Dorothy Lund, I said to myself, and then I said it aloud to Agnes Brandt, because I needed to hear how it sounded. “Mrs. Brandt, stay where you are. Lock the door of your room and do not come out. The police are four minutes away.” Behind me Kayla had the dispatcher on the line, and she was reading the address of Mrs. Brandt in a voice that shook only a little. I kept the receiver against my ear and listened to the old woman breathe. In thirty four years at that counter I had never wanted so badly to be somewhere else, on a porch on 22nd Avenue.
The first officers arrived in six minutes. I heard the doorbell through the phone, and the clunk of a chain, and the voice of a young patrolman saying, “Mrs. Brandt? Kenosha Police. You are safe now.” Then the voice of Agnes, high and cracked and weeping: “Oh, thank God. Oh, thank you.” I put my head on the counter. Kayla patted my shoulder like a mother. Detective Janelle Brooks arrived at the pharmacy twenty minutes later, a short, steady woman with a notebook, and asked me to tell it from the beginning.
I told her everything, and I gave her every script I had on file for the past seven weeks, the ones with the proper dose, and the new one with the forged name of Dr. Fenske, which I had never filled. She read them twice. “Tyler Brandt does not exist,” she said at last. “At least, not under that Social Security number. We found the folder under the mattress. Six women, Mrs. Kowalczyk. Six obituaries across three counties in four years. In every one, a devoted grandson. In every one, a house that changed hands within a month of the funeral.”
A single call you are not supposed to make can be the one that saves a life, and six more besides.
Tyler came home at five minutes before five, in his khakis and his polo, whistling, with a grocery bag on his arm and a bunch of flowers for the grandmother. He parked in the driveway. He walked up the path. I was told that he said, to the two detectives waiting in the front hall, “Is something wrong?” Then he saw the folder on the table. He set the flowers down on the hall stand with great care, as if they might spill, and put his hands behind him before anyone had asked.
His real name was Todd Lasko. He was thirty one, from Joliet, and he had been doing this since he was twenty seven. He found his women the way a pharmacist finds her patients: in the obituaries, in the church bulletins, in the lists of the widowed. He brought a pie and a photograph. He learned the pills. He took the checkbook. And in four cases out of six, a doctor later confirmed, the women had died of what looked like the natural end of a long life, in their own beds, with a cup of tea at the bedside.
Agnes Brandt had been given three doses of insulin, mixed into her tea, before the Sunday that she fell asleep until Tuesday. A doctor at the hospital in Kenosha told the police that she had survived because she was so strong and so stubborn, and because she did not drink the whole cup. “She poured half of it into the African violet,” the doctor said, almost laughing. “The violet died. She did not.” Agnes sat up in her bed, small and pink cheeked, and told me that she would like to see her plant given a proper funeral.
The exhumations began in November. Two of the women had been cremated, but four had not, and in each of the four the lab found the same trace in the tissue that I had learned to fear. The trial was held in the spring, in a courtroom in Kenosha that smelled of floor polish and coffee. I sat in the second row each day. Agnes sat beside me in a hat with a feather, holding my hand, and when the families of the other women came forward to testify, she wept for women she had never met.
The jury needed three hours. Todd Lasko was convicted of four counts of first degree murder and two of attempted murder, and a judge in a black robe sentenced him to life in prison without parole. He was thirty three. I looked at him once, at the end, and what I saw was the polite young man who had thanked me twice, every Friday, for six weeks. I want to say that I felt triumph. I felt only a great, quiet tiredness, and the memory of all the times I had said, at my counter, “Have a good weekend.”
The house of Agnes was returned to her by an order of the court. The forged papers were torn up in front of her, one by one, by the clerk. She stayed in her house, but she did not stay alone: a woman named Nina from the church moved into the spare room, a retired nurse with a laugh like a trumpet. Every Friday, at four, the two of them walk three blocks to the pharmacy on 52nd Street, and Agnes sits in the folding chair beside my counter, the one that Kayla found for her, and tells everyone in line about her violet.
Last week she brought her own thermos. “It is only tea, Diane,” she said, with a very straight face, and set it on the counter in front of me. I looked at her. She looked at me. And then the two of us began to laugh, quietly at first, and then so hard that the customers turned to stare. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. In thirty four years I have caught many forged scripts, but I will tell you the one that I am proudest of. It was the call that I was not supposed to make.
