“You’re wrong.”
“I’m warning you…”
“No.” Cheryl Beth could hear the sharpness in her voice. “You’re telling me you didn’t arrest the killer today? It’s not Lennie?”
Dodds was silent. She felt a sudden wave of nausea knock through her.
“You’re wrong about me. And there’s still a killer out there and somebody was standing in my damned flower beds looking into my house-after Christine was killed!” She knew she was over the top. She didn’t care. “Now, you either arrest me, or let me out at the hospital, because a patient needs me.”
They were pulling into the ER parking lot. “Don’t go far,” he said. “I know how to find you. When you’re done, come down to the basement. You know where.”
Cheryl Beth padded along on the new, heavy-duty carpet of the hallway into Four-East. It was already looking ratty. She was surprised to see Denise there, away from her usual floor.
“Angela was sick, so they moved me over at the last minute,” Denise said. “I’m sorry to get you up here, baby girl. I called his doc and he said to call you. It’s a compliment, really.”
“Right.” Cheryl Beth looked around the chart caddy for the paperwork. As often happened, the chart was missing. She squinted at the white board, which gave a basic rundown of the patient and his meds.
“Sorry,” Denise said. “This station is a mess. Blunt chest trauma as a result of an auto accident. Chest tube. It’s been in for a week and he’s really hurting. Why are your hands shaking?”
Cheryl Beth stripped off her coat and sat heavily, studying her hands. They never shook. But a tremble ran through both. She knotted them into fists and it stopped. “The cops don’t think Lennie is the killer,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s what I said. But it gets worse. This one detective, he’s acting like I’m a suspect. Denise, I could get fired and blackballed. Stephanie Ott already hates me. I don’t know what to do.” She folded her arms across her chest, feeling her breasts through the soft fabric of her scrubs. They were softer now. Her body was becoming a stranger in middle age. She looked up at Denise. “It looks bad on the surface. The thing with Gary…”
“I know.” She said it low and sympathetically, but Cheryl Beth angrily waved her hands.
“Everybody in this fucking hospital knows!” She brought her voice down. “Sorry. Sorry.” She held her hands out and they were steady. “Let’s get to work.”
“Baby girl, nobody could think you had anything to do with it. That’s crazy. I was with you that night. I gave you the message to go down there.”
“That would play well before a jury,” Cheryl Beth said, laughing ruefully. “Did you take Christine’s call that night?”
“No,” Denise said. “The ward clerk handed it to me. It must have come in when we were working on poor Mrs. Dahl.”
So Christine might have called just before she was killed. Why did she call when she could have paged her? Why did she want to talk at all-what more was there to say? The details of the night came rushing back upon her.
“So you came on duty at eleven?”
Denise nodded. “And that poor old lady was hurting so bad. I say, ‘enough of this, I’m calling Cheryl Beth.’ So I paged you.”
“Had you seen Lustig that night?”
“On that floor? No way. Anyway, she wasn’t even cutting any more.”
“So I came in around eleven-twenty, say? We worked with Mrs. Dahl for maybe half an hour and I spent another half an hour writing the new orders.”
“Makes sense.”
“So it was nearly twelve-thirty and I was about to leave when you saw the message?”
“Right. It must have come in while we were in the room with Mrs. Dahl. It definitely wasn’t there when I came on duty.”
Cheryl Beth made herself stand and they walked toward the patient’s room. She could hear moaning in the distance. She stopped and faced Denise. “Ever run into a nurse named Judd Mason?”
“Creepy dude, huh?” Denise said. “No bedside manner at all. You know he used to be an OR nurse for Lustig?”
Cheryl Beth stopped and held Denise’s shoulder. “What?”
“He scrubbed in with her for years,” Denise said. They stood in the dim hallway next to the code cart, speaking in low voices. Except for the moans coming from the next door, the only sound was loud snoring. “He was good in the operating room, I hear. Lot of those nurses love the teamwork, the stress, the autonomy. They don’t have to be great with direct patient contact.”
“So were they still together?”
“Nope, they had a falling out. This was before Lustig went on leave to do the computer project.”
“What do you mean, ‘falling out’?” Cheryl Beth felt revived by an adrenaline shot through her system.
Denise shrugged. “That gossip never made it to the graveyard shift. Maybe he was another one of Lustig’s conquests gone wrong. They want to know who killed her, they ought to look at the list of her old boyfriends. I think it’s called the Cincinnati phone book. There’s one other thing.”
Cheryl Beth waited, watching Denise swallow conspicuously.
“I had to stop by employee benefits today,” she said. “So I’m in street clothes, in the upscale part of this dump. Out in the hallway I see Stephanie Ott talking to Dr. Carpenter, and I distinctly hear your name.”
“He said he’d have my back,” Cheryl Beth said.
“Hmmm.” Denise closed her eyes for a second and shrugged. “He told me he’d have my back, too, and next thing I knew I was kicked out of ICU. Today they looked pretty chummy, his arm on her shoulder. And I heard your name and Lustig’s name more than once.” She stroked her cheek in thought. “Something I’ve thought about…”
After a pause, Cheryl Beth asked her to continue.
“Oh, you know, after being done in by Ott once before I believe in conspiracies. But think about this. Lustig is working on the digital medicine project-every patient record will be online, every order or change of treatment entered instantly. Think what that would do to docs who screw up.”
“They couldn’t blame the nurses anymore.”
“Right,” Denise said. “Old Doc Palmer? He’s got lawsuits against him. He’s way past his prime. Dr. Stewart-I watch his stuff like a hawk. I’ve seen major screwups from residents that were quietly ignored. How many times have the doctors closed ranks to protect one another? The new computer system, if it worked, would make that a lot harder. They couldn’t bury their mistakes anymore.”
“You’re saying there are powerful docs who wouldn’t have wanted the project to succeed. Who might have wanted Christine… God, if Christine was really pushing the project, it could have threatened a lot of people.”
Denise laughed. “Oh, forget it. I’m just scaring you when you’re already scared. I’m probably being paranoid. But I did see Carpenter talking to Ott about you. Watch out, baby girl. Hospital politics can be murder.”
Cheryl Beth stared at Denise, then found her bearings and walked through the wide doorway. In the first bed was a gaunt young man with skin nearly the color of white paper. He implored her with wide, scared eyes. Faces told so much.
“I’m a pain management nurse,” she began. “One of your doctors wanted me to see if we could make you feel better…”
Forty-five minutes later, she took the elevator down to the basement. Her feet felt like lead, making this familiar trip. She never used the basement shortcut now. She had already decided that if the hallway were deserted when the doors opened, she would immediately close the door and go back to the first floor. The car was cold but she was burning up. She should have asked a guard to come down with her.