Danny settled into a sweatshirt and jeans before spreading out on the living room floor with his growing stack of paperwork, including the new information he’d requested from Lund. One stack of paper contained the mortality records from the Somerset Medical Center CCU for the time Charles Cullen worked there. The other stack listed Cullen’s shifts during that time. Danny cross-indexed the two, looking for a pattern.
He’d tried indexing patient deaths against Cullen’s birthday, those of his children and ex-wives and girlfriends, his parents and known siblings. Then Danny tried wedding anniversaries, divorce anniversaries, feast days, and holidays—anything that might correlate with the deaths, some rule of murder. The more items he added, the more ideas came to mind. Soon he was comparing the names of the deceased with Cullen’s family’s names, then comparing initials, then using the initials to spell words… Danny put the pad down and rubbed his eyes. It was four o’clock in the morning. What was the point? You throw enough variables into the mix, you can find a pattern in anything. The whole world was a code to the paranoid, but that didn’t give it meaning.
It was nearly dawn by the time Danny finally crawled into bed. He lay there for a few hours, awake behind his eyelids, still scrambling the numbers and letters to find a reason, as if reasons were what mattered.
Tim didn’t have the same responsibility for marshaling all the mind-numbing drugs and dates and details that Danny did as lead detective on this thing, but his head was still busy, doing the math on murder, the odds on catching their guy. They’d been grinding away on this thing for months already, but they were still feeling their way in the dark. Adding it up, Charles Cullen had been doing exactly this for sixteen years at ten different hospitals. The guy was a veteran in a field of homicide in which the detectives were just rookies.
Tim Braun had read up on the Internet about the medical murderer type—the two lady nurses who did it as a sexual thing, the orderly who killed patients to decrease his workload, the Kevorkian types, mercy killers, psychopaths, who knew what else. The FBI had specialists in Quantico who dealt with nothing else, agents and shrinks and guys who were both. Maybe the FBI had a whole file on guys like Cullen, a recipe box they could look at, with tips on how to catch one. Tim knew an FBI guy, maybe he could put them in touch with the Quantico experts. He didn’t know if it would help, but could it hurt? The promise let him get some sleep at least.
But when he brought the FBI idea up at the morning meeting, Prosecutor Forrest shot it down—they weren’t going to bring in anyone. Tim understood the ambition—you didn’t succeed as prosecutor by giving away your cases—but that didn’t mean he agreed with it. This close to retirement, Tim had the luxury of taking orders as suggestions, anyway.
Charlie had been out of work for a month already, his girlfriend was pregnant but wanted him to move out of her house, and he was in no mood to answer the phone. But then the voice on the machine was Amy’s, sympathetic Amy. She knew how he was, knew he was too spent to pick up, and knew to call back anyway. This time he picked up with a knowing “Hi.”
“Hi honey,” Amy said.
“Hi,” Charlie said.
“How are you?”
“Oh, good,” he sighed. “All right. Um, you know how it is… I applied for unemployment but they denied that.”
“Why? Why would they deny it?”
“Well,” Charlie said, “they’re saying, ah—because I put—I’m gonna appeal it but—”
“Yeah,” Amy said, “but if you’re terminated, can’t you get—I mean, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Well, I wasn’t employed for that long.”
“Well,” Amy said, “I’ll write you a reference, you know that. But what—you know, I, yeah, I was calling too because they’ve been asking weird questions. At the hospital.”
“And it’s like they’ve been, they’ve been kind of calling people in for, like, internal stuff? And, um, you know, somebody had, asked me about you.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. Waiting to hear where this was going.
“And, you know. I kind of—I kind of wanted to give you the heads-up about that.” Amy waited, hearing only breath on the other side of the phone, so she continued, “And they asked me, they were just asking me shit about certain patients and I can’t, you know, I can’t remember any of ’em, I can’t remember any of their names or… you know. And I was… I didn’t know. I didn’t know if they had been questioning you…”
“Right,” Charlie said. “Well, they…”
“ ’Cause I’m kind of… honestly, Charles, I’m a little bit nervous, that’s all,” Amy said. “Asking me just like stupid shit like, certain medications, and, you know, asking me about dig…”
“Well,” Charlie said, “there’s the one patient I recall, a Reverend something.”
“Right.”
“They had asked me about that patient, too. Ah, but again, I… I didn’t know anything about the patient. I had heard, ah, you know, ah, ah, Joan talk about it the following day or two—”
“Right.”
“But, um, you know, I—”
Amy cut him off. “I mean, is this something I should worry about or—”
“I—I don’t, I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “I mean, I think they’re probably talking to other people. I mean—I know the insulin thing, it’s going, it’s ongoing, so… I don’t know what’s happening with that.”
“They’ve really been talking,” Amy said. “And I know they’ve asked about you. I wanted you to be aware of that, because—I know that they’ve questioned other people and your name has come up. And, I, and, ah, you know—and I was mad. That’s when they put—when they pulled me in.”
“Right,” Charlie said.
“But you know me, I’m freaking nervous! I’m a worrywart. And I don’t have you around to make me feel better.”
“Yeah. Well, um, I don’t know if I’m the focus of their investigation,” Charlie says. “I mean… like I said, I’m terminated.”
Amy laughed, “Yeah, you’re already gone, dumbass!”
Listening in on a headset from the next room in the prosecutor’s office, Danny had to admit the girl was really a natural on the wire.