Saturday morning, Danny Baldwin drove out to the Medical Examiner’s Office. He observed the autopsy and drove back to his desk at the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office to type up the I-1-00 form, jacketed the paperwork, and called Tim from the car. The deceased, he said, one McKinley Crews, was an older black man with nothing visibly wrong with him.
“It was kinda a waste of time,” Danny explained. It wasn’t just his take—the state coroner, Dr. Nobby C. Mambo, was of the same opinion: a natural death. But the prosecutor had called, and there was pressure. They ran the lab tests, which came back clean. A natural death.
“Yeah, and who was the guy?” Pressure from the brass like that, VIP for sure. “He look like anybody?”
Danny told him no. He didn’t get that sense. He was an older fellow, black, looked sick. Looked dead, in fact, an opinion confirmed by Dr. Mambo. So Braun called the prosecutor, still not quite believing that this was the new job and wondering if there was still enough of the weekend left to head down to his cabin and watch the leaves die.
The next call came down from Prosecutor Forrest four days later. Tim and Danny Baldwin were to report down the street, to Somerset Medical Center, the biggest employer in town with the building to match. A century’s worth of donations and steady profits had paid for an unending process of renovations and additions, the most recent being a colossal, new corporate-gifted lobby featuring a player piano that played calming classical stuff from a little black box. Tim and Danny were still eye-rolling when the elevator door closed. It wasn’t until they got into the conference room and saw all the heavy hitters gathered there that they started to realize this was no ordinary call. The way Tim figured it, Wow, this dead guy must be one hell of a VIP.
It was a lawyer who stood up first,2 introducing himself as Paul Nittoly, counsel for Somerset Medical Center. Nittoly was a big white man with a hundred-dollar haircut and a cornflower-blue tie, the kind of guy you see on billboards. He thanked the detectives for coming and explained, in a roundabout way, that the Medical Center wasn’t reporting a homicide, not exactly.
Over the previous five months, the lawyer continued, Somerset had experienced five “unexplainable patient incidents” in their Critical Care Unit. Last Friday, there was a sixth incident on the CCU. At this point, he said, the hospital had notified the Prosecutor’s Office.3 Somerset Medical Center’s senior vice president, Dr. William Cors, read the names: on May 28, Mr. Joseph Lehman; on June 4, Ms. Frances Kane; on June 16, Ms. Jin Kyung Han; on June 28, Reverend Florian Gall; on August 27, Ms. Francis Agoada. The last on the list was McKinley Crews, who had died only four days previous; it was only after his death that Somerset had called the prosecutor, and Danny had visited the morgue.
Dr. Cors seemed to pick his words carefully, avoiding cause and effect. All six patients had “unexplainable, abnormal laboratory findings” and “life-threatening symptoms,” and five of those patients were now dead. Whether those incidents were connected, Cors couldn’t or wouldn’t say, but the hospital had been conducting its own internal investigation for five months. This investigation, Cors said, had not identified the source of the occurrences. Cors then proceeded to summarize all six patients’ medical histories, in brief but technical detail.
Tim had some names on the page—the names of the dead and some medical stuff, spellings scratched out and replaced by all caps—INSULIN and GLUCOSE, which he’d heard of, and a new one, DIGOXIN, a heart drug. The rest was a blur of medical jargon, cc’s, mg’s, and microliters. No crime scene, no weapon, no fingerprints or witnesses, no bullet, no gun. But did they have a crime? Tim underlined the question mark till he split the paper in his notebook.
One seat over, Danny Baldwin seemed to be squeezing the life out of his pen.
The detectives couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. Outside, the October sun was hitting the tinted windows of Braun’s Green Crown Vic. Tim popped the locks and pushed into the driver’s side, feeling the relief of cool leather.
Tim knew that Somerset Medical Center pulled serious weight in the community. It was a money center, one of the county’s biggest employers and a heavy influence in local politics with at least two former state senators on the board, one of whom was also father-in-law to the chief of police. Trouble there lit a fire under the prosecutor’s ass, which lit a fire under his. Tim waited till Danny had his door closed before he started grousing. “What the fuck was that?” Tim said. “Tell you what, give me a good, old-fashioned shooting instead of this fucking Greek.” Tim couldn’t raise his hand in the middle of all the doctor talk, tell the suits, “Um, me and Danny? We do street murders.” But he sure wanted to.
