The Pain Nurse (4 page)

“You can break that seal and get in that office,” Will said. “I want to look around. And I want to see the murder book. Nothing is right about this case.”

“Stop.”

“Just call security and let’s look inside.”

Mueller smiled and shook his head. “You were a good detective, Will, but never very smart about your career. I was worried about that when you transferred over. Big-time homicide copper having to lower himself to investigate chickenshit complaints against officers. I was afraid you’d always want to go for the big cases, even when you didn’t belong there. You didn’t disappoint me. The Reading incident, remember?”

“The city was in the wrong. I just went where the facts pointed.”

“And you didn’t mind pissing on a city council member to get there.”

“Important people can still be asked questions. A good internal affairs investigator has to be able to do that. And he has to be able to disagree with his superiors.”

“In your world, but it’s not too smart. You can make enemies in high places. Most cases in our division involve pleasing our stakeholders.”

“Our ‘stakeholders,’ as you call them, are the citizens of Cincinnati, not the brass.”

“Sure,” Mueller said. “That’s what I meant. What I mean is you need to be smart this time, stop driving yourself nuts over some case that’s just a lot of smoke.”

“In the middle of the smoke lies the crime.” Will wanted to slap himself. Now he was making up his own Muellerisms.

Mueller took on an uncharacteristically thoughtful expression. “You’re not tracking, Will. I never wanted you on this detail. Homicide guys always think they’re better. Never knew why you left a prestige detail like homicide to come here. But we had a new chief and I did what he told me.”

“Does the chief know you’re trying to retire me?”

Mueller gave an exasperated sigh. “Has the chief been to visit? It’s time to take you back to your room.”

Will felt enveloped in sudden exhaustion and pain. His back muscles rippled with spasms. He stared down the hallway, to where the floor and walls disappeared into the silent gloom. The black void seemed to erase any sense of the busy, noisy hospital above them. He imagined someone emerging from it any second, someone he and Dodds had missed before.

Chapter Five

The extra security guards lasted two days, then they were gone. Cheryl Beth was surprised they had lasted that long. The chaos that was Cincinnati Memorial Hospital was always overwhelmed by fresh chaos, fresh crisis, fresh calamity, like rolling waves. Usually she tap-danced her way through it. It was harder in the days after Dr. Christine Lustig’s murder. The extra guards had been replaced, as if by memo, by holiday bunting hanging from the nurses’ stations. Yet shock and dread were as present inside the hospital as the late autumn days outside, the cold December wind that whipped against her coat. The hospital held a memorial service for Christine Lustig in the cafeteria. The newspapers seemed to forget about the killing, too: fresh, terrible trouble in the ghetto just down the hill. Yet beyond that, the city was bundled up happy and waiting for Christmas. There had been no snow and little rain, allowing the magical heartland twilights that Cheryl Beth loved, where the black tree limbs stood out against the infinite cobalt blue horizon. This year she had barely noticed. She had barely slept.

Three days after finding the body, Cheryl Beth began her day as usual, in the tiny office she shared with two other nurses. Office space was always valuable, and this was the sixth shabby closet she had been crammed into in six years. Only the neurosurgery unit and administration had the nice offices. It was an unusual day, because there were no fires to put out, even after two days off. So she looked through the overnight referrals and quickly checked her e-mail. Today she wanted to get five patients off IVs and onto oral pain meds. She never stayed in the office long.

“I can’t believe Lustig would be in that office at that time of night,” Lisa said. Lisa was a nurse practitioner in charge of recruiting neuro-ICU nurses. She looked around thirty-five, but Cheryl Beth knew she was ten years older. She was slender with long, straight auburn hair, a pretty midwestern face, and the body of the high school cross-country runner she had been. Her husband worked for DHL at the airport but traded stocks online, convinced he would make a fortune from the Internet boom. Lisa was fascinated by the murder and kept up a running commentary, picking up the thread seamlessly the next day from where she had last left it.

“Have you been digging through my desk?” The drawers were unlocked—Cheryl Beth never left her desk unlocked. The files on top of the desk were out of order. The normally neat desk drawers had been pawed through, though nothing seemed to be missing.

“No.”

“Somebody unlocked my desk.”

“Maybe you forgot to lock it. Anyway, there’s no way I would even go in that basement at that time of night without security with me. This place is nuts. We don’t even know who’s in these hallways half the time. Maybe it was Crazy Lennie who did it?”

