The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (21 page)

30

T
he call came in on October 3, 2003,
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a Friday, from Somerset County prosecutor Wayne Forrest. Braun cradled the receiver and figured his options. His view was, the vic was probably a political hack, someone rich or connected, so the local power needed to make the cops dance. A guy dies in the hospital, they call the cops. That was the sort of thing that got Somerville excited. Connections were everything. It wasn’t fast-food murder like Newark, but it was the job, at least until Tim’s pension kicked in.

As the detective sergeant, Braun’s job was to assign and supervise all of the cases that came into Major Crimes. He looked over to the whiteboard, the color-coded dry-erase indicating the on-call rotation, and saw that it was young Danny Baldwin, the new guy, in the box. Easy. Danny Baldwin was hard to miss—not only because he was a former linebacker with a clean-shaven head and a yardstick of muscled collarbone leveled beneath his chin, but also because he was the only black detective in the Somerset prosecutor’s office. His six-and-a-half-foot, 250-pound frame twitched with raw energy and ambition, jittering, leg-jiggling electricity. Tim had first met him back in Newark, where Danny had earned a sterling reputation in their elite Auto Theft Task Force and been one of the few African-American detectives in Essex Homicide. He was ten years younger than Tim, but the senior detective recognized himself in the new detective. Danny was good police, which is to say he made cases and not just files, and when he heard Danny was looking for a change, he’d lobbied hard to bring him over to Somerset County.

Danny had been at Somerset for only six months, and aside from a few bank robberies, his time there had been relatively quiet. He’d made good use of his time in other counties, working undercover with some of his old sources for the FBI in a South Carolina murder-for-hire case, and helping solve a high-profile homicide over in neighboring Morris County for
Prosecutor Michael Rubinaccio, but he hadn’t yet fielded a single homicide case in Somerville. Tim had worked plenty with him back in Newark; he knew he could count on Danny to get this thing off his desk. Braun reached Baldwin at home, relaying what Prosecutor Forrest had told him. “This guy, died in the hospital, go figure, right?” Tim said. “Go to the autopsy, make some overtime. Bang ’em hard while you’re at it.”

Danny and his wife, Kimberly, had a wedding to attend, but he couldn’t turn down the job. His new coworkers in Somerset were already on him for being a big-time Newark transfer winning glory in other counties and wearing good suits instead of the Somerset uniform of Dockers and a jacket, ties that matched the shirt. No matter what his commitments, Danny wasn’t going to put his first Somerset homicide call on someone else.

Saturday morning, Danny Baldwin drove out to the Medical Examiner’s Office. He observed the autopsy and drove back to his desk at the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office to type up the I-1-00 form, jacketed the paperwork, and called Tim from the car. The deceased, he said, one McKinley Crews, was an older black man with nothing visibly wrong with him.

“It was kinda a waste of time,” Danny explained. It wasn’t just his take—the state coroner, Dr. Nobby C. Mambo, was of the same opinion:
a natural death.
But the prosecutor had called, and there was pressure. They ran the lab tests, which came back clean.
A natural death.

“Yeah, and who was the guy?” Pressure from the brass like that, VIP for sure. “He look like anybody?”

Danny told him no. He didn’t get that sense. He was an older fellow, black, looked sick. Looked dead, in fact, an opinion confirmed by Dr. Mambo. So Braun called the prosecutor, still not quite believing that this was the new job and wondering if there was still enough of the weekend left to head down to his cabin and watch the leaves die.

T
he next call came down from Prosecutor Forrest four days later. Tim and Danny Baldwin were to report down the street, to Somerset Medical Center, the biggest employer in town with the building to match. A century’s worth of donations and steady profits had paid for an unending process of renovations and additions, the most recent being a colossal, new corporate-gifted lobby featuring a player piano that played calming classical stuff from
a little black box. Tim and Danny were still eye-rolling when the elevator door closed. It wasn’t until they got into the conference room and saw all the heavy hitters gathered there that they started to realize this was no ordinary call. The way Tim figured it,
Wow, this dead guy must be one hell of a VIP.

It was a lawyer who stood up first,
²
introducing himself as Paul Nittoly, counsel for Somerset Medical Center. Nittoly was a big white man with a hundred-dollar haircut and a cornflower-blue tie, the kind of guy you see on billboards. He thanked the detectives for coming and explained, in a roundabout way, that the Medical Center wasn’t reporting a homicide, not exactly.

Over the previous five months, the lawyer continued, Somerset had experienced five “unexplainable patient incidents” in their Critical Care Unit. Last Friday, there was a sixth incident on the CCU. At this point, he said, the hospital had notified the Prosecutor’s Office.
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Somerset Medical Center’s senior vice president, Dr. William Cors, read the names: on May 28, Mr. Joseph Lehman; on June 4, Ms. Frances Kane; on June 16, Ms. Jin Kyung Han; on June 28, Reverend Florian Gall; on August 27, Ms. Francis Agoada. The last on the list was McKinley Crews, who had died only four days previous; it was only after his death that Somerset had called the prosecutor, and Danny had visited the morgue.

Dr. Cors seemed to pick his words carefully, avoiding cause and effect. All six patients had “unexplainable, abnormal laboratory findings” and “life-threatening symptoms,” and five of those patients were now dead. Whether those incidents were connected, Cors couldn’t or wouldn’t say, but the hospital had been conducting its own internal investigation for five months. This investigation, Cors said, had not identified the source of the occurrences. Cors then proceeded to summarize all six patients’ medical histories, in brief but technical detail.

