The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

by Charles Graeber

  “No, I can’t… it wouldn’t… I can’t…”

  “I’m here, Charlie,” Amy says. “I’m here, because—I love you. And I’m here because—I know you killed those people.”

  Charlie has stopped moving.

  “I know it,” she says.

  The world has stopped. His lips move.

  “Was it just—a rush?” Amy asks. She reaches across the table. His hand is cold. “Was it just for the kick of it, like when we’re at a code?”

  Charlie’s eyes flick to the edges of the table, the space there.

  “I don’t know why,” Amy says. “I—I don’t know what your motivation was. But I know you’re smarter than this. And I know you did it.”

  “I can’t—”

  “I know you did it. Let’s go to the police station. We can tell them together.”

  “I can’t I can’t I can’t…”

  “Because I know you killed them, Charlie.”

  Charlie looks up.

  This time, she feels a sudden wave of cold static. Then she sees the switch.

  Sees his skin go slick and buttery. Watches his jaw reshape and his spine shift. Then Charlie’s eyes began to drift apart.

  The right eye unplugs and drifts lazy to the edge of the table, reading the darkness there, pacing kinesthetic tracks back and forth and back. The left eye watches her. The wax head twists and speaks. The voice is low and toneless. Amy has never heard this voice before. It does not remind her of anything human.

  There are undercover detectives here, men with guns watching, somewhere—but she isn’t feeling that kind of fear. She doesn’t sense evil in the man across from her. It’s not rage or murderous lust. It’s blankness, a horrible nothing. A wall has fallen. There is nothing behind it. In this moment, she knows. Charlie is not Charlie. If she did not know him, it was only because there was nothing really to know.

  Tim had tried wiggling all the levels of the stupid wireless receiver, but they weren’t getting squat out of there. The voices were distorted and drowned. They’d listen for a while, straining at the pips and pops and birdsong from the speakers. Then Danny would try the knobs. After a while they just stared ahead across the parking lot and watched the doors.

  Charlie came out first, from the side door, alone. They watched him unlock his car and pull out onto 22.

  “Where is she?” Tim said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “This isn’t good,” Tim said. “I’m going in.”

  Then Amy pushed through the front entrance. She hung to the door handle and stopped, dazed. The detectives hopped out of their car, waving and yelling. Amy looked to the sound, lost across a parking-lot sea.

  She made the car before she fell apart and collapsed sobbing into Danny’s arms. Tim opened the door and they slid her in to collect herself in the Crown Vic’s heat. The recorder was there between the seats, a tape still spinning in the plastic window. The sight sobered her.

  “So,” she said. “Did you get it?”

  Tim looked at Danny. “We’ll get him,” he said. “But—we were having a little trouble making out what he was saying.”

  “I told him,” Amy said. “I told him that I knew. Something weird happened to him. His face. It was—awful. And he kept saying the same thing, over and over.”

  “What did he say.”

  “He was talking weird,” Amy said. “Low, almost a growl, one word at a time. But I think what he said was, ‘Let. Me. Go. Down. Fighting.’ ”

  60

  Amy had statements to sign at the prosecutor’s office before they let her go to her staff Christmas party. It didn’t matter what kind of a day she had, Amy simply had to attend. It was the big-deal work event of the year, the sort of thing nurses pulled seniority on the schedule for. It was usually a good party as work parties go, docs and nurses, pharmacy and administration, secretaries and maintenance workers getting down beneath the disco ball of the Bridgewater Marriot ballroom. Amy’s coworkers counted on an appearance by the outrageous party girl who wasn’t afraid to hit on doctors or shake her ass on the dance floor or make them all drink shots with embarrassing names. A Christmas work party without Amy was like a year without Santa Claus. Amy wasn’t the type to let anyone down except herself. Amy called Donna from Danny’s desk, telling her she was running late, not able to say why.

