Jon Talton - The Pain Nurse

But it hadn’t been a simple case. No witnesses could place Chambers at the scene anytime near the murder. He had claimed he hadn’t seen Theresa for two weeks before the murder. The kitchen had lacked Chambers’ fingerprints. He had said it was because he hadn’t lived there for a month, but Will thought Chambers had wiped it down. Other evidence-bloody shoeprints, fibers, skin under the fingernails-was missing. A search warrant executed at Chambers’ apartment turned up nothing. The knife was missing from the scene, and wouldn’t turn up for days, when Dodds went back to Theresa’s house, did his homicide stroll, and finally found it in the back of the freezer. It had no trace evidence.

On the fifth day of interrogation, Chambers had seemed to crack. He changed his story, said he had left patrol to visit his girlfriend. She would back him up. Her name was Darlene Corley, a white-trash woman living down in the flood zone of the Columbia neighborhood. They had found her in an ancient, paint-peeled duplex that seemed like the moon compared to the Victorians being restored a block or two away. They had stood on the porch talking to her, and she had said that she had been with Chambers early that morning. He had pulled his patrol car right up to the curb there, and come inside and they had made love. The two detectives were about to invite themselves inside when the call came: another homicide in Mount Adams, same MO.

Jill Kelly was a thirty-eight-year-old single woman, an assistant professor at Xavier University. Her fiancé had found her inside her apartment at seven p.m., exactly two weeks after the murder of Theresa Chambers. The apartment was two blocks away from the location of the first killing. Like Theresa, Jill had a petite build and shoulder-length auburn hair. The scene had almost been a carbon copy, right down to the folded clothes and missing ring finger-with her engagement ring on it. This time, however, the medical examiner found evidence of sexual assault but no semen. The assailant had worn a condom. Will had found the knife on the first sweep, buried in the cat box. Like the weapon that had been used on Theresa, it was a folding combat knife.

Mount Adams is a sky island of a neighborhood perched over downtown and the Ohio River, on the leafy edge of Eden Park. Sit in one of the bars and restaurants with a view, and you’re eye level with the top of the imposing cluster of skyscrapers. On clear summer nights it’s as if you can reach across and touch their necklaces of light. Mount Adams had long since been reclaimed by gentrification and its narrow streets were home to galleries, restaurants, townhouses, and expensive homes, mostly in closely-spaced, restored nineteenth-century buildings. Although it sat in the midst of the city, its height and affluence seemed to offer an illusion of safety. Trouble was down the hill-not there. When the media learned of the Jill Kelly homicide coming just fourteen days after the killing of Theresa Chambers, they thought: serial killer in paradise. They called him “the Mount Adams Slasher.” That was fine with Dodds and Will, who also adopted the term. The most horrific, distinctive fact of the two crimes had been concealed from the media: the amputation of the ring fingers. Between themselves, the cops called the killer something altogether different.

They called him the Ring Bearer.

And two weeks later, he struck again, four blocks away, when Lisa Schultz had come home late from work to a house that was supposed to be empty. Her husband had been on a business trip to London. Instead, the Slasher had been waiting for her. His method was identical to the Kelly murder. And then the city had gone into near panic. Police patrols had been increased yet again. Two nights later, a unit responding to a prowler call had chased a black male from beside a house on St. Gregory Street. He had run through Longworth’s, out the kitchen and gotten away, but one of the patrolmen knew the suspect. He was a small-time burglar and sometime Peeping Tom named Craig Factor.

Will had always known they had the wrong man, despite the fact that the semen matched. Departments made mistakes with DNA every day. Chambers had seemed right for many reasons. But one was especially powerful: what woman would automatically open her door at night for a stranger, particularly after an unsolved murder had happened nearby? A woman who was reacting to a police officer, standing there under the “burned out” porch light, showing his badge. But they had never run across the tracks of a male nurse named Judd Mason, not once. Maybe he had been so wrong because he had never seen the case objectively. But right at that moment, burning his mouth with expensive coffee, it was a thought through whose threshold he didn’t dare pass. He pulled out his cell phone to call Dodds. Then he put it away. What was the point?

He raised his head just in time to see Cheryl Beth walking purposefully toward him. She was wearing street clothes, jeans, a turtleneck and carrying a heavy coat. He couldn’t help noticing how nicely she filled out those clothes. He managed a smile-she had to be relieved at the news. But she had a look of wild fear in her eyes.

“I’ve got to talk to you.” She pulled a chair close.

“Did you see?” Will indicated the newspaper.

“It’s not right. Mason may be a little creep, but he didn’t kill Christine.”

“How…?” Will barely got the word out before she continued in an agitated voice.

“Somebody broke into my house last night. I’ve stayed the last couple of nights with my friend Lisa. I was just too creeped out to stay at home. Yesterday afternoon, around six, I stopped off at home to get some clothes. Everything was fine. Today I drove by just to check on things and my front door was open. I called the police. Somebody had broken in.” She leaned in close. “My bed, the comforter and the pillows, had been sliced up. Somebody went up to my bedroom and did that. There was a computer and a stereo and a TV, and they’re all fine. But somebody sliced up my bed, and they threw everything out of my desk drawers.”

“Mason would have already been in jail.”

“Exactly.” She bit her lip. “There’s something else.” She hesitated then recounted her ambush by Gary Nagle of the day before. Will listened carefully, listened as a simple case fell apart.

“Could it have been him?” Will asked.

“I don’t know. I used to think I knew him, now I’m not sure about anything. He just seemed like a wild man yesterday. But your former friend Dodds doesn’t care. He’s not interested. He would barely talk to me.”

He could almost detect she was shaking. He wanted to reach out to her but didn’t. He said, “I don’t know how else to push this. I wish I could get out of here.”

She didn’t miss a beat. “I can get you out.”

Half an hour later, Cheryl Beth wheeled Will out to the drive-up entrance to the neuro-rehab wing. She had signed him out for the day with the ward’s patient coordinator-usually it was a privilege given for family members, so patients could spend a few hours outside the hospital. She made sure to take along all of Will’s meds and some extra, just in case. The cold hit them when they came out the door. The temperature was in the low thirties, the gusts making it feel colder. Cheryl Beth had draped a blanket over Will because he didn’t have a coat among his things. They would stop by his place and pick one up.

“Here’s how we’re getting you in the car,” she said, opening the door and pulling out a thin board that measured about two and a half feet long. “This is a transfer board. I lied and said you had been trained in how to use it.”

“Whatever it took to spring me.” He smiled.

She instructed him on the use of the plastic transfer board, pushed his wheelchair close to the open car door, and removed the arm side closest to the car. She asked him to raise up while she positioned one end of the board under the seat of the wheelchair and the other end on the car seat.