The Pain Nurse (13 page)

“This isn’t about me or you. This is what a psycho cop would do.”

“Oh, hell, Borders.”

“This is the best breakthrough we’ve ever had in this case,” Will said. “I’m asking you as a friend.”

“No,” Dodds cut him off harshly. “We’re not friends. You make up any story you want about going to Internal Investigations, but you know. I fired your ass as a partner because you lied to me.”

There was a long silence with only the background noise of a distant generator. Cheryl Beth walked in as if she had just arrived.

“You. What took you so long?” Dodds glared at her with hostile eyes. Will looked as if he were about to crumple and fall out of the wheelchair.

“We need to get you upstairs,” Cheryl Beth said.

“That can wait.” Dodds opened a leather portfolio with a legal pad in it, then picked through several pages of dense handwritten notes and diagrams. He was leaning against one of the old autopsy tables.

“Why are you in here?” she asked.

“Maybe I should ask you that. Come in here often?”

Cheryl Beth felt instantly defensive. “I’ve never been in here. I knew it was here, but they stopped using it before I was even hired.”

Dodds slid a pair of reading glasses over his nose. He silently paged through the notes. “We’re going to do this again, Ms. Wilson. The night you say you discovered the body of Dr. Lustig. I want to hear your story. All over again, from the top. Then I want you to walk me through it, from where you started down here, to when you claim you found her, to what you did next.” He looked over the glasses at Will. “You can leave.”

Will wheeled himself out the double doors, and Cheryl Beth told her story in a hoarse voice. Then she took him out to the main elevator bank, walking down past the shadows of old carts to Christine’s office, then showing him the path she had taken to the stairwell that brought her back to the first floor to get help. It all looked benignly alien with the full lights on. Will trailed well behind them in his wheelchair, saying nothing. His face was a mask of pain and exhaustion. Dodds ignored him.

“So you get off the elevator, walk down the hall, see the light coming out of her office…”

“That’s right.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean, ‘what else?’ There’s no more else. I walked down the hall…” And she remembered. Dodds could see it in her face but he said nothing.

“I heard a sound. It was like metal on metal. I just remembered…”

“From where?”

She took her time, but she was sure. “From that direction.” She pointed toward the old morgue. Will, who had rolled closer, looked sharply at Dodds.

“What kind of keys do you have to the hospital?” Dodds asked.

“Oh, come on,” Will said.

“Shut the fuck up,” Dodds snarled at him, then turned again, looming over her.

“Keys? I don’t have any keys.”

“Could you get into that morgue? Maybe after you killed the doctor, you ran down here and opened these doors and took the old elevator up and out? It would be a clever way to avoid being seen. Now you don’t have to talk because you have a right to remain silent.”

“Are you crazy?” Cheryl Beth heard her accent become more pronounced. It happened when she was mad. She thrust her keychain out to him. “See this? Car, house, desk, bicycle lock!”

Dodds reached out and delicately took her lanyard. “Tylenol, huh?” He pulled it out from her lab coat and examined it. “Partners Against Pain…NAPI scale…” He let it go and it draped back against her. “That card looks pretty ratty on the edges. Like you used it to pick a lock. Mind if I keep it?”

Cheryl Beth looked at him coldly. In a soft voice she said, “As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Get the hell out of here, both of you.” Dodds turned and walked back toward the morgue. Cheryl Beth wheeled Will toward the elevators in silence. Only when the doors closed and the car began to move did she speak.

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but what did he mean back there, about him firing you?”

Will was staring straight ahead and didn’t answer. It took a moment before she realized he was asleep.

