Searching for individuals who matched Rose’s patient profile, Marion had worked through three years of the files Rose videoed at the MCU. She searched by date of entry, diagnosis, primary care doctor, length of stay, date of death—any venue that might produce a pattern or a repeated name.

In the previous three years five people, including Rose, were placed in the MCU with a diagnosis of rapid-onset dementia. Of those five, Rose and three others were diagnosed with both rapid-onset and early-onset dementia. The others were Camilla Reynolds, James Madding, and Charles Boster—Chuck.

Reynolds and Madding are deceased. Three months after becoming a resident of the MCU, Reynolds, a seventy-three-year-old white female, broke a femur in a fall and died of heart failure six days later. She was survived by her son, who sold his home in Charlotte shortly after his mother’s death and moved to parts unknown. Madding, a sixty-nine-year-old white male, suffocated after a chunk of meat became lodged in his throat seven weeks after placement in the MCU. He was survived by a younger brother, who sold the family home in Charlotte and moved to Aspen, Colorado, two months after James Madding died.

Chuck Boster, seventy-one, white male, is still living. But for Rose, he is the most recent inductee, incarcerated in the Memory Care Unit forty-three days before Flynn put Rose there. If victims are being put in the MCU for sinister purposes, Chuck fits the criteria for “not lasting the week.” Chuck is top priority. Not only is he alive, but he also has a wife living in Charlotte. Even if Rose could locate Reynolds’s son, or Madding’s brother, travel by air is out of the question. She is a fugitive from the law.

More than that, Chuck is her friend. Through her drug fog and his severe dementia—or drug-induced confusion—they connected. They shared comfort and compassion under difficult circumstances. Given the state of her mind when in the Memory Care Unit, Rose marvels at the effort and concentration it must have taken Chuck to yell “Help!” and “Fire!” when she’d needed a distraction.

Madding seven weeks, Reynolds three months—if death is the goal, why not kill the victims the day they arrive? Because, to use Andre the Uber driver’s word, it would look “hinky.”

 … these things can happen too fast and too often. We need to be careful of our special needs patients … Wanda said that, Rose remembers. The deaths must be spaced out, made to look natural.

“What are you thinking?” Mel asks. Mel, flopped on the faux animal skins, is watching as Rose does her best to apply makeup using a palm-sized piece of mirror the “Indians” use to signal one another when they are in residence.

“About how long it takes the world to cease caring about an old, demented person.”