Jon Talton - The Pain Nurse

“Gary, I told you that night you should immediately go to the police and tell them the truth.”

“Bryant said he’d shut it down. No one would even talk about it.”

Cheryl Beth took that in but kept her face as expressionless as possible. You’re an open book .

“You’ve got to help me,” he said, adding, “Cheryl Beth.”

“I’ve done all I can do, Gary.”

“Damn you!” He shook his fist at her. “You’re such a cold bitch. It’s all because your mother never loved you. I get you.”

She pushed her anger down into her shoes and quietly said, “Gary, you never knew anything important about me. What matters to me. You weren’t man enough to ask or to understand. We just fucked. It was nothing special.” The cold harshness of her voice surprised her. His eyes widened and he actually twitched, jerking his head to the left, the veins standing out in his neck.

“Please, I’m sorry.”

She just watched him.

“You saw me at the bar that night on Main Street…”

“No, I didn’t. You just said you were there.”

He stood, but didn’t move toward her once he realized she would walk out the door. “You’re not playing well with others. I was there, you saw me.”

“I did not.”

“Don’t you understand the favor I did for you? When I first talked to the police…”

“You said I was your lover. We hadn’t been together for months. That was no favor.”

“I didn’t tell them you were with Christine that night, on Main Street, before she came back to the hospital.”

“So? I told them. They already know.” She was amazed at the effortless way she lied. He started to talk, but she was already out the door, walking fast to the elevators.

The next morning Will wheeled himself out to the busy main lobby and lined up at the Starbucks. It was one piece of the normal, outside world in the dreary daily hospital routine. His brother had brought him some money and fresh underwear, and then gone off to his shift as a firefighter. They were not close, and he could sense the discomfort from Mark, that he and his family might end up having to care for an invalid. Will vowed that wouldn’t happen. He would find a way to be self-sufficient. People worse off than him could do it. Cindy-he didn’t know when he would see her again, and didn’t want to care. Their marriage was just a scar now, not a wound. He couldn’t fix it, never could. His physical pain was less-it was noticeable, now more an anxiety he might miss his next dose than the constant vicious companion of recent weeks. Don’t worry about becoming an addict, Cheryl Beth had said. So he wouldn’t worry. He ordered his coffee, got it and rolled over to a table, then he saw the front page of that day’s Enquirer.

“Nurse charged in doctor’s murder,” a large headline said. A smaller one added: “Police suspect a romantic triangle led to killing.” He set the coffee down and read:

Police on Wednesday arrested a 35-year-old nurse in the Dec. 6 murder of Dr. Christine Lustig at Cincinnati Memorial Hospital.

Judd Mason, who also worked at the hospital, faces one charge of aggravated murder, according to Cincinnati homicide Det. J. J. Dodds.

Mason, of Deer Park, was arrested at his home around 4 p.m. Tuesday without incident. He is being held in the Hamilton County Jail on $1 million bond. Dr. Lustig, 41, was found dead in her basement office. According to the medical examiner, she died from repeated stab wounds.

Police say Mason was having an affair with Dr. Lustig, the ex-wife of prominent neurosurgeon Dr. Gary Nagle. Lustig broke off the affair and an enraged Mason sought revenge, police allege.

Officials at Memorial said they were relieved that “this horrible chapter has been closed,” according to a spokesman.

Relieved . Will lingered on the word. Closed. He read the story to the end, letting the coffee scald the roof of his mouth, but he really wasn’t comprehending the other words. It was the boilerplate of a hundred news stories about murders, usually telling little, often telling outright lies. Something went out of him and he just sat there staring at the table. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe it had been this simple, all along. He suddenly felt so tired, so sad beyond the words even to express it, much less to examine its headwaters. And Will wasn’t that kind of man.

Homicide is not that hard. That’s what the old detective who had broken him in-the man’s name had been Charlie Brill, but everyone called him Bull-had told him when he had joined the detail. Most homicides are simple. Family fights, drug deals gone wrong, disputes over money. Young men with guns and no control over their impulses. Jealousy. Lovers killed each other. Most murder victims knew their killers. Most killers eventually screwed up. Gather evidence. Make an arrest. Take it to the DA. Testify. Simple.

Sometimes one good case solved many others. As a young detective, Bull had worked the Cincinnati Strangler case. Seven women had been raped and strangled in 1965 and 1966. The swirling, lethal dangers of the sixties had come down on never-changing Cincinnati. Will had been in grade school, but he remembered it. The cops had eventually arrested a cab driver after a woman had been found beaten and stabbed in his abandoned cab. The MO hadn’t been the same as the others, who had been strangled. But each murder had been slightly different. One woman had been strangled with a necktie in a park. Others had died thanks to plastic clothesline. Two had been exact copies: women beaten badly and strangled with electrical cord. Bull had said they had a theory, played a hunch: that the cabbie was the strangler. He was convicted on only one murder, but after his arrest, the strangler killings had stopped. One veteran newspaper columnist later compared the case to the Slasher attacks: only one conviction, but no more killings.

Except that the Mount Adams killings hadn’t been simple. Theresa Chambers’ body had been found on an April afternoon when a coworker had become concerned and stopped by to check on her. She had looked through the kitchen window and seen a naked leg and a lot of blood. Inside the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old restored house, the scene had been surreally calm, neat-no broken dishes or overturned tables or chairs. A set of women’s clothes had been neatly folded on a chair, with black panties on top. The body had almost been arranged: completely nude, legs open, arms and hands holding a framed photo of her daughter, who was away at college. Yet all was not calm: the body had been nearly flayed in some places by a very sharp knife, then her throat had been slashed. Blood pooled darkly on the floor. She had been sexually assaulted and semen had been recovered by the medical examiner. And her ring finger had been cut off and taken.

Will and Dodds had immediately looked at her estranged husband, Bud. The spouse almost always was the killer. Simple, remember? Their marriage had been marked by physical abuse and she had a restraining order against him. He was also a Cincinnati cop who had faced more than his share of brutality complaints. Theresa’s time of death had been estimated at around three a.m. the day her body had been discovered. Bud had an alibi-he had been on duty on the overnight shift. But that broke down within a day when it turned out that he had gone off his beat early, his shift commander agreeing to cover for him, thinking he needed to run an errand. Day after day, Will and Dodds had interrogated Chambers in one of the dismal little rooms at headquarters. A cop with a bad temper and a history of threats against his wife had finally killed her. Where had he been that day? Chambers had said he hadn’t been feeling well, so he went home to his apartment and took a nap. No alibi. Lots of motive.