Chapter Nineteen

Will was so exhausted that he slept deeply for three hours. It was the longest uninterrupted sleep he had enjoyed since coming to the neuro-rehab unit. At five-thirty, a nurse woke him for his meds. Then he dozed fitfully as his roommate, Steve, received a breathing treatment, the technician working hard to get the poor man to cough. His muscle control for even this simple act of living was gone with the spinal cord injury. Will had learned about the “quad cough,” where the nurse or technician used his hand to thrust up in the patient’s abdomen, all the while coaching: “cough…cough…cough.” It sounded like torture. In Will’s mind the thought of “that could have been me” was ever present, yet the sessions behind the curtain a few feet away had also just become part of the background noise. The man never seemed to have visitors. Will didn’t have visitors. Brother officers always deluged cops in the hospital with visits. Not Internal Investigations cops, not the rat squad.
Were we all just abandoned here?
Will wondered in hazy half sleep, and then he lost the thought, his mind orbiting between the noisy morning coming to life of the hospital and his body’s desperate hunger for sleep.

He dreamed of old arguments with Cindy. Not really dreamed: he wasn’t that far under. His mind, half asleep, reprocessed the same disagreements. They always said the same lines, like veteran actors in a long-running play. Then he fell under enough for dreams and she was there that spring day when the rain came down hard and straight. She was telling him her decision, a decision she had made on her own. It wasn’t fair or right but she had done it. He had been on a big case, working nights, not there. It was done. He was pleading with her and crying, in his dreams at least. It was too late, too late.

His next vision: Cheryl Beth Wilson was sitting in the chair beside his bed. She was in her usual white lab coat and green scrubs, just watching him. The small-boned features of her face were beautiful when it was watchful. It was a warm dream. No, he was awake. He was aware of a wetness at the edges of his eyes. There was so much suffering around him, and he had been so fortunate, so spared, that he couldn’t dwell on old griefs. That would be yet another sin.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she said. “How are you sleeping?”

“Barely. At least they took the sutures out last night. I got back in the middle of the night, and one of the night nurses took them out. I felt like I was an old suit being let out.”

Cheryl Beth gave her musical laugh. “That’s good.”

“What time is it? How long have you been sitting there?” He felt oddly shy around her, pulling the sheet over his flimsy patient gown. He thought he had grown accustomed to the hospital’s relentless lack of privacy.

“It’s seven-thiry. I just wanted to check on you. How are you feeling?”

Will could already feel a monumental soreness, running from his right shoulder down into his thigh. He pushed the button to raise the head of his bed. It complied slowly with a hum and cranking sound. The movement helped set off the burning ache in his left side. It was the wages of being dumped out of his wheelchair and onto the floor, then getting into a fight with a knife-wielding scumbag. Just another day at the office.

“I can feel yesterday, believe me.”

She bit her lip and looked down. “Could I talk to you sometime today?”

“How about now?” Of course, she could talk to him. He was grateful for the company. But as he came more awake, all the events of the previous day filled his head like a flood of foul water. They needed to talk. He asked her to give him a minute to get dressed and they could get out of the stifling room.

“Can I help you with anything?”

“No,” Will said, feeling that shyness. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Want me to call one of your nurses?”

“No, they have enough to do.”

She walked out, closing the curtain around his bed. Fifteen minutes later he had gone through the morning agony, made more difficult by his body’s memory of the physical exertion of yesterday. He knew he was sweating and looking grim when he wheeled the chair out the door. They moved silently through the busy hallway. He stopped at the nurses’ station to get a cup of new pills. Then he felt her pushing him up the ramp into the main hospital. He sat back and let her do it. His Quickie moved easily and they didn’t talk.

***

They found a deserted spot in the huge cafeteria near a heavily decorated Christmas tree. It was a reminder that he would likely spend Christmas in neuro-rehab, in this hospital prison. For the moment, he could keep those feelings in check. He watched as Cheryl Beth brought them both bagels. She walked fast and lithely. The bagels were a relief from the daily routine of a cup of scrambled eggs, a slice of bacon, and toast. Will knew that his breakfast tray was sitting inside the big cart back in the ward, an aide wondering where he was. His orderly mind worried about it for fifteen seconds, no more.

