The Pain Nurse

by Jon Talton

  Her feet felt like the cement of dreams and from her stomach came a nauseous lurch she hadn’t felt since she had seen her first autopsy as a nursing student. She fumbled to pull the cell phone out of her lab coat, nearly dropping it. All she could see was the long thick dark blade.

  “Lennie,” she said in as calm a voice as she could manage, “Lennie, put down the knife. You’re going to hurt…”

  “He’s right there behind you!” he bellowed. “The devil from hell. He’s come up from hell to get me. But nobody’s gonna get Lennie. No fucking devil’s gonna get Lennie.”

  Cheryl Beth’s fingers felt numb and huge as she tried to punch in the keys to hospital security. Where was everybody? She looked around for help, found none. Then he was there, a blur of dark color, a heavy mass rushing toward her. Her hand exploded in pain and the cell phone flew into the wall, smashing into several pieces. Time moved fast and slow. She was conscious of every part of the phone clacking down to the floor, her stethoscope, pens, and Starbucks card flying out of her lab coat, as if each was taking days to reenter the atmosphere. But he had gotten to her so fast, faster than her brain could even send a signal to step back or block his swing. He pushed her roughly and her left ankle gave way, then she was flying and sliding backward on the waxed floor. Somehow her head didn’t hit the tiles. She turned to see him rush toward the patient, the knife held high as he screamed in a language she couldn’t comprehend. Now it would happen, just like it had with Christine, and then he would come for her. This was how it had happened. Oh, God.

  Suddenly he seemed to hit a wall and collapse. His bulky form abruptly turned horizontal and crashed. She realized the man on the floor had shoved the wheelchair forward, tripping Lennie, who now fell forward across the chair.

  “No, devil!” He landed at the patient’s legs and was flailing. The knife was still in his hand. She heard the blade strike the floor, a hard, off-key sound. She remembered a game her brother had played as a teenager, poking a hunting knife as fast as he could into a table between his outstretched fingers. Was it called mumblypeg? Cheryl Beth could never bear to watch and she thought it made him seem like a redneck. Now she heard the same chilling sound: bak, bak, bak, bak.

  Lennie pulled himself up over the man, climbing and slithering up his body, swinging the knife. But the man grabbed his wrist with one hand, then two, while Lennie screamed, spat, and thrashed atop him. The man’s face was red and he grunted with effort, twisting his torso. God, the sutures would come out. She pulled herself to her knees with difficulty, as if she were willing some other body to move. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She grabbed Lennie from behind and pulled on him, feeling the parka rip. Then it gave way entirely and she fell backward again, landing painfully on her butt, half a filthy jacket in her hands. Just then the patient bucked his head, crashing his forehead into Lennie’s nose. He screamed and the knife slipped from his hand, hitting the floor loudly. Lennie tried to roll toward the knife but the man grabbed his shoulder and Lennie fell back. He was again on top but this time facing the ceiling, being restrained by the patient. He kept flailing his hand toward the knife. Cheryl Beth ran and kicked it away. By the time she turned around, the man had his arms locked around Lennie’s neck in what looked like an odd wrestling hold. Lennie struggled with renewed fury but only for a few seconds. Then his eyes rolled back and his body went limp.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” Cheryl Beth pulled Lennie off the man. “Is he okay?”

  “Probably,” the man said, lying on his back, his chest heaving to get breath.

  “You’re sure you’re all right? Can you feel your toes?” The man nodded. “Your right leg’s doing well. That was quite a trick, pushing the wheelchair under him. Probably saved us. I used to think I was a good woman in a crisis.”

  “You are.”

  She looked back at Lennie. “I thought he was harmless.”

  “Nobody’s harmless.” The man smiled and held out his hand. “Will.”

  “Cheryl Beth.” His hand felt warm in hers.

