The Pain Nurse (Will Borders: Cincinnati Casebook 1)

“You’re quite an artist.”

“My dad said it was a waste of time. It’s come in handy on a crime scene or two.”

Now she was the one fighting back tears. “Thank you.”

She unbuc

kled her seat belt and then undid his. “I can’t let you take that inside.” She pointed to the gun.

“There’s a killer on the loose.”

She gave a slight smile and shook her head.

“I’m a police officer.”

“Well, right now the pain nurse is pulling rank.” She opened the glove box and he reluctantly slid the holster and pistol inside. She closed it carefully and locked it.

“Do you trust me, Cheryl Beth?” He turned as much as he could to face her. He looked drained and yet still handsome. She leaned over and kissed his cheek.

“I don’t know,” she said, and opened the door to get the wheelchair.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Cheryl Beth took Will into the neuro-rehab unit, signed the paperwork that showed he had been returned to the ward, and went back to her car. The streetlights illuminated the sleet descending in thousands of vertical needles. Inside the car, she looked again at the makeshift Christmas card, then carefully tucked it into her purse. She smiled and shook her head. She would have to think about this man with his wavy hair and undercover idealism, his surface calm and inner fires.

She pulled carefully out from the overhang and waited while a black SUV sped past. She followed it as it reached the spot where the street hit an abrupt downgrade. Fortunately, she was driving slowly, deep in thought, letting several car lengths gather between them. Suddenly the red taillights ahead of her danced to the left, back to the right, and momentarily out of sight, only to be replaced by headlights. It was the same SUV. The hill had frozen and the vehicle lazily looped its way around and down until it crashed into a parked car. The muffled sound of smashing metal and composites reached her ears. She stopped immediately, called 911 and tried to back up. The road under her offered traction. Ahead was a down-bound street of black ice. She reversed the Saturn and drove around the level drive into the employee garage. She would work until the city came to put salt on the hill and clear away whatever other hapless drivers went down the slalom. She parked and double-checked that the glove box, with its lethal cargo, was locked. Five minutes later, she was inside her cramped office, leafing through the latest paperwork.

Cheryl Beth worried about her patients, especially at night, even when another nurse was covering for her. They came as impersonal consult sheets: a thirty-three-year-old male, motorcycle accident, with fractures of one femur, his pelvis, and elbow. He denied he was in pain and refused to ask for medication. When she talked to him she got little, but his body language was a vivid storyteller, the way he didn’t want to move, the set of his face. He had a name: Ron Morton, he was from Dayton, worked in an auto plant, and his dad had taught him never to show pain, never complain. She could only gauge the time between injections by the look on his face.

A forty-six-year-old female with ovarian cancer, metastasized throughout her abdomen and liver. Her name was, with cruel perversity, Hope—Hope Mundy and she wanted to live to see her daughter graduate from high school. The doc had her on a continuous morphine drip, which also left her in a stupor. When it was cut back she moaned all the time, and the other patients complained. Cheryl Beth adjusted the doses daily, sat with her and listened, taught her how to relax through her breathing, put cool compresses on her forehead.

The new consults came every day. Pain made people angry, stoic, sometimes darkly comic. The woman in the busy ER who had screamed, “Who do I have to give a blowjob to, to get an epidural.” Fortunately, Cheryl Beth had learned how to give epidurals years ago, so no oral sex was required. Often they were in the cruelest agony. They were grateful for the smallest things. Some days she thought it would drive her insane, especially when the suffering was caused by the hospital’s inattention. Most days she knew she could help them. Sometimes she caught addicts, trying to scam new pain meds.

She always had the hardest cases: the most painful shootings, stabbings, chest tubes, spinal and lower back problems, abdominal surgeries, and cancers. It seemed as if Will’s job had been that way, too. But his “consults” were dead people. His symptoms were “MOs.” She was still on a high from the day: the latent danger of the jail, the way Will had elicited information from Lennie and Darlene. She would make a good detective, he had said. She doubted that. If she did his job, she would be too haunted by the ghosts of the dead and their very live, hurting families. She would be afraid of getting hurt. But just like her job, to do it well, he must have relied on skill, instinct, and, truth be told, bending the rules when it was necessary to help people.

