murmured a soft thanks and tilted his head toward me—a subtle reminder of Sheffield’s warning: she can kill you with kindness.

“So, Mrs. Millstein,” I said. “When did he die?”

“Please call me Loretta,” she said. “Martin enjoyed dinner with the other residents last night, said good night at aboutseven-thirty, and at ten I got a call from one of our staff to say that she went to his room and he was deceased.

“Why did she go to his room?” Kylie asked.

“Excellent question. It would help if you understood that we are not a nursing home. We have no doctors or nurses. If a resident falls, all we can do is call their family or an ambulance. We are designated by law as anassisted-livingfacility. We provide meals, clean their rooms, do their laundry, plus we have a busy activity calendar.”

“I understand,Loretta,” Kylie said, her tolerance for bullshit gone. “But why did one of your employees go to his room at that hour?”

Mrs. Millstein gave Kylie her bestfuck-yousmile. “As I was about to say, Mr. Sheffield also opted for ourmemory-careassistance package, which means that for a modest fee we assume full responsibility for administering his medications in the exact dosages and at the exact times that his physicians prescribed. The staff member who found him was bringing him his evening meds, but he apparently had died peacefully in his sleep.”

“An autopsy will determine what he died of,” Kylie said.

“An autopsy?” Millstein said, a half smile on her face. “He was an old man with Alzheimer’s. He came here because heknewhe was dying, and he wanted to be cared for in his final days, Detective. Mission accomplished.”

“Then your work is done,” Kylie said. “The medical examiner will confirm the cause of death. Until then, we’re going to station a police officer outside his room to make sure that nobody enters.”

“A police officer?I have a couple scheduled to tour the facility at three o’clock,” Millstein said. “What am I supposed to say when they ask why a cop is standing in the hallway?”

Kylie shrugged. “I don’t know. How about ‘it’s all part of Golden Grove’s fierce commitment to safety’?”

Theo put his hand to his mouth to stifle a laugh. Kylie was playing the role of her alter ego,K-Macthe wisecracking TV cop, and the boy was loving it.

I was not amused.

“Loretta,” I said, jumping in. “Mr. Sheffield’s room will be in custody of the New York City Police Department. And there won’t be just one cop. There’ll be an investigative team, so maybe it would be best if you canceled all prospective clients until further notice. I also suggest that you keep the residents away from that section because the medical examiner will be here shortly to look at the body and take it back to the morgue.”

“Too late for that, Detective,” she spat out, her rosy smile gone black.

“What do you mean?”

“The funeral home removed him last night,” she said. “It’s very disconcerting to our residents to know there’s a dead body in the next room. They came around midnight while most people were asleep. Mr. Sheffield had made prior arrangements with them.”

Kylie and I exchanged a quick look. If Sheffield had been murdered, the crime scene was now contaminated. We needed to get to the body before someone started prepping it for burial.

“We’ll still be posting an officer outside his room until we’ve gone through it,” I said. “And we’ll need the name and address of the funeral home.”

“Of course,” Millstein said. “Is there anything else?”

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