by Jon Talton
“And I remember you as well.” He looked her in the eye.
“Why would that be?”
“Well, don’t be put off by this, but you’re a very attractive woman.”
She laughed and shook her head. He was nearly twenty years younger than she. But there was the irresistible allure of a compliment.
“Ms. Ott is quite the taskmaster,” he said. “The accreditation process has them all jumpy.” His expression was pleasant, but his eyes were deep like a friendly well; something moved far down, but she didn’t know what.
Cheryl Beth leaned back. “So you’re not from around here?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Silicon Valley. I’m not used to this kind of weather. If you don’t think I’m out of line, could I ask if you were the nurse who found Dr. Lustig?”
Cheryl Beth sighed. “Now tell me how you would know that?” The edge was obvious in her voice.
“I’ve been working here, on a contract. People talk. I’d heard it was you. I was working with Christine.”
“I see.”
“It’s a terrible loss for us,” he said quietly. “And she was a wonderful person. Just a devastating loss.”
“Makes me wonder why the hospital moved her down to that basement office. Do you wonder about that?”
“Well, the office was private, and I imagine she needed the quiet to get the evaluation of the project software done. We were under a very tight deadline to complete it.”
He waited as a crowd of civilians walked past, bearing flowers and boxes in Christmas wrapping. “Did you know Christine, Cheryl Beth?”
She shifted in her seat, suddenly hot in her coat. “I did,” she said, and slipped off the coat. She pulled out two of the new consults and studied them, ignoring him. For a long time she thought he might just stand and leave.
“I know this sounds weird,” he said, a small smile lighting up his face. “But would you have dinner with me? I’ve been cooped up writing computer code for months and haven’t had dinner with a beautiful woman.” His eyes were different now. She had his full attention. “Maybe you’d show me your city. I’m not some weirdo Californian, I promise.”
Cheryl Beth stopped herself from laughing. She was rusty with a gentle brush-off. He was an attractive young man with a sly and sexy smile. But she was not looking, and in any case she liked tall, big men. Maybe when she was feeling better she would tell Lisa this story and chuckle about it. “I can’t,” she said. “But you’re sweet to say that, Josh.”
“I mean it,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. She could see the logo SoftChartZ. Another reach produced a pen and he wrote something on the back of it.
“At least take my card. I put my hotel number on the back. Just in case you change your mind.”
Cheryl Beth pocketed the card and turned away, eager to find Will so she could tell him about her sleuthing in the peds’ records.
Chapter Thirty
Will had watched with apprehension as they neared the hospital, knowing his day out was ending. The hospital tower was illuminated by spotlights and it looked like a building from an old comic book, a perch for a superhero. It was just a box of the sick and dying, a base camp for perilous journeys and ascending prayers, and for now it was his home. He had watched Cheryl Beth walk away, seeing in those well-fitting civilian clothes her confident long-limbed strides, knowing she thought him a fool for giving her the Christmas card. Or she thought worse of him. And as she walked out the door, he felt the almost supernatural buoyancy that had kept him calm and functioning after the tumor was diagnosed, through the first days of dismal prognoses and dire worries, through the surgery and days of pain, through Cindy’s final jettisoning of him, through the murder investigation—he felt it disappear.
He asked the aide to give him his dinner in the large rehab room. He couldn’t bear to take off his suit and get in the cursed bed yet, even though his legs and back ached and he was battered by exhaustion. So he sat alone in the room, feeling the cold seeping through the windows, and surveying the precise little scoop of mashed potatoes, three tablespoons of corn, and two slices of meatloaf. He had enough money to buy a Diet Coke, which he used to take his pain meds. This was his life now. He had lived twenty-five years on the other side of the crime-scene tape and the emergency lights, a quarter century where his badge gave him a pass anywhere in the city. That was gone. Tomorrow or the next day, he would have to endure a visit from his brother and his family, bearing gifts they probably resented giving. He would have nothing to give in return. And the day after that, and every day he was given, he would assess every little pain or change in his body with the knowledge that it might be nothing, or it might be catastrophe. Theresa’s face and then Cheryl Beth’s hovered in front of him, her kiss still warm on his cheek, as he lapsed into sleep.
