The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (36 page)

After the tape-up Amy excused herself to the bathroom and locked the door. Quiet. She planted her purse across the sink and studied herself in the mirror. She looked the same. But wasn’t there a hint of her secret mission, the secret-agent gizmo?

Amy shot herself a fierce look, the kind she’d flash her daughter to get her to behave. She fixed her hair and then felt silly about it and unfixed it. Then she flicked the light and stepped back out onto the homicide floor, wired for sound.

A
my had set the lunch date with Charlie and tried to keep it short. Charlie had wanted off the phone anyway. He said it was probably bugged. That seemed to amp the romance of their rendezvous for Charlie. In fact, it was Amy’s phone that was tapped.

Afterward Amy called Tim with the details on the meet, at an Italian restaurant called Carrabba’s. Tim was impressed—the girl was choosing food she actually wanted to eat, thinking not just about bringing down her friend as a serial killer but about expensing some homemade sausage, too.
Hell, Amy wasn’t just the most fun CI he’d ever run, she might even be the best, he thought. If the girl ever wanted to quit nursing, she’d make one heck of a cop.

The detectives had outlined the plan in the squad room earlier that afternoon. The goal was to have Amy draw Cullen over the state line so they could put the nippers on him in New Jersey, to avoid the extradition process. While they were at it, they’d put Amy on a wire, hoping to God she could get Cullen to talk. But when Tim and Danny drove over to scout the location, they found Carrabba’s closed. It was an accident, but a good one. Meeting at a closed restaurant, seeming to switch it up on the fly—if Cullen was paranoid, this would make it look unplanned.

Tim and Danny set up in the unmarked Crown Vic, parked idling in a vantage spot. They saw Amy get out of her car, Charlie come in from his blue Escort, the two of them saying hi and complaining about the restaurant being closed. By the time Danny had gotten her tuned in on the box she was back in the car again, Charlie following in his. The detectives rolled with them.

A
my was freaking. She could drive, turn the key, press the gas and use the signal, but she couldn’t hear the signal, or anything except the wooly whoosh of blood in her ears. She tried a few sentences out loud—to herself, to the gods, to the detectives—telling them she was on her way to a new location, a place called The Office, trying to be official. And then when that two seconds was over she decided,
Screw it,
and cranked the dial on the stereo, letting a solid sonic wall of FM power metal wash it all away.

Amy saw Charlie’s little car still wobbling in her rearview as she signaled right into the Office parking lot, felt a fresh spike of panic over the challenge of parking between yellow lines, and killed the engine to inhale a half second of silence.

Then she bobbed to the rearview, shot herself a
Be Cool
look and sprung out into the air, calling, “
Hi, sweetie!”

59

T
he wireless unit was borrowed from Narcotics. They both knew it was a piece of shit, a tool not much used on the mean streets of Somerset County but hopefully good enough. They heard a car door slam, greet-greet
Hi-Hi
chitter-chatter and double doors into restaurant noises, the rhubarb of laugh and talk, bright sounds of tine and plate. They heard Amy ask for a quiet booth,
Good girl
. Tim and Danny slid reflexively into their leather buckets listening hard.

H
i hon-ney, how are you?”

Charlie winces at the December sun. “Oh, all right,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Oh-kay.”

Amy nods at the bloody nicks below his nose and lip. “Well, you shaved.”

Charlie rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I shaved too closely.” He touches his chin, feeling dried blood. “I shaved once, then I looked at myself in the mirror, said, Oh my god! With my glasses on.”
¹

They push through the double doors into the good-time décor, a beer-o-clock theme with hanging mugs for regulars and tables out behind. Amy now takes another look at Charlie. The too-close double-shave, the new haircut and, okay—he
did
look like he’d dressed for a date.

“Look at you!” Amy says. “With the decked-out shirt.”

“I know,” Charlie says. Despite the December weather, he was in dated tropical wear—a loose shirt in the same ice-cream white as his pants and shoes. “I’m all white.” If not for the repeating jungle leaf print running along one side of the shirt, he might have been in uniform.

