Somerville, New Jersey, first appears as a place where Tim Braun expects to slow down: a prosperous town of neat houses and porches, a historic square, and a new county prosecutor’s office. It becomes something else when unexplained patient deaths at Somerset Medical Center draw Braun and Danny Baldwin into an investigation that eventually reaches across years of hospital records. The town’s quiet affluence frames both Braun’s hoped-for retreat and the expanding work that follows.

Setting and Braun’s Move

The approach to Somerville marks a sharp change of scene. Thirty minutes down the Garden State Parkway, past Exit 140A toward US 22, the road surface grows darker and smoother. The gang colors and apartment towers Braun associates with Newark give way to small houses, American flags, and front porches. Across from a historic town square stands the gleaming county prosecutor’s office. Somerset County is described as the richest county per capita in New Jersey and the fourth wealthiest in the country: a setting that seems to promise safety, comfort, and a less dangerous career.

Braun has come to Somerville after a cold case has taught him how little power an individual detective may have against institutions. The Somerset County Homicide position offers better pay for less work and less danger. At forty-two, he imagines himself approaching the end of his career: he has a private office with a door that closes, a padded desk chair that tilts back, and the unresolved Duryea case sealed in a cardboard box in his closet. His move is both a practical retreat and an attempt to live with what he has left unfinished.

A Hospital Death Becomes a County Case

On October 3, 2003, Somerset County Prosecutor Wayne Forrest calls Braun about a death at a hospital. Braun assumes the deceased may be politically connected, and initially treats the matter as an assignment likely to satisfy local power rather than as the beginning of a major investigation. As detective sergeant, he assigns the case to Danny Baldwin, a former Newark colleague whom he had urged to join the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office. Baldwin has been in Somerville only six months and has not yet handled a local homicide.

The call interrupts Baldwin’s plans to attend a