The Pain Nurse

by Jon Talton

  “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.

  “Those might not have even been her real clothes,” Will said. “I found bloody clothes in the old morgue last night and her ID card was pinned to them. Jeans, a blue wool top, a black leather jacket. Would she have worn something like that?”

  “Yes…” Cheryl Beth was almost whispering. “If she had come in late, she wouldn’t wear something fancy. She owned a black leather jacket.”

  “That means you may have just missed seeing the killer,” Will said. “He killed her, planted the folded clothes, gathered up her real clothes and went down the hallway to the morgue, where he stashed them. Then he took an old elevator up and out.”

  “Oh, shit.” She seemed stricken, her body slumping back, seeming to lose five pounds in front of his eyes. This was not the body language of a killer.

  “Are you sure the hall was deserted? Think back.”

  “I’m sure.” She reached for her bagel but her hand shook.

  “What?”

  “A couple of days after the killing,” she said, “I noticed footprints in the flower bed by my window at home. I had only cleared the leaves out the day Christine was killed, and those footprints weren’t there.”

  “Is there any chance…?”

  “No,” she cut him off. “I don’t have a gardener. It’s not near the meters. It wasn’t the cable guy. I told all this to Detective Dodds. He didn’t care. He said call nine-one-one if I see a prowler.” She furrowed her brow. “There’s something else. I forgot about this. A couple of days after Christine was killed, I saw my desk had been opened. Somebody had gone through it. I’m scared.”

  Will reached across and took her hand and held it a long time. She didn’t resist. They sat that way as Will conducted a silent debate with himself. But in the end, there was only one thing to do, only on
e right thing. He had drunk nearly the entire Diet Coke and yet his mouth was suddenly dry.

  “Cheryl Beth, do you remember the killings in Mount Adams two years ago?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Cheryl Beth walked down the middle of the busy hallway, dazed, barely acknowledging the nurses and docs that said hello. She had three new consults and half a dozen follow-ups. She wanted to get as many of her patients over from IVs to oral pain drugs as soon as possible. People were hurting: stabbings, shootings, chest tubes, every kind of mayhem in the belly. Will was hurting, the pain etching deep ravines around his eyes. He was a young man, her age. She had to argue with one of the surgeons about continuing to use Demerol—it was a crappy pain drug, even if it gave the patient a buzz. Slow drip Dilaudid, that was a wonderful drug. How many years had she spent teaching them about it? The patients had to be watched closely for side effects or irritation to the vein, but most of the time it was very effective. Then the afternoon would get really busy with new consults, as people came out into the recovery room. Some of them would come out of surgery, wake up, and hurt so much they’d rather be dead. Did some of the anesthesiologists care?

  Her feet kept moving, but dizziness was coming in and out, her pager feeling like ten pounds on the drawstring belt of her scrub bottoms. She made a sudden turn, cutting through a throng carrying flowers, and pushed through two double doors. It was the back way into the emergency department.

  She cut down a narrow hallway and opened the door into a large supply closet. Her hands found the cool wall and she just stood there, slowing her breathing, trying not to throw up. She had gotten used to every hospital smell: feces, urine, decaying flesh, vomit, the peculiar odor of disinfectant and putrification that attended many cancer patients. She never flinched. Right at that moment, she didn’t trust herself to move. She wasn’t thinking about the probable explosive reaction from Detective Dodds when she showed him the letter. Her hands splayed against the wall, she read the labels on the nearby drawer, silently moving her lips as she had in grade school until her teachers had stopped her.

  The Mount Adams Slasher. She wasn’t even sure she had heard everything Will had told her after hearing those words. An avid newspaper reader, Cheryl Beth remembered the crimes vividly. All the nurses had been terrified. One of them lived a block away from one of the killings. Women had bought guns and big dogs. For three months, the city had seemed transformed into a terrifying stranger, familiar on the surface but with a sinister current running beneath it like a poisoned underground river.

  Will Borders had worked on that case with Dodds—they were the “primaries,” he said; every profession had its jargon—and now he was telling her that the same killer had murdered Christine Lustig. And he might have seen Cheryl Beth as she walked out of the elevator into the darkened corridor that night. She knew a man had been arrested for the murders, but Will had been adamant. He hadn’t done it. The Slasher was killing again. Now, with the note she picked from Judd Mason’s trash, she knew who might have really done it. Her breathing was so shallow she was barely conscious of it. The nurse in her imagined how little of her lung capacity she was using, even worried she might be on the verge of hyperventilating.

  That was when she caught sight of the large black shoes and white pants.

  “Sorry,” she started, then raised her head to see that Judd Mason was standing there, just inside the doorway. It had been a long time since she had seen a nurse wearing whites at Memorial. His face showed that he knew she recognized him. “You’re an open book,” her mother had always said, derisively. Her mother didn’t know her.

  Cheryl Beth stood straight up and walked toward the doorway but he didn’t move. “Excuse me,” she said. He just stood there. In the bright light of the supply room, she was more aware of the pallor of his skin, with a dark stubborn beard fighting to come out. His hair was nearly black and close-cropped, revealing a wide forehead. He just stared at her, his mouth compact and his lips nearly bloodless. His eyes were small, intense, and blue. She looked again briefly at his large shoes and imagined matching them to the imprints in her flower beds.

