The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder (22 page)

Enclosed herewith is a copy of my file memorandum which I prepared after our meeting with Charles Cullen.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Very Truly Yours,

Raymond J. Fleming

“Charles Cullen?” Tim said. “They mention him?”

“Next page,” Danny said. “Memo says he’s a nurse. He worked the Critical Care ward with one of the vics. The Reverend.”

“So he a suspect or what?”

“Doesn’t say so—in fact, it says the opposite.” Danny flipped to the last page. “Says, ‘We agreed that there was nothing so overtly suspicious at this point in time either from the records or Mr. Cullen’s demeanor itself that would necessitate a call to the authorities.’ ”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Mary Lund and the lawyer,” Danny explained. “Fleming. Apparently they interviewed this Cullen together.”

“July 14,” Tim said. “Ten days later they write a memo about it.”

“Maybe it took ’em ten days to finish,” Danny said. “Bill by the hour, shit happens.”

“Then two months later, they send it to us,” Tim said. He flicked the paper. “So, where’s the rest? The other memos about the rest of the nurses?”

Danny didn’t know. But he had a meeting that afternoon with someone who should.

I
n theory, Mary Lund could be the key to this investigation. Lund was a former nurse who had worked her way up the corporate ladder to become the gatekeeper to the hospital world, a woman who could help translate the medical mysteries of the hospital into something the detectives could understand. The only question was whether she’d cooperate. Danny needed more than her polite professional assistance; he needed Mary Lund to actually like him.

Danny parked out front of the hospital, smoothed his tie against the wind and nodded respectfully at the rent-a-cop by the elevator. Down the hallway of Marriot carpet and bad art he found a secretary with color photos of a panting shih tzu plastered to her computer monitor. Danny read “Trudy” off the name plate, introduced himself, going for serious but not scary, and not quite pulling it off.

As Danny would later remember it,
²
Mary Lund was heavyset, middle-aged, white, no frills—perfectly suited to the title of risk manager. Her suit skirt was corporate sensible, neutral toned and neutered cut. She didn’t seem like the type for chitchat, so Danny started right in with the investigative memo the Somerset Medical Center lawyer had sent over. He pulled the fax from his breast pocket, skipping to the parts he’d highlighted.

“So, following the, uh, passing of the Reverend Gall, you and this attorney Fleming conducted an interview with a nurse named Charles Cullen?”

“Yes,” Mary said. “We interviewed all the nurses who worked on the unit.”

“Okay, okay,” Danny said. “And what did you—”

“None of these interviews turned up anything unusual or incriminating,” Mary said.

“I see that,” Danny said. “So, with this nurse, Cullen—was there anything which made you interview him, anything suspicious or—”

“No no,” Mary said. “We interviewed all the nurses on the unit.”

“And are there any other memos we might have—anything which might be useful?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Mary said. “That would be a question for our house legal counsel, Paul Nittoly.”

“All right, all right,” Danny said. “We’ll talk to him as well, I’m sure. And this nurse, um, Cullen—”

“Yes.”

“You spoke to him.”

“Well, as I said—we went through, conducted an interview with Mr. Cullen, like all the others,” Mary said.

“This was in regards to one of the patient incidents—the Reverend?”

“Reverend Gall. Yes.”

“And this nurse, Charles Cullen—he was the reverend’s nurse?”

“Well, yes and no,” Mary said. “They rotate.”

“I’m sorry…?”

“Rotate patients,” Mary said. “The nurses get different room assignments each night they come in. Over the course of his care here at Somerset Medical Center, Reverend Gall was attended by many different CCU nurses.”

“And Nurse Cullen was Gall’s nurse?”

“No,” Mary said. “Charles Cullen wasn’t Reverend Gall’s nurse on the night he expired.”

“Okay, okay,” Danny said. “So—who was?”

“I don’t have that information handy,” Lund said. “I’d have to get back to you with that.”

“Yes, please. And that nurse, Gall’s nurse, do you have a memo about that interview, or—”

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything like that,” Mary Lund said. “I’ll have to look into it and get back to you.”

“All right,” Danny said. “I’d appreciate that.” He wasn’t getting anywhere, but knew better than to let his frustration show. “Another question, about this, um, ‘pixies,’ or…” Danny held up the memo, the word circled with a question mark.

“Pyxis, uh-huh,” Mary said.

“Those are the medicine requests?”

“The Pyxis computer keeps track of each drug withdrawal,” Mary said. “It also bills the patient and alerts the pharmacy when to restock.”

“And you checked these records?”

“Yes,” Mary said.

“And, says here there was nothing unusual, is that right?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Mary said.

“If I could, I’d like to get a photocopy of those records,” Danny said. “Look at the periods surrounding the, uh, unusual occurrences with the patients—”

“Well, that’s not possible, I’m afraid,” Mary said. “Unfortunately, Pyxis only stores records for thirty days.”

“So…”

“Yeah,” Mary said. “I know.”

“Okay,” Danny said. “So this nurse wasn’t the focus of your investigation then.”

“No no no,” Mary said. “We interviewed all the nurses on the unit. But there is one person you might want to look into.”

