Her feet kept moving, but dizziness was coming in and out, her pager feeling like ten pounds on the drawstring belt of her scrub bottoms. She made a sudden turn, cutting through a throng carrying flowers, and pushed through two double doors. It was the back way into the emergency department.
She cut down a narrow hallway and opened the door into a large supply closet. Her hands found the cool wall and she just stood there, slowing her breathing, trying not to throw up. She had gotten used to every hospital smelclass="underline" feces, urine, decaying flesh, vomit, the peculiar odor of disinfectant and putrification that attended many cancer patients. She never flinched. Right at that moment, she didn’t trust herself to move. She wasn’t thinking about the probable explosive reaction from Detective Dodds when she showed him the letter. Her hands splayed against the wall, she read the labels on the nearby drawer, silently moving her lips as she had in grade school until her teachers had stopped her.
The Mount Adams Slasher. She wasn’t even sure she had heard everything Will had told her after hearing those words. An avid newspaper reader, Cheryl Beth remembered the crimes vividly. All the nurses had been terrified. One of them lived a block away from one of the killings. Women had bought guns and big dogs. For three months, the city had seemed transformed into a terrifying stranger, familiar on the surface but with a sinister current running beneath it like a poisoned underground river.
Will Borders had worked on that case with Dodds-they were the “primaries,” he said; every profession had its jargon-and now he was telling her that the same killer had murdered Christine Lustig. And he might have seen Cheryl Beth as she walked out of the elevator into the darkened corridor that night. She knew a man had been arrested for the murders, but Will had been adamant. He hadn’t done it. The Slasher was killing again. Now, with the note she picked from Judd Mason’s trash, she knew who might have really done it. Her breathing was so shallow she was barely conscious of it. The nurse in her imagined how little of her lung capacity she was using, even worried she might be on the verge of hyperventilating.
That was when she caught sight of the large black shoes and white pants.
“Sorry,” she started, then raised her head to see that Judd Mason was standing there, just inside the doorway. It had been a long time since she had seen a nurse wearing whites at Memorial. His face showed that he knew she recognized him. “You’re an open book,” her mother had always said, derisively. Her mother didn’t know her.
Cheryl Beth stood straight up and walked toward the doorway but he didn’t move. “Excuse me,” she said. He just stood there. In the bright light of the supply room, she was more aware of the pallor of his skin, with a dark stubborn beard fighting to come out. His hair was nearly black and close-cropped, revealing a wide forehead. He just stared at her, his mouth compact and his lips nearly bloodless. His eyes were small, intense, and blue. She looked again briefly at his large shoes and imagined matching them to the imprints in her flower beds.
“Excuse me.” She said it louder this time, imagining how she might try to kick him in the groin and run past, or at least scream like hell. Inside she was shaking. He raised his right arm and leaned a hand against the doorjamb, further blocking her exit.
“You’re the one who discovered her body.” He looked her over. He displayed no sympathy or even the expression of a man who was attracted to her. His features were flat and immobile. “Had she suffered?”
She spoke quietly. “I’m going to go now.”
“You were spying on my car last night,” he said, his voice even and calm. “At first, I didn’t know who you were.”
“I wasn’t spying on anything,” Cheryl Beth said, using her best tough voice for standing up to a blockheaded doc or nurse. The problem was that she might be standing up to a killer.
“What were you looking for?”
“I wasn’t looking for anything.” She studied his face, reading nothing. “You worked with Dr. Lustig, didn’t you?”
“Are you the police?” The same steady voice, neither angry nor friendly.
She wanted to say, no, but the police will want to see you very soon. That was, if she could get out of this room with the purloined letter that was in the bottom left pocket of her lab coat. She looked past him into the corridor. Deserted. Not a sound. Only fifteen feet away was the busiest trauma center in southwestern Ohio. If only she could walk through walls.
He raised his arm and stepped aside. She walked past him, making herself move at a normal pace.
“You didn’t know her.” She heard his voice behind her. “I did.”
She turned and faced him. He was leaning against the wall, still staring at her.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
His lips turned up. “You were sleeping with her husband, but I guess all’s fair.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Cheryl Beth braced her shoulders as a sudden rage overcame her. No-she made herself cool down. She had the entire hallway behind her now, the entire hospital. He was more than an arm’s length away. She tried to take stock. He had obviously seen her looking into his car. He might even have surmised that she saw the letter-but maybe not. He didn’t realize she had it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We should talk. If you’d write down your number and a good time to call you, we can sort this out.”
“Hmmpf.” He shook his head. “You can find me. I’m in the directory.”
“I hear you used to work in the OR with Christine. What was that like?”
He studied her again. She imagined he was measuring the distance between them, but she refused to move. She folded her arms and stared back.
“You don’t know me. You didn’t know her. Let’s say we saw the world differently and leave it at that. When she was assigned to go to the SoftChartZ project, I wasn’t surprised.”
Now it was Cheryl Beth’s turn to just watch him. She felt strangely brave.
“Whatever you think you know is wrong.” His small eyes became smaller, darker.
“What do I know?” Cheryl Beth made herself laugh. “I’m just a small-town girl from Kentucky. Just the pain nurse.”
“She was a good doctor. She didn’t want to be in that basement office, you know. They moved her down there.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “By that time she’d broken it off with me. So I never found out.” It was said in the same flat, easy voice. He took a step toward her and Cheryl Beth retreated two steps. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”
“What doctor are you talking about?” Cheryl Beth tried to draw him out, her gambit to see his handwriting having failed. Say “Chris,” she thought, just like the salutation on the note.
Mason gave a tight smile. “Just a small-town girl who likes to play games. By the way, I thought you had been instructed to not discuss Dr. Lustig’s murder with anyone: colleagues, patients, and absolutely not the press.”
With that, he turned and walked away, striding through the double doors and out into the hospital.
Chapter Twenty-one
For days, Will had eyed the closet in the big rehab workout room with lust: it held walkers, crutches, four-footed canes and regular canes. He would walk again. He would make himself walk again, whatever noodles he now possessed in place of legs. This spinal cord, it was such a creation. His legs still had the same strong muscles that had existed before the tumor, before the surgery. But the signals couldn’t get through to them. Slowly, some were starting to come back. He did his usual walk up and down the wooden walkway, holding the parallel bars, as Amy guided him from the front and another physical therapist followed them with his wheelchair, in case he needed to suddenly sit. He wouldn’t consider such a defeat. His legs moved more easily, even if they still seemed almost detached from his torso. Amy held the multicolored gait belt she had cinched around his waist-he didn’t know how she could even slow his two hundred pounds if it started down, much less stop it, but the rules were the rules. Back and forth he walked, standing erect. It reminded him that he was a tall person.