The Pain Nurse

Chapter Sixteen

Dr. Gary Nagle was a man with a secret and he wanted his girlfriend to lie for him. It didn’t matter much to Will, unless it would help focus Dodds’ mind, get him off his theory that Cheryl Beth had anything to do with the murder. Knowing Dodds, however, he realized this new information might cause him to wonder if Cheryl Beth and Nagle had acted together to eliminate a wife that was in the way. He would have thought the same, if all the evidence hadn’t pointed to the real killer. Nagle’s secret was a distraction. Any other explanation was too fantastic: that Nagle himself was the Slasher. And what? He killed the other women to throw the police off, in preparation for killing Christine Lustig? Will chuckled to himself as he wheeled down the empty hallway, back to another dreary night trapped in neuro-rehab. He didn’t even have a shower to look forward to-that wasn’t until tomorrow night. And he wouldn’t be expecting a morning visit from Cindy, ever again.

He rolled down the slight incline through another set of automatic doors and then he was in the old hospital tower, with its narrower hallways and drab, fading walls. He passed a waiting area that was empty except for one young man, wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a jacket. He was tapping into one of those personal data assistants-is that what they called them?-while he had an agitated conversation on the cell phone. He lowered his voice as he saw Will roll past. So many sad stories in the hospital.

In a minute he would reach the main elevator bank then take the elevator down to his “home.” But he had to pee like a sonofabitch. The feeling had come upon him suddenly, as it always did now. It was as if he were inhabiting someone else’s body and starting all over learning about it, and it sure as hell didn’t work as well as his old body, the one lost to the tumor. The hallway ahead of him mostly consisted of long, empty walls, white with pastel stripes, as if you followed them long enough they might lead to Oz or someplace wonderful. The one thing lacking was any sign of a restroom. But he reached a narrow corridor leading to the right with a restroom sign and an arrow. This passage was unlighted and he depended on the light coming in off the main hall to guide him. He glided in ten feet and touched the door. It opened and he turned on the lights. He desperately didn’t want to urinate on himself.

Now it was the tricky part. There had never been a graduation ceremony where he could get to the toilet by himself. It had just happened, with him on his own and the nurses so distracted with the worse-off patients. He couldn’t stand, of course. He angled the wheelchair by the toilet seat and locked the wheels into place. Next he kicked up the footrests-this took more doing with the one for his weak left leg-and slid himself to the edge of the seat. With one fluid motion he used the railing on the wall by the toilet to pull himself over. Then he took down his sweatpants and relieved himself. The bathroom lacked the usual call button with a long string, in case a patient fell and needed help. It was also ancient, with tile so old it was mottled with decades of dirt and efforts to remove it. Tile pieces were coming apart where they had retrofitted the handicapped railing into the wall. When he was done, he repeated the moves in reverse. One bad move and he would have been helplessly on the floor.

Ready…flex…shift. He was back in the chair. He washed his hands and used the hand sanitizer he had become obsessive about, knowing he was surrounded by germs and illness. When he backed the wheelchair out of the restroom he saw it. At the end of the short, dim corridor was an elevator door. He had been all over this part of the old tower but he never knew there was another elevator outside the big bank of six elevators at the center of the building. Now here was this: a small set of unmistakable elevator doors. The buttons were black and stuck out half an inch, something from the fifties maybe. This whole end of the corridor smelled like dust. He wheeled his way there and pressed the down button. He was surprised to hear a distant motor whirring.

The car arrived and the doors pulled back, revealing a long, narrow space. Unlike the spacious cars at the main elevators, this could fit at best one bed, maybe not even that. Whatever the small, rogue elevator’s purpose, it didn’t look as if it had been used much for years. Unlike the hospital, it had a distinct sour smell. A single fixture in the center of the ceiling provided light; it held a hundred dead bugs. The floor was broken linoleum, the color of dying winter lawn. The walls were linoleum bracketed by long metal strips. Once the walls must have been as white as an old nurse’s cap, but now they were fading, too. A dozen prominent scars told of years of banging carts and beds against them. Will wheeled the chair in and turned around. Down the hallway the main corridor of the hospital was known and safe. He looked at it a long time, keeping the doors open with his hand. Finally, he let them close with a creaky bang. He pressed the old black button that read B, and the car lurched, making a deep, echoing clang, then found its footing and began a smooth descent.

The door opened on the blackest dark he had ever experienced. The little overhead light of the elevator barely penetrated past the threshold. A musty smell assaulted his nose. The door started to close as if it didn’t want to linger in such blackness. Will dug into his fanny pack and pulled out the small flashlight he had kept in it since long before it became his bag of provisions in the hospital. Powered by two C-cell batteries, it was enough to illuminate a few feet in front of him. Still, he hesitated and stayed in the elevator car, keeping the door open. Ahead of him was a ten-foot-deep space with scuffed gray walls and rubber mats over a broken gray linoleum floor. No light switch was visible. Then the space made an abrupt right turn.