D
anny gave Tim the rundown over lunch at the Thai place across from the courthouse. Tim watched the waitress come and go with the menus before he started in. “So, Lund,” he said. “She setting us up or what?”

“She gave us a name,” Danny said. “Name of Allatt, Edward.”

“That the male nurse?”

“Another guy. He worked on the same floor as the vics sometimes, and had access. She thought we’d want to look at him.”

“What’s he do?” Tim said.

“He’s one of those guys who comes and takes your blood…” Danny flicked down to his notes.

“Yeah, phlebotomist,” Tim said, surprising himself.

“Oh, you know that one, right?”

“Hey, I was a hospital rent-a-cop,” Tim said. “High school.”

“Yeah, well, Lund said they like this phlebotomist guy.”

“He a suspect?” Tim said. “I thought they didn’t have anyone.”

“Mary Lund told me, ‘Allatt is one you’ll want to look at.’ What she said.”

“She say why?”

“Guess this guy has a beef with the hospital. Local guy, some issue with the expansion plans, maybe union stuff.”

“He a suspect?” Tim said.

“Just said he was suspicious, and had a beef,” Danny said. He read from the notebook. “Her words: ‘Allatt might be the one responsible for these unusual occurrences.’ ”

“Hey, okay, good,” Tim said, writing it down. “They don’t have anyone, then they give us somebody. I’ll take it. Anything else?”

“Not yet,” Danny said. “I asked her about the thing they sent, the nurse from the memo.”

“Yeah, the leaflet they sent?”

“The investigation,” Danny said. “All four pages of it.” Danny flipped again, fingered the page. “The male nurse they talked to. Charles Cullen.”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me about Allatt.”

“Yeah, but about Cullen?”

“Nothing,” Danny said. “I guess he wasn’t the focus of the investigation.” Danny told Tim about the Pyxis machine, and how it only stored records for the previous thirty days. “Going back, that’s what, September 7 or 8, right? So we can only look at the drug orders for Mr. Crews.”

The only problem was, Crews’s coroner’s report had come back normal; according to Mambo, he had died of natural causes.
³

“Okay, well, that sucks,” Tim said. “How about the other nurses? We got anything for them?”

“The lawyer might,” Danny said. “Lund didn’t.”

“She didn’t have any of their interviews? They did interviews, I thought.”

“She didn’t have shit,” Danny said.

Tim held his breath, let it go with a sigh. “So what you’re telling me,” he said finally. “We got nothing.”

“Well, no,” Danny said. “We got Allatt.”

32

I
t was Danny’s case but as supervisor, Tim had co-lead, and he was particular about doing the standard-operating-procedure stuff himself. First he ran Edward Allatt’s name through the state’s motor vehicle system, checking for a registration and license. He found the guy and his car but no red flags, so he transcribed the address and personal info in his notebook before plugging the name into the National Crime Information Center database.
Edward Allatt
came back clean, no hits. Dead end. Tim tried again using alternate spellings and nicknames. Nothing. So the guy had a car and he had never been in jail. Next, Tim logged into the New Jersey Department of Justice’s PROMIS/Gavel database, which followed the progress of criminal cases through the New Jersey court system. Tim had gotten some big hits like this—even if they’d never done time, bad guys usually tended to be mixed up with the court system one way or another, whether as witnesses or victims or they had been acquitted of charges. But
Allatt, Alatt, Allat
came up clean. The phlebotomist was a dead end. Tim sat for a moment. A redball sat burning on his desk and he had nothing to chase. They’d set up an interview with this Allatt guy tonight, catch him at home, see him tomorrow. Meanwhile, Braun figured, what the hell. He flipped to a clean page in his notebook and typed “Charles Cullen” into the database.

Charles Cullen was in the Motor Vehicles database as the registrar of a baby blue Ford Escort station wagon and the possessor of a valid driver’s license. NCIC came up with two hits for Cullen: once for criminal trespass in Palmer, Pennsylvania, another for drunk driving in South Carolina, both charges over ten years old. Cullen owned no firearms, had no registered pets, and hadn’t been involved with so much as a speeding ticket for a decade.

There were still some loose threads to pull before he closed the book.
Tim stood up from the terminal, walked back to his desk, and dialed 411 for the Palmer, Pennsylvania, police.

Tim identified himself as a Homicide detective from Somerset, New Jersey, and asked for the records bureau. The female voice on the other end laughed and told him, “Nope, we don’t have one, just me!” Tim thinking,
Oh great, Barney Fife,
and explained he needed background on a guy Palmer picked up in ’93 and would she be so kind as to pull the case jacket.

“Just a sec,” the lady said. Tim could hear the phone conk on the desk, the drum roll of big metal file cabinets opening and closing. A couple minutes, then she was back on the line, saying, “Uh-huh, it’s here, a case jacket with a yellow Post-it.”

She had one Charles Cullen. Date of birth February 22, 1960. Arrested in Palmer in March 1993 for trespassing and harassment, charges dropped. Braun had started into his thank-yous when she said, “And oh, and there’s a note. You want that, too?”

The sticky note indicated that the State Police had called for the file a couple months earlier.
¹
And there was something else underlined—now, what’s this word? she said.

It was a word Braun recognized.

Digoxin.