  Amy was a confusion of unprocessed emotions. One minute she felt sickened by Charlie’s revelation, then guilty that she’d not felt his darkness sooner, then frightened by that darkness. She was nervous that her involvement might cost her job. Then, in the next stuttering breath, she felt a surge of pride. Wearing a wire, working undercover for homicide detectives, catching a serial killer. How cool was she? She felt extraordinary, and experienced a vain rush she hadn’t felt since her days playing bass in a rock cover band. Then she realized (yuck!) she was stoking her ego because of her proximity to murder and infamy, the way Charlie had over lunch, showing her how famous he’d become in the newspaper, the Angel of Death. Amy’s self-loathing set in, followed by guilt and anger. Each emotion pushed through in succession. Amy couldn’t hold on to any one of them; it seemed so much simpler to just feel none. She craved numbness. Alcohol was the universal solvent. It might wash her mental whiteboard clean.

  All the hotel she primped upstairs in the room she’d rented with her girlfriends and had a few drinks, prepartying. She checked herself in the elevator mirror, looking hot—her hair in golden ringlets, makeup prom-perfect, and a dress picked out weeks in advance, a tight, strapless thing that pushed her boobs up to her chin. It was a satiny blood red that Amy thought gave her a fairy-tale look, like wicked Cinderella. When the doors binged open she put a little extra wiggle in her stride as she made her way toward the ballroom. She might not have known exactly who she was in that moment, or even how she felt, but she definitely knew how to make guys pay attention. With a dress like that, every man’s face was a mirror. She knew it was shallow, but it was reassuring, too.

  Somerset Medical CEO Dennis Miller was giving his speech to the troops as she walked into the crowded ballroom. Amy headed straight for the bar, ordering two Heinekens loudly enough that she got some looks. Miller was still talking. Amy took her beers, finished one, ordered another, then took them to where her nurses sat. She threw herself dramatically in a seat, giving an excited scrunch face to all the familiars, toasting, making too much of a fuss. The microphone man kept talking. Miller. Amy focused in on the CEO’s red face and red tie. He was talking about Charlie. Miller never said the name, but that’s what this was. He was congratulating Somerset Medical for standing up and reporting irregularities. “Blah blah blah,” Amy said. That’s what it was. A feel-good speech. He was taking credit. I reported this, I reported that. Amy was disgusted. She had reported things. She was risking her job. Didn’t anyone else hear this crap? Amy searched the faces around the table for agreement but everyone was just listening to Miller, waiting for him to finish so they could get dessert. Amy wanted to puke. She flagged the waiter and ordered two glasses of white wine.

  Miller saying how Other hospitals had turned their heads, but we met this head on, as a team.

  “Bullshit,” Amy said, maybe too loud.

  Saying he was proud of Somerset for keeping patients safe.

  “Lie lie lie,” Amy said. “Blah blah blah.”

  Everyone at the table was watching her now. Some were smiling: Classic Amy.

  Amy knew she was looking hot, but she had to wonder whether some of the looks she was getting owed something to Charlie as well. Of course, none of Amy’s coworkers imagined she was a confidential informant working with the prosecutor’s office, much less that she’d spent the afternoon at lunch with the killer, or the previous weeks secreting evidence out of the hospital. She could see them at the other tables, leaning in, whispering, staring. The rumors were out there, circulating, the looks said: Is she one of us, or one of them? At this point, she wasn’t sure herself. She clapped a little too loud when Miller got
offstage, and followed that with a round of shots. The party had turned a corner now, speeding along a course powered by the open bar. The lights dipped, the music came up, a few stray coworkers clapped their hands and bent their knees and shot finger pistols in the air.

  Amy saw Miller working the tables, a drink in his hand. She stood up and sidled next to him, waited for him to notice. He noticed. Liked the dress. He leaned into it, yelling something in her ear, the music too loud but Amy couldn’t miss the point. She said “What?” anyway.

  Miller signaled for the girl with the drinks tray, flashed two fingers. He seemed cocky. One of those power guys with clean-shaven jowls and a full head of gray hair. She hated the man. He leaned in toward her bosom. “I need to know your name!” he said. “Who are you?”

  Amy finished her wine, kept it wet on her lips, put them in his ear. “I’m Charlie Cullen’s best friend!” she said.

