The Pain Nurse - [30]

“I don’t even know if it was real, understand? She came to me about a month ago and said she was getting calls, down in her office. The phone would ring and she’d answer and nobody would be on the line. I mean, nobody talked. But she was convinced they were there, just listening to her. She was a babe, okay? So what babe hasn’t gotten a breather at some point in her life? Anyway, talked to the telecom people, and we ran the times of the calls. They weren’t coming from inside the hospital. So all we could do was complain to the phone company and change her extension. We had a work order for that when she was killed.”

“That doesn’t sound like something a homeless guy would do,” Will said.

Dodds said, “Go back, Stan. You said ‘mostly.’”

He was hunched forward, his hands clenched together.

“About three days before she was killed, she came back to me and said there had been a call. Started out same as the rest. She answers and it’s dead air. Then she hears a whisper. Says she’s going to die. Hangs up. She was shaken up. I offered to call the police for her. But then she just changes, gets really icy. Says to forget it.”

“And you did.”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what it all means.” He sat back up and fanned his coat jacket. “It’s not going to be a problem, right? You’ll test the blade of Lennie’s knife. You’ll find Dr. Lustig’s blood on it. Look, I’ve got a meeting.” He stood. “What I told you was all off the record. I’ll deny it if you try to screw me, and you can just deal with the hospital’s lawyers.”

***

The door closed and Dodds shook his head. “Stan ‘Don’t Call Me David’ Berkowitz. The assholes always land well. It’s a shame he wasn’t good enough to get into homicide. Would have loved to have a homicide cop named after a serial killer.” Dodds folded Lennie’s weapon inside the evidence bag and yawned.

Will said quietly, “That’s not the knife.”

Dodds’ artillery shell of a head swiveled. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s not the knife. Did you really check her office? Like under the desk?”

Dodds stared at him. He’d seen the look before. Then Dodds stood, like a redwood suddenly appearing full-grown, and roughly grabbing the handles of Will’s wheelchair, rushing him out of the room, nearly banging his feet on the doorjamb. They burst into the hallway, nearly T-boning a patient bed being wheeled by, then almost running down two nurses who jumped aside. Dodds pushed the wheelchair fast while he bent down to Will’s ear.

“You fucker, you cocksucker, damn you all to hell, you’d better be pulling my chain. You’d better be in some drug-induced hallucination…”

“You know better. Slow down.”

“God damn you to hell, Borders.”

Dodds flashed his badge at the elevator bank, people cleared out, and they got a down-bound car all to themselves. “I ought to bring you up on charges, if you’ve been meddling in a crime scene. Bastard, bastard, bastard…” The doors opened into the darkness and Dodds sped them toward Lustig’s office, past the single bank of overhead lights. He stopped the wheelchair so hard Will was thrown forward.

“Don’t apply to be an orderly,” he said.

“Fuck you, fuck, fuck you,” Dodds mumbled. “Crime scene seal broken. Son of a bitch. There’s no chain of custody now, whatever the hell we find. This is worse than a rookie mistake. Without the seal on the door, any defense lawyer can say we just planted the evidence. We can’t prove chain of custody. The DA would have our jobs-what the hell am I saying: my job. I ought to use this Ka-Bar on you myself.”

“Calm down. Don’t open the door yet.” Will pointed to a strip of medical tape across the yellow seal. It had his initials written on it. “That’s me. Nobody’s been inside since.”

“You put that on there?”

Will nodded.

“After you broke the seal to go inside.”

“No. Actually, I followed you inside. You left and I was still in there.”

“Sneaky, fucking, cripple bastard.”

“So when I left I wanted to make sure the chain of custody was clean. So I got the tape, wrote my initials, taped it across where the seal was split. You see it.”

“I’m gonna arrest your ass right now.”

“I’m still a sworn officer.”

“Damn you to hell.” He slit the tape with a pocketknife, fumbled with a key, and swung open the door.

“It’s under the desk drawer, taped there with duct tape.”

Dodds moved to the desk, looking back angrily. “Did you take it out, touch it?”

“Sure. I also wiped it clean of prints.”

“Bastard. Asshole.”

Will thought about what Scaly Mueller had said about two old married people fighting, but it didn’t make him smile. He had a fleeting image of Cindy to add to the constant reminder of her leaving. Somehow he was lousy with partners.

Dodds produced a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket. He felt carefully under the center drawer of the desk. In a moment he pulled out a dark rectangle cradled in the duct tape that had held it to the bottom of the center desk drawer. He put it on top of the desk and carefully unwrapped the knife. Using an evidence envelope from another coat pocket, he meticulously slid the duct tape inside and sealed it. Then he opened the knife. It clicked into place with a sharp metal sound.