  “Excuse me.” She said it louder this time, imagining how she might try to kick him in the groin and run past, or at least scream like hell. Inside she was shaking. He raised his right arm and leaned a hand against the doorjamb, further blocking her exit.

  “You’re the one who discovered her body.” He looked her over. He displayed no sympathy or even the expression of a man who was attracted to her. His features were flat and immobile. “Had she suffered?”

  She spoke quietly. “I’m going to go now.”

  “You were spying on my car last night,” he said, his voice even and calm. “At first, I didn’t know who you were.”

  “I wasn’t spying on anything,” Cheryl Beth said, using her best tough voice for standing up to a blockheaded doc or nurse. The problem was that she might be standing up to a killer.

  “What were you looking for?”

  “I wasn’t looking for anything.” She studied his face, reading nothing. “You worked with Dr. Lustig, didn’t you?”

  “Are you the police?” The same steady voice, neither angry nor friendly.

  She wanted to say, no, but the police will want to see you very soon. That was, if she could get out of this room with the purloined letter that was in the bottom left pocket of her lab coat. She looked past him into the corridor. Deserted. Not a sound. Only fifteen feet away was the busiest trauma center in southwestern Ohio. If only she could walk through walls.

  He raised his arm and stepped aside. She walked past him, making herself move at a normal pace.

  “You didn’t know her.” She heard his voice behind her. “I did.”

  She turned and faced him. He was leaning against the wall, still staring at her.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  His lips turned up. “You were sleeping with her husband, but I guess all’s fair.”

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Cheryl Beth braced her shoulders as a sudden rage overcame her. No—she made herself cool down. She had the entire hallway behind her now, the entire hospital. He was more than an arm’s length away. She tried to take stock. He had obviously seen her looking into his car. He might even have surmised that she saw the letter—but maybe not. He didn’t realize she had it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We should talk. If you’d write down your number and a good time to call you, we can sort this out.”

  “Hmmpf.” He shook his head. “You can find me. I’m in the directory.”

  “I hear you used to work in the OR with Christine. What was that like?”

  He studied her again. She imagined he was measuring the distance between them, but she refused to move. She folded her arms and stared back.

  “You don’t know me. You didn’t know her. Let’s say we saw the world differently and leave it at that. When she was assigned to go to the SoftChartZ project, I wasn’t surprised.”

  Now it was Cheryl Beth’s turn to just watch him. She felt strangely brave.

  “Whatever you think you know is wrong.” His small eyes became smaller, darker.

  “What do I know?” Cheryl Beth made herself laugh. “I’m just a small-town girl from Kentucky. Just the pain nurse.”

  “She was a good doctor. She didn’t want to be in that basement office, you know. They moved her down there.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “By that time she’d broken it off with me. So I never found out.” It was said in the same flat, easy voice. He took a step toward her and Cheryl Beth retreated two steps. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

  “What doctor are you talking about?” Cheryl Beth tried to draw him out, her gambit to see his handwriting having failed. Say “Chris,” she thought, just like the salutation on the note.

  Mason gave a tight smile. “Just a small-town girl who likes to play games. By the way, I thought you had been instructed to not discuss Dr. Lustig’s
murder with anyone: colleagues, patients, and absolutely not the press.”

  With that, he turned and walked away, striding through the double doors and out into the hospital.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  For days, Will had eyed the closet in the big rehab workout room with lust: it held walkers, crutches, four-footed canes and regular canes. He would walk again. He would make himself walk again, whatever noodles he now possessed in place of legs. This spinal cord, it was such a creation. His legs still had the same strong muscles that had existed before the tumor, before the surgery. But the signals couldn’t get through to them. Slowly, some were starting to come back. He did his usual walk up and down the wooden walkway, holding the parallel bars, as Amy guided him from the front and another physical therapist followed them with his wheelchair, in case he needed to suddenly sit. He wouldn’t consider such a defeat. His legs moved more easily, even if they still seemed almost detached from his torso. Amy held the multicolored gait belt she had cinched around his waist—he didn’t know how she could even slow his two hundred pounds if it started down, much less stop it, but the rules were the rules. Back and forth he walked, standing erect. It reminded him that he was a tall person.

  Finally, after letting him rest, Amy unfolded a walker. It was scuffed and old, but it would do. They locked the wheels of his chair and he kicked back the footrests. She had him by the gait belt as he hoisted himself up and nearly fell. But then he was up, standing, holding the arms of the walker. “Easy…take your time…you’re doing great…” He heard the words and moved slowly, his mind focused solely on not falling. For those moments, he couldn’t stew about Judd Mason and the letter to Christine Lustig. Could he have been wrong all these years about Bud Chambers and the Slasher case? He couldn’t worry about Cheryl Beth, who might be in danger. He could only try to…walk. His body was now an awkward, dangerous contraption liable to go down at any second. Don’t fall…don’t fall…every brain impulse was focused on one command. But his feet moved. His legs pushed forward. He was using the walker. Five feet. Ten feet. Turn. He was grateful to ease himself back down into the seat of the wheelchair. Amy patted him on the shoulder.