by Jon Talton
“Sold you out?”
“The cops said she didn’t back up my story that we were together that night, the night that Chris was killed.”
“So she told the truth.” She was comforted by the sounds of a housekeeping crew working in the hallway close by.
“Do you know how much money I bring into this hospital as a neurosurgeon?” His adult voice was back, but with an angry edge.
“I know, you’re the famous two-million-dollar man.”
“They told me this would go away. They said it would not touch me!”
“Who told you? What are you talking about?”
“The hospital! Jim Bryant!” The CEO of Memorial. Cheryl Beth had a hard time believing such a thing. Gary’s eyes were still wild.
“Gary, I told you that night you should immediately go to the police and tell them the truth.”
“Bryant said he’d shut it down. No one would even talk about it.”
Cheryl Beth took that in but kept her face as expressionless as possible. You’re an open book.
“You’ve got to help me,” he said, adding, “Cheryl Beth.”
“I’ve done all I can do, Gary.”
“Damn you!” He shook his fist at her. “You’re such a cold bitch. It’s all because your mother never loved you. I get you.”
She pushed her anger down into her shoes and quietly said, “Gary, you never knew anything important about me. What matters to me. You weren’t man enough to ask or to understand. We just fucked. It was nothing special.” The cold harshness of her voice surprised her. His eyes widened and he actually twitched, jerking his head to the left, the veins standing out in his neck.
“Please, I’m sorry.”
She just watched him.
“You saw me at the bar that night on Main Street…”
“No, I didn’t. You just said you were there.”
He stood, but didn’t move toward her once he realized she would walk out the door. “You’re not playing well with others. I was there, you saw me.”
“I did not.”
“Don’t you understand the favor I did for you? When I first talked to the police…”
“You said I was your lover. We hadn’t been together for months. That was no favor.”
“I didn’t tell them you were with Christine that night, on Main Street, before she came back to the hospital.”
“So? I told them. They already know.” She was amazed at the effortless way she lied. He started to talk, but she was already out the door, walking fast to the elevators.
Chapter Twenty-three
The next morning Will wheeled himself out to the busy main lobby and lined up at the Starbucks. It was one piece of the normal, outside world in the dreary daily hospital routine. His brother had brought him some money and fresh underwear, and then gone off to his shift as a firefighter. They were not close, and he could sense the discomfort from Mark, that he and his family might end up having to care for an invalid. Will vowed that wouldn’t happen. He would find a way to be self-sufficient. People worse off than him could do it. Cindy—he didn’t know when he would see her again, and didn’t want to care. Their marriage was just a scar now, not a wound. He couldn’t fix it, never could. His physical pain was less—it was noticeable, now more an anxiety he might miss his next dose than the constant vicious companion of recent weeks. Don’t worry about becoming an addict, Cheryl Beth had said. So he wouldn’t worry. He ordered his coffee, got it and rolled over to a table, then he saw the front page of that day’s Enquirer.
“Nurse charged in doctor’s murder,” a large headline said. A smaller one added: “Police suspect a romantic triangle led to killing.” He set the coffee down and read:
Police on Wednesday arrested a 35-year-old nurse in the Dec. 6 murder of Dr. Christine Lustig at Cincinnati Memorial Hospital.
Judd Mason, who also worked at the hospital, faces one charge of aggravated murder, according to Cincinnati homicide Det. J. J. Dodds.
Mason, of Deer Park, was arrested at his home around 4 p.m. Tuesday without incident. He is being held in the Hamilton County Jail on $1 million bond. Dr. Lustig, 41, was found dead in her basement office. According to the medical examiner, she died from repeated stab wounds.
Police say Mason was having an affair with Dr. Lustig, the ex-wife of prominent neurosurgeon Dr. Gary Nagle. Lustig broke off the affair and an enraged Mason sought revenge, police allege.
Officials at Memorial said they were relieved that “this horrible chapter has been closed,” according to a spokesman.