Tim started the car and eased out of the turnaround while Danny sprawled in the passenger side with the stack of medical charts. Apparently, if there was a crime, it wasn’t in these pages—the medical people had already studied them. Danny was chewing his cheek and bouncing his hams. He was the lead detective here. It would be his job to make sense of what Somerset gave him, and see if he could make a case out of it.
But what were the pieces here? Numbers. Lab values. Technical results neither Tim nor Danny understood. Apparently even the professional laboratory people couldn’t explain them. The vics were only potential vics; they might be natural deaths. For now, they were bodies without visible wounds. This wasn’t even definitely a crime. They had “incidents,” medical ones, which medical people had already investigated for five months, finding nothing. But this was the way it was with a redball, same here as in Newark. It seemed obvious to Tim that some bigwig in Somerset corporate had an agenda. It was far worse than being handed a cold case. This one maybe wasn’t a case at all.
Danny looked up from his notebook, seeing Bridge Street on his right now and then behind him, wondering why Tim was blowing by the turn to the prosecutor’s office. “Basically, they think somebody’s poisoning patients, on purpose or whatever. Right?”
“And they’ve been investigating five months already?” Tim said.
“So, why call now?”
“Exactly. They got juice to call us anytime. Why not call us five months ago?”
Danny scanned his notes. “ ‘Unexplained incidents,’ what they called it,” he said. Four with insulin, two with the heart drug. Danny flipped a page, fingered the word. “Digoxin.”
“Digoxin, digoxin,” Tim said, getting his mouth around it. He pulled the wheel right, circling 360 degrees to merge onto Route 206. “What the fuck is digoxin?”
“You mind I ask, you’re going where?”
“Here,” Tim said, pulling into the mall parking lot and easing into the fire lane. “Medical dictionary.” He opened the door to get out then stopped. “Okay,” he said. “So, let me ask you this. You catch the call Friday. Three days later, we’re brought into this happy horseshit.”
“So, what happened between Friday and today?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, well, maybe the lawyers had a weekend to think on it,” Danny said. “Maybe, they got scared, is what happened.”
“Yeah,” Tim said. He thought on that. “You know what?” he said finally. “I bet those assholes know exactly who did it.”
31
Redball or not, the investigation couldn’t start until Somerset Medical Center delivered the paperwork. The lawyer Nittoly had promised to send the detectives everything they had from their internal investigation, and as soon as possible. It was late afternoon when the package arrived. Danny considered the contents for a few minutes before walking the package next door to Tim’s office.
The envelope contained only the photocopied pages of a single faxed memo. The detectives had known better than to expect a finished investigative report, but they expected more than scraps. Including the cover letter, the memo was five pages long; one of the pages appeared to be missing.
“Check the date,” Danny said.
The memo was dated July 25, 2003—over two months ago.
“What’s this?” Tim said. “I thought
the in-house investigation just ended.”
The memo had been sent by Raymond Fleming, a hospital-retained lawyer at a West Orange law firm,1 and titled “Re: Reverend Florian Gall v Somerset Medical Center,” with an attached file number.
Danny didn’t know the lawyer, but he took special note of the title, especially the “v” in the middle. He knew it was a lawyer’s nature to make everything look like a fight, but still, it seemed funny to him, like patient and hospital were on opposite sides here.
According to the cover page, the recipient of the memo was Mary Lund. They’d shaken hands with her earlier that day in the SMC conference room. Lund and Danny had exchanged cards; from here on, she was assigned as Danny’s liaison at the hospital, the friendly face for whatever the lead detective on this case might need to do his job. Tim remembered her as a middle-aged corporate-type lady with the unforgettable job title of Somerset Medical Center’s “risk manager.” Apparently, the risk manager had been Ray Fleming’s point of contact, too.
Dear Ms. Lund;
Enclosed herewith is a copy of my file memorandum which I prepared after our meeting with Charles Cullen.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Very Truly Yours,
Raymond J. Fleming
“Charles Cullen?” Tim said. “They mention him?”
“Next page,” Danny said. “Memo says he’s a nurse. He worked the Critical Care ward with one of the vics. The Reverend.”