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  Just then she heard Lennie moan, but Will almost involuntarily kicked his right leg. His foot connected sharply with Lennie’s skull and this time the man lay still.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The security men came and handcuffed the derelict. Will was into his wheelchair and Cheryl Beth brought his two p.m. meds. She checked the sutures on his back, which somehow had survived intact. He had slathered hand sanitizer on his hands, arms, and face. The adrenaline from the fight was still fueling him. He was high on it, even if his muscles were starting to ache and he could still smell the man’s odor on him. Then the uniforms arrived and led the suspect off to a squad car. He was mumbling to himself but looked no worse for the choke hold Will had administered. He had seen cases where the hold could kill a suspect and hated to use it. But it had been a few years since he had been in a fight like that, and back then he could walk and run. He had needed every advantage he could get.

  Now he sat in a small conference room with Dodds and the head of hospital security. He was a former cop named Stan Berkowitz. Will never knew him well. He was always in patrol and had risen to sergeant. He had retired at fifty, but he looked ten years younger, right down to his fine suit, sculpted chin, and perfect haircut. He looked like a congressman.

  Dodds said, “Stan ‘Don’t Call Me David’ Berkowitz.” Will chuckled, knowing Berkowitz hated the nickname.

  “I made ninety-five thousand last year,” he said. “So screw you both.” He still talked like a cop. “Why are you still putting up with the shit out there when you could retire, get a pension, then start to make real money. Private sector loves retired cops for security gigs. They give you respect, too.”

  Dodds said, “So how’d this guy get in the hospital with a knife, now that you got respect and all.”

  “Welcome to my world.” Berkowitz opened his hands and smiled gently. “We do a lot of Medicaid cases here. This isn’t Indian Hill. We knew about Lennie, of course. Leonard Snowden Williams Jr.—he sounds like chairman of Procter and Gamble, huh? He had been a patient. He was homeless. He would sometimes get inside. That’s not uncommon, especially in the wintertime. We have to run them out of the old boiler room, the closed wings. We do what we can, what with budget cuts and all. We had to lay off nine security officers last year. There’s no money for screening devices at the doors. That wouldn’t be practical anyway. There’s always risks. We have a risk-management officer, know that? Some things fall between the cracks.”

  “Like security for the basement wing where Dr. Lustig was killed,” Will said.

  Berkowitz shifted his jawline to Will. “What the hell happened to you, Borders?”

  “Bad back,” Dodds said, studying the knife through the plastic of a large evidence bag. Will stared at it, guessing it was a Ka-Bar brand, carbon steel blade, maybe seven inches long. It looked smaller in the bag than when it was being thrust over his head. He realized he hadn’t exhaled.

  “We thought Lennie was harmless…” Berkowitz started.

  “Did you know Christine Lustig?” Will asked.

  Berkowitz paused, seemed thrown off stride. “Sure. They wrote her up in last month’s newsletter, the big computer project she was doing. She was a surgeon. So I saw her around. And, well. She was…well, hell, she was an attractive woman. You know how it is. I noticed her.”

  “Did she know Lennie?”

  Berkowitz pushed out his chest, knocking his tie aside. “What the hell, Borders, you’re a patient. Why are you asking questions?”

  “Indulge us,” Dodds said.

  “Oh, I get it, the great salt-and-pepper homicide team, back together again. How would I know if she knew him?”

  “Maybe,” Will said, “you could check his records here, see if she ever treated him. Maybe there was a connection.” Will was surprised Dodds was letting him talk. He already knew there was no chance Lennie had killed Christine Lustig. He said, “Did you inv
estigate any threats against Dr. Lustig in the months before she was murdered?”

  “I thought the hospital president himself had already talked to the police. He came down here the night Dr. Lustig was, well, killed.”

  “I didn’t see you that night,” Dodds said.

  “The president talked to me. We thought everything that could be done was being done. I didn’t need to be in the way… You wouldn’t believe the bureaucratic crap we have here. Just like being with the cops, only more meetings. Anyway, I thought this was already resolved. You’ve got the man. It was obviously Lennie.” Berkowitz shifted imperceptibly, pushing back the chair slightly and running a hand across his congressional hair. Will had learned how cops showed discomfort during interviews.

