Jon Talton - The Pain Nurse

He asked the aide to give him his dinner in the large rehab room. He couldn’t bear to take off his suit and get in the cursed bed yet, even though his legs and back ached and he was battered by exhaustion. So he sat alone in the room, feeling the cold seeping through the windows, and surveying the precise little scoop of mashed potatoes, three tablespoons of corn, and two slices of meatloaf. He had enough money to buy a Diet Coke, which he used to take his pain meds. This was his life now. He had lived twenty-five years on the other side of the crime-scene tape and the emergency lights, a quarter century where his badge gave him a pass anywhere in the city. That was gone. Tomorrow or the next day, he would have to endure a visit from his brother and his family, bearing gifts they probably resented giving. He would have nothing to give in return. And the day after that, and every day he was given, he would assess every little pain or change in his body with the knowledge that it might be nothing, or it might be catastrophe. Theresa’s face and then Cheryl Beth’s hovered in front of him, her kiss still warm on his cheek, as he lapsed into sleep.

The next image that broke into his consciousness was J. J. Dodds. Will shook his head to clear away the medicine haze and was fully awake.

“Detective Dodds.”

“Detective Borders.” Dodds sat in a chair turned backward, his blue, polka dot tie hanging over the chair’s back. “I risked my neck on the ice to bring you good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

Will pushed himself up in the wheelchair and said he needed good news.

“Darlene is in protective custody, her kid, too. She gave Chambers up. We’ve reopened the case and we’ve got a warrant for his arrest. I think we can get him for the three women in Mount Adams.”

All this, Will thought, and Dodds was not angrily berating him for interfering.

“So what’s the bad news?”

“He’s gone. We sent a tactical unit to his apartment and he wasn’t there. We’ve got it staked out.”

“Where does he work?”

“He’s some kind of independent security consultant, so he works out of his place. We’re running down family, friends. So far, no Chambers.”

“Hell.” Will’s mind pulled out of its depression and began plotting how they could find him.

“There’s more,” Dodds said. “Darlene said Chambers has a cabin down by Rabbit Hash. We never found it before because it’s in his father’s name. It’s empty right now, but we’ve got Kentucky State Police sitting on it. If he doesn’t show up there in the next day, we’re going to execute a search warrant. What do you want to bet we find some very interesting things hidden down there?”

“That doesn’t sound like bad news.”

Dodds’ mouth turned up in an imitation of a smile. “That’s because there’s more bad news.”

Will pushed away the food tray and waited.

“Your girlfriend’s been lying. I always had this gut feeling about her.”

“What girlfriend? You mean Cheryl Beth?”

“She was with Dr. Lustig the night she was killed.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“Real shit,” Dodds said. “Dr. Nagle said he saw the two of them talking and drinking at a bar on Main Street the night the doc was murdered…”

“He’s just trying to save his own skin, since he doesn’t have an alibi anymore.”

“Will you let me finish? Thank you. After you so industriously had this girl Amy Morton come back and say she lied about Nagle’s alibi, well, I brought him in for a chat. He’s very full of himself. Know what he calls himself? The Two Million Dollar Man, for all the surgeries he does. But he tells me he was on Main Street that night and saw the two of them together. Unfortunately for your girlfriend…”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Will said through a sour mouth.

“Unfortunately for your girlfriend, I took their pictures to the bar and the bartender and one of the waitresses positively identified them. She was with Lustig that night.”

Will stared into the table, ran his hand lightly back and forth over its smooth surface, and felt himself breathe. His stomach was now the home to a heavy, spiky rock. How could she have lied to him? “So what are you saying?”

“Motive. She was Nagle’s lover and Lustig’s rival. Opportunity. There could be an hour or more between the time Cheryl left the bar and the time she claimed she found the body. And she’s been lying to us.”

Will rubbed his temples, feeling his head start to ache. Was it a headache because Cheryl Beth had lied to him, or a brain tumor? Finally he shook his head and forced a laugh. “Reach, reach, hell, your arms are long.”

Dodds ran his hand across the top of his head, as if searching to see if any hair had escaped his daily shaving. “There’s some weird shit going on at this place, and she knows what it is. I still like Mason for killing Lustig. I’m keeping his ass in jail. But maybe Cheryl Wilson is in on it, too, and this Nagle asshole.”

“Her name is Cheryl Beth.”

“Mason’s fingerprints are on the threatening letter. He also has a knife collection. Have you seen him? He’s one of these no-affect types-you don’t know if they’re just fucked up or a killer. I say a killer.”

“What does he say?”

“He says he was in love with her, that the letter was clipped on the windshield wiper of his car one day at work, after Lustig was killed. Nice try, but the stamps had been canceled. He had to have taken it from Lustig’s mailbox to cover his tracks.”

“Unless somebody steamed the stamps off a canceled letter and applied them to the letter found with Mason.”

Dodds snorted. “Let me guess. Damn, Bud Chambers. He’s killed everybody in Cincinnati! But it could still have been your girlfriend, Cheryl Beth . She could be the killer.”

“I thought you said you liked Mason!” Will’s angry voice echoed in the large, empty room.

“He’s involved. Hell, maybe they were all sleeping together. We’ve seen stranger shit. Stuff like that even happened in the department.”

“And they somehow found out the confidential information on the MO of the Slasher to do it? Give me a break. You know this is the Ring Bearer again.”

Dodds mouth tightened and they locked eyes. Finally, “You can find anything out on the Internet now. Maybe a patrolman told his wife, who told her girlfriend, who told…I don’t have it all worked out yet. Maybe I need to check into the hospital so I can be as good a detective as you.”

Will sat in the acid of betrayal, silent. Dodds just watched, with his preternatural patience. Will’s heart banged against his chest wall as Dodds’ cell phone rang. The conversation was brief.

“Dispatch,” Dodds said. “Hospital security asked if I could meet Berkowitz down in the basement.”

“Lustig’s office?”

“Yep.”

Will stared through the blackness of the windows, now accumulating ice around their edges. “Have fun.”

“Fuck you very much.” Dodds stood up. “But you’re working, too. Quit feeling sorry for yourself because you’re on the job and coming with me. Back to the murder room, Detective Borders.”

Will put his hands to the wheels and rolled toward the doors. “Just like old times, Detective Dodds.”

Cheryl Beth checked in on several patients, and each time she looked out the windows to survey the streets outside. From the promontory of the tower, nothing seemed to be moving on Pill Hill. She could even see a clot of red taillights at the foot of the street where the SUV had slid. Several blocks through the trees came the yellow pulse of lights, salt trucks, but so far she was stuck at the hospital. There were other ways down, but they all involved hills and she would not risk it. Cincinnatians became hysterical in even modest snowstorms. An ice storm on a city of hills was, as her grandmother would have said, a gracious plenty of a mess. If worse came to worst, she could use one of the cots the on-duty trauma teams slept on.