“So he a suspect or what?”
“Doesn’t say so—in fact, it says the opposite.” Danny flipped to the last page. “Says, ‘We agreed that there was nothing so overtly suspicious at this point in time either from the records or Mr. Cullen’s demeanor itself that would necessitate a call to the authorities.’ ”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Mary Lund and the lawyer,” Danny explained. “Fleming. Apparently they interviewed this Cullen together.”
“July 14,” Tim said. “Ten days later they write a memo about it.”
“Maybe it took ’em ten days to finish,” Danny said. “Bill by the hour, shit happens.”
“Then two months later, they send it to us,” Tim said. He flicked the paper. “So, where’s the rest? The other memos about the rest of the nurses?”
Danny didn’t know. But he had a meeting that afternoon with someone who should.
In theory, Mary Lund could be the key to this investigation. Lund was a former nurse who had worked her way up the corporate ladder to become the gatekeeper to the hospital world, a woman who could help translate the medical mysteries of the hospital into something the detectives could understand. The only question was whether she’d cooperate. Danny needed more than her polite professional assistance; he needed Mary Lund to actually like him.
Danny parked out front of the hospital, smoothed his tie against the wind and nodded respectfully at the rent-a-cop by the elevator. Down the hallway of Marriot carpet and bad art he found a secretary with color photos of a panting shih tzu plastered to her computer monitor. Danny read “Trudy” off the name plate, introduced himself, going for serious but not scary, and not quite pulling it off.
As Danny would later remember it,2 Mary Lund was heavyset, middle-aged, white, no frills—perfectly suited to the title of risk manager. Her suit skirt was corporate sensible, neutral toned and neutered cut. She didn’t seem like the type for chitchat, so Danny started right in with the investigative memo the Somerset Medical Center lawyer had sent over. He pulled the fax from his breast pocket, skipping to the parts he’d highlighted.
“So, following the, uh, passing of the Reverend Gall, you and this attorney Fleming conducted an interview with a nurse named Charles Cullen?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “We interviewed all the nurses who worked on the unit.”
“Okay, okay,” Danny said. “And what did you—”
“None of these interviews turned up anything unusual or incriminating,” Mary said.
“I see that,” Danny said. “So, with this nurse, Cullen—was there anything which made you interview him, anything suspicious or—”
“No no,” Mary said. “We interviewed all the nurses on the unit.”
“And are there any other memos we might have—anything which might be useful?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Mary said. “That would be a question for our house legal counsel, Paul Nittoly.”
“All right, all right,” Danny said. “We’ll talk to him as well, I’m sure. And this nurse, um, Cullen—”
“Yes.”
“You spoke to him.”
“Well, as I said—we went through, conducted an interview with Mr. Cullen, like all the others,” Mary said.
“This was in regards to one of the patient incidents—the Reverend?”
“Reverend Gall. Yes.”
“And this nurse, Charles Cullen—he was the reverend’s nurse?”
“Well, yes and no,” Mary said. “They rotate.”
“I’m sorry…?”
“Rotate patients,” Mary said. “The nurses get different room assignments each night they come in. Over the course of his care here at Somerset Medical Center, Reverend Gall was attended by many different CCU nurses.”
“And Nurse Cullen was Gall’s nurse?”
“No,” Mary said. “Charles Cullen wasn’t Reverend Gall’s nurse on the night he expired.”
“Okay, okay,” Danny said. “So—who was?”
“I don’t have that information handy,” Lund said. “I’d have to get back to you with that.”
“Yes, please. And that nurse, Gall’s nurse, do you have a memo about that interview, or—”
“I’m afraid I don’t have anything like that,” Mary Lund said. “I’ll have to look into it and get back to you.”
“All right,” Danny said. “I’d appreciate that.” He wasn’t getting anywhere, but knew better than to let his frustration show. “Another question, about this, um, ‘pixies,’ or…” Danny held up the memo, the word circled with a question mark.
“Pyxis, uh-huh,” Mary said.
“Those are the medicine requests?”
“The Pyxis computer keeps track of each drug withdrawal,” Mary said. “It also bills the patient and alerts the pharmacy when to restock.”
“And you checked these records?”
“Yes,” Mary said.
“And, says here there was nothing unusual, is that right?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Mary said.
