“Get away from me.”
“I’ll say you talked.”
“What?”
Kat nodded, trying to keep her voice firm. “The moment you die, I will arrest his ass. I will say you ratted him out. I will tell him I got a full confession from you.”
Monte Leburne smiled again. “Nice try.”
“You don’t think I’ll do it?”
“Don’t know what you’ll do. I just know no one will believe it.” Monte Leburne looked past her toward Nurse Steiner. “And I got a witness, don’t I, Sylvia?”
Nurse Steiner nodded. “I’m right here, Monte.”
A fresh roll of pain made him wince. “I’m really tired, Sylvia. It’s getting pretty bad.”
Nurse Steiner quickly moved closer to his bedside. “I’m right here, Monte.” She took his hand. What with the garish makeup, her smile looked literally painted on, like something on the face of a scary clown.
“Please make her go, Sylvia.”
“She’s leaving now.” Nurse Steiner started pressing the pump, releasing some kind of narcotic into his veins. “Just relax, Monte, okay?”
“Don’t let her stay.”
“Shhh, you’ll be fine.” Nurse Steiner gave Kat the baleful eye. “She’s as good as gone.”
Kat was about to protest, but Nurse Steiner pressed buttons on the IV box again, making the point moot anyway. Leburne’s eyes started to flutter. A few moments later, he was out cold.
• • •
A waste of time.
But then again, what had Kat expected? Even the dying man had scoffed at the idea of a deathbed confession. Cozone knew how to keep his employees quiet. You do your time, your family gets taken care of for life. You talk, everyone dies. There was no incentive to get Leburne to talk. There never had been. There certainly was none now.
Kat was just about to head back toward the car when she heard the sickly sweet voice behind her. “You handled that very poorly, dear.”
Kat turned to see Nurse Steiner standing there, looking like something out of a horror movie with the nurse getup and the paint-can makeup. “Yeah, well, thanks for your help.”
“Would you like my help?”
“Pardon?”
“He has very little remorse, you know. I mean, true remorse. A priest stops by, and he says the right words. But he doesn’t mean it. He’s just trying to bargain his way into Heaven. The Lord isn’t so easily fooled.” She gave the creepy, lipstick-on-teeth smile again. “Monte murdered many people, is that correct?”
“He confessed to killing three. There were more.”
“Including your father?”
“Yes.”
“And your father was a police officer? Like you?”
“Yes.”
Nurse Steiner made a tsk-tsk noise of sympathy. “I’m very sorry.”
Kat said nothing.
Nurse Steiner chewed on her lipsticked bottom lip for a moment. “Please follow me.”
“What?”
“You need information, am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“Please stay out of sight. Let me handle this.”
Nurse Steiner spun and started back toward the infirmary. Kat hurried to catch up. “Wait, what are you going to do?”
“Do you know anything about twilight sleep?” Nurse Steiner asked.
“Not really.”
“I started my career working for an ob-gyn doing baby deliveries. In the old days, we’d use morphine and scopolamine as anesthesia. It would produce a semi-narcotic state—the expectant mother would stay awake, but she wouldn’t really remember anything. Some say it dulled the pain. Perhaps it did, but I don’t think so. I think what happened was, the expectant mother forgot the agony she was forced to endure.” She tilted her head, like a dog hearing a strange sound. “Does pain happen if you don’t remember it?”
Kat thought that question was rhetorical, but Nurse Steiner stopped and waited for an answer. “I don’t know.”
“Think about it. For any experience, good or bad: If you don’t remember it immediately after it happens, does it really count?”
Again she waited for an answer. Again Kat said, “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. It’s an interesting question, isn’t it?”
Where the hell was she going with this? “I guess so,” Kat said.
“We all want to live in the moment. I understand that. But if you can’t recall that moment, did it ever really happen? I’m not sure. The Germans started twilight sleep. They thought it would make childbirth more bearable for the mothers. But they were wrong. We stopped using it, of course. The child came out drugged. That was the main reason—at least, that’s what the medical people claimed.” She leaned conspiratorially toward Kat. “But between us, I don’t really think that was it.”
“Why, then?”
“It wasn’t what happened to the babies.” Nurse Steiner stopped at the door. “It was the mothers.”
“What about them?”
“They had issues with the procedure too. Twilight sleep allowed them to miss the pain, yes, but they never experienced the birth, either. They went into a room and next thing they remembered, they were holding a baby. Emotionally, they felt disconnected, removed from the birth of their own child. It was disconcerting. You’ve been carrying a child for nine months. You’ve started labor and then poof—”
Nurse Steiner snapped her fingers for emphasis.
“You wondered whether it really happened,” Kat finished for her.
“Exactly.”
“What does this have to do with Monte Leburne?”
Nurse Steiner’s smile was coy. “You know.”
