The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (29 page)

D
anny typed up the incident in the black-and-white of police-report-ese:

This detective responded to the Somerset Medical Center and met with Director Mary Lund, to discuss the necessity of obtaining Cullen’s PYXIS activity in its entirety…. During this meeting we also discussed various alternatives that may allow us to obtain this information.

Note: throughout the course of this investigation detectives were informed that the PYXIS system only stored data for (30) thirty days.

At the conclusion of this meeting, Ms. Lund made several telephone calls inquiring about possible ways of retrieving this data.

As a result, the requested information was subsequently obtained and turned over to this detective along with work assignment sheets for every patient in the Critical Care Units during Cullen’s tenure at this Facility.

The Pyxis reports printed out like a spreadsheet. Danny saw each of Cullen’s trips to the drug computer as a time-stamped line of information, showing the units and type of drug ordered, and the patient to whom it was billed.

But the orders on the evening before Reverend Gall’s overdose the Pyxis indicated that Cullen had not withdrawn any digoxin during his shift, and that evening looked very much like the evenings before and after. This was supposed to be the jackpot. But if there was a smoking gun there, Danny couldn’t see it.

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O
n November 4, 2003, the detectives started scheduling interviews with the Somerset Medical CCU nurses, hoping to find a source of information unfiltered by corporate lawyers. The Somerset Medical Center administration lawyers requested that all interviews be conducted within the hospital, in the presence of Risk Manager Mary Lund. The assistant prosecutor had agreed to the conditions. Both Danny and Tim were furious, Tim going so far as to tell the AP, the prosecutor, and the police chief, too, that the whole interview process was now officially a “crock of shit.” In private, the chief, the detective captain, and the other detectives agreed with Tim
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—but they didn’t say it in the meeting, in front of their boss—which, of course, was exactly his point.

Orchestrating that waste of time was Danny’s problem. Danny delegated detectives Russell Colucci and Edward Percell to conduct the interviews.

The daily reports provided an encyclopedia of information about nursing procedures and scheduling and physical layout—all essential groundwork, none of it game changing. Not all of the nurses had worked with Charles Cullen. Those that did used many of the same words to describe him—“quiet,” a “loner,” a little “bizarre” in his personal behavior, but professionally “excellent.” Most showed at least a mild affection for their quiet, quirky coworker, and they were particularly appreciative of his willingness to pick up shifts.
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Reviewing the interviews later, Tim and Danny couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that aside from the murders, Charles Cullen might have been a pretty good nurse.

But what the interviews didn’t reveal was anything of the slightest use to a homicide investigation. The descriptions they gave were brief and sterile. Danny couldn’t be sure if the nurses didn’t know anything, or if they were just being quiet in front of Mary Lund. Each time his detectives asked a
question, it seemed like the nurse would reflexively glance over at Lund before speaking. Finally toward the end of November, Danny decided to change tactics. From now on, he’d be doing the interviews himself, and alone. So far, all the detectives had done was ask the nurses to provide information, with an administrator sitting right there. The detectives had been told not to share any of their suspicions with the Somerset Medical Center staff. The nurses were confused by the process, and had little incentive to open up. They didn’t even know exactly what the investigation was about. For all they knew, they were the ones in trouble with the law.

Colucci and Percell had been told to run it that way—Tim and Danny couldn’t risk a leak to Cullen or the newspapers, or even to the Somerset Medical administration. But Danny knew that if they were going to get anywhere, he would have to bend the rules, and take the leap of trusting somebody. Colucci and Percell weren’t in the position to make that call, but Danny was. And so, only three days after storming into Mary Lund’s office to demand the Pyxis information, Danny and Mary were spending five to ten hours a day crammed together in a little room off the Somerset Medical ICU,
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both of them hating every minute of it.

B
y necessity, the two had reestablished a friendly, if false, work rapport. But Danny noticed that something fundamental had changed in Mary Lund. It was as if the woman was suffering a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Lund was getting it from both sides, the bottleneck between the hospital and the murder investigation. She was the risk manager in a situation of unprecedented consequence in lives and jobs and dollars.

Mary had been losing weight steadily since the investigation started, and it didn’t seem to Danny like the intentional kind—Danny had known women, when they lost a pound or two, to go out and buy something new to show it off. Mary Lund had lost maybe twenty pounds but she was trying to hide it, shrinking inside her pantsuit, nervous as a hare. The presence of Danny Baldwin in the room wasn’t helping her nerves, either.

A
my had been telling her girlfriends for weeks that she was definitely not down with the whole investigation thing.

Waves of paranoia swept the unit. Each secretly feared the police
interviews had something to do with her personally, and that it could affect her future. The nurses whispered together in the hallways, forming alliances, choosing sides. Each shift amplified and distorted the rumors from the shift before. Most of the rumors were about Charlie. Two weeks into it, the rumors were about Amy, too.