Relieved. Will lingered on the word. Closed. He read the story to the end, letting the coffee scald the roof of his mouth, but he really wasn’t comprehending the other words. It was the boilerplate of a hundred news stories about murders, usually telling little, often telling outright lies. Something went out of him and he just sat there staring at the table. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe it had been this simple, all along. He suddenly felt so tired, so sad beyond the words even to express it, much less to examine its headwaters. And Will wasn’t that kind of man.
Homicide is not that hard. That’s what the old detective who had broken him in—the man’s name had been Charlie Brill, but everyone called him Bull—had told him when he had joined the detail. Most homicides are simple. Family fights, drug deals gone wrong, disputes over money. Young men with guns and no control over their impulses. Jealousy. Lovers killed each other. Most murder victims knew their killers. Most killers eventually screwed up. Gather evidence. Make an arrest. Take it to the DA. Testify. Simple.
Sometimes one good case solved many others. As a young detective, Bull had worked the Cincinnati Strangler case. Seven women had been raped and strangled in 1965 and 1966. The swirling, lethal dangers of the sixties had come down on never-changing Cincinnati. Will had been in grade school, but he remembered it. The cops had eventually arrested a cab driver after a woman had been found beaten and stabbed in his abandoned cab. The MO hadn’t been the same as the others, who had been strangled. But each murder had been slightly different. One woman had been strangled with a necktie in a park. Others had died thanks to plastic clothesline. Two had been exact copies: women beaten badly and strangled with electrical cord. Bull had said they had a theory, played a hunch: that the cabbie was the strangler. He was convicted on only one murder, but after his arrest, the strangler killings had stopped. One veteran newspaper columnist later compared the case to the Slasher attacks: only one conviction, but no more killings.
Except that the Mount Adams killings hadn’t been simple. Theresa Chambers’ body had been found on an April afternoon when a coworker had become concerned and stopped by to check on her. She had looked through the kitchen window and seen a naked leg and a lot of blood. Inside the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old restored house, the scene had been surreally calm, neat—no broken dishes or overturned tables or chairs. A set of women’s clothes had been neatly folded on a chair, with black panties on top. The body had almost been arranged: completely nude, legs open, arms and hands holding a framed photo of her daughter, who was away at college. Yet all was not calm: the body had been nearly flayed in some places by a very sharp knife, then her throat had been slashed. Blood pooled darkly on the floor. She had been sexually assaulted and semen had been recovered by the medical examiner. And her ring finger had been cut off and taken.
Will and Dodds had immediately looked at her estranged husband, Bud. The spouse almost always was the killer. Simple, remember? Their marriage had been marked by physical abuse and she had a restraining order against him. He was also a Cincinnati cop who had faced more than his share of brutality complaints. Theresa’s time of death had been estimated at around three a.m. the day her body had been discovered. Bud had an alibi—he had been on duty on the overnight shift. But that broke down within a day when it turned out that he had gone off his beat early, his shift commander agreeing to cover for him, thinking he needed to run an errand. Day after day, Will and Dodds had interrogated Chambers in one of t
he dismal little rooms at headquarters. A cop with a bad temper and a history of threats against his wife had finally killed her. Where had he been that day? Chambers had said he hadn’t been feeling well, so he went home to his apartment and took a nap. No alibi. Lots of motive.
But it hadn’t been a simple case. No witnesses could place Chambers at the scene anytime near the murder. He had claimed he hadn’t seen Theresa for two weeks before the murder. The kitchen had lacked Chambers’ fingerprints. He had said it was because he hadn’t lived there for a month, but Will thought Chambers had wiped it down. Other evidence—bloody shoeprints, fibers, skin under the fingernails—was missing. A search warrant executed at Chambers’ apartment turned up nothing. The knife was missing from the scene, and wouldn’t turn up for days, when Dodds went back to Theresa’s house, did his homicide stroll, and finally found it in the back of the freezer. It had no trace evidence.