She tried to think systemically about all she had seen and heard, as if it were a new consult. And she tried to listen to her gut. Will seemed so sure: the killer was this Bud Chambers. He was sure of it as a police detective, and surer of it as the avenger for the woman he had loved. It was still not so clear to Cheryl Beth. Her mind was branded with the memory of finding Christine—why would this man have killed a doctor he didn’t even know? It was branded with the brief note she had dug out of Judd Mason’s trash, written in the neat script. Obviously the police had found more about this strange, silent man—Mason was in jail for the murder. But, even there, she just wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure. What about Gary? He had lost his mind—enough to kill Christine? Yet she knew Gary’s doctorish scrawl and he was incapable of writing as clearly as the script on the threatening note. Then there was Denise’s self-described paranoid thought about the digital medicine project—it could have threatened any of the medical personnel at Memorial with something to hide, whether it was mistakes or stealing drugs.

And what of Will? She was growing too fond of him. But could he have killed Theresa in a rage? Was he capable of that? She had made mistakes judging men before, but it was hard for her to believe. It was impossible to believe he had killed the two other girls, and then somehow come right out of the ICU and murdered Christine.

It had to be Judd. Why else would he have retrieved the note and tried to dispose of it?

She leafed through the roster of the circulating nurses. Judd Mason had most recently spent two months in the pediatric ward. She grabbed her purse, turned off the lights, locked the door, and walked to the other side of the hospital, to the peds ward.

The hospital was emptying out for Christmas. Everyone wanted to be gone, and patients tried hard to get discharged. With visiting hours winding down, the normal crunch of people in the hallways was missing. The PA system, without its seemingly unending summonses of doctors and trauma teams, seemed more omnipresent by its silence. Only the most serious cases were here. Those, and the forgotten and abandoned. She waved and made small talk as she passed the nurses’ stations, but nothing could stop the constricting in her throat and chest as she neared the bright blue-and-yellow doors. She would walk in briskly, say hello, and look over some of Judd’s charts. If anyone asked, she would say one of the docs wanted her to double-check something. She would not look at the abundance of donated toys in the play areas and waiting rooms. She would not look into the rooms, or into the frightened, haunted eyes of the parents. She would avoid the doctors who had, as a matter of course, to tell mothers and fathers that their children were dying.

They had named her Carla Beth, after Andy’s mother, with Cheryl Beth’s middle name. After her, Cheryl Beth couldn’t have another child; it had been a difficult delivery, a wondrous result. She had the wheat-colored hair that Cheryl Beth had as a little girl, before it had darkened, and she had loved unicorns and the color yellow and laughing. And Carla Beth was dead before her fourth birthday. And it was a story she would tell no one. It belonged to her. The grief and guilt and bottomless sorrow, the lock of her hair, her last expression—hers alone. Andy returned to Corbin, remarried, and had three children. Cheryl Beth stayed in Cincinnati. When people asked if she had children, she would simply say no. Every person in this hospital had been stunned by calamity, and why should she be different? She had to make the decision between sitting in a chair, staring at a wall, and waiting to die, or returning to her life helping people. But she coul

d not work peds. She could barely stand to be in the ward.

She leafed through the charts looking for one with Judd Mason’s signature. She found it on the fifteenth chart. The details of the case—she made herself skip over them. But the chart contained several pages written by Mason. The handwriting was not the same as on the note to Christine, not at all. She slammed the chart shut, shelved it, and nearly ran from the ward.

***

The Starbucks in the lobby was already closed by the time she got there. She was hoping to grab a cup of coffee that was better than the swill at some of the nurses’ stations.

“Hi, there.”

She knew she had jumped when she heard the voice, but she instinctively smiled as she turned and faced the young man. He was seated at one of the tables.