Tim had some names on the page—the names of the dead and some medical stuff, spellings scratched out and replaced by all caps—INSULIN and GLUCOSE, which he’d heard of, and a new one, DIGOXIN, a heart drug. The rest was a blur of medical jargon, cc’s, mg’s, and microliters. No crime scene, no weapon, no fingerprints or witnesses, no bullet, no gun. But did they have a crime? Tim underlined the question mark till he split the paper in his notebook.

One seat over, Danny Baldwin seemed to be squeezing the life out of his pen.

T
he detectives couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. Outside, the October sun was hitting the tinted windows of Braun’s Green Crown Vic. Tim popped the locks and pushed into the driver’s side, feeling the relief of cool leather.

Tim knew that Somerset Medical Center pulled serious weight in the community. It was a money center, one of the county’s biggest employers and a heavy influence in local politics with at least two former state senators on the board, one of whom was also father-in-law to the chief of police. Trouble there lit a fire under the prosecutor’s ass, which lit a fire under his. Tim waited till Danny had his door closed before he started grousing. “What the fuck was that?” Tim said. “Tell you what, give me a good, old-fashioned shooting instead of this fucking Greek.” Tim couldn’t raise his hand in the middle of all the doctor talk, tell the suits, “Um, me and Danny? We do street murders.” But he sure wanted to.

Tim started the car and eased out of the turnaround while Danny sprawled in the passenger side with the stack of medical charts. Apparently, if there was a crime, it wasn’t in these pages—the medical people had already studied them. Danny was chewing his cheek and bouncing his hams. He was the lead detective here. It would be his job to make sense of what Somerset gave him, and see if he could make a case out of it.

But what were the pieces here? Numbers. Lab values. Technical results neither Tim nor Danny understood. Apparently even the professional laboratory people couldn’t explain them. The vics were only potential vics; they might be natural deaths. For now, they were bodies without visible wounds. This wasn’t even definitely a crime. They had “incidents,” medical ones, which medical people had already investigated for five months, finding nothing. But this was the way it was with a redball, same here as in Newark. It seemed obvious to Tim that some bigwig in Somerset corporate had an agenda. It was far worse than being handed a cold case. This one maybe wasn’t a case at all.

Danny looked up from his notebook, seeing Bridge Street on his right now and then behind him, wondering why Tim was blowing by the turn to the prosecutor’s office. “Basically, they think somebody’s poisoning patients, on purpose or whatever. Right?”

“And they’ve been investigating five months already?” Tim said.

“So, why call now?”

“Exactly. They got juice to call us anytime. Why not call us five months ago?”

Danny scanned his notes. “ ‘Unexplained incidents,’ what they called it,” he said. Four with insulin, two with the heart drug. Danny flipped a page, fingered the word. “Digoxin.”

“Digoxin, digoxin,” Tim said, getting his mouth around it. He pulled the wheel right, circling 360 degrees to merge onto Route 206. “What the fuck is digoxin?”

“You mind I ask, you’re going where?”

“Here,” Tim said, pulling into the mall parking lot and easing into the fire lane. “Medical dictionary.” He opened the door to get out then stopped. “Okay,” he said. “So, let me ask you this. You catch the call Friday. Three days later, we’re brought into this happy horseshit.”

“So, what happened between Friday and today?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, well, maybe the lawyers had a weekend to think on it,” Danny said. “Maybe, they got scared, is what happened.”

“Yeah,” Tim said. He thought on that. “You know what?” he said finally. “I bet those assholes know exactly who did it.”

31

R
edball or not, the investigation couldn’t start until Somerset Medical Center delivered the paperwork. The lawyer Nittoly had promised to send the detectives everything they had from their internal investigation, and as soon as possible. It was late afternoon when the package arrived. Danny considered the contents for a few minutes before walking the package next door to Tim’s office.

The envelope contained only the photocopied pages of a single faxed memo. The detectives had known better than to expect a finished investigative report, but they expected more than scraps. Including the cover letter, the memo was five pages long; one of the pages appeared to be missing.

“Check the date,” Danny said.

The memo was dated July 25, 2003—over two months ago.

“What’s this?” Tim said. “I thought the in-house investigation just ended.”

The memo had been sent by Raymond Fleming, a hospital-retained lawyer at a West Orange law firm,
¹
and titled “Re: Reverend Florian Gall v Somerset Medical Center,” with an attached file number.

Danny didn’t know the lawyer, but he took special note of the title, especially the “v” in the middle. He knew it was a lawyer’s nature to make everything look like a fight, but still, it seemed funny to him, like patient and hospital were on opposite sides here.

According to the cover page, the recipient of the memo was Mary Lund. They’d shaken hands with her earlier that day in the SMC conference room. Lund and Danny had exchanged cards; from here on, she was assigned as Danny’s liaison at the hospital, the friendly face for whatever the lead detective on this case might need to do his job. Tim remembered her as a middle-aged corporate-type lady with the unforgettable job title of
Somerset Medical Center’s “risk manager.” Apparently, the risk manager had been Ray Fleming’s point of contact, too.

Dear Ms. Lund;