On the fifth day of interrogation, Chambers had seemed to crack. He changed his story, said he had left patrol to visit his girlfriend. She would back him up. Her name was Darlene Corley, a white-trash woman living down in the flood zone of the Columbia neighborhood. They had found her in an ancient, paint-peeled duplex that seemed like the moon compared to the Victorians being restored a block or two away. They had stood on the porch talking to her, and she had said that she had been with Chambers early that morning. He had pulled his patrol car right up to the curb there, and come inside and they had made love. The two detectives were about to invite themselves inside when the call came: another homicide in Mount Adams, same MO.
Jill Kelly was a thirty-eight-year-old single woman, an assistant professor at Xavier University. Her fiancé had found her inside her apartment at seven p.m., exactly two weeks after the murder of Theresa Chambers. The apartment was two blocks away from the location of the first killing. Like Theresa, Jill had a petite build and shoulder-length auburn hair. The scene had almost been a carbon copy, right down to the folded clothes and missing ring finger—with her engagement ring on it. This time, however, the medical examiner found evidence of sexual assault but no semen. The assailant had worn a condom. Will had found the knife on the first sweep, buried in the cat box. Like the weapon that had been used on Theresa, it was a folding combat knife.
Mount Adams is a sky island of a neighborhood perched over downtown and the Ohio River, on the leafy edge of Eden Park. Sit in one of the bars and restaurants with a view, and you’re eye level with the top of the imposing cluster of skyscrapers. On clear summer nights it’s as if you can reach across and touch their necklaces of light. Mount Adams had long since been reclaimed by gentrification and its narrow streets were home to galleries, restaurants, townhouses, and expensive homes, mostly in closely-spaced, restored nineteenth-century buildings. Although it sat in the midst of the city, its height and affluence seemed to offer an illusion of safety. Trouble was down the hill—not there. When the media learned of the Jill Kelly homicide coming just fourteen days after the killing of Theresa Chambers, they thought: serial killer in paradise. They called him “the Mount Adams Slasher.” That was fine with Dodds and Will, who also adopted the term. The most horrific, distinctive fact of the two crimes had been concealed from the media: the amputation of the ring fingers. Between themselves, the cops called the killer something altogether different.
They called him the Ring Bearer.
And two weeks later, he struck again, four blocks away, when Lisa Schultz had come home late from work to a house that was supposed to be empty. Her husband had been on a business trip to London. Instead, the Slasher had been waiting for her. His method was identical to the Kelly murder. And then the city had gone into near panic. Police patrols had been increased yet again. Two nights later, a unit responding to a prowler call had chased a black male from beside a house on St. Gregory Street. He had run through Longworth’s, out the kitchen and gotten away, but one of the patrolmen knew the suspect. He was a small-time burglar and sometime Peeping Tom named Craig Factor.
Will had always known they had the wrong man, despite the fact that the semen matched. Departments made mistakes with DNA every day. Chambers had seemed right for many reasons. But one was especially powerful: what woman would automatically open her door at night for a stranger, particularly after an unsolved murder had happened nearby? A woman who was reacting to a police officer, standing there under the “burned out” porch light, showing his badge. But they had never run across the tracks of a male nurse named Judd Mason, not once. Maybe he had been so wrong because he had never seen the case objectively. But right at that moment, burning his mouth with expensive coffee, it was a thought through whose threshold he didn’t dare pass. He pulled out his cell phone to call Dodds. Then he put it away. What was the point?
He raised his head just in time to see Cheryl Beth walking purposefully toward him. She was wearing street clothes, jeans, a turtleneck and carrying a heavy coat. He couldn’t help noticing how nicely she filled out those clothes. He managed a smile—she had to be relieved at the news. But she had a look of wild fear in her eyes.
“I’ve got to talk to you.” She pulled a chair close.
“Did you see?” Will indicated the newspaper.
“It’s not right. Mason may be a little creep, but he didn’t kill Christine.”