  Miller straightened up. He seemed to change color, but Amy couldn’t be sure if that was just the disco lights. She thought he’d leave her, flee to the bar, but he didn’t. “I know you,” she said. She leaned back, looking him in his eyes.

  “Oh you do, huh?”

  Amy could tell the guy liked leaning in, the way the music forced them to breathe on each other. “Yeah,” she said. “Do you know me?”

  “I do now,” Miller said. Amy saw his little smirk. He didn’t know her. He probably didn’t know anything at all. The guy was cocky. She wanted to smack that smirk off his fat face.

  “Yeah, well, I know you’re a liar,” she shouted.

  “Let’s dance,” Miller said. He took her hand. She let him lead toward the floor.

  “I know things,” Amy said into the music. “I know what happened. You’ve got secrets, mister—behind the scenes.” Miller grinned at her. He seemed to think she was flirting with him. She watched him, doing some sort of vague twist like a chaperone at a high school dance, that cocksure smile. She wanted to vomit everything she knew on this man. Just empty her whole day on him, every unchecked emotion, every fear, all the secrets and anger. She wanted him to be scared, like she was. To be humble, at least. They weren’t dancing together so much as at each other, each in their own rhythm. Amy was actually making a shame-shame-shame dance out of shaking her finger at her CEO. “I know things,” she yelled. “Big news. Big big big news.”

  Miller cupped his ear, not even trying, and took her hand to spin her. By now her friends were taking pictures. Classic Amy! The flashes were like a strobe light. Amy looked down at the hand, up at the man in the tie, the photographers. What was she? Enjoying the spotlight, angry at the man, dancing… Drunk was what she was. Drunk and confused and at an office party. “You’re a liar,” Amy said, and turned and walked back to her friends at the table. “Dennis Miller is a liar,” she announced. “He lies.”

  Amy didn’t know what to do next, so she went back to the bar. She tried drinking some more, tried flirting with one of the cuteish residents. Finally she wandered out into the parking lot. Distant highway sounds mixed with the music. Amy looked up but saw no stars there, no sky.

  61

  Charlie steered his Ford Escort out of the Office restaurant parking lot and into the flow of traffic along 22 West. It was 4:40 p.m. Danny had radioed ahead to officers Timothy Musto and Michael Vanouver and Detective Douglas Brownlie, positioned just down the street in a marked Somerset County Sheriff’s Department car. He and Tim wanted to do it themselves, but the officer who arrested Cullen and Mirandized him couldn’t be part of the team that interrogated him later. Tim had found that you arrest a guy and tell him, “You have the right to be silent,” and then later ask him to talk, he thinks you’re joking. Better to have a uniform stop him, using something recognizable as a police car, make it seem like a routine traffic stop. Then hopefully, Cullen would be willing to talk later with the guys in suits.

  Fifteen minutes later, the radio car came up behind Charlie and hit the gumballs. Charlie steered onto the paved shoulder just before the turnoff to Frontier Road. The officers ordered him out of the car and onto the ground, where Charlie was cuffed and searched before being placed in the rear seat of the marked unit. He was then driven to the prosecutor’s office at 40 North Bridge Street and secured to the handcuff cable bolted to the floor in the upstairs Interview Room. Then Tim and Danny made their appearance.

  Charlie looked up at the men in suits, big guys in a little room. Two guys standing over him while he’s chained to the floor.

  “Hi there,” Tim said. He jerked his thumb between himself and Danny. “Remember us?”

  Charlie looked at the ground.

  “And where are you now, asshole?”

  Charlie tried to turn away, but he was stuck on a short leash. The man kept talking.

  “Yeah, that’s right, you sick son of a bitch,” Tim said. “I told you so. Didn’t I tell you?”

  Tim was a smartass, yeah, and he’d admit he enjoyed it. But laying into Cullen served another purpose besides sport. Cullen had to know that he was in their world now. Tim knew that Charlie Cullen had been investigated repeatedly and never suffered any consequences. He was a guy who had made decisions and paid for them with other human lives. No matter what he seemed like at the moment, that fact alone meant Cullen was a pretty cocky guy. There was no greater measure of control one man could exert over another than murder.

