“No,” Denise said. “The ward clerk handed it to me. It must have come in when we were working on poor Mrs. Dahl.”
So Christine might have called just before she was killed. Why did she call when she could have paged her? Why did she want to talk at all-what more was there to say? The details of the night came rushing back upon her.
“So you came on duty at eleven?”
Denise nodded. “And that poor old lady was hurting so bad. I say, ‘enough of this, I’m calling Cheryl Beth.’ So I paged you.”
“Had you seen Lustig that night?”
“On that floor? No way. Anyway, she wasn’t even cutting any more.”
“So I came in around eleven-twenty, say? We worked with Mrs. Dahl for maybe half an hour and I spent another half an hour writing the new orders.”
“Makes sense.”
“So it was nearly twelve-thirty and I was about to leave when you saw the message?”
“Right. It must have come in while we were in the room with Mrs. Dahl. It definitely wasn’t there when I came on duty.”
Cheryl Beth made herself stand and they walked toward the patient’s room. She could hear moaning in the distance. She stopped and faced Denise. “Ever run into a nurse named Judd Mason?”
“Creepy dude, huh?” Denise said. “No bedside manner at all. You know he used to be an OR nurse for Lustig?”
Cheryl Beth stopped and held Denise’s shoulder. “What?”
“He scrubbed in with her for years,” Denise said. They stood in the dim hallway next to the code cart, speaking in low voices. Except for the moans coming from the next door, the only sound was loud snoring. “He was good in the operating room, I hear. Lot of those nurses love the teamwork, the stress, the autonomy. They don’t have to be great with direct patient contact.”
“So were they still together?”
“Nope, they had a falling out. This was before Lustig went on leave to do the computer project.”
“What do you mean, ‘falling out’?” Cheryl Beth felt revived by an adrenaline shot through her system.
Denise shrugged. “That gossip never made it to the graveyard shift. Maybe he was another one of Lustig’s conquests gone wrong. They want to know who killed her, they ought to look at the list of her old boyfriends. I think it’s called the Cincinnati phone book. There’s one other thing.”
Cheryl Beth waited, watching Denise swallow conspicuously.
“I had to stop by employee benefits today,” she said. “So I’m in street clothes, in the upscale part of this dump. Out in the hallway I see Stephanie Ott talking to Dr. Carpenter, and I distinctly hear your name.”