“How…?” Will barely got the word out before she continued in an agitated voice.
“Somebody broke into my house last night. I’ve stayed the last couple of nights with my friend Lisa. I was just too creeped out to stay at home. Yesterday afternoon, around six, I stopped off at home to get some clothes. Everything was fine. Today I drove by just to check on things and my front door was open. I called the police. Somebody had broken in.” She leaned in close. “My bed, the comforter and the pillows, had been sliced up. Somebody went up to my bedroom and did that. There was a computer and a stereo and a TV, and they’re all fine. But somebody sliced up my bed, and they threw everything out of my desk drawers.”
“Mason would have already been in jail.”
“Exactly.” She bit her lip. “There’s something else.” She hesitated then recounted her ambush by Gary Nagle of the day before. Will listened carefully, listened as a simple case fell apart.
“Could it have been him?” Will asked.
“I don’t know. I used to think I knew him, now I’m not sure about anything. He just seemed like a wild man yesterday. But your former friend Dodds doesn’t care. He’s not interested. He would barely talk to me.”
He could almost detect she was shaking. He wanted to reach out to her but didn’t. He said, “I don’t know how else to push this. I wish I could get out of here.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “I can get you out.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Half an hour later, Cheryl Beth wheeled Will out to the drive-up entrance to the neuro-rehab wing. She had signed him out for the day with the ward’s patient coordinator—usually it was a privilege given for family members, so patients could spend a few hours outside the hospital. She made sure to take along all of Will’s meds and some extra, just in case. The cold hit them when they came out the door. The temperature was in the low thirties, the gusts making it feel colder. Cheryl Beth had draped a blanket over Will because he didn’t have a coat among his things. They would stop by his place and pick one up.
“Here’s how we’re getting you in the car,” she said, opening the door and pulling out a thin board that measured about two and a half feet long. “This is a transfer board. I lied and said you had been trained in how to use it.”
“Whatever it took to spring me.” He smiled.
She instructed him on the use of the plastic transfer board, pushed his wheelchair close to the open car door, and removed the arm side closest to the car. She asked him to raise up while she positioned one end of the board under the seat of the wheelchair and the other end on the car seat.
“This might not work,” he said. “I’m pretty big, and I don’t know if I can scoot that way.
”
She leaned down to him. “Do you trust me?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Cinching the gait belt around his waist, she coached him to move across the board and into the car seat. She wasn’t a physical therapist and had never done this before. But it worked well enough. She held the belt from behind and he did the work. One inch out onto the board, then half his butt was on it, then he was moving into the car. He fell into the bucket seat and used both hands to lift his left leg in. Then he swung his right leg inside and pulled down the seat belt.
“Okay?” she asked.
He nodded, short of breath. Then she took the chair and transfer board and stowed them in the trunk. The newer wheelchairs folded with amazing ease and were not that heavy.
“Drive me around for a minute.” He added: “Please.”
It was not a demand. She could see the wonder in his face at actually being out of the hospital for the first time in almost three weeks. So she drove out of the maze of Pill Hill and into Clifton, around the university.
“I went to school there,” she said. “I never thought I’d stay in Cincinnati. I thought it was very smug and insular—and I came from a small town. And it is all that. But I fell in love with it and stayed.”
“Lots of people who come here say that,” he said. “I always thought I’d leave, but I never did.”
“So you’re a native?”
He said he was.
“But you don’t seem like one of those Cincinnatians whose families have been here for one hundred and fifty years and nobody else can really be accepted.”
“No,” he laughed. “They revoked my membership to the Queen City Club, and great-great-granddad didn’t come from Germany.” It was almost that simple among the establishment: the old English stock that settled after the American Revolution and the Germans that came in huge numbers in the nineteenth century. And the blacks. Will was working class. His father had been a cop. His mother had been a striver of sorts, or at least a dreamer for him, and she wanted him to go to college and not follow in the family business.