Everyone knew she was “Charlie’s friend.” They remembered the stink Amy had made about signing for insulin. Apparently, there was a death involved, and both insulin and Charlie were mixed up in it. Some of the nurses now avoided Amy, as if suspicion was contagious. Her friends were worried for her. To tell the truth, Amy was scared for herself.

She always played the tough girl, but inside, she was terrified—freaking out-of-her-mind scared. What had she done? Amy’s heart condition required that she take daily antianxiety medication. Had she taken too much Atavan one night and made a mistake? Were there narcotics missing, was the insulin issue to blame? It could be anything. Amy called to ensure her RN license hadn’t expired, and it hadn’t. So what was it, then? Amy wondered whether she needed a lawyer. Every time the detectives made an appointment Amy would call in sick. After two weeks she could avoid it no longer. Her manager sent her to the room.

Inside, she found Mary Lund and a police detective, a big black guy in a suit and tie. He asked her to have a seat. He called her “Ms. Loughren.” There was a water pitcher and Dixie cups. Amy felt like a criminal. Her heart was going to explode if she held it in, so she let it all out.

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D
anny had already been conducting interviews for a week,
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and right away, this nurse seemed different. She was clearly afraid for her job, just like the others, but the difference was, Amy came out and admitted it. And she didn’t glance over at Lund when she did.

Amy Loughren had graduated from nursing school in 1988, making her maybe a few years older than Danny. She was a white woman with bleachy streaks of blonde hair, blue doe-eyes, and high, prominent cheekbones, tall and attractive, but not a fragile sort of beauty, more rugged and practical, and, despite her conspicuous curves, clearly comfortable with the guys. There was something easy about her personality that turned the formality of interview into a conversation with flow.

She started right in, telling Danny that she had heard rumors that this investigation had something to do with her friend Charles Cullen, and both the rumors and the investigation “pissed her off, royally.” Clearly, this girl wasn’t holding anything back.

Danny sat back in his chair, letting her vent, knowing right away,
She’s the one.

A
my didn’t remember finishing her shift or the long drive home. At some point she realized she was sitting in her driveway, trying to make sense of her day as her breath turned to frost on the windshield. She’d been so defensive at first, so fierce. Protective of her Charlie. She’d told the detective exactly what she thought of his investigation, and she didn’t care that Mary Lund was there to hear it. But the detective hadn’t reacted as she’d expected. He listened, seemed calm, maybe even happy. That didn’t make sense, with him getting yelled at like that—Amy thought she even caught a
smile. And then, rather than ask her questions, the detective started to give Amy answers. Things about what had been happening on the unit, information about Charlie. Some of it sounded familiar. A lot of it surprised her. Amy glanced over to see how Mary Lund was reacting, but Mary was gone.
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Amy had been so keyed up, she hadn’t even heard the woman leave.

“Look, Ms, Loughren,” the detective said. “I don’t know
why
, but I trust you. Okay?” He slid a piece of paper across the table. Amy could see it was a Pyxis printout. It was Charlie’s, from the night Reverend Gall had died.

By the time Mary Lund walked back into the room, the Pyxis page was off the desk, and the angry, defiant Amy was gone. In her place was a silent woman whose eyes held a glaze of tears and shock. Mary had looked across the table from the nurse to the detective, but Danny was no longer speaking, either. He was using every muscle in his face trying not to smile.

Amy had seen Charlie’s Pyxis and knew it right away. It was obvious, at least to her. She had always fought to defend Charlie against the bullies of the world, the unfair accusations. The paper Danny showed her told her not to. For the first time, it was possible to imagine that Charlie had done something strange and terrible during those shifts. She could believe that now. But what she couldn’t do, what she still couldn’t imagine possible, was reconciling that paper with her idea of her friend.

When she got home, Amy dumped her coat and her purse and fished the big bottle of Cabernet from on top of the fridge. She sat with a glass at the kitchen table. How was she supposed to deal with this? There wasn’t a self-help book for this one. She’d seen the drug orders. She knew what happened to Gall. Nurses didn’t do this. A nurse had done this. Her friend had done this. Maybe.

Maybe it was selfish, but that was what hit her first. She trusted Charlie—or—had, like she’d trusted few others, and even fewer men. That was what her tough-girl persona was all about, armor against the world. After a lifetime spent wrestling with issues of trust, those struggles had come to define her. She made no secret of her torturous childhood. Her sexual abuser had practically been a member of her family. They trusted him. But Amy knew people, and what they were capable of. Growing up, a little girl hiding in closets and hampers and behind basement doors, she had prayed over and over to the universe, begging for the superpower of invisibility. Instead, he had found her, again and again. In the end, she decided, the only one she
could really trust was herself. She actually carried her piggy bank to the local mental health clinic and asked the stunned secretary, “How many sessions will this buy me?”
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