The Night Nurse

Chapter 3 — The Detective

The interview room at the Area 3 precinct was painted a shade of green that had probably been chosen by someone who hated people.

Detective Sam Ortiz sat across the table from Priya with a paper coffee cup in one hand and a file in the other, and he had the patient, unhurried manner of a man who had watched a hundred guilty people talk themselves into corners and had no intention of rushing this one. He was in his late forties, with gray threading through his close-cropped hair and lines around his eyes that said he’d stopped being surprised by anything about a decade ago.

“Ms. Sharma,” he said, “do you know why you’re here?”

“Because three of my patients died.”

“Because three of your patients died of morphine overdoses.” He opened the file. “Frank Delaney, seventy-four — seventy-four, excuse me, sixty-eight. Eleanor Alvarez, seventy-four. David Okafor, sixty-one. The state lab finished Delaney’s tox screen yesterday. Four times the ordered dose in his bloodstream. That’s not a therapeutic window, Ms. Sharma. That’s a canyon.”

Priya’s stomach turned over. “I gave him two milligrams. It’s in the chart. It was ordered for air hunger—”

“He had a daughter,” Priya said quietly. “She read him the sports page every evening at six. She was going to walk in at six, like always, and find—” She stopped, because her voice was coming apart. Ortiz’s expression didn’t change. “The families are the ones I think about,” he said. “Alvarez’s son flew in from Denver. Got there four hours after she died. Four hours, Ms. Sharma. He calls the precinct every day, asking me what happened to his mother.”

Priya pressed her hands flat against the table to stop them shaking. “I know what’s in the chart.” Ortiz turned a page. “Your signature is on the 02:00 med pass for Delaney. Your signature is on the 04:00 med pass for Alvarez, the night she died. Your signature is on Okafor’s chart forty minutes before he coded.” He looked up. “You sign a lot of charts, Ms. Sharma.”

“I’m a nurse. Signing charts is—”

“Your badge,” Ortiz said, “was used to open the Pyxis dispensing cabinet in Pod B at 2:12 a.m. on the night Delaney died. Twelve minutes after your documented med pass. Can you tell me what you took out of the cabinet at 2:12?”

Priya stared at him. “I didn’t — I don’t remember opening the Pyxis at 2:12. I was with Delaney, I was doing rounds, I—”

“You don’t remember.”

“I work twelve-hour nights, Detective. I open that cabinet forty times a shift. I can’t account for every—”

“Can anyone account for you?” Ortiz asked quietly. “Between 2:00 and 2:20 that night, where were you?”

The question hung in the green room like smoke. Priya thought back. The 2:00 round. Delaney, stable, breathing easy. Then — the on-call room. She’d been exhausted, her knees aching, and she’d sat down on the cot for what she told herself would be five minutes. Just five minutes, in the dark, with her shoes off. She must have drifted. The next thing she remembered was the alarm at 2:47.

“I was on break,” she said. “In the on-call room. Alone.”

“Alone,” Ortiz repeated. He wrote something down. “So no one can confirm where you were in the twenty minutes before your patient died with four times his morphine dose in his veins.”

“I fell asleep on the cot,” Priya said, and heard how it sounded. “Detective, I swear—”

“I’m going to ask you something, and I’d like you to think before you answer.” Ortiz set down his pen. “Why St. Mercy? You’re a good nurse — your file says so, your supervisors say so. You could work anywhere in this city. Why this hospital?”

The question hit her like a hand on a bruise. Priya’s mouth opened, and for a second the truth sat right there on her tongue, huge and hot and impossible: *because my mother died here*. But she couldn’t say it — not here, not to him, not with three bodies between her and every word out of her mouth.

“I wanted a Level I trauma center,” she said. “The best training. It was — it was a career decision.”

Ortiz studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly, as if she’d confirmed something.

“Ms. Sharma, I’m going to be straight with you, because I think you’re a smart woman and I don’t enjoy watching smart people lie to me.” He closed the file. His voice dropped, and it was the quietness that made it chilling — no anger, no accusation, just a man reading a weather report. “In twenty-two years, I have never once seen a nurse’s badge open a drug cabinet twelve minutes after a med pass for no reason. I have never once seen three patients die of the same drug, on the same nurse’s shift, by coincidence. And I have never once had a suspect tell me they were asleep, alone, with no witness, during the exact window when it happened — and turn out to be telling the truth.”

He stood. The chair scraped against the tile.

“You’re free to go. For now.” He walked to the door, then paused with his hand on the knob. “One more thing. The other two tox screens come back Friday. If they say what Delaney’s said — and I believe they will — I’m coming back with a warrant, Ms. Sharma. And warrants don’t care how good a nurse you are.”

The door clicked shut behind him, and Priya sat alone in the green room, shaking, with the taste of precinct coffee sour in her mouth, and understood that she had just been told, in the politest possible terms, that the police had already decided she was a murderer.

They were only waiting for the paperwork to agree.