“Detective Dodds implied that Lennie didn’t kill Dr. Lustig,” Cheryl Beth began, putting the bagel on its plate after taking a single bite. “It’s hard to get anything straight out of him. He’s so eager to arrest me…” She stopped and ran her fingers through her hair, which fell back like strands of light-brown silk against her shoulders. When she spoke again, some of her previous intensity had dialed down. “I’m sorry. I haven’t slept much, and I should leave you alone to get better. I just don’t know where else to turn.”

He watched her face redden as she spoke. “That means the murderer is still out there.” Her voice was drained of its music. “Somehow I knew it. I knew there was more to this than Crazy Lennie.”

“How did you know it?”

“My gut. I’m very intuitive.” She gave a slight smile. “My mother saw ghosts. I’m not that intuitive.”

“Lennie didn’t do it. We have other evidence.” He watched her carefully. She was pulled into herself, as if expecting a blow. He went on, “Why were you down in the basement that night?”

“She left a message at the nurses’ station, up at Seven-North, saying she was in her office and I should stop by.”

“This was when?”

“I don’t exactly recall. I’ve tried to put a timeline together, though, with the supervising nurse on that floor. I had been called in for a consult. The message came in while I was with the patient. So I went down probably around twelve-thirty.”

“Why would you do that?”

Cheryl Beth pulled back and sighed. Will knew he had made a misstep. He spoke gently.

“I’m just curious. I mean, it’s the middle of the night. That’s a very deserted part of the hospital.”

“Oh, I feel like I’ve told this story so many times. Sorry, it’s not you. I’m here at all hours, especially after dark. That’s when people hurt. It isn’t unusual to see docs here, either, especially surgeons checking on their patients.” That much was true. Will’s surgeon might routinely cruise through at one or two in the morning. It seemed like cops’ hours, with better pay.

Cheryl Beth continued, “After she took a special assignment to work on the digital project—help us get this paperwork on computers—she was working in the admin wing. At some point, she took an office in the basement.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Wouldn’t have been my choice. Maybe it was odd she was working so late, but she was a workaholic. I didn’t really think about it. I take shortcuts all the time. I used to, at least. And that corridor through the basement is a great way around some of the logjams in the main hallways. It just didn’t seem odd until later.”

Her bagel remained untouched. Will had eaten his quickly, appreciating the taste and texture as never before. Now he was drinking a Diet Coke, all these things precious in his hospital jail. He asked more questions. The hallway had been deserted when she got off the elevator. It was only later, when the cops had sealed off the main first-floor hallway because of the gang shooting, that traffic would pick up in the basement, the time when he had been wheeled by, only hours out of surgery. When she had first got there, only the usual bank of lights was on, leaving most of the length of the corridor in darkness. As she had walked to Dr. Lustig’s office, she did hear a metallic sound. She didn’t think much about it at the time.

“It didn’t scare you to be down there?”

“It sure does now. I hate that. I used to love being in the old parts of the hospital, thinking about the history of this place.” She lowered her head slightly. “Will, there’s something you need to know.” He waited with a neutral face. His old detective face.

“I had an affair with Dr. Lustig’s husband.” She spoke the words slowly, in a hard, low voice. Will imagined her teeth grinding at the thought. This was not a happy memory. Yet she looked at him straight on. “It had been over for a long time. For several months. It was really bad judgment on my part.”

“This is Gary Nagle?” Will smiled gently. “I know about it.”

She shook her head. “You must think I’m a really stupid person.”

“No.”

“Your friend Detective Dodds thinks I killed Christine!” Her eyes were wide with apprehension.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Will said.

“You believe me? I had nothing to do with this.”

He nodded. Still, she didn’t look reassured. For a long time she just stared into the tabletop. “I think he’s going to arrest me.”

“If he really thought you had done it, he would have executed a search warrant long before now.”

“Why can’t they catch this person then?”

Will wanted to say,
because it’s not TV.
He had heard these questions so many times, often from grieving family members desperate for news, any news. “I’m out of the loop, believe me. Dodds doesn’t want my help. I’ll tell you this much: the first forty-eight hours after a homicide are the most important. It’s been more than two weeks now.

