The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (20 page)

He pulled a 10 cc syringe from his scrubs pocket and injected four ampoules of insulin into the port of Mr. Strickland’s IV, throwing the syringe and ampoules in the sharps bin. Then he signed out and went home. He never saw Mr. Strickland go through his convulsions, but he had the commute to imagine.

He arrived early the next day, still September 22. Charlie walked quickly by Stickland’s room and glanced in. The man, or someone, was still in the bed. In the hall he checked the chart, using the mobile Cerner, staying away from the nursing station and the chitty chat. It was 7:05, only minutes into
his shift, but he couldn’t wait. He wheeled the cart back to the nurses’ station for the shift change.

Charlie sometimes had no patience for these details, but he did today. The day nurses colored in the details of the numbers Charlie had seen on Strickland’s Cerner screen.

Mr. Strickland’s blood sugar had been routinely tested that morning. The lab had found zero glucose in the sample, and assumed there had been an error. A man couldn’t survive on zero blood sugar. They did not imagine that Strickland had already been hypoglycemic for over three hours. As the morning wore on, Strickland’s sugar-starved brain began eating itself.

Strickland’s daughter arrived midday, this time with her older, teenage son. Charlie had seen the boy before and generally tried to avoid him during visiting hours. Apparently, it was he who first noticed something wrong with his grandfather.

The boy had seen a slight twitch in Strickland’s arm. That’s how it started. At first, it was hardly perceptible. But as the day wore on and Mr. Stickland’s glucose reserves wore out, the twitch gained and globalized, until Mr. Strickland was in full seizure. Even the most hardened of veteran day nurses said it was truly horrifying—the man thrashing in his bed, the alarms screaming, the family yelling for somebody please to do something. Strickland was now grinding and frothing like he’d bit a live wire as his brain’s temporal lobe pulsed in spasm. The nurses had pumped Mr. Strickland with glucose all day, but the man kept crashing. The son pointed at the expensive medical equipment demanding, “What the hell are these machines for?”
¹

Charlie pulled up the Cerner computer and went through Strickland’s numbers again, reliving the code and the patterns, the echoes of his voice. Then Charlie went back to the Pyxis machine, to think on someone else. Mr. Strickland would survive, at least in body. He’d remain at Somerset. It took two weeks before Charles Cullen finally finished Mr. Strickland with a midnight dose of dig.
²
But dig didn’t appear anywhere on Strickland’s chart, and it wasn’t in Charlie’s Pyxis requests either. Nor did any canceled dig orders appear on his Pyxis. Charlie was good.

Each patient presented a variety of symptoms that could be treated, or exacerbated, by any number of drugs on the ward. Later, he would recall only a handful. Like Melvin Simcoe, from back in May, a corporate manager with four grown children, to whom Charlie gave sodium nitroprusside
until his blood was thinned to uselessness. And Christopher Hardgrove, a drug user who had arrived on the CCU already largely brain-dead. And Philip Gregor, whom he had poisoned and coded but did not quite kill. And Frances Agoada, whose blood sugar spiked dangerously after Charlie delivered an overdose of insulin, and Krishnakant Upadhyay, whose heart he had stopped, as he had Mr. Strickland’s, with massive doses of dig.

Really, the variations were nearly endless, especially on the CCU. There was no reason to stop. And so Charlie didn’t. After sixteen years, it was still that simple.

PART II

29

E
very case starts with a call. Dispatch sends a marked car, and the uniforms look over the bodies, sort accidents from suicides and what they call “natural deaths.” When it’s none of those, when they can’t say for sure what the hell happened, they call Homicide.

Each body is a death, but not every death is a crime scene. Generally, the very young are accidents, the very old are natural deaths, and almost everyone else gets shot—at least, that was how it panned out in Newark. Suicides don’t always look like suicides. For the bodies that come off one of the housing towers, the question becomes: did he jump or was he pushed? Statistically, the depressed don’t leap, they fall. You take out the tape and check the charts. If it’s a shooting death and the gun’s still there, that’s a possible suicide, too, no matter how many bullet holes. Bodies on the corner are almost always murder, bodies on the tracks are a mess, and bodies in the river are mysteries. You hear stories of cops poking floaters back out into the Passaic toward another jurisdiction.

The detective on call takes whatever comes during his twenty-four-hour shift. He might get lucky and catch none, but one night, when he still worked Newark, Tim Braun caught four. In those days, he seemed to attract bodies. If he was in the box, he got them. That’s the way it works in most precincts: It’s up to the detective to figure the priority of the cases, but every new murder shuffles the deck. The top case is the “redball,” the one everyone wants off his desk, the one that needs to just go away. In Newark, if the news cameras were on the scene before Tim, it was definitely a redball. If a child or some mayor’s shithead son was involved: redball. But that could change.
Redball
is a temporary designation, a hot hand that can go cold quick, and every new murder reshuffles it. Every new body changes the priorities. Each call resets the clock.

T
he first bodies Tim Braun ever saw were when he was working as a security guard at Saint Barnabas Medical Center, his hometown megahospital in Livingston, New Jersey. Tim was still a teenager, vigorous and bulletproof, and the elderly bodies weren’t real bodies to him—they were just anonymous husks, weight that “Big Tim” carried whenever a cute nurse asked. The first body that mattered came later. Tim was a new cop on patrol, a uniform responding to a call; a fisherman led him through the reeds near the river. The guy in the mud was dressed in ordinary clothes. He had pockets and shoes. He was normal but for the red line across his neck and the spine flashing white like a broken smile. He was a victim, what they called a vic. It can sound crass to someone outside law enforcement, but the language of the death business is intentionally impersonal. See too much, feel too personal a connection, and the job becomes impossible. But Tim hadn’t learned that yet. That fall Tim took the tests to transfer to Newark, heading toward a career in Homicide.