Crazy Lennie was a homeless man who sometimes wandered the hospital. Security would throw him out. He would come back, sometimes when he was brought to the emergency department for his assorted ailments. Lennie was distinguished from the many lost souls that frequented the hospital by his passion to defecate in the hallways, and not in a corner but usually right in the middle of the floor. It had entered the hospital vocabulary: a pile in the hallway was a “Lennie” or, “Somebody Lennied outside the ICU.”

“Lennie’s harmless.”

Lisa looked over her glasses. “Nobody’s harmless, Cheryl Beth. Speaking of which, have you run into our newest urologist?”

“Oh, no.”

Lisa was the keeper of the FDN List, as in Funny Doctors’ Names List.

“Dr. Small! Get it?” She squealed with laughter. “He had a patient come into the ER with a hard-on he’d had for six hours. And the guy’s name was Dick Wood!”

“He did not.”

“Well, his name really is Dr. Small.”

The FDN List, lovingly maintained over the years, included Dr. Aikenhead, Dr. Dingfelter, Dr. Buderlicker, Dr. Hyman Pleasure, Dr. Pine-Coffin (a pathologist), and Dr. Cutter (a surgeon). There was Dr. Payne, of course, and Dr. Hurt.

“So back to Christine. My God! How much had she bled out?”

“Lisa, my head is about to explode right this minute.” The page from neuro-rehab rescued her. Everybody wanted to talk about the murder. Nobody else had been in that office, bloody and useless, as Christine lay dead.

“At least I may not have to go to any more of those goddamn SoftChartZ meetings,” Lisa went on.

“Lisa!”

“You know how they spell it? SoftChartZ all run together, with a capital Z on the end. Isn’t that cutting edge? Christine was really into it, but she could be such a pain in the ass. Well, she could! Gag, these endless meetings, and where’s the ‘totally digital work environment’? Lord knows how much we’re paying these smart young things from Silicon Valley to do it. They look at me like I’m an idiot. The lead guy, Josh, he’s twenty-six and rich—can you believe it? I think Christine’s slept with him.”

“I’m leaving…”

“You know how she was. And he’s cute. Anyway, young and strong, go all night. Change your life, Cheryl Beth. You ought to get one of those.”

***

Cheryl Beth heard the yelling, a man’s voice spewing profanities. A cluster of nurses stood outside a door. As she approached, a compact young Indian doctor came into the hall, handing Cheryl Beth a patient chart.

“Maybe you can deal with him,” she said. “He was in a motorcycle accident.”

“Quad?” Cheryl Beth asked.

“His legs are probably lost to him,” the doctor said.

She quickly scanned the chart amid the verbal barrage coming from the room. Then she carefully stepped inside.

“What the fuck do you want?” The first thing she noticed was the swastika tattoo that snaked around the man’s neck. Involuntarily, she thought of the wound on Christine’s neck. “Bitch!” His scream brought her back to reality. It came from a florid-faced young man encased in bushy red hair and beard.

“I’m hurting here, and nobody will help me.”

“We’re going to help you,” Cheryl Beth said softly.

“I want it now!”

“Take it easy. My name is Cheryl Beth Wilson, and I’m a pain management nurse. Your doctor wanted me to see if we could control your pain better.” She read the chart but already knew she was dealing with an addict. Even before his accident, he had likely been on high levels of OxyContin. So his body wasn’t responding to the level of painkillers he was now receiving.

“Tell me what kinds of pain drugs you were on before the accident.”

“Nothin’!” His eyes bulged.

“I’m not the cops. I’m the pain nurse. I need to see what kind of dosage…”

“Fuck you!”

She sighed. “Mr. Baker, tell me about your pain. Tell me how much it hurts, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the…”

“Fuck you!” His head rocked violently around the pillows, his arms waving, tossing IV lines around like so much fishing tackle. The rest of his body lay like concrete.

“Stop!” Cheryl Beth yelled, dropping the chart on the bed and clenching her hands. The man was suddenly silent.

“You want to help us help you? Or you want trouble?” She waved her arm, beckoning him out of the bed. “You think you’re such a bad-ass! Get out of that bed. I’m not afraid of you!”

The man looked at her with wide eyes.

“Come on. Let’s get it on.”

“I… I…”

“Get out of that bed. I’ll fight you.”