“If I could, I’d like to get a photocopy of those records,” Danny said. “Look at the periods surrounding the, uh, unusual occurrences with the patients—”
“Well, that’s not possible, I’m afraid,” Mary said. “Unfortunately, Pyxis only stores records for thirty days.”
“So…”
“Yeah,” Mary said. “I know.”
“Okay,” Danny said. “So this nurse wasn’t the focus of your investigation then.”
“No no no,” Mary said. “We interviewed all the nurses on the unit. But there is one person you might want to look into.”
Danny gave Tim the rundown over lunch at the Thai place across from the courthouse. Tim watched the waitress come and go with the menus before he started in. “So, Lund,” he said. “She setting us up or what?”
“She gave us a name,” Danny said. “Name of Allatt, Edward.”
“That the male nurse?”
“Another guy. He worked on the same floor as the vics sometimes, and had access. She thought we’d want to look at him.”
“What’s he do?” Tim said.
“He’s one of those guys who comes and takes your blood…” Danny flicked down to his notes.
“Yeah, phlebotomist,” Tim said, surprising himself.
“Oh, you know that one, right?”
“Hey, I was a hospital rent-a-cop,” Tim said. “High school.”
“Yeah, well, Lund said they like this phlebotomist guy.”
“He a suspect?”
Tim said. “I thought they didn’t have anyone.”
“Mary Lund told me, ‘Allatt is one you’ll want to look at.’ What she said.”
“She say why?”
“Guess this guy has a beef with the hospital. Local guy, some issue with the expansion plans, maybe union stuff.”
“He a suspect?” Tim said.
“Just said he was suspicious, and had a beef,” Danny said. He read from the notebook. “Her words: ‘Allatt might be the one responsible for these unusual occurrences.’ ”
“Hey, okay, good,” Tim said, writing it down. “They don’t have anyone, then they give us somebody. I’ll take it. Anything else?”
“Not yet,” Danny said. “I asked her about the thing they sent, the nurse from the memo.”
“Yeah, the leaflet they sent?”
“The investigation,” Danny said. “All four pages of it.” Danny flipped again, fingered the page. “The male nurse they talked to. Charles Cullen.”
“What’d she say?”
“She told me about Allatt.”
“Yeah, but about Cullen?”
“Nothing,” Danny said. “I guess he wasn’t the focus of the investigation.” Danny told Tim about the Pyxis machine, and how it only stored records for the previous thirty days. “Going back, that’s what, September 7 or 8, right? So we can only look at the drug orders for Mr. Crews.”
The only problem was, Crews’s coroner’s report had come back normal; according to Mambo, he had died of natural causes.3
“Okay, well, that sucks,” Tim said. “How about the other nurses? We got anything for them?”
“The lawyer might,” Danny said. “Lund didn’t.”
“She didn’t have any of their interviews? They did interviews, I thought.”
“She didn’t have shit,” Danny said.
Tim held his breath, let it go with a sigh. “So what you’re telling me,” he said finally. “We got nothing.”
“Well, no,” Danny said. “We got Allatt.”
32
It was Danny’s case but as supervisor, Tim had co-lead, and he was particular about doing the standard-operating-procedure stuff himself. First he ran Edward Allatt’s name through the state’s motor vehicle system, checking for a registration and license. He found the guy and his car but no red flags, so he transcribed the address and personal info in his notebook before plugging the name into the National Crime Information Center database. Edward Allatt came back clean, no hits. Dead end. Tim tried again using alternate spellings and nicknames. Nothing. So the guy had a car and he had never been in jail. Next, Tim logged into the New Jersey Department of Justice’s PROMIS/Gavel database, which followed the progress of criminal cases through the New Jersey court system. Tim had gotten some big hits like this—even if they’d never done time, bad guys usually tended to be mixed up with the court system one way or another, whether as witnesses or victims or they had been acquitted of charges. But Allatt, Alatt, Allat came up clean. The phlebotomist was a dead end. Tim sat for a moment. A redball sat burning on his desk and he had nothing to chase. They’d set up an interview with this Allatt guy tonight, catch him at home, see him tomorrow. Meanwhile, Braun figured, what the hell. He flipped to a clean page in his notebook and typed “Charles Cullen” into the database.
The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder Page 14
