Missing You(14)

“Would you like my help?”

“Pardon?”

“He has very little remorse, you know. I mean, true remorse. A priest stops by, and he says the right words. But he doesn’t mean it. He’s just trying to bargain his way into Heaven. The Lord isn’t so easily fooled.” She gave the creepy, lipstick-on-teeth smile again. “Monte murdered many people, is that correct?”

“He confessed to killing three. There were more.”

“Including your father?”

“Yes.”

“And your father was a police officer? Like you?”

“Yes.”

Nurse Steiner made a tsk-tsk noise of sympathy. “I’m very sorry.”

Kat said nothing.

Nurse Steiner chewed on her lipsticked bottom lip for a moment. “Please follow me.”

“What?”

“You need information, am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“Please stay out of sight. Let me handle this.”

Nurse Steiner spun and started back toward the infirmary. Kat hurried to catch up. “Wait, what are you going to do?”

“Do you know anything about twilight sleep?” Nurse Steiner asked.

“Not really.”

“I started my career working for an ob-gyn doing baby deliveries. In the old days, we’d use morphine and scopolamine as anesthesia. It would produce a semi-narcotic state—the expectant mother would stay awake, but she wouldn’t really remember anything. Some say it dulled the pain. Perhaps it did, but I don’t think so. I think what happened was, the expectant mother forgot the agony she was forced to endure.” She tilted her head, like a dog hearing a strange sound. “Does pain happen if you don’t remember it?”

Kat thought that question was rhetorical, but Nurse Steiner stopped and waited for an answer. “I don’t know.”

“Think about it. For any experience, good or bad: If you don’t remember it immediately after it happens, does it really count?”

Again she waited for an answer. Again Kat said, “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. It’s an interesting question, isn’t it?”

Where the hell was she going with this? “I guess so,” Kat said.

“We all want to live in the moment. I understand that. But if you can’t recall that moment, did it ever really happen? I’m not sure. The Germans started twilight sleep. They thought it would make childbirth more bearable for the mothers. But they were wrong. We stopped using it, of course. The child came out drugged. That was the main reason—at least, that’s what the medical people claimed.” She leaned conspiratorially toward Kat. “But between us, I don’t really think that was it.”

“Why, then?”

“It wasn’t what happened to the babies.” Nurse Steiner stopped at the door. “It was the mothers.”

“What about them?”

“They had issues with the procedure too. Twilight sleep allowed them to miss the pain, yes, but they never experienced the birth, either. They went into a room and next thing they remembered, they were holding a baby. Emotionally, they felt disconnected, removed from the birth of their own child. It was disconcerting. You’ve been carrying a child for nine months. You’ve started labor and then poof—”

Nurse Steiner snapped her fingers for emphasis.

“You wondered whether it really happened,” Kat finished for her.

“Exactly.”

“What does this have to do with Monte Leburne?”

Nurse Steiner’s smile was coy. “You know.”

She didn’t. Or maybe she did. “You can put him in twilight sleep?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And you think—what?—I can get him to talk and then he’ll forget about it?”

“Not really, no. I mean, yes, he won’t remember. But morphine isn’t all that different from sodium thiopental. You know what that is, don’t you?”

Kat did, though it was better known as Sodium Pentothal. In short: truth serum.

“It doesn’t work like you see in the movies,” Nurse Steiner continued. “But when people are under, well, the mothers tended to babble. Confessing, even. At more than one delivery, with the husbands pacing in the other room, they confided that the baby wasn’t his. We didn’t ask, of course. They would just say it, and we would pretend that we didn’t hear. But over time, I started to realize that you could actually carry on conversations. You could ask and learn a great deal and, of course, she would never remember a thing.”

Nurse Steiner met Kat’s eye. Kat felt a shiver run down her back. Nurse Steiner broke the contact and pushed open the door.

“I should point out that there is a huge problem with reliability. I’ve seen it happen many times with morphine. The patient will speak convincingly about something that can’t possibly be true. The last man who died in this infirmary? He swore that every time I left him alone, someone would kidnap him and take him to different cat funerals. He wasn’t lying. He was convinced it was happening. Do you see?”

“Yes.”

“So you understand, then. Shall we continue?”

Kat didn’t know. She had grown up in a cop family. She had seen the dangers of bending the rules.