November Naughty Nurse: A Xara Smith Mystery

By Bill McGrath

Private investigator Xara Smith's good friend Senior Detective Eric Samuels of the Dallas Police Department must move his mother to an assisted living facility called the "Castle". Trouble soon starts when residents at the Castle seem to be dying off at an alarming rate. Naughty Nurse Nola Nevins is killing them off so that her boyfriend might make a financial profit for his business. Xara's partner Jill takes the lead role in the investigation, and Xara's girlfriend Jana gets to play SPY. Meet the cool cast of characters including the retired prostitute Princess and the dirty old man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill McGrath
• Release date: Oct 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301657650

Bill McGrath

Bill McGrath has lived in the north Texas since 1989. He is married and has raised three daughters and a son. He has had several careers including; Computer Programmer, Cab Driver, Factory Worker, Volunteer Coordinator, and Customer Service Representative. Now that you have bought this book he will also claim that he is an Author.

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November Naughty Nurse

A Xara Smith Mystery by Bill McGrath

Copyright 2012 Bill McGrath

Smashwords Edition

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All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Other Xara Smith Mysteries by Bill McGrath

available on Smashwords:

January Juggling The Jentons

February At Feldman's On Fifth

March Of The Mustangs

April At The Antique Alley

May Might Mean Murder

June Jumping The Jaguar

July Jill's Justice

August Avenging Arlene

September Surgeon Shamed

October Octagon Occult

November's Naughty Nurse

December Deadly Dolls

Also by Bill McGrath:

Virika - Maiden

Bill McGrath Web Site:

WWW.WIX.COM/WGJM53/BILLMCGRATH

To contact author please send email to [e-mail]

CHAPTER-01.

Nola Nevins, chief nurse, rolled the cart into room 138. The cart was lined with small packages of medications. Some were pills, but most were hypodermics. It was not normal for the chief nurse to pull this duty on a regular basis, but at a small facility that cares for the elderly, she found herself occasionally stepping out of the administrators office and doing some of these more mundane nursing tasks.

There were two runs each day where a nurse would wheel the cart throughout the facility, visit each room where medication was scheduled, give the medicine to the resident, record the paperwork, and move on. It would take Nurse Nevins a full three hours to complete the run. She did not mind doing the nursely task, and she did enjoy seeing the residents, but she constantly worried that some crucial management issue would come up while she was away from her real responsibilities back in the administration office. That is why whenever she assigned herself this task, she always took the night run.

Room 138 currently housed widow Emelda Ryan. Mrs. Ryan had been in room 138 now almost a full year. There was not much wrong with Mrs. Ryan except that at her advanced age she got dehydrated quite often. Therefore, the Dr. had placed her on a saline drip. To help her sleep through the night he had also prescribed Xolpidem Tartrate which was usually taken as a pill. Nurse Nevins had selected the less common injection form because she could squirt it into the saline drip and therefore not need to disturb poor Mrs. Ryan. It had always bothered Nurse Nola to wake a patient up so that the patient could take a scheduled sleeping pill.

Nola Nevins, knowing she was on the security camera, lifted the clipboard and read the instructions for room 138. She looked around to make sure she had closed the door behind her. Satisfied that she and Mrs. Ryan were the only two in the room, she stepped to the cart making sure her back was to the camera and that her body blocked the camera's view of the cart. In a deft move, Nurse Nevins picked up the hypodermic full of Xolpidem Tartrate. She slipped the hypodermic into the pocket of her apron and pulled out from that same pocket a different, previously prepared needle. She turned to face the bed where Emelda was sleeping. She did that thing where they hold the hypo upside down and tap it to make sure they were not injecting air. She knew the move was not necessary because she was going to inject the liquid into the float chamber of the saline drip device and that would float out any air bubbles by itself, but she did the tap because it is simply what any good nurse would be in the habit of doing, and she was certainly a good nurse. Nurse Nevins stabbed the needle into the drip chamber and pressed the plunger swirling the slightly blue liquid into the clear saline.

Sweet dreams Emelda she said as she tossed the empty syringe into the hazardous material disposal container on the cart. She took her cellphone out of her apron pocket and dialed a number from memory. She would not put the number in the phones memory because if anyone examined her phone she did not want them easily finding the number, but she knew the number well. She had called it often.

A male voice answered simply saying yes?

You should pull the papers on the Ryan estate. I believe there will soon be some movement there.

Nurse Nola Nevins slowly pushed the cart out of the room and down to 144. In 144 the resident would need an allergy shot. She was only half way through her round. She hoped the alarms wouldn't go off until after she was done and back in her office. If she were the one to answer the alarm she could control it better. It is not that she thought she might get caught. It was rather that she wanted the alarm answered in a professional manner so as not to cast any bad light on the business she loved and the community where she spent the vast majority of her time, The Castle on Trinity Retirement and Nursing Care or as most residents and staff simply called it, The Castle.

Nola Nevins had started at The Castle some twenty-two years ago fresh out of nursing college with her LPN. She was assigned to a night shift where the main activity on her nightly tour would be emptying bedpans. Perseverance was her thing. In the past twenty-two years she had seen many nurses come and go. It was, in fact, a place where old people went to die. They never cured a patient and sent them home healthy and happy like they did in hospitals. What they did was make every effort to make the residents last years as comfortable and pain free as possible until death finally took them. That was the main difference between working a hospital and a hospice, and it just was too depressing for most nurses. Sometimes Nurse Nevins would see the turnover rate grow higher amongst the frustrated staff than it was for the bed-count.