  “So what about it, Stan? Had she?” Dodds’ large almond eyes were innocent with inquiry. Suddenly it felt to Will like the old days, where they would double-team a suspect.

  “Well, I’d have to check the records.”

  “Didn’t you do that after the murder?” Will asked.

  The sweat appeared on the sides of Berkowitz’s neck, an odd place. But it was definitely sweat. “Damn, do you have any idea? Can we go off the record here?”

  Neither Will nor Dodds spoke, but just as they knew he would, Berkowitz filled the gap of silence. “There’s a huge issue of liability for the hospital here. Do you have any idea how much we could be sued for if it came out that Lustig had been threatened and the hospital didn’t do enough to protect her? You know how lawyers twist everything.” He swiveled toward Will and his mouth crooked down. “You know, you got kicked out of homicide and ended up on the rat squad. You twist cops’ words all the time. Why am I even talking to you?” By now he was sweating enough that it had broken through the light-blue dress shirt.

  Will said, “So she had been threatened?”

  “Phone calls, all right. Somebody was calling her office line. Mostly hang-ups.”

  Dodds said, “Mostly?”

  Berkowitz leaned forward, his face pinched. “We’re off the record, remember? Right? I’ve got a good thing here.”

  “What is mostly?” Will demanded. Berkowitz’s youthful face started dissolving into wrinkles.

  “I don’t even know if it was real, understand? She came to me about a month ago and said she was getting calls, down in her office. The phone would ring and she’d answer and nobody would be on the line. I mean, nobody talked. But she was convinced they were there, just listening to her. She was a babe, okay? So what babe hasn’t gotten a breather at some point in her life? Anyway, talked to the telecom people, and we ran the times of the calls. They weren’t coming from inside the hospital. So all we could do was complain to the phone company and change her extension. We had a work order for that when she was killed.”

  “That doesn’t sound like something a homeless guy would do,” Will said.

  Dodds said, “Go back, Stan. You said ‘mostly.’”

  He was hunched forward, his hands clenched together.

  “About three days before she was killed, she came back to me and said there had been a call. Started out same as the rest. She answers and it’s dead air. Then she hears a whisper. Says she’s going to die. Hangs up. She was shaken up. I offered to call the police for her. But then she just changes, gets really icy. Says to forget it.”

  “And you did.”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know what it all means.” He sat back up and fanned his coat jacket. “It’s not going to be a problem, right? You’ll test the blade of Lennie’s knife. You’ll find Dr. Lustig’s blood on it. Look, I’ve got a meeting.” He stood. “What I told you was all off the record. I’ll deny it if you try to screw me, and you can just deal with the hospital’s lawyers.”

  ***

  The door closed and Dodds shook his head. “Stan ‘Don’t Call Me David’ Berkowitz. The assholes always land well. It’s a shame he wasn’t good enough to get into homicide. Would have loved to have a homicide cop named after a serial killer.” Dodds folded Lennie’s weapon inside the evidence bag and yawned.

  Will said quietly, “That’s not the knife.”

  Dodds’ artillery shell of a head swiveled. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not the knife. Did you really check her office? Like under the desk?”

  Dodds stared at him. He’d seen the look before. Then Dodds stood, like a redwood suddenly appearing full-grown, and roughly grabbing the handles of Will’s wheelchair, rushing him out of the room, nearly banging his feet on the doorjamb. They burst into the hallway, nearly T-boning a patient bed being wheeled by, then almost running down two nurses who jumped aside. Dodds pushed the wheelchair fast while he bent down to Will’s ear.

  “You fucker, you cocksucker, damn you all to hell, you’d better be pulling my chain. You’d better be in some drug-induced hallucination…”

  “You know better. Slow down.”

  “God damn you to hell, Borders.”

  Dodds flashed his badge at the elevator bank, people cleared out, and they got a down-bound car all to themselves. “I ought to bring you up on charges, if you’ve been meddling in a crime scene. Bastard, bastard, bastard…” The doors opened into the darkness and Dodds sped them toward Lustig’s office, past the single bank of overhead lights. He stopped the wheelchair so hard Will was thrown forward.

