Jon Talton: The Pain Nurse

“What are you saying?” Mueller’s voice kicked up a notch. “Do you know what the chief would say if I even raised this? It had to be Factor. What other theory works?”

“Bud Chambers.”

“No, don’t. Don’t you dare.” Mueller backed away a step as if Will had pulled a knife on him.

“Damn it, Steve. Don’t let Dodds piss this away. This homicide is the same MO as Mount Adams. It’s him. Do they have a time of death?”

“No…I don’t know. Look, Will, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re not going to be a cop now. Take the disability. You can get a good partial pension. My gosh, your wife must make a ton with the bank now. You don’t need the money. Quit driving yourself nuts over this. Think of all the Reds games you can go to.”

“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.

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.”