“Every day that passes after that makes it less likely that the case will be solved. That’s when the real drudgework of homicide begins—don’t believe all the crap you see on TV about the miraculous forensic breakthrough. Usually it’s just grueling footwork. But there are a lot of cases that are never solved.”

“But this was a doctor, at the hospital,” she blurted. “It’s not like some drug killing down in Over-the-Rhine.” She stopped herself with a sharp intake of breath. “Oh, God, that sounded awful. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve heard worse,” Will said. “To be honest, I don’t know why they don’t have somebody in custody.” He was conscious of the alien word
they
instead of the familiar
we
. “I know there was another high-profile killing. The city’s on track for a record number of homicides this year. The detail is short-handed. There have been budget cuts.” He shook his head. “Excuses. Bullshit.”

She reached out for his hand. “Do you believe me, as a police officer, when I tell you I had nothing to do with this?”

Her hand felt warm and fragile inside his. He squeezed it. “I do.”

She drew it back and pulled a white envelope from her coat. “I’ve been feeling that if I didn’t try to play amateur detective, they were going to try to make me the bad guy. Maybe I went too far.” She handed him the letter. By habit he took it lightly by the edges, holding it as if between the calipers of his fingers. It was addressed to Christine Lustig and the stamps had been canceled.

“I need latex gloves,” he said.

“Oh, hell, I touched it. I am truly a stupid person.” She buried her head in her hands momentarily, then reached into a coat pocket and pulled out a whitish bundle. He rested the letter on the table and slid his fingers into the gloves, as he had done so many times before. Cheryl Beth quietly cursed as he pulled out a sheet of white stationery and read the neat script in black-ink handwriting:

Chris,

You’ve betrayed me for the last time. I’m going to put a stop to you.

There was no signature. “Where did you get this?” Will asked, and she told him the story of seeing the envelope on the front seat of Judd Mason’s car, and how she fished it out of his trash.

“I was really dumb to do this, wasn’t I?”

Will thought about it, the layers of what had seemed like a simple case getting deeper. “Maybe not. Dodds said he saw you picking in the trash.” He thought it through for a moment as she watched expectantly. “I want you to take this to Dodds. Don’t tell him you showed it to me.”

She nodded, hesitantly. Will could imagine the hell Dodds would raise. He asked, “Who wrote this note?”

Cheryl Beth pursed her lips. “I think Mason did, then tried to get it back after she was killed. Which might mean he killed her. How about this, I can find out where Mason works, get one of his charts, check his handwriting.”

“Don’t,” Will said, a little too hard. He softened his voice. “Don’t do that. He’s already seen you.”

“So you think he might have…”

They both let it hang between them. Finally, Cheryl Beth said, “She didn’t like to be called Chris. The only other person who did that was Gary, and he did it because he knew it bugged her.”

“Just tell Dodds the truth. Don’t jump to conclusions.” Will studied the letter one more time and then leaned over and slid it into her coat pocket. No Slasher case had involved a threatening letter. Suddenly the pain returned, emerging from his back and wrapping around his ribs in a pincer movement. He couldn’t stop himself from visibly wincing.

“You’re still hurting,” she said. “I’m going to talk to your doctor. And I want you to take what I give you. Don’t worry about becoming a drug addict. That’s not going to happen.”

He smiled in spite of the sharp stabs he was enduring. Finally, he made his face relax, got his breathing down.

“What were you guys doing in the morgue last night?”

He hesitated for only a moment. “I’ll tell you, but don’t tell Dodds. First I need you to answer a few more questions about that night.” He went through it with her and the answers were chillingly reassuring. He had seen it before. The doctor had been on the floor, naked and bloody, knife wounds on her arms and torso—slashes—and the deep cut to her throat. Her ring finger was gone, chopped off. Her clothes had been neatly folded on top of a small filing cabinet, as if she had undressed for a lover. Cheryl Beth began shaking her right leg as she recounted the details. By the end, she was sniffling and teary, reaching for hospital paper napkins to dab her eyes and nose.