The Pain Nurse - [17]

Ott was nearly shaking with anger. She took several deep breaths, sat at her desk, and rearranged a pile of papers. Her head shook fiercely. “My God, Cheryl Beth, what were you thinking?”

“What?”

“You’re involved in a homicide investigation. You have involved this hospital in a homicide investigation.”

“I found her,” Cheryl Beth said heatedly. “She was murdered here.”

“That’s not what Detective Dodds tells me. They are looking at you, Cheryl Beth. You. And to have become romantically involved with Dr. Nagle. That’s terribly unprofessional. Just…unconscionable.”

Cheryl Beth felt a burning on her ears and cheeks. She said nothing.

“Why did you go to Dr. Lustig’s office that night?”

“She left word for me. I told you. She asked me to come down.”

“In the middle of the night?” Ott’s voice rose. “So you were fighting with her over Dr. Nagle?”

“No. That was over a long time ago.”

“So what did she want?”

Cheryl Beth shook her head. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Dr. Lustig was a key member of our technology committee. She was working directly with SoftChartZ to bring this hospital into the twenty-first century. Now she’s gone.”

Cheryl Beth made herself say nothing. Any words bubbling up inside her would only make things worse, especially the ones that were careening around in her head at that moment.

Stephanie stared at her. “You have charmed a lot of the physicians here. I don’t get it, but that has given you tremendous freedom. But you have never charmed me. You’re a bull in a china shop with some powerful protectors. I’m going to be watching you even more closely.” Her shoulder pads quivered. “And if this matter is not resolved quickly… I will not tolerate this.” She leaned forward. “You are not to discuss Dr. Lustig’s murder with anyone: colleagues, patients, and absolutely not the press.”

Stephanie Ott turned to her computer screen and began furiously typing. “You can leave now.”

***

Cheryl Beth left the office and walked directly to the parking garage, barely containing her angry tears. God, she hated it when she cried. It made people think she was weak. Certain people. She had to get away from the hospital for a while. This, even though the work allowed her to momentarily forget Christine and the blood, that night in the basement, the yawning canyon in her life “before” and “after.” When she was helping patients she could be herself again. She tried not to think how badly she wanted a glass of whiskey. Five minutes later, she was back home.

Cheryl Beth’s small house backed up to a thick stand of trees. Beyond that, a park fell off toward Over-the-Rhine and downtown. But the incline began in her driveway. Her old, wooden garage was lower than the house, the result being that in the cold months she often parked nearer to the street, to keep from being stranded in the garage by an overnight ice or snowstorm. An oak stood in her small backyard, its branches overhanging the old garage. The location made her uneasy late at night. The park attracted unsavory characters, so even before Christine’s murder Cheryl Beth had avoided the tree line after dark.

So it had been days since she had pulled down the driveway. She went all the way down today and walked back through the cold, crisp air. She looked back at the house and felt centered again. She would get through this, through the horrible discovery in the basement of the hospital, and through the debris of her breakup with Gary. She would live in this house, enjoy her music and her gardening, watch the tiny perfection of birds from her porch, forget about men. No more blind dates set up by friends. No more waiting for the phone to ring. No married men, ever. She walked up the incline of the drive, admiring the flower beds that she had cleared of leaves. Even on her small city lot, she could fill dozens of bags with leaves every fall. The flower beds were the last touch. At least one thing in her life was neat, she thought, even as Stephanie Ott’s words burned inside her head. Maybe next year she would plant gardenias.

The indentations on the ground. She noticed them only on a second look, the realization that comes when the brain processes a mundane scene, one noticed a thousand times before, but this time something is subtly different.

She walked slowly back to the flower beds that stood beside the house. It was unmistakable, two footprints dug deep into the soil, just behind the hedge that stood at the corner of the house. They might as well have been the first footprints on Mars for the primal force with which they hit her. They were large footprints, fresh since she had cleared out the leaves. Someone had been standing there, easily concealed by the hedge. Since Christine had been murdered. Standing there where he could look through the large bay window into her living room.

Chapter Nine

The city rolled out beneath his feet, the bare, black trees thick on hills tumbling down to the Ohio River, the sky a dirty white blanket. Landmarks sprouted comfortingly: Carew Tower, a baby Rockefeller Center, dominating the jewel box of downtown skyscrapers, just as it had all of Will’s life, all his parents’ lives. The massive deco band-shell shape of Union Terminal stood against the Western Hills. The tower of St. Peter-in-Chains Cathedral. Closer in, the huge windows of the hospital solarium gave him a view of the crescent of tilting roofs of 150-year-old row houses, punctuated by all manner of church steeples. The vast rail yards connecting north and south ran along Mill Creek, and, beyond them, stood the old neighborhoods of the Germans and the Appalachian briars. All the green was drained out of the hills.