“It’s okay, lady,” he said. “Just take it easy.”

***

The doctor was smiling when Cheryl Beth left, but just beyond the smile stood the black detective, Dodds. He intercepted her and they walked together toward the elevators.

“That’s quite a bedside manner, Cheryl.”

“Cheryl Beth,” she corrected. “That was an exception. I prefer to make people laugh.”

“Mmmm. So why do they call you the pain nurse, Cheryl Beth?”

“I’m the pain in the butt nurse, probably.” She tried a smile, feeling so uncomfortable around him. His face was hard. “It’s pain management nurse. That’s my specialty.”

“So you have easy access to drugs for yourself.”

Cheryl Beth laughed at him. “Alcohol is my drug of choice.”

He steered her into an empty section of the large waiting room. He sat heavily and she followed. “I want to go over your timetable Friday night again.”

“We’ve done this twice before.”

“Humor me,” Dodds said, opening a notebook. “We have a killer at large.” Again Cheryl Beth told how she had returned to the hospital for a patient and had then been summoned to Christine’s office.

“And she called you?”

“She left a message at the nurses’ station.”

“Why do that? Why not page you?”

Cheryl Beth shrugged and shook her head.

“Did you keep the message?”

A flustered sigh escaped her mouth. “No.”

She watched him closely but he said nothing. He regarded her with large brown eyes. Finally, “Why would you go into pain management? Do you have a drug problem? Does this make it easier to score?”

“No.” She tried to keep her face calm. She knew he was trying to rattle her. “I have a great record. I’ve never had drugs go missing. You can check it.”

After a long pause, Dodds said, “I have.” He raised his head and studied her anew. “Why do you wear a lab coat?”

“I get cold, and I need all the pockets.”

He fell silent for what seemed like an hour. Maybe it was five minutes. He just watched her, his eyes not quite kindly, not quite hostile. If he talked again it would seem as surprising and sudden as a stopped heart that suddenly began beating on its own.

Finally: “And it gets you more respect?”

“The coat? Maybe. I guess.”

He made a humming sound, looking at her for a long time before returning to the notebook and leafing through it. She sat back in the seat, then squirmed forward again.

“Were you wearing a lab coat on Friday night?”

She nodded.

“Is this it?”

“No.” She explained that lab coat had been smeared with blood and she threw it away in a hazmat container.

“Why would you do that?” His voice was even, but his eyes were large with suspicion. This was a man who did most of his talking through his eyes.

“It was ruined. What should I have done with it?”

“It was evidence. You should have given it to the police.”

“It would have been nice if the police had told me that.” She heard the defensiveness and stress in her voice.

He made notes—an impossibly long paragraph—and sat back studying her. He spoke after a long pause.

“So how long have you been seeing Dr. Nagle?”

“Damn it.” She spoke quietly but vehemently. “Who told…?” She stopped herself, feeling small and off balance. “We saw each other for about a year.”

“While he was married?”

“He was separated.” She sighed. “Part of that time, but, shit, sure, he was married.”

“Did Dr. Lustig know?”

She became only gradually aware of the avalanche bearing down on her. “Am I a suspect?”

Dodds pursed his lips. “I can declare you a person of interest. That’s not quite a suspect.”

“Holy crap,” Cheryl Beth said. “You can’t think I could…? I found her!”

“Dr. Nagle told us that you and he had an affair.”

“Why isn’t he a suspect? Because he’s a hotshot neurosurgeon?”

“You might both be suspects,” Dodds said.

“Look, Detective.” Cheryl Beth touched his arm and drew back. “This isn’t what you think…Hell, I know you hear that all the time. You’re used to people lying to you. Me, too. It goes with my job. I broke it off with Gary three months ago. Christine probably knew about it for a long time. But we weren’t enemies.”

Dodds again let the conversation fall into another canyon of silence. He hadn’t mentioned that Cheryl Beth and Christine had been at a bar together that night. That meant Gary hadn’t told him, despite the threat he had made at her house. Why? She realized she didn’t know Gary at all. Indeed, she was now afraid of him.

“How would you characterize your relationship with Dr. Lustig?”

Cheryl Beth was aware of how fast her breaths were coming. “Coworkers. Colleagues.” She nervously added, “In another life maybe we could have been friends.”

“Really?” Dodds’ comeback was sudden. “Funny way to treat a friend.”