The next image that broke into his consciousness was J. J. Dodds. Will shook his head to clear away the medicine haze and was fully awake.
“Detective Dodds.”
“Detective Borders.” Dodds sat in a chair turned backward, his blue, polka dot tie hanging over the chair’s back. “I risked my neck on the ice to bring you good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”
Will pushed himself up in the wheelchair and said he needed good news.
“Darlene is in protective custody, her kid, too. She gave Chambers up. We’ve reopened the case and we’ve got a warrant for his arrest. I think we can get him for the three women in Mount Adams.”
All this, Will thought, and Dodds was not angrily berating him for interfering.
“So what’s the bad news?”
“He’s gone. We sent a tactical unit to his apartment and he wasn’t there. We’ve got it staked out.”
“Where does he work?”
“He’s some kind of independent security consultant, so he works out of his place. We’re running down family, friends. So far, no Chambers.”
“Hell.” Will’s mind pulled out of its depression and began plotting how they could find him.
“There’s more,” Dodds said. “Darlene said Chambers has a cabin down by Rabbit Hash. We never found it before because it’s in his father’s name. It’s empty right now, but we’ve got Kentucky State Police sitting on it. If he doesn’t show up there in the next day, we’re going to execute a search warrant. What do you want to bet we find some very interesting things hidden down there?”
“That doesn’t sound like bad news.”
Dodds’ mouth turned up in an imitation of a smile. “That’s because there’s more bad news.”
Will pushed away the food tray and waited.
“Your girlfriend’s been lying. I always had this gut feeling about her.”
“What girlfriend? You mean Cheryl Beth?”
“She was with Dr. Lustig the night she was killed.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“Real shit,” Dodds said. “Dr. Nagle said he saw the two of them talking and drinking at a bar on Main Street the night the doc was murdered…”
“He’s just trying to save his own skin, since he doesn’t have an alibi anymore.”
“Will you let me finish? Thank you. After you so industriously had this girl Amy Morton come back and say she lied about Nagle’s alibi, well, I brought him in for a chat. He’s very full of himself. Know what he calls himself? The Two Million Dollar Man, for all the surgeries he does. But he tells me he was on Main Street that night and saw the two of them together. Unfortunately for your girlfriend…”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Will said through a sour mouth.
“Unfortunately for your girlfriend, I took their pictures to the bar and the bartender and one of the waitresses positively identified them. She was with Lustig that night.”
Will stared into the table, ran his hand lightly back and forth over its smooth surface, and felt himself breathe. His stomach was now the home to a heavy, spiky rock. How could she have lied to him? “So what are you saying?”
“Motive. She was Na
gle’s lover and Lustig’s rival. Opportunity. There could be an hour or more between the time Cheryl left the bar and the time she claimed she found the body. And she’s been lying to us.”
Will rubbed his temples, feeling his head start to ache. Was it a headache because Cheryl Beth had lied to him, or a brain tumor? Finally he shook his head and forced a laugh. “Reach, reach, hell, your arms are long.”
Dodds ran his hand across the top of his head, as if searching to see if any hair had escaped his daily shaving. “There’s some weird shit going on at this place, and she knows what it is. I still like Mason for killing Lustig. I’m keeping his ass in jail. But maybe Cheryl Wilson is in on it, too, and this Nagle asshole.”
“Her name is Cheryl Beth.”
“Mason’s fingerprints are on the threatening letter. He also has a knife collection. Have you seen him? He’s one of these no-affect types—you don’t know if they’re just fucked up or a killer. I say a killer.”
“What does he say?”
“He says he was in love with her, that the letter was clipped on the windshield wiper of his car one day at work, after Lustig was killed. Nice try, but the stamps had been canceled. He had to have taken it from Lustig’s mailbox to cover his tracks.”