  The detectives needed to make Cullen understand that he wasn’t in control anymore. This wasn’t some late-night hospital shift where Charlie called the shots; it was the interrogation room of the state. The man needed to comprehend the full ramifications of his new reality. He had to internalize them. He needed to be torn down and broken. Meanwhile, the rest of the SCPO team watched through the two-way mirror, wondering how long the guy would sit there before he smartened up and asked for a lawyer.

  The truth was, they couldn’t make Charlie talk, nobody could. The best the detectives could hope to do was create an environment in which Charlie wanted to.

  They were asking Cullen to tell them things that Cullen believed he could not tell them. The detectives’ job was to help resolve this paradox for him. They needed to challenge his belief system so deeply that the architecture of his universe failed. Then they needed to rebuild the world into one in which confessing to murder seem like a good option. And the only way to do that was to create a situation where not talking was actually worse.

  “I tell you what I see, Charlie,” Tim said. “I see you jerking off on dead people. We’ve seen your Cerner. We’ve seen your drug orders and cancellations. We have you, asshole. We just want to hear you say it, is all. That what you did? You jerk off before or after you killed these people, Charlie?”

  Charlie didn’t look at him. He studied the corner.

  “You know what the world is going to know about you?” Danny said. He walked around to get in Cullen’s field of vision. “A sick fucking monster. Charlie Cullen, oh yeah—that nurse who got off on dead old guys. That was how you did Gall.”

  “I can’t,” Charlie said quietly. “I can’t. I—”

  “Why don’t you tell us about it, asshole?” Tim said. “Because otherwise that’s the way they’ll know you. The twisted sex monster who killed to beat his meat. Nice for your kids. How could you do that to them? You ever think about your kids, Charlie?”

  After a few hours of this, Charlie was curled up in the fetal position, crying into his palms. Tim had only seen a guy do that maybe two, three times in his career. It was the last stop on the trip over the edge. Every other guy he’d broken like that had gone. But Charlie just stayed out on that edge. It was as if he somehow couldn’t. So Danny and Tim tried another tack.

  They took turns telling Charlie, “Hey, your girlfriend there? She’s been calling the jail. This girl Amy. The two of you were at a lot of the same deaths at the same time. How about we bring her in for this, too?”

  “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t…”

  “Did you take turns, or did you push the nee
dle together?” Seeing if maybe they could motivate him to protect Amy.

  Then they’d give Charlie a little break, step outside the room to let Charlie steep in it for a while, then come back in. The breaks weren’t regular. They’d come in when they wanted to, leave, then return, sometimes appearing with Captain Nicholas Magos, surprising him, showing Charlie that he was not in control. Showing him they could go all night.

  “You’re either a sick fuck or you’re the Angel of Mercy, up to you. Meat beater or mercy killer—which one will your kids like for a dad?”

  At that for an hour, leaving, getting a coffee, watching the guy roll around on the monitor, coming back in the room, grilling him: “What if I told you we had fingerprints on some IV bags?” Giving him the bluff, but leaving some wiggle room with the what-if in case the guy had worn gloves.

  Six hours in and Charlie was still rolled up and rocking, making guttural animal sounds. The detectives stood over him, listening. Sounds of frustration. Communication without words. Still not a confession. Sometimes Charlie stopped and seemed to compose himself, only to bury his face into his hands again and cry. Sometimes he studied the floor as if it were a map and he was lost. Sometimes he just said, “I can’t,” repeating it for half-hour stretches like a mantra of abnegation. He was tired. Cullen was a night nurse, he was used to late shifts, but he had to be exhausted by now. That was a good thing. The detectives stepped out of the room again to let him say his I can’ts to the walls. They grabbed fresh coffee, talking through whether they should go next with the Amy angle or the sick-creep angle, when Forrest said, “Send him back.” Meaning, it got shut down, and Cullen would go back to the jail.

  Tim and Danny weren’t finished, and they didn’t think Charlie Cullen was finished, either. Sometimes a guy gets to a point and that’s it, he’s done, but Charlie wasn’t there. The guy was going. They were close enough that one more push might do it. Push him and he might go. Quit now, and he wasn’t going anywhere but court.