The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (40 page)

Tim and Danny weren’t finished, and they didn’t think Charlie Cullen was finished, either. Sometimes a guy gets to a point and that’s it, he’s done, but Charlie wasn’t there. The guy was going. They were close enough that one more push might do it. Push him and he might go. Quit now, and he wasn’t going anywhere but court.

But Prosecutor Forrest was worried that any more would look bad. It was 3 a.m., and the guy was grunting on the floor, practically frothing. They’d been pushing him for nine hours.
¹
Forrest didn’t think they could push him much further. They were done. Tim and Danny knew the guy would have a lawyer before morning.

T
im drove home and hit the bed by 4 a.m. He hoped his internal clock would allow him to sleep in the next morning but nope, there was the sun, and he was up. Tim hated coming off a big case, dumping it into the institution. He wasn’t even the lead and he felt like that. Danny had to be worse. It was disorienting; it never felt right. His mind was still on emergency mode, trying to crack this guy. Instead, he was supposed to relax, recharge, let it go. He’d done his job. This was the weekend. Doo-dads to take care of around the house. Now there was time. Run down to the cabin, check the pipes. Errands. By early afternoon Tim found himself sitting in the mall parking lot, thrumming his finger on the steering wheel while his wife shopped at the craft store.

What burned Tim was, they weren’t done with the guy. He would have gone, given another few hours. He had that look. Now, get a lawyer in there and the guy’s not opening his mouth again. It would drag on for a couple years and go to jury trial for one murder and one attempted—and that was
if
Somerset Medical Center didn’t have the juice to keep the whole thing under seal with a grand jury, which Tim figured they absolutely did.
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Would the charge of killing Reverend Gall stick? Did they have enough to convict him, or would they have to cut a deal? Tim flashed back to his Duryea murderer, the guy convicted of one attempted, then walking after serving seven years. Tim could picture the guy. He was probably walking down the street, whistling a happy little tune at that very second. Maybe he
was here at the mall right now, doing a little weekend Christmas shopping. Why not—everyone else in the world seemed to be here. After all, it was the friggin’ weekend.

Tim thought about that, drumming the steering wheel. Thought about it some more. And then Tim thought,
Maybe.

Tim punched numbers on his phone and caught Assistant Prosecutor Tim Van Hise at home, who told him, sure, it was still legal, and he’d be willing to vouch. Cullen had signed his Miranda forms. He’d initialed that he understood his rights. He’d agreed to let them question him without the presence of an attorney. That was yesterday, but it still applied, absolutely.

Cullen’s arrest had been made after hours on a Friday. He’d gone straight to the interview, and he hadn’t been processed at the county jail until early the next morning. It was the weekend. The judge was probably out Christmas shopping with his wife. Cullen hadn’t been arraigned yet. He hadn’t seen a judge. Tim called the clerk at the jailhouse. He had Charlie’s file still sitting there. It hadn’t been flagged by an attorney yet. Then Tim called Danny. It was the call Danny was waiting for.

They could still take one more run at the guy. They weren’t finished. They just needed Amy back in Somerville one last time.

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N
ews of an arrest for patient murders at Somerset Medical Center was reported on Friday afternoon. The phone calls started less than a minute later, flooding the prosecutor’s office switchboard with over 175 inquiries and potential victims from tipsters and concerned family members. It was late afternoon before Tim and Danny could break free, leaving Detectives Brownlie and Magos to deal with the public while they walked across to the county jail.

The sergeant let them past the screaming metal detector and the two-way mirrored wall through the series of buzzing electronic doors to the lockup. Tim and Danny found Cullen curled on his bed, staring at the wall.

“Hey,
there
he is,” Tim said.

Cullen turned. He gave them a flat look. Then he looked at the floor.

“Treating you all right in here, Charlie?” Danny said.

He glanced down at his new prison sneakers. “Yeah, it’s okay. These shoes don’t quite fit, but… you know. It’s cold…”

“Yeah, well. We’ll see what we can do about that,” Danny said. “Meanwhile, tell you what. I don’t know if you—well, it’s like this. Your friend called again.”

“Amy?”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “Amy. She keeps calling.”

“Won’t leave us alone,” Tim said.

“She’s real worried,” Danny said. “Said she needed to talk to you. She’s upset.”

The story Tim and Danny had concocted had Amy as a hysterical but loyal friend with influential friends in local government. “It doesn’t matter to us,” Danny said. “But now our boss is on our back. So, tell you what.
Tim and I, we want to bring you back over to the interview room, continue our conversation.”

