The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [78]
“Not the mothers,” Miss Howard answered. “Their babies.”
“It seems,” Marcus continued, “that during the eight months she was employed by the Lying-in Hospital, Nurse Hunter attended to an inordinately high number of babies who died—most of them only a few weeks after birth.”
“Died?” the Doctor echoed, quietly but with a kind of frustrated bewilderment. It was as if he’d been given a square peg of information that just didn’t fit into some round hole of an idea that he’d formed in his brain. “Died…” The Doctor stared at the floor a moment. “But—how?”
“Difficult to say, precisely,” Marcus answered. “The police report doesn’t go into any real specifics. But the nurses did. They claim that the children—there were four cases that they all agreed on, as well as some others that were questionable—were perfectly healthy when they were born, but fairly quickly developed respiratory problems.”
“Unexplained episodes of labored breathing,” Lucius added, “resulting, uniformly, in cyanosis.”
“Hunh?” I noised.
“A telltale bluish coloration of the lips, skin, and nail beds,” Lucius answered. “All caused by reduced hemoglobin in the small vessels—which generally indicates some kind of suffocation.” He looked to the Doctor again. “There would be two or three preliminary episodes, and then one during which the child would expire. But here’s the key: every time a child did die, Nurse Hunter was either rushing it to a doctor on her own or alone in a wardroom with it.”
Dr. Kreizler just kept looking at the floor. “Did the doctors at the hospital ever draw any connection between the events?”
“You know how things are in institutions like that,” Miss Howard said. “Sometimes the mothers had already left the hospital, giving their babies up. Under those kinds of circumstances there’s a high mortality rate, and nobody in authority tends to ask any questions. Dr. Markoe only went to the police because the nurses brought it to his attention—not that he’s a bad man, but—”
” But when you’ve got a dead infant and too few beds and nurses to start with,” Mr. Moore said, “it’s ship the body to the old potter’s field and on to the next case.”
“Actually,” Marcus said, “the doctors had always considered Nurse Hunter’s efforts on behalf of the cyanotic infants to be quite—well, heroic, in a way. It seemed to them that she worked tirelessly to prolong the babies’ lives.”
“I see …” The Doctor stood up and walked over to stare into the eyes of one of General Washington’s frozen oarsmen. “And what, then, made the nurses think that there was anything untoward?”
“Well,” Marcus said, “they took note of all the similarities involved in the various incidents, and decided that they were too exact to be coincidences.”
“Was Nurse Hunter particularly unpopular?” the Doctor asked.
Marcus nodded. “That’s a problem—she was apparently very high-handed, very competitive, and could carry quite a grudge against anybody who crossed her.”
The Doctor nodded along with the detective sergeant. “According to the other nurses, at any rate. I fear, Marcus, that these statements must be taken with a certain grain of salt—the medical profession breeds petty jealousy and infighting in all its branches.”
“Then you’re reluctant to believe the other nurses?” Miss Howard asked.
“Not reluctant,” the Doctor answered. “Not precisely that. But it simply doesn’t…” He shook his head once, hard. “Well—go on.”
Marcus shrugged. “Like Sara says, the rest of the nurses made a stink with Dr. Markoe. He went to the police, and Nurse Hunter was brought in. She vehemently denied any wrongdoing—got so incensed, in fact, that she immediately resigned. And it wasn’t as if these crimes—if in fact they were crimes—could be proved. Every one of them looked just like spontaneous infantile respiratory failure. And the way Nurse Hunter told it, she’d kept them alive for as long as they did live. Markoe was inclined to believe her, but—well, he has to worry about his funding. There can’t be even a hint of scandal.”
“True, Marcus,” Dr. Kreizler said. Then he held up a warning finger. “But