The Pain Nurse - [23]

“Is that why she was put on the computer project?”

“You mean to get away from patients for awhile? Maybe. She actually asked for the assignment, and she became a real advocate. I called her Tech Head, she became such a geek. She traveled to other hospitals and studied their systems. SoftChartZ is pioneering electronic patient records. Digital medicine. Christine was a believer. Don’t kid yourself. This is what’s got Stephanie’s panties twisted, that the project might be delayed now. Not that she gives a damn about how much paperwork you do. But the docs in the neurosurgery practice are screaming for computerized records, and they’re the ones who still bring real money into this benighted place.”

“So who in this long list of enemies was capable of killing Christine?”

“Oh, Cheryl Beth. How would I know that?”

“Because you know everything, Dr. Carpenter.”

“What, you’re a detective now?”

“Someone has to be. This cop, Dodds-I have a really bad feeling about him. He just looks at me like he thinks I did it, like I’m hiding something.”

“Are you?”

A shot of defensiveness stiffened her before he laughed.

“I’m serious, doctor. I feel like I need to do something, get him some information. And Stephanie, too. You should have seen how she went off on me.”

“The detective talked to me. I told him you couldn’t have done it.”

“See! He has it in his head that I killed her!”

“Cheryl Beth, this is a big old urban hospital. And we have all the problems of an urban hospital. Yesterday, I saw a guy in a stairwell, dressed in rags, just walking up and down the stairs. He said his dead mother was chasing him, and didn’t I see her? He was shaking and bawling. Scared the hell out of me. I called security, and it turned out he was just another street person who wandered in here for warmth. He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, off his meds, hearing voices. Good Lord.”

He stopped. Then, “Do you know how much of this hospital has been closed down the past decade? There are old, abandoned parts of this place that I’ve never even been to, that the security guards don’t even know about.”

“They’re probably all my old shortcuts,” she said.

“You know I studied here when I was a medical student? This was back in the Stone Age, when they had real wards, just long rows of beds separated by curtains. But it was great training. Young docs today, most of them don’t really know how to listen to heart sounds. They don’t get a chance. Hearts get fixed. People don’t get rheumatic fever. Back then, we’d get lots of public health cases, lots of people with heart murmurs. It was great to be a student. The old basement, that’s where the morgue was. It’s so isolated. Why they would put offices down there, much less even put a woman alone in an office there…?” He shook his head. “It was just a horrible, random act.”

That didn’t make her feel better. She said, “So what about the footprints in my flower bed?”

He smiled, half to himself, staring at the floor. At first Cheryl Beth thought he was patronizing her and she grew angry. Then he spoke in a different voice. “The irony of the whole thing is that Christine was quite the sexual predator. She had cheated on Gary for years, and not with just one person. She was hardly the victim, however much I am baffled by your taste in men. I’ll just leave it at that.”

For a moment, Cheryl Beth was conscious of her every swallow and breath. She made herself smile and gently punch Dr. Carpenter in the arm. She said, “Don’t tell me you and Christine…?”

“Not my taste,” he said. “And my conquests are vastly over-imagined by some of my coworkers, not that I’m complaining… Cheryl Beth?”

She realized she had just been standing there silently staring at the wall.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “The way Christine was cut. It was done with such rage. I’ve never seen anything…not in the ER…not anywhere. It could have been…”

He spoke quickly. “I probably said too much.”

“It could have been a spurned lover.”

“Cheryl Beth…”

“It could. My God, it could have been a lover’s angry wife. A woman could be strong enough to do that…”

She stopped instinctively when his name came over the paging system.

“You.” He put his arm around her. She didn’t feel intimidated. It felt good, just to be touched. “You, my intense friend, need to go home and get some rest. But first, come with me to the party, get something in your stomach.”

“Doctor’s orders?”

“Absolutely.” He took her arm and they walked.

Chapter Eleven

Gravity was his enemy. Anything dropped to the floor was lost. A pen, a book, a pill. A towel, a water cup, a dollar bill. He couldn’t pick it up because he couldn’t stand, much less bend down. His only recourse was to ask a nurse to retrieve it, or ask Cindy. But she wouldn’t be coming back. He had lost her just as surely as if she had fallen out of his hands to earth, his useless legs unable to let him follow her. The morning had been slow and difficult, as he had pulled on his T-shirt and sweatpants, then, in greater agony, socks and shoes. Cindy had bought him workout shoes with Velcro snaps, to avoid the near impossibility of holding his legs in place long enough to tie shoes. Then he had angled the wheelchair close to the bed and locked each wheel in place, while he carefully pushed himself into a sitting position and maneuvered to the edge of the mattress.