Newark in the 1990s was the center of the murder universe, “the most dangerous city in America,” according to
Time
magazine, and one of the most corrupt, according to everybody else. If you worked in the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office you were a detective, and being a detective was a lifestyle, loaded guns and good suits and cop bars that never closed. Tim imagined himself finally chasing bad guys, the way he imagined it as a little kid, the way his dad had done as a Livingston cop. At first, Tim was always at work, or at least never at home, and partying around the clock. The adrenaline was highly addictive. Detectives were like rock stars with guns. The badge gave you license, and some of the guys abused it. For quiet nights, Tim kept a cold case of Miller and an extra box of bullets in the car, and usually ran through both before the sun came up. His marriage began to suffer, or so he heard later—at the time, he didn’t worry about that, or much else. Shifts ran around the clock. Booze helped push everything else to the side, until finally that overwhelmed him, too.
¹
Three months after stepping into Essex he asked for a three-month leave. He spent his thirtieth birthday in “a jitter joint,” traded the beer for a judo black belt, and came back clean and ready to take on Newark as a homicide detective.

The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office had just ten detectives to cover some four hundred calls a year. Braun was fighting a guerilla war in which
every civilian was a potential enemy. It was fun at first, but like most detectives, Tim found it almost impossible not to blur the line between that violent world and his personal life. Newark was a brutal place. In Livingston, Braun got written up every time he swore at a civilian; in Newark he discovered that people were grateful to get away without a beatdown, and that the occasional complaints that did make it to the station house were regarded as noise, quickly swept away by the overwhelming flow of cases. Tim learned on the job, put in his years, and racked up medals. He learned that it didn’t matter whether the body turned up on the river or on the tracks or on the corner, because 99 times out of 100 whatever happened started with drugs and ended with a gun. He learned that when he made a call to inform a mother about her son’s death: as soon as Mama’s tears dried, she asked about the free money. Tim didn’t understand how they all seemed to know that the state paid victims’ families or why, afterward, those families seemed to stop caring. Ninety-nine times out of 100, the family never called the number on his business card, never asked him,
Did you get the bad guy?
He didn’t think about how the Newark projects taught these mothers to expect violent death or prison for their children, he just thought:
They don’t care, but I’m supposed to? That’s fucked up.
And every day was just more dead kids, with always more to come. But after a while, it wasn’t always clear who the bad guys were any more.

One case in particular marked the beginning of the end for Tim. It started as an unusual case, a crime on the street but not a street crime, and probably a redball only because the victim was white and middle class, with a nephew in the State Police. Ethel Duryea was a respected fifty-year-old nurse who got gunned down on the sidewalk of an affluent Newark suburb. A jogger found her body in the snow, her purse laying untouched next to her. There were no witnesses, no leads, no suspects, and no clues other than the bullet itself. Tim got the call but it was a stone-cold whodunnit. It took a year before Tim was able to connect the bullet to the gun that fired it, another six months before he connected the gun to a multi-million-dollar insurance scam. Somebody in the emergency rooms of local hospitals was selling privileged patient information to local slip-and-fall lawyers. And some of those lawyers had some political juice in Newark. It was starting to look like Nurse Duryea’s murder was a hit on a whistleblower. Tim was told by his superiors to leave it alone. When he ignored the warnings, he was temporarily rotated out of Homicide, put on what Tim called “the rubber gun squad,” working the courthouse.

Gradually he got the picture; the cold case was going to stay cold, or Tim could forget his pension. But something about Duryea’s case had clicked for him, the way his first murder did. Tim had gotten close to the victim’s family and was personally invested in catching her killer. He had spent all of his energy ignoring the world he inhabited, and had never learned what all the families in the projects already seemed to know, that not every bad guy got got. He had thought his job was helping put Ethel Duryea’s ghost to rest. His real job, as he now realized, was only to service the machinery of power. He could sweep the streets, bust street kids, but he could never mess with the machine itself. The redball had gone cold, and neither the family nor the press would know that he’d found the gun that had killed Ethel Duryea.
²
But Tim knew. And while it seemed too crazy to admit, he was certain that the ghost of Ethel Duryea knew, too. She was still out there, a blur at the edge of his field of vision. She wasn’t a vic—she was a woman in a bloody nurse’s uniform, sitting on his conscience. Soon enough it showed up the side of his arm, too, in the form of a rash the size of a cigarette burn. Each day it grew, until the shingles covered a whole side of his body. For ten years since he’d stopped drinking, Tim had never taken a single sick day. Now he started dipping in. He spent time with his wife Laurie and his young son Connor, thinking and praying. Then he got the hell out of Newark.

Thirty minutes down the Garden State Parkway the blacktop got blacker, the roads smoother. Exit 140A to US 22, Somerville, New Jersey, Somerset County. There were no gang colors on the corner, neat little houses with American flags and porches instead of ghetto towers, and a gleaming new county prosecutor’s office across from a historic town square. Somerset was the richest county per capita in New Jersey—the fourth wealthiest in the country. It was the sort of place where a guy could tap the brakes and slow down as he crossed the finish line to his pension.

The Somerset County Homicide job offered better pay for less work and less danger. He had an office with a door that closed and a padded desk chair that tilted all the way back. He kept the cold case taped up in a cardboard box in his closet. He told himself that Nurse Duryea’s ghost would understand. At the age of forty-two, Tim thought he was slowing down, headed toward stop.