By just doing her job to the best of her ability and not giving up, she found herself gaining more and more seniority in a hurry. Less than three months after she took the job she was the most senior of the nurses on her shift that did the bed-pan duty, so she was officially named supervisor of that team, got a slight raise in pay, and was given the duty of training new-hires to that team. About a year later there had been enough staff attrition on the day shift that she was able to get the same job but working the day shift rather than the night shift.

In another four years she had moved from bed-pans to the team that did physical therapy and then to the team in charge of nutrition and finally where she thought she belonged, the team that did medications. She still could not prescribe meds. They had a staff of doctors for that purpose, but the doctors very rarely gave the medication to the patient. That was a job for a nurse, and Nola was good at it. She worked her way to supervisor of that team and was, for the first time in her life really happy, but it did not last for long.

The Castle had 460 beds that they needed to keep full to make a profit. With a facility of that size and a staff of nearly one-hundred augmented by several dozen part-time volunteers, the group that really ran the business was administrations. Her track record had been noticed so as soon as there was an opening she was selected to that team.

Of course that meant that she was sent back to the night shift but even this worked in her favor. At the peak of the day, if every desk in the administration area were filled, there would be a total of seventeen people. Of course, not every desk would be filled all day long, but that number represented a full staff of busy office personnel. On Nurse Nevins' first night shift on the admin team there were four people there including herself. It is not that there were less things to do at night, every job still needed to be taken care of, but there was not the same volume at night. Therefore, one night staffer would do the same duties covered by half-a-dozen day time workers, but would work only about an hour each night at what a day time worker did all day every day.

What that meant was that the night staff learned the different administrative duties faster simply because they had to. After five years doing the admin job at night, and easily mastering each and every duty they included, she tossed her name into the ring when the vacancy came up for chief-nurse. By that time she had been at the Castle a dozen years, worked in every single post except for cooking in the kitchen and managing the parking-lot security. She knew how payroll worked. She knew the current department heads. She was good as an administrator. In addition, there was simply little other competition for the job. They did look at a few candidates from outside the facility, but in the end, a decade ago, Nurse Nola Nevins was promoted to the position of chief-nurse which was as close to a true boss that the Castle offered. There was still a volunteer board of directors she would have to report to, but none of these people worked day-in and day-out at the Castle. Nurse Nevins had arrived. She was in charge. She was the chief.

She already knew that her primary concern would be the safety and care of the residents. She also knew that it would be important for her to keep the staff motivated and productive. She fully expected the headaches of dealing with families as they brought their aging parents into the facility. She was ready to face the constant stream of funerals her residents would generate. What she found difficult though was the one additional duty she now had. Her newest duty was to insure that there was enough money coming in to make sure The Castle could stay in business. The money came mostly from the residents in the form of rent, and medical fees. There was also a good deal of money from the State of Texas, and occasionally a bit from the federal government in the form of grants. They occasionally did some sort of fund-raiser but, as fun as these events might be, they usually cost about as much or more to do as the money they brought in, and there was one other source of income for the business. Occasionally they would have a resident who had no family to leave any estate to, so the resident might leave The Castle whatever they had left when they passed. It was because of this that poor old Mrs. Ryan had just been given the hot-shot.

Nurse Nevins knew that it was not right, but occasionally something had to be done for the greater good, and after all, Emelda Ryan was just marking time in a bed that could be offered up to someone else who might flourish under nurse Nola's care.

At a few minutes past four in the morning Nola Nevins wheeled her cart into the pharmacy room which she unlocked with her swipe card. She first went to the shoot where they dumped the hazardous material. It was a long steel tube that dropped into a special incinerator far below the ground in what would be the third basement level. The fire in that incinerator was kept at two-thousand degrees. It's sole purpose was to completely render harmless any material that might carry with it some biological that could be harmful to human health. It did so by instantly turning things into sterile ash powder. Nurse Nevins even felt the welcome heat as she opened the little door to the shoot. There would be no tangible trace of the meds that went into good old Mrs. Ryan. She also took the opportunity to slip the original hypodermic intended for Mrs. Ryan out of her apron pocket and down the shoot.

She continued with the duty which included parking the cart in the place it was supposed to be parked in, rubbing the cart itself down with an antiseptic wipe, tossing the wipe down the incinerator, and filing the paperwork in it's proper place.

Just an hour later, still two hours before the first of the day shift people started showing up, Nola was sitting at her own desk in the most secure office in the administration area. She had two spreadsheets on her computer screen at the same time. One had a budget versus actual expenses listing for October which had just concluded. The other spreadsheet was a staff schedule for the month of November which would include the Thanksgiving holiday week-end. As she was peering at the two spreadsheets a beeper started going off. She looked at the light-board mounted on her wall and noticed that 138 was flashing. She picked up her office phone pressed the speed-dial button that would connect her with the duty nurse's station.

Hi Julie. Who is on East Wing? she said.

I am already on it Nola, Julie answered.

CHAPTER-02.

At fifty-two years old Senior Detective Eric Samuels of the Dallas Police Department had faced many tough situations. He dealt daily with the likes of drug-dealers, pimps, outlaw-bikers, lunatics, meth-heads, rapists, murderers, and pedophiles. Samuels took the world, and himself, seriously. At just five feet and four inches, he made up for his lack of height by working out daily which gave him a very powerful build even if it did render him a fire-hydrant in shape. Today though he was dealing with the most difficult opponent he had ever faced: Florence (Flo) Samuels, his mother.

The tiny stubborn woman had recently celebrated her 75th birthday and she was, in Eric's opinion, getting nuttier every day. He had arrived at her house as quickly after his work shift as he could at the insistence of the current house-keeper. He knew it was not fair on these poor house-keepers. They were maids. Their duties were to clean the house, and keep the mess in order. They were not psychiatrists or even nurses. They simply were not equipped to care for the elder spunky little woman. This one