Will hadn’t been afraid of the dark since he was six years old. He had to banish that fear to take care of his younger brother, who had night terrors. It was a good attribute for a policeman, who might be alone in the empty night inside one of the abandoned industrial cathedrals of Cincinnati. But he still hesitated, studying the utilitarian walls ahead of him, somehow comforted by the fragile light of the elevator car. But there were questions. Questions he and Dodds had never answered. It had been that kind of case. The door banged against his hand and the car started buzzing. Will clenched the small flashlight in his teeth and wheeled himself out onto the rubber mat. The elevator closed behind him and he was alone, armed with the small cone of light.

His hands pushed lightly, moving the well-machined wheels of the wheelchair forward. He stopped at the angle and took the flashlight in his hand to play across the next space. A nearby wall held an old time clock. Like so many antiques, it had a black metal plaque with the manufacturer’s name and “Cincinnati, Ohio.” So many things used to be made in this city. The clock was broken at 12:13 and covered with dust. He made a quick sweep with the light and at first thought this might have been an old kitchen. It was a large room with tile walls, metal shelves, large sinks, and what looked like freezer doors. Water and rust stains marked the walls. A rickety wooden ladder sat askew against one. The silence wrapped around him.

But it was no kitchen. It was a morgue.

A shiver slithered up his left shoulder blade to his neck. It was a silly thing. He had been in countless morgues. Here, the distinctive porcelain autopsy tables were still in place. In new postmortem labs they tended to be stainless steel and fancy. This place was old and probably hadn’t been used in years. The old elevator must have been used to bring down the dead, out of the sight of families and patients. Still, the smell of decaying flesh lingered. Will gave it a once-over with the flashlight and rolled toward a set of double doors.

He knew he was on borrowed time. The pain meds Cheryl Beth had given him would soon wear off and he was far from the nurses’ station in neuro-rehab. He pushed the chair to the double doors. They were secure, but he noticed the remains of a push bar. The bar was gone but the lever was still in place. He leaned against it and the doors gave way. Now he was in a long, wide, dark corridor, but a bank of fluorescent lights was visible maybe a hundred feet away. And suddenly he knew exactly where he was.

Christine Lustig’s office was a hundred and twenty feet straight ahead. Cheryl Beth had walked down this hallway alone that night, finding a nude body with dozens of slash marks. She might have seen the doctor’s clothes folded neatly on a desk or a shelf. Did she scream that night, out into the empty dark hallway? Did the killer know Cheryl Beth was going to be there?

Will turned back to the doors to the old morgue. They were tightly locked and the buttons on the latches refused to budge. But when he trained the beam of the flashlight on where the doors joined, he saw how the lock could easily be picked. He was playing a hunch, a long shot. But it might not only answer a question about the night Lustig was killed, but also one of the most puzzling issues about the Mount Adams Slasher. He fished in the fanny pack and pulled out a slender black-and-silver object. He pressed his thumb against the button and a blade flashed out and locked into place. It was a switchblade he had taken off a suspect years ago and he had kept it. It was illegal and useful in tough situations. Will slipped the blade between the doors and easily released the latch. He pulled the door open and wheeled himself back inside. He discovered the lights and, using the knife instead of his fingers, turned them on. Gradually the old fluorescents came alive, giving the spacious room a yellow-green tint. He carefully studied his surroundings.

A newer plastic wastebasket sat by one shelf. Inside were torn condom wrappers and used condoms. Some of the living had been having fun down here. He wheeled himself to the dozen freezer drawers, lined in two rows one on top of the other. He pulled down his sleeve to cover his hand to keep his fingerprints off the handles and began opening the doors. The refrigerator hadn’t been on in years and the decaying flesh smell worsened. Meanwhile, pain was starting to radiate out of the middle of his back like mercury rising in a thermometer on a summer day. It scared him more than the old morgue around him.

Just a little more time. A little more…

It was the drawer on the lower tier, one drawer in from the left. Will slowly pulled out the body tray, making a loud metal-on-metal racket. Just inside was a black trash bag. He carefully folded back the bag and saw the bloody clothes. Using the switchblade, he poked through the fabric until he found something solid. The knife hooked into it and Will pulled. The blade had caught on a lanyard used to hold an ID card. It was the kind of hospital identification Will had seen on every employee at Cincinnati Memorial. This one was caked with dried, dark blood, but not so much that Will couldn’t see the photo of a beautiful, auburn-haired woman and the lettering. It said Christine D. Lustig, MD.