“Unless somebody steamed the stamps off a canceled letter and applied them to the letter found with Mason.”
Dodds snorted. “Let me guess. Damn, Bud Chambers. He’s killed everybody in Cincinnati! But it could still have been your girlfriend, Cheryl Beth. She could be the killer.”
“I thought you said you liked Mason!” Will’s angry voice echoed in the large, empty room.
“He’s involved. Hell, maybe they were all sleeping together. We’ve seen stranger shit. Stuff like that even happened in the department.”
“And they somehow found out the confidential information on the MO of the Slasher to do it? Give me a break. You know this is the Ring Bearer again.”
Dodds mouth tightened and they locked eyes. Finally, “You can find anything out on the Internet now. Maybe a patrolman told his wife, who told her girlfriend, who told…I don’t have it all worked out yet. Maybe I need to check into the hospital so I can be as good a detective as you.”
Will sat in the acid of betrayal, silent. Dodds just watched, with his preternatural patience. Will’s heart banged against his chest wall as Dodds’ cell phone rang. The conversation was brief.
“Dispatch,” Dodds said. “Hospital security asked if I could meet Berkowitz down in the basement.”
“Lustig’s office?”
“Yep.”
Will stared through the blackness of the windows, now accumulating ice around their edges. “Have fun.”
“Fuck you very much.” Dodds stood up. “But you’re working, too. Quit feeling sorry for yourself because you’re on the job and coming with me. Back to the murder room, Detective Borders.”
Will put his hands to the wheels and rolled toward the doors. “Just like old times, Detective Dodds.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Cheryl Beth checked in on several patients, and each time she looked out the windows to survey the streets outside. From the promontory of the tower, nothing seemed to be moving on Pill Hill. She could even see a clot of red taillights at the foot of the street where the SUV had slid. Several blocks through the trees came the yellow pulse of lights, salt trucks, but so far she was stuck at the hospital. There were other ways down, but they all involved hills and she would not risk it. Cincinnatians became hysterical in even modest snowstorms. An ice storm on a city of hills was, as her grandmother would have said, a gracious plenty of a mess. If worse came to worst, she could use one of the cots the on-duty trauma teams slept on.
She noshed on the remains of a Christmas party on Five-West. Most of the nurses and docs were already gone. She was still in civilian clothes with her ID card hung around her neck by her red lanyard. She smiled attentively as a young nurse talked about her little girl’s part in the Christmas play. From somewhere down the hall, she barely but distinctly heard a small choir singing carols. Hark, the herald angels sing…The sound filled her with longing. She wanted to find these singers and listen.
“Hey.”
She turned to see Lisa surveying the remains of the food. “I am such a carb and sugar slut,” she said, picking up a piece of cold pizza. “Thank God they didn’t order in Aglamesis’ ice cream.” Her lean, tall body seemed to show no ill effects from her addictions.
“What are you doing here so late?”
“I’m trapped like everybody else.” She munched contentedly, but her eyes looked tired. “I gave notice today.”
“What?”
“I’m going to University. For years I thought I could make a stand here and make this place better. I’m just ready for a change.”
Cheryl Beth hugged her. “Who’s going to maintain the FDN list and keep me up to speed on all the gossip?” She felt like crying, even though Lisa was only going a few blocks away.
“You should come with me,” Lisa said. “They’d love to have you.”
“I know. Maybe not so much now that I’m the slutty nurse who was involved in a murder.”
“Oh, please. It just makes you more interesting. Anyway, you’re the most straitlaced person I’ve ever worked with. Not that the degenerates at this hospital are a good yardstick.” She stopped laughing and cocked her head. “You’re wheezing, babe. Asthma acting up?”
“I guess.” It was true. The cold and the stagnant Cincinnati air were hell on her lungs. She reached for her inhaler and the business card that the young man from SoftChartZ had given her fell out, fluttering down to the floor. It landed face down.
“Shit!”
“What?”
Cheryl Beth picked the card off the floor and read the handwritten message on the back: “Westin, room 560. I’m on West Coast time so am staying up late. I’d love to have company.” She turned the card to the front, which introduced Josh Barnett, Chief Executive Officer, beneath a SoftChartZ logo.
Lisa had been hovering, watching. “Way to go, Cheryl Beth! You will have such fun, and you’ll have that wonderful funny walk in the morning that happens after…”
“Stop!” Cheryl Beth nearly shouted. “You don’t understand. Now I remember. This is the guy you said was sleeping with Christine.”
“Young and strong.” Lisa’s smile was so broad it nearly broke her face in half.
Cheryl Beth held the card in a shaking hand, the paper nearly searing her skin.
“Don’t be afraid,” Lisa said. “It’s no questions asked, rules of the road…”
“His handwriting.” Cheryl Beth was almost talking to herself. “It’s the same handwriting as on the note in Mason’s car. I swear it’s the same.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cheryl Beth tried to explain as Lisa cocked a hip and rested her hand on it, looking at her as if she were a crazy woman.
“This was never some random murder,” Cheryl Beth said. “Christine somehow…” She tried to work through it, feeling light-headed. It seemed impossible that the baby-faced tech executive could be a killer. But so many millions of dollars were at stake, and the hospital was already in trouble. “This is why Stephanie Ott was so strange, why the hospital tried to keep this quiet. Why they moved her office down to the basement. Now I understand why Christine was so crazy that night…” To herself, she thought, now I know why she held me so tight and kept asking, “Can I trust you, Cheryl Beth? Can I trust you…?”
Lisa put an arm around her. “You need to go home, babe, or take a cab to his hotel once the roads clear.”
“Ladies.” Dr. Carpenter sidled into the room, his voice booming. “My two favorite healers.”
They moved apart and greeted him. Cheryl Beth stared into the face she had known for so many years and wondered, who can I trust now?
“Is my timing bad?” he asked. “Sorry if I interrupted.”
“Just women stuff,” Lisa said.
Cheryl Beth stuffed the card back in her pocket just as her pager buzzed: the main switchboard.
“You have a call from Detective Dodds, to meet him down in Dr. Lustig’s office, uh, former office.”
“Now?”
“The call just came in.”
Cheryl Beth put the phone back in the cradle. She was excited, but she was also afraid. Why did Dodds suddenly want her? And why there? Maybe she would ignore the page, try to make it home through the ice. Then she would, what? Think it through… Maybe… She shook her head. It wouldn’t work. It wasn’t right. Just then, she saw one of her favorite guards pass on an intersecting hallway.
“Don!”
She ran and caught up with him. “Could I ask a favor? Would you walk me down to the basement?”
“Now?”
She said now, and they headed to the main elevator bank, talking about the ice storm. He said the radio was reporting wrecks and impassable streets all over the city. “We’re pretty much cut off for awhile,” he said. “I guess the ambulances have chains. But I haven’t seen one of those for an hour, either…” She was barely listening. The downward movement of the elevator was making her ill. As it left the fifth floor, as the car deviated from its normal run to the lobby, the lighting seemed to change and darken, the buttons looked filthy and worn, the walls pocked with stains and creases, gravity making her feel heavy, as if her body would crumple in on itself.
The elevator car settled and a deep mechanical thud came from somewhere far above them. Don just shook his head and they stepped into the hallway. The single bank of fluorescent lights was starting to go out. Its insistent flickering made them look like characters in a silent movie. It made the beds and big supply carts parked against the walls cast trembling, diabolical shadows. Her body was wound tight and her lungs felt small and fragile. She finally used the inhaler.
“You sure somebody called you down here?” he asked.
Then they saw the light streaming out of the office. “I guess so.” Twenty more steps and she looked inside to see Dodds and Will. At the sight of Will, she smiled spontaneously.