“And you can talk to your little friend.”

“Amy.”

“Yeah, talk to Amy. You guys can talk, get her off our back. Afterward we talk, you and us. Good?”

“Sure,” Charlie said. He had no problem with that.

The sergeant opened Cullen’s gated door and escorted him to a metal table, where Danny handed him a Miranda Warning Form to read aloud. This was the second since his arrest, but Assistant Prosecutor Tim Van Hise had suggested the caution. Danny watched Charlie print “YES” and his initials by each line then sign the bottom, then they handed it to the sergeant to be time-stamped. Danny took the pen away again, in case Cullen got any ideas, and led him to the car for the ride back to the prosecutor’s office.

A
my waited in a room
¹
in the prosecutor’s office, her eyes fixed on the flickering closed-circuit television. The screen showed the interview room, a plain cinder-block space with a table and plastic chairs made greenish and blurry by the video feed and reminding Amy of news footage from the war in Iraq. It was not a happy room to look at, at least not on the monitor, worse when Charlie appeared. He was stooped and affectless. His arms and legs were bound in chains. He shuffled forward in beige prison scrubs and shoes without laces. Amy felt nauseous. She had done that to Charlie. The guilt overwhelmed her, and she burst into tears. What had she done?

There were other detectives in the room with her: Captain Nick Magos, the lawyer from the prosecutor’s office, Tim and Danny, maybe others coming and going—by now she knew the guys by sight, at least. They certainly seemed to know her. She was Amy, the confidential informant. They told Amy she was great, a natural, pumping her up. Words. She heard other words, like
death penalty, life in prison
. On the screen, Amy watched her friend, the one they wanted to kill, the meek little man shivering on his plastic chair in the war bunker. The killer the men talked about wasn’t here now. She saw only a little boy, frightened and alone. She had sent this boy to prison and yet there he was, waiting for her, honestly believing that she had come as his
friend. And in that moment, he was right. She was his friend, somehow, still. Charlie’s eyes darted around the room, then found the camera mounted on the wall, and held it. Amy felt herself blush with terrific shame. He couldn’t see her, she knew that. But it didn’t change the way she felt.

T
he detectives started in on Charlie from the top, tag-teaming like the night before.

“Look, you know, Charlie, this is going to come out that you were getting off, sexually, on killing these people. Or we can go with the mercy-killing thing. It’s up to you.”

Then Danny came in, with his own version.

Then it was Tim. Then Danny.

Then it was Amy’s turn.

T
he detectives led Amy along a maze of corridors and office doors, the men talking, Amy not hearing anything but her own heart. The doors all looked the same. She felt like she was in hell, or on a game show. Finally they stopped at one, opened the door, and left Amy in a room with a couch. She sat down on one end, then the other, deciding eventually on a perch farthest from the door. And then finally she allowed herself to look around. It was an especially plain room with unadorned walls. The only other furnishings besides the hard couch and a few scratchy woolen pillows were a coffee table, a cabinet, and a wall-mounted camera. She assumed the camera was on. The coffee table had a tape recorder taped to its underside, the kind she remembered from fifth grade. The cabinet was full of dolls.

Amy looked closer. The dolls were all anatomically correct. It was the room used to investigate sex crimes against children. She sat on the couch, staring at the little Muppet-type penises and vaginas. She hadn’t told anyone from the prosecutor’s office that she’d been sexually abused; she hadn’t shared that with anyone, but still she wondered if there was something about her that telegraphed this fact, if they’d put her here on purpose. Hell or a game show. Amy couldn’t help but think how different it would have been if a lady cop had brought her to a room like this when she was seven, how her life could have gone and the nightmares she would never have had to know. But nobody had protected her then, and when she had tried
to protect herself, her family didn’t believe her. They had told her the man she accused wasn’t like that. He was so nice. He was a good uncle. But Amy knew that inside the good uncle was a monster. He was there during birthdays and Thanksgivings and Christmases. He was always there whether anyone saw him or not. This was the truth of Amy’s life. And it was also the truth of Charlie’s.

Charlie entered the room, unshackled. Amy gave him a sympathetic smile. It didn’t feel false. She wasn’t nervous any more. Charlie sat next to her on the couch. He was still small, still meek, like a frail stick figure in beige PJs and blue canvas shoes. He still looked like the scared little boy. The short-sleeved jail shirt showed his bare arms. It was the first time Amy had ever seen them. They were blue-pale and thin. Her eyes ran to a thick scar along his biceps.