  “Don’t apply to be an orderly,” he said.

  “Fuck you, fuck, fuck you,” Dodds mumbled. “Crime scene seal broken. Son of a bitch. There’s no chain of custody now, whatever the hell we find. This is worse than a rookie mistake. Without the seal on the door, any defense lawyer can say we just planted the evidence. We can’t prove chain of custody. The DA would have our jobs—what the hell am I saying: my job. I ought to use this Ka-Bar on you myself.”

  “Calm down. Don’t open the door yet.” Will pointed to a strip of medical tape across the yellow seal. It had his initials written on it. “That’s me. Nobody’s been inside since.”

  “You put that on there?”

  Will nodded.

  “After you broke the seal to go inside.”

  “No. Actually, I followed you inside. You left and I was still in there.”

  “Sneaky, fucking, cripple bastard.”

  “So when I left I wanted to make sure the chain of custody was clean. So I got the tape, wrote my initials, taped it across where the seal was split. You see it.”

  “I’m gonna arrest your ass right now.”

  “I’m still a sworn officer.”

  “Damn you to hell.” He slit the tape with a pocketknife, fumbled with a key, and swung open the door.

  “It’s under the desk drawer, taped there with duct tape.”

  Dodds moved to the desk, looking back angrily. “Did you take it out, touch it?”

  “Sure. I also wiped it clean of prints.”

  “Bastard. Asshole.”

  Will thought about what Scaly Mueller had said about two old married people fighting, but it didn’t make him smile. He had a fleeting image of Cindy to add to the constant reminder of her leaving. Somehow he was lousy with partners.

  Dodds produced a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket. He felt carefully under the center drawer of the desk. In a moment he pulled out a dark rectangle cradled in the duct tape that had held it to the bottom of the center desk drawer. He put it on top of the desk and carefully unwrapped the knife. Using an evidence envelope from another coat pocket, he meticulously slid the duct tape inside and sealed it. Then he opened the knife. It clicked into place with a sharp metal sound.

  Unfolded, it looked like the skeleton of a prehistoric predator. The handle was thick and black. The blade was stainless steel, with a sharp leading edge that turned into a nasty looking saw-like serration as it got closer to the handle. There was a hole in the upper part of the blade, as if in dinosaur days it had been an eye socket.

  “That would scare the hell out of anybody who saw it coming.”

  “Fuck you.”


  “It will also be common enough that we can’t trace, and it won’t have prints.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Dodds studied it under the light, his mouth turning deeper and deeper into an inverted U. He slid it into another evidence envelope and sealed it. He swung around in the chair and sighed.

  “When were you going to tell me about this?”

  “I assumed you had found it by now. Anyway, I was going to check on the seal today and if it hadn’t been broken, I was going to call you. I didn’t expect a hero’s welcome for what I was going to tell you.”

  “That’s sure as hell right.”

  “Let me ask you something. That day when you came down here, when I snuck in behind you. Did you come back in a few minutes and try the door?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody did.”

  “Maybe it was a security guard.”

  “This was different. Somebody tried the door several times.”

  Dodds murmured something and shook his head. “Well, I guess our shit-stained boy didn’t kill her. That may not work out for your Florence Nightingale.”

  “Cheryl Beth?”

  “Cheryl Beth Wilson, RN.” He drew out each syllable. “I consider her a person of interest.”

  “Come on…”

  “She found her, you know.”

  Now Will remembered that night, when he had been groggy on drugs, terrified of the late-night trip to the MRI. He had seen her there, outside the office, her white lab coat stained with blood.

  Dodds went on. “It gets better. She was banging Lustig’s husband. I call that motive.”

  Will was starting to hurt again, but he had to hang on. He had gotten this far. He said, “Yeah, you should have seen how effectively she fought against this guy in the hall. No way. Why aren’t you looking at the husband?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Because you know it’s the Slasher. It takes you awhile to come around sometimes, if you didn’t think of something in the first place. But you know, Dodds. You know who did this.”