She didn’t. Or maybe she did. “You can put him in twilight sleep?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And you think—what?—I can get him to talk and then he’ll forget about it?”
“Not really, no. I mean, yes, he won’t remember. But morphine isn’t all that different from sodium thiopental. You know what that is, don’t you?”
Kat did, though it was better known as Sodium Pentothal. In short: truth serum.
“It doesn’t work like you see in the movies,” Nurse Steiner continued. “But when people are under, well, the mothers tended to babble. Confessing, even. At more than one delivery, with the husbands pacing in the other room, they confided that the baby wasn’t his. We didn’t ask, of course. They would just say it, and we would pretend that we didn’t hear. But over time, I started to realize that you could actually carry on conversations. You could ask and learn a great deal and, of course, she would never remember a thing.”
Nurse Steiner met Kat’s eye. Kat felt a shiver run down her back. Nurse Steiner broke the contact and pushed open the door.
“I should point out that there is a huge problem with reliability. I’ve seen it happen many times with morphine. The patient will speak convincingly about something that can’t possibly be true. The last man who died in this infirmary? He swore that every time I left him alone, someone would kidnap him and take him to different cat funerals. He wasn’t lying. He was convinced it was happening. Do you see?”
“Yes.”
“So you understand, then. Shall we continue?”
Kat didn’t know. She had grown up in a cop family. She had seen the dangers of bending the rules.
But what choice did she have?
“Detective?”
“Go ahead,” Kat said.
The smile widened. “If Monte hears your voice, it will put his defenses up. If you let me handle it, we may get some useful information for you.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to need some information about the shooting.”
It took about twenty minutes. Nurse Steiner added scopolamine into the mix, checked vitals, made adjustments. She was doing this with all too much a practiced hand, so that, for a moment, Kat wondered whether this was the first time Nurse Steiner had done it for reasons that were not purely medical. Kat couldn’t help but wonder about the implications of twilight sleep, the potential for abuse. Nurse Steiner’s seemingly cheery justification—if you don’t remember it immediately after it happened, did it happen?—sounded too easy.
The woman was off, no doubt about it. Right now, Kat didn’t much care.
Kat sat low in the corner, out of sight. Monte Leburne was awake now, his head lolling back on the pillow. He started calling Nurse Steiner Cassie—the name of his sister who died when she was eighteen. He started talking about how he wanted to see her when he died. Kat marveled at how Nurse Steiner seemed to lead him further and further down the path she wanted him to travel.
“Oh, you will see me, Monte,” Nurse Steiner said. “I will be waiting on the other side. Except, well, there could be issues with the people you killed.”
“Men,” he said.
“What?”
“I only killed men. I wouldn’t kill no woman. Not ever. No women, no children, Cassie. I killed men. Bad men.”
Nurse Steiner shot a glance toward Kat. “But you killed a police officer.”
“Worst of them all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cops. They ain’t no better. Don’t matter, though.”
“I don’t understand, Monte. Explain it to me.”
“I never killed no cop, Cassie. You know that.”
Kat froze. That can’t be right.
Nurse Steiner cleared her throat. “But, Monte—”
“Cassie? I’m sorry I never defended you.” Monte Leburne started to cry. “I let him hurt you, and I didn’t do nothing to help.”
“That’s okay, Monte.”
“No, it’s not. I protected everyone else, right? But not you.”
“It’s over. I’m in a better place now. I want you to be here with me.”
“I protect my family now. I learned. Dad was no good.”
“I know that. But, Monte, you said you never killed a cop.”
“You know that.”
“But what about Detective Henry Donovan?”
“Shh.”
“What?”
“Shh,” he said. “They’ll hear. It was easy. I was toast anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“They already had me for killing Lazlow and Greene. Dead to rights. I was going to get life anyway. What’s one more, if it provides, you know what I mean?”
A cold hand wrapped itself around Kat’s heart and squeezed.
Even Nurse Steiner was having trouble keeping her tone even. “Explain it to me, Monte. Why did you shoot Detective Donovan?”
“Is that what you think? I just took the fall. I was already toast. Don’t you see?”
“You didn’t shoot him?”
No answer.
“Monte?”
She was starting to lose him.
“Monte, if it wasn’t you, who killed him?”
His voice was far away. “Who?”
“Who killed Henry Donovan?”
“How should I know? They visited me. Day after I got arrested. They told me to take the money and the fall.”
“Who?”
Monte’s eyes closed. “I’m so sleepy.”
“Monte, who told you to take the fall?”
“I should have never let Dad get away with it, Cassie. What he did to you. I knew. Mom knew. And we didn’t do nothing. I’m sorry.”
“Monte?”
“So tired . . .”
“Who told you to take the fall?”
But Monte Leburne was asleep.