The Night Nurse

Chapter 16 — The Plan

Ortiz met them at a diner on Damen Avenue, because hospitals had ears and the station house had paperwork.

The detective slid into the booth across from Priya and Alan, ordered black coffee, and put his phone face-down on the table.

“Talk to me,” he said.

Priya’s hands shook around her mug. Two days without sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she saw a hospital corridor eight years gone — St. Mercy, Room 412, 3:17 a.m. — and the back of Helen Voss going through that door, unhurried.

“I know who it is,” Priya said. “And I know I can’t prove any of it alone.”

She told him everything. The wiped camera feeds from the nights of the deaths. The morphine vial in Helen’s locker, photographed. The fourth patient, Mr. Harlow, dosed on Helen’s day shift — he survived, barely — with Priya’s badge credentials on the dispensing log — credentials Priya had never used that afternoon, because she’d been home asleep. The night in Room 6, the syringe, the words — *I freed them from pain. You don’t understand* — delivered the way other people said *I love you*.

And then the confession she hadn’t planned to make, the one that scraped its way out of her anyway: “She killed my mother. Eight years ago, at St. Mercy. I was twenty-two and I saw her go into my mother’s room the night she died, and I buried it, and I came to St. Mercy to find her.”

Ortiz listened without interrupting. When she finished, he exhaled slowly.

“You understand that last part makes you a revenge witness, not an innocent bystander,” he said. “A defense attorney will eat you alive with it. ‘Nurse with a grudge frames beloved colleague.’ That’s the headline.”

“I don’t care about the headline.”

“You should care about the conviction.” Ortiz leaned forward. “We need Helen to incriminate herself cleanly — on the record, undeniable, no interpretation required. Eyewitness testimony from you, with your motive, gets us an indictment and maybe an acquittal. I don’t do maybes.”

Alan leaned forward. “So we give her no wiggle room. We catch her doing it.”

Ortiz studied him. “You have an idea, Doctor.”

“A trap,” Alan said. “Helen only chooses patients with no hope — terminal, suffering, the ones the machines keep alive out of habit and paperwork. We give her one. A controlled setup.”

“An undercover officer,” Ortiz said. “Playing a patient.”

Priya felt the table tilt under her elbows. “You want someone to lie there with tubes in them and wait for a killer to come kill them?”

“No.” Ortiz’s voice was flat and certain. “I want someone to lie there while a killer comes to *try*. The IV line gets saline. The dose never reaches the patient. There’s a camera in the room, a second officer outside the door, a medical team on standby two floors down. Helen injects — we have her on video, the syringe in evidence, chain of custody clean — and the whole thing never put anyone in danger.”

“It still puts someone in danger,” Priya said quietly.

Ortiz met her eyes. “Every sting does. I’ll pick the volunteer myself. It’ll be a cop who’s done this before.”

They spent the next hour on details, and the planning steadied Priya the way work always had.

Helen worked days; the trap would be set on a Tuesday afternoon, in ICU Room 4 — close to the nurses’ station, far from Helen’s usual rounds, because they wanted her to *choose* it, to walk past it and feel the pull. The “patient” would be Walter Brandt, sixty-eight, end-stage liver failure, DNR — except Walter Brandt would be Officer Karen Doyle, forty-one, in heavy makeup and a gray wig, coached by Alan on shallow breathing and unfocused eyes.

“We need a reason she’s there at all,” Ortiz said. “Helen doesn’t kill for fun. She needs to believe this woman is suffering. That the suffering is the kind that has no exit.”

“We give her pain,” Alan said. “Quiet moaning. Asking for relief. Helen listens at doors — everyone on that floor says so. She checks on the suffering ones. She can’t help herself.”

Priya stared at her coffee. “She also listens to nurses. If any nurse on that floor knows, she’ll smell it. She reads people the way we read monitors.”

“Then no nurse knows,” Ortiz said. “Not the charge nurse, not the attending. Just us three, Officer Doyle, and two people outside the door who aren’t wearing scrubs.”

“When?” Alan asked.

“Tuesday,” Ortiz said. “Three days from now. Helen works Tuesday.”

Priya thought of the other mercy killings — the pattern she had mapped alone in her apartment at 2 a.m., index cards spread across her kitchen table, three deaths on her own night shifts, the credentials stolen, the logs faked. Helen had framed her — quietly, almost tenderly, like everything else Helen did.

“There’s one more thing,” Priya said.

Ortiz waited.

“She knows I know.” Priya’s voice was steady now. The shaking had moved somewhere deeper, where no one could see it. “We’ve been circling each other for weeks. She sent me a card when I was suspended — *thinking of you, dear*. She *visited* me. Sat in my living room and drank my tea. She isn’t afraid of me.”

“Then she won’t be careful enough,” Ortiz said. “Killers who think they’re saints never are. They want to be seen doing the righteous thing. That’s their weakness — the need for a witness to their virtue.”

“And if she doesn’t come?” Alan asked.

Priya looked out the diner window at the rain-slicked street. “She’ll come. I know how she thinks now. You don’t spend thirty years believing you’re the only one brave enough to do the hard thing and then walk past a suffering woman in Room 4. She won’t be able to leave her there.”

Ortiz paid for the coffee. At the door he turned back, rain beading on his coat.

“Priya. After Tuesday, whatever happens — you stay out of that room. You’re the witness, not the bait. I need you clean for the stand.”

She nodded, and the lie sat in her mouth like a stone, because she had already decided: she would be in that hospital on Tuesday. Somewhere Helen would see her. Somewhere the trap would feel like fate, not theater.

That night she drove past St. Mercy and looked up at the ICU windows, the small blue squares glowing against the dark like eyes that never slept.

Three days until Tuesday. Then they would end it.