Amy tells the hostess they’re playing hooky from work, sneaking smiles at Charlie, making it fun as they follow the waitress to the back of the bar. Charlie and Amy slide into opposite sides of a vinyl booth.

“So,” Charlie says, jumping right in. “They were talking about me on the radio.”

“Wait—
when
?”

“Oh, when I was driving here,” Charlie says. He’d been following the news closely for several days. Newark
Star-Ledger
reporter Rick Hepp had an unnamed source confirming that the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office was investigating a string of possible homicides at Somerset Medical Center, with an unnamed local male nurse as the lead suspect. The news leak had exploded from there, gathering scope and juicy specificity by the hour. “I was listening to the classics station, it was a local station, like 99, a local oldies station. Or, it was—”

“And it said…?”

“My name,” Charlie says. “ ‘Charles Cullen.’ And, you know, and the other one, 101.5, it just mentioned that it was a nurse. I’d read it too, before—the investigation, they’d mentioned it.”

“And this is…”

Charlie had been following himself in the papers. “The Newark
Star
.
²
And I read it in the
Morning Call
—it’s a local paper—that they’d contacted the nurse’s employer, what they thought would be the employer, and—what they thought—that’s Montgomery, so…”

“Oh, Montgomery,” Amy says. “Is that—”

“How’s everybody doing today?” the server, Joel, asks. “Maybe you folks wanna start off with a couple drinks?”

Charlie glances at Amy, unsure. Amy’s having a Corona. But Charlie’s been sober for weeks now. He promised his daughter he’d stay that way.

“Um, yeah,” Charlie says. “Um… Miller? Or Michelob?”

“We have Michelob Ultra.”

“Yeah,” Charlie says quickly. “Good, good…”

“That’s, like, low-carb, dude,” Amy says.

“Oh is it?” Charlie says. “Oh, ha-ha. No no no, not that. I’ll have a Corona.”

Charlie waits until the waiter is gone before he continues. “Yeah, and so my eldest is thirteen,” he says. “So I just told her, I took care of that.”

“So you just told her… because you were worried it was going to hit the papers?”

“Well, I didn’t talk to her until a couple of days ago,” Charlie says. “When they took me up for questioning. Because they told me, you know, next time they see me, they’re going to put handcuffs on me and take me in, so I wanted to call her and let her know.”

Charlie tells Amy he’d been waking up and going to bed wondering,
Can I sleep through the night, or are they already at the door?
When the call did come, it wasn’t the police at all, but a reporter from a newspaper. Charlie is famous. He wants Amy to know this is way bigger than his recruitment flyer. “And, well—it was in the
New York Times
, so—”

“Did you folks have a chance to look over the menu, or…” It’s the waiter again.

Charlie drops his head and studies his placemat until the kid disappears and he has Amy’s attention again.

“Okay,” he says. “So… you want me to start from the beginning?”

O
ver the wire the noise grew by degrees, with the early after-work crowd becoming louder round by round, plus there was an electrical something interfering with the mic frequency—air traffic control or a pager or the girl’s pacemaker; they didn’t know, only that it was a strain to listen to.

The men leaned in, ties hanging, as if getting closer to the box was going to help with the headphones. They heard Amy tell Charlie, “All right, let’s start from the beginning,” which made them lean in even more.

W
hen—when everything happened at Somerset, they only said—”

“That there was an issue with my application,” Charlie says. “You know, something like that. I mean I went to the first interview, that was fine, then when I went to the second interview, when they pulled me off the floor—the first one was at upper management, that was for the Reverend…”

“What happened? I—I mean, honestly, I don’t even know what happened with him.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie says. “I mean, he seemed fine at the time.”

“He seemed—I mean, did you have him?” Amy knows all of this, of course; she knows more than Charlie could imagine. The point is to make him say it. “What did he have?” Amy asks. “What was wrong with him?”

“I think he was liver failure and kidney failure,” Charlie says. “We had to dialyze.”

“I think I had him,” Amy says.

“Yeah, well I had him once. Or twice,” Charlie says. “When he was over at the ICU.”