The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (28 page)

With the highway, the pace quickened, sudden and clean. I-78 comes with the exit, a chute of traffic fast in four lanes and forty minutes through real farms, gentle hills, and flaming forest, surprisingly rural as Charlie crossed the line back to New Jersey, tootling through suburban streets, more upscale than his Bethlehem neighbors, split-level Mod Colonials with attached garages, faux shutters affixed neatly to picture windows, front doors with American eagle knockers, expensive seasonal facades of decorative cornstalks and gourds of surprising size and rustic array. The quality of the surroundings, a town you’d call “nice,” seemed a positive reflection upon him personally. Charlie crossed the Somerville town line into the signifiers of status that marked his professional station, the prestige houses
and prestige cars, un-rusted Nissans and Subarus—and suddenly the police car,
wow-wow
ing him with its siren.

The officer was nice enough, but Charlie was miffed. The officer told Charlie he was impounding the car. Charlie felt he was persecuted—but he always thought that when he was pulled over. This time, however, he was right. He
was
being persecuted.

Charlie argued. The impound was supposedly for parking tickets, still unpaid from when Charlie lived in Phillipsburg. But, Charlie complained, he didn’t have any outstanding tickets, none that he knew of—in fact, the Phillipsburg house had a driveway. What tickets could he possibly have? It was unfair, and he was ready to throw a tantrum. Except, surprisingly, the officer actually listened to him. He called him “sir” and seemed to mean it. He promised to have the whole thing cleared by that afternoon.

In the meantime, Charlie would be driven to work in the police car, a late-model Ford still shining with paint and wax. He slid into the warm cave of hard leather seats and official purpose and found himself, despite everything, enjoying the experience. And when a few hours later, Charlie received a call telling him that he was entirely correct, a mistake apparently, just as Charlie had said, just so, and as recompense the officer would deliver the car right to the hospital—well, it was just the sort of story he could tell Amy, when they next worked together. It was a perfect illustration of how his misunderstood correctness manifested in the circumstances of his crazy life.

The shift itself was unremarkable, boring even. Charlie occupied himself with his patients and their charts, their soaping, grooming, and lubrication, allowing his mind to wander back to the story, imagining how Amy would think of him then, and how she’d laugh. His night was nearly over when he got the message to come to the office.

“Terminated” was the word they used. In Charlie’s experience, they never said “fired.”

42

A
my was home raking leaves on her day off when her friend Donna called and broke the news about Charlie. Her first reaction was to cry, but then she got angry. Then, during her four-hour commute to the Somerset Medical night shift, Amy fell apart again, and she had to sit in the parking garage and fix her face in the rearview mirror.

Charlie had been fired.
Her
Charlie. The nursing station suddenly seemed so dull. Over the long nights she’d heard so many stories from his life, how he’d always been a target for bullying and bad luck, how he’d been pushed from hospital to hospital because of his depression. She had tried to shelter him, standing up to the residents when they lambasted him for using the wrong drug. Once, she’d even taken the fall for him, claiming that she’d been the one who’d administered it. She had failed him. He was in the wind again, cast out from another job, and on the same week he had learned that his girlfriend, Cathy, was pregnant. He was such a sensitive soul. Amy could only imagine the hell Charlie was going through now, and so the tears came again, right there on the ward. Amy asked one of the other nurses to cover for her while she huddled at the corner phone of the nurse’s station, reaching Charlie at home.

“Sweety, honey—hey, what’s going on?”

Charlie’s speech was halting. “I don’t know, if you know, this whole issue,” he said. “Of why I got terminated.” Charlie explained that he been sat down just before the end of his shift by someone from Somerset HR. They’d fired him for “inaccuracies on his application,” referring to the dates of his previous employment at Saint Luke’s Hospital. “They were approximate, you know,” Charlie said. After sixteen years of nursing, he couldn’t be expected to remember every little date.

Amy didn’t understand. He’d been at Somerset for nearly a year already.
Somerset had even turned Charlie Cullen into something of a local celebrity—a photograph of Charlie, along with a short personal statement, were prominently featured in a nurse recruitment flyer the hospital had mailed out to thousands of potential employees.
Charles appreciates the technology—and more!
His featured quote was about how easy it was to chart patients through Cerner. He’d acted coy when it came out, but Amy could see that he was clearly proud of his star turn and enjoyed the feedback. He’d even styled his hair for it. Why would HR scrutinize his application now? Why did they even think to look at it?

Charlie didn’t know. Maybe, he said, it might have something to do with the increased attention at the hospital after the death of Reverend Gall.

“It was an investigation, so they were certifying everything,” he said. “Looking for any little thing.” He was a scapegoat. “Also,” he added, “it might have been because of the part—the reason I left Saint Luke’s.” Charlie said that he hadn’t really told Somerset, or Amy, the whole story. “There was an investigation at Saint Luke’s. Maybe someone at Saint Luke’s saw my picture in the brochure.”

Why would it matter that Saint Luke’s had seen it—what did that have to do with anything?

Charlie could imagine the reasons. He told Amy he’d resigned from Saint Luke’s under a cloud. The administration had persecuted him there, too. It had taken six months to clear up, but in the meantime it had cost him other jobs. Charlie had previously reapplied for a position at Easton Hospital after he resigned from Saint Luke’s. Easton wouldn’t hire him. Charlie suspected they’d been warned off by someone at Saint Luke’s; in fact, attorney Paul Laughlin had contacted a staff member of Easton’s ICU.
¹
Charlie told Amy what he was experiencing in Somerset was more of the same, and exactly what had happened a year ago, at Sacred Heart. “There, they said that I wasn’t getting along with my coworkers and, well…”

Amy had to laugh at that one. “Oh, let’s see,” she said. “What’d you do—did you just not talk?”

Charlie grinned into the phone but didn’t interrupt her.

“Or did you, like, not break bread with them at the station or something?” Amy knew some nurses took it personally that Charlie never ate on shift. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she told him. “You’ll get another job.
Everybody
needs help right now. You’ll be working again before you know it.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I know.”

43

T
im remembered how, shortly after he’d first started at Somerset, the county had been rattled by a small earthquake. It was a minor event, hardly worth remembering, except for the way it lit up the police switchboard. The SPCO had a good laugh about that, calling cops to report an act of God, but they understood it, too; even in an imagined crisis, people always turned to the uniforms. Sometimes it was a cop or a fireman, sometimes a doctor or a priest, but the uniform was an assurance that the world wasn’t falling apart, that a safety net existed. Then along came Charlie, a guy who’d been putting holes in hometown safety nets for sixteen years. The world might not have known about it, but the SPCO did, and it had even the seasoned detectives spooked. Every member of the team had a family, and at one time or another, every one of them had relied upon at least one of the hospitals Cullen had worked at. Most cops, most people, held genuine respect for the experts who plumbed the mysteries of the human body. Working the Cullen case had reminded them that beneath the white coats and scrubs, they were just people, too. And that was scary. Homicide cops knew people, and what they were capable of.

But as frustrating as it was to admit, Tim couldn’t stop Cullen, despite everything the detectives had learned about him. The investigation had brought to light a troubled work history, resulting in at least three previous investigations and possibly a fourth, and an equally troubled personal life that included perhaps a dozen suicide attempts and at least one arrest. The SPCO detectives had zero doubt that their suspect was a killer, but that didn’t mean they could convince a jury to put him away for good. None of the facts they’d assembled definitively connected Nurse Cullen with a crime at Somerset Medical Center. Arresting Cullen now would succeed only in tipping him off to the fact he was being watched. All Charlie would
have to do was pick up a phone to get back on the street. Tim would bet that the next call he received would be from a lawyer.

At this point, Danny’s only option with his case was to stay focused, try to somehow build a case, and hope Cullen didn’t try to run, or kill anyone else, in the meantime. But every day, they knew their killer was out there, loose in the world, walking into post offices and shopping malls and who knew where, and at what risk. Trying to contain that risk had been the inspiration for the phony traffic stop the night before Cullen was fired.

Tim and Danny had come up with the idea together and done it legally, Danny and Assistant Prosecutor Tim Van Hise going through a judge for the order. While Charlie Cullen waited on his bogus parking ticket problem, the detectives unscrewed the door panel of his impounded Ford and installed a radio tracking unit. From now on, Cullen’s movements would now be followed at a safe distance by an unmarked car, with a detective from the Major Crimes Unit and another from the Narcotics Squad trading shifts around the clock.

To do more than watch from a distance—to actually stop Cullen—the SCPO needed to definitively prove that he had killed, or attempted to kill, at least one person. They had two Somerset victims already lined up as potentials—Reverend Gall and Mrs. Han, for murder and attempted murder, respectively, and a medical consensus that deadly levels of various drugs had been fed into their systems. They had the victims, the weapon, and a suspect. But they couldn’t tie them together.

Tim couldn’t simply trace a drug back to a syringe and find its owner, the way he could with a bullet to a gun. The only records of access to the drugs would have been in the Pyxis machine. But, as Mary Lund had told them, Pyxis stored the drug data for only thirty days. Reverend Gall had been dead nearly four times that long. The relevant records were gone, and the case against Cullen was stuck.
¹
At least, according to what the hospital had told the detectives.

Tim thought about that for a few seconds, then decided, what the hell. He swiveled over to the keyboard and typed “Pyxis” into the browser, finding the company that manufactured the system, a Midwestern outfit called Cardinal Health. Tim dialed the toll-free number, was connected with a sales rep, and introduced himself as a detective sergeant with Homicide and Major Crimes, Somerset, New Jersey. That got the guy’s attention.

“Look,” he told the guy. “I’m hoping you can help us here.” Tim
explained that he was trying to figure out a method of recovering data from one of their medical machines, the way you do when you spill coffee on your laptop. “It’s some older information,” Tim explained. “Half a year. Is there any way to recover anything that far back—maybe do some sort of data-recovery thing?”

The rep didn’t seem to understand the question. There was no thirty-day window. The Pyxis system stored every piece of data entered into it from the moment it left the factory floor. Cullen’s entire paper trail had been sitting on the hard drive this entire time.

“Just pull it up,” he said. “Is there something wrong with your machine?”

T
his time there was no friendly banter with Mary Lund’s secretary, no knock, no smile, no please. Danny was too angry for that.
²

Mary sat at her desk, eyes big, visibly frightened of the giant towering over her. Danny told Lund what he needed and when he needed it.

He told her that if she didn’t want the FBI ripping her little office apart and an obstruction-of-justice charge on her bail ticket, she’d better pick up the phone, right fucking now, and get him the paper and not any of this just-four-pages-and-one-missing bullshit, either.

Mary picked up the phone.