by Jon Talton
“Her husband, Bud, he found out?”
“They were separated. I knew Bud Chambers years ago, on patrol. We weren’t friends. The more I heard about the way he had treated her, I hated him. I checked him out. He was still a patrolman, never even made sergeant. He had a load of brutality complaints. But he was part of the ole-boy network on the force.” He shook his head. “She deserved so much better. But it was, like, I don’t know, once Cindy realized I was involved with somebody she suddenly said she wanted me back. I knew better, but it was hard. Cindy was the woman I’d married. But Theresa…”
He huddled deeper in his coat. “Her daughter kept pressing her to reconcile with Bud. The girl was, maybe, sixteen then. She didn’t know any better, wanted mom and dad together. Theresa was very guilt-ridden about it. She said she was probably doing the wrong thing, making the biggest mistake of her life. But she told me she’d decided to try again with Bud. I didn’t hear from her for almost a year. Then, the week before…” He swallowed hard. “Before she was murdered. She called and said he had moved out again. She’d thrown him out and gotten a restraining order. She said she didn’t want for me to have to get involved in it. But she said she’d come over soon. We made a date. It was for the day after…after…”
He took a gulp of air. “We were the primaries. The first detectives called to the scene. It was a beautiful day. Like the first real spring day. I prayed she had moved, that someone else was at that address. But I knew. I knew.” His voice slowed as he seemed to struggle to get the words out. “I knew he did it. I swore to her I’d make him pay, but I never did. I got him off the force, but he got away with it. And with those other girls he killed to cover his tracks. And now with Christine. He’s a killer. Who knows why? Who cares?”
She asked why he didn’t tell Dodds that he had been involved with Theresa Chambers.
“I knew how he’d react,” Will said. “It would be a distraction, too. I knew Bud did it. And command might take me off the case—too close to the victim and all that. So I didn’t tell him for two weeks, when the next woman was killed. When I did, he said he didn’t want to work with me anymore. He never told anyone. We stayed together until Craig Factor was convicted and everybody said we were supercops. But our friendship was over. I transferred to Internal Investigations, to try to get some of these dirtbag cops off the streets.” He paused. “That’s what I told myself. I just kept seeing her face, seeing her dead…”
Cheryl Beth felt light enough to float away, felt wetness at the edges of her eyes.
“Did you love her?”
Will didn’t answer. She could see him struggling not to cry. Men were funny that way. Most never knew the release of a good cry. She fought the impulse to take him in her arms. He was just a patient. She had hugged and comforted hundreds of patients. Why was she struggling? What was she struggling with? He leaned away from her, against the car door.
“Weepy Borders,” he laughed and half-sobbed.
“What?”
“Long story.”
Cheryl Beth tried to lighten her voice. “Did you have fun with her?”
“Oh, yeah,” he rasped. “I never knew it was possible.”
She started the car and drove slowly out of the park and into the downtown streets. As the defroster cleared the windshield, rain began pecking at the glass.
“You blame yourself.”
He was staring out the passenger-side window as they passed Fountain Square, decorated for Christmas, an impressionist painting as umbrella-shrouded office workers and shoppers scurried across, the buildings dissolving in the rain. He stared past her into Garfield Park, magically lit by the ornate streetlamps. It was five thirty and full dark. Cincinnati still had the bones of the major American metropolis it once was.
“Let’s just say when the tumor was found, I figured that God had given me what I deserved.”
“How can you say that?” Cheryl Beth gripped the wheel tightly. “I grew up with that crap, and that’s not the God I worship. Stuff happens, Will. Some gene betrayed you. It’s not the Lord’s punishment for anything you did or didn’t do with Theresa. You’re not to blame for what happened.”
He laughed mordantly. “Well, I haven’t had an erection since the surgery, so let’s say I don’t have to worry about women anymore.”
They were stopped at a traffic light. Cheryl Beth turned to him. “Stick out your tongue. Go ahead, I’m a nurse. Stick out your tongue.”
He did.
“You’ve got everything you need to make a woman happy.”
The light changed and her tires spun on the pavement. She could feel herself turning bright red. That was a routine she had done before with spinal patients, a little bit of fun, strictly professional. Now she was burning with embarrassment. It faded only slowly as she drove up the hill on Vine Street and the windshield wipers revealed the sleet that was now coming down hard. She drove with extra care. The sleet clung to the hood of the car, slathered the street. If it froze… But she also drove slowly because she didn’t want the day to end.
“Did you miss being a homicide detective?” She felt herself talking nervously, to break the spell that had fallen into the car.
“Some days,” he said. “I loved my job. That may be different from a lot of cops. They start out loving it, showing up at work early, everything’s new, they work past their shift without even thinking about filing an overtime slip. Later, it changes. A lot of them get bitter, hate everybody, marriages fall apart. Then they wait for their pensions. The best ones get in a zone. They know the job, the politics, how to put a case together and testify. They make friends off the job.”
“Internal affairs must have been hard. Other cops don’t like you.”
“That’s true,” he said. “But there’s a freedom to it, if you do it right. There are two kinds of Internal Investigations cops—the yes men, and the ones who believe in getting the facts and serving the public and your fellow officers. You want to make the bad cops go away and make sure the good ones stay. You have to be willing to ask important people embarrassing questions sometimes, and that upsets the bosses. But the chief has had my back.”
Cheryl Beth gave him a gentle laugh. “You sound like an idealist.”
Will laughed and shook his head. “An idealist and a philosopher. And a realist. That’s a good cop. Dodds is that way, I give him that. But you can never let the idealist or philosopher part show, because you’re surrounded by colleagues who believe the world is fucked. Pardon my language. They’re the realists.”
“That’s too bad. Have you ever shot someone?” She was instantly sorry she had asked.
“I have no problem killing bad humans.”
He said it dispassionately, then quickly asked about the politics of her job. “Me? I fight the bureaucracy, but mostly I try to put people at ease, make them laugh. Get them to trust me. I ask myself, ‘How do you get people to do things they’ve never done before?’”
“You mean the bosses?”
“Bosses, patients, doctors, nurses.”
Finally the neuro-rehab entrance became unavoidable, and she pulled under the overhang.
“Thank you,” Will said. “I had…”
“I know.”
“Tomorrow’s Christmas eve. I couldn’t get out to buy you a Christmas present, so this will have to do.”
He reached in his pocket and handed her a piece of white paper. It was folded into the shape of a card, and on the cover were pencil sketches of a decorated tree and a pretty good likeness of Cheryl Beth in her lab coat and scrubs. “My best gift this Christmas…” was written in block letters. She opened it and read, “is no pain.” It was signed, “Thank you, Cheryl Beth—Will.”
“You drew this?”
He nodded.
“You’re quite an artist.”
“My dad said it was a waste of time. It’s come in handy on a crime scene or two.”
Now she was the one fighting back tears. “Thank you.”
She unbuc
kled her seat belt and then undid his. “I can’t let you take that inside.” She pointed to the gun.
“There’s a killer on the loose.”
She gave a slight smile and shook her head.
“I’m a police officer.”
“Well, right now the pain nurse is pulling rank.” She opened the glove box and he reluctantly slid the holster and pistol inside. She closed it carefully and locked it.
“Do you trust me, Cheryl Beth?” He turned as much as he could to face her. He looked drained and yet still handsome. She leaned over and kissed his cheek.
“I don’t know,” she said, and opened the door to get the wheelchair.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Cheryl Beth took Will into the neuro-rehab unit, signed the paperwork that showed he had been returned to the ward, and went back to her car. The streetlights illuminated the sleet descending in thousands of vertical needles. Inside the car, she looked again at the makeshift Christmas card, then carefully tucked it into her purse. She smiled and shook her head. She would have to think about this man with his wavy hair and undercover idealism, his surface calm and inner fires.
She pulled carefully out from the overhang and waited while a black SUV sped past. She followed it as it reached the spot where the street hit an abrupt downgrade. Fortunately, she was driving slowly, deep in thought, letting several car lengths gather between them. Suddenly the red taillights ahead of her danced to the left, back to the right, and momentarily out of sight, only to be replaced by headlights. It was the same SUV. The hill had frozen and the vehicle lazily looped its way around and down until it crashed into a parked car. The muffled sound of smashing metal and composites reached her ears. She stopped immediately, called 911 and tried to back up. The road under her offered traction. Ahead was a down-bound street of black ice. She reversed the Saturn and drove around the level drive into the employee garage. She would work until the city came to put salt on the hill and clear away whatever other hapless drivers went down the slalom. She parked and double-checked that the glove box, with its lethal cargo, was locked. Five minutes later, she was inside her cramped office, leafing through the latest paperwork.
Cheryl Beth worried about her patients, especially at night, even when another nurse was covering for her. They came as impersonal consult sheets: a thirty-three-year-old male, motorcycle accident, with fractures of one femur, his pelvis, and elbow. He denied he was in pain and refused to ask for medication. When she talked to him she got little, but his body language was a vivid storyteller, the way he didn’t want to move, the set of his face. He had a name: Ron Morton, he was from Dayton, worked in an auto plant, and his dad had taught him never to show pain, never complain. She could only gauge the time between injections by the look on his face.
A forty-six-year-old female with ovarian cancer, metastasized throughout her abdomen and liver. Her name was, with cruel perversity, Hope—Hope Mundy and she wanted to live to see her daughter graduate from high school. The doc had her on a continuous morphine drip, which also left her in a stupor. When it was cut back she moaned all the time, and the other patients complained. Cheryl Beth adjusted the doses daily, sat with her and listened, taught her how to relax through her breathing, put cool compresses on her forehead.
The new consults came every day. Pain made people angry, stoic, sometimes darkly comic. The woman in the busy ER who had screamed, “Who do I have to give a blowjob to, to get an epidural.” Fortunately, Cheryl Beth had learned how to give epidurals years ago, so no oral sex was required. Often they were in the cruelest agony. They were grateful for the smallest things. Some days she thought it would drive her insane, especially when the suffering was caused by the hospital’s inattention. Most days she knew she could help them. Sometimes she caught addicts, trying to scam new pain meds.
She always had the hardest cases: the most painful shootings, stabbings, chest tubes, spinal and lower back problems, abdominal surgeries, and cancers. It seemed as if Will’s job had been that way, too. But his “consults” were dead people. His symptoms were “MOs.” She was still on a high from the day: the latent danger of the jail, the way Will had elicited information from Lennie and Darlene. She would make a good detective, he had said. She doubted that. If she did his job, she would be too haunted by the ghosts of the dead and their very live, hurting families. She would be afraid of getting hurt. But just like her job, to do it well, he must have relied on skill, instinct, and, truth be told, bending the rules when it was necessary to help people.
She tried to think systemically about all she had seen and heard, as if it were a new consult. And she tried to listen to her gut. Will seemed so sure: the killer was this Bud Chambers. He was sure of it as a police detective, and surer of it as the avenger for the woman he had loved. It was still not so clear to Cheryl Beth. Her mind was branded with the memory of finding Christine—why would this man have killed a doctor he didn’t even know? It was branded with the brief note she had dug out of Judd Mason’s trash, written in the neat script. Obviously the police had found more about this strange, silent man—Mason was in jail for the murder. But, even there, she just wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure. What about Gary? He had lost his mind—enough to kill Christine? Yet she knew Gary’s doctorish scrawl and he was incapable of writing as clearly as the script on the threatening note. Then there was Denise’s self-described paranoid thought about the digital medicine project—it could have threatened any of the medical personnel at Memorial with something to hide, whether it was mistakes or stealing drugs.
And what of Will? She was growing too fond of him. But could he have killed Theresa in a rage? Was he capable of that? She had made mistakes judging men before, but it was hard for her to believe. It was impossible to believe he had killed the two other girls, and then somehow come right out of the ICU and murdered Christine.
It had to be Judd. Why else would he have retrieved the note and tried to dispose of it?
She leafed through the roster of the circulating nurses. Judd Mason had most recently spent two months in the pediatric ward. She grabbed her purse, turned off the lights, locked the door, and walked to the other side of the hospital, to the peds ward.
The hospital was emptying out for Christmas. Everyone wanted to be gone, and patients tried hard to get discharged. With visiting hours winding down, the normal crunch of people in the hallways was missing. The PA system, without its seemingly unending summonses of doctors and trauma teams, seemed more omnipresent by its silence. Only the most serious cases were here. Those, and the forgotten and abandoned. She waved and made small talk as she passed the nurses’ stations, but nothing could stop the constricting in her throat and chest as she neared the bright blue-and-yellow doors. She would walk in briskly, say hello, and look over some of Judd’s charts. If anyone asked, she would say one of the docs wanted her to double-check something. She would not look at the abundance of donated toys in the play areas and waiting rooms. She would not look into the rooms, or into the frightened, haunted eyes of the parents. She would avoid the doctors who had, as a matter of course, to tell mothers and fathers that their children were dying.
They had named her Carla Beth, after Andy’s mother, with Cheryl Beth’s middle name. After her, Cheryl Beth couldn’t have another child; it had been a difficult delivery, a wondrous result. She had the wheat-colored hair that Cheryl Beth had as a little girl, before it had darkened, and she had loved unicorns and the color yellow and laughing. And Carla Beth was dead before her fourth birthday. And it was a story she would tell no one. It belonged to her. The grief and guilt and bottomless sorrow, the lock of her hair, her last expression—hers alone. Andy returned to Corbin, remarried, and had three children. Cheryl Beth stayed in Cincinnati. When people asked if she had children, she would simply say no. Every person in this hospital had been stunned by calamity, and why should she be different? She had to make the decision between sitting in a chair, staring at a wall, and waiting to die, or returning to her life helping people. But she coul
d not work peds. She could barely stand to be in the ward.
She leafed through the charts looking for one with Judd Mason’s signature. She found it on the fifteenth chart. The details of the case—she made herself skip over them. But the chart contained several pages written by Mason. The handwriting was not the same as on the note to Christine, not at all. She slammed the chart shut, shelved it, and nearly ran from the ward.
***
The Starbucks in the lobby was already closed by the time she got there. She was hoping to grab a cup of coffee that was better than the swill at some of the nurses’ stations.
“Hi, there.”
She knew she had jumped when she heard the voice, but she instinctively smiled as she turned and faced the young man. He was seated at one of the tables.
“I missed them, too,” he said. “Seemed like a good night for a hot latte.”
“Well, it’s always something.” Cheryl Beth stood there awkwardly. She knew this man. The young software millionaire. He had walked out of Stephanie Ott’s office that day she had received her dressing down. He still looked like a college student on a pub crawl, this time wearing black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black leather jacket. That jacket reminded her of what Christine had worn the last night of her life. Stretched out in the chair, the man was compact, with an unlined face, sleepy blue eyes, and a crop of moussed sandy hair.
“You’re the one they call the pain nurse.”
She introduced herself and he stuck out his hand. “I’m Josh Barnett. Care to join me?”
“For a minute,” she said, curious. She still felt wobbly and was grateful to sit. “Not that anybody’s going anywhere until they get salt on those streets.” She nodded her head toward the front doors.
“I saw you at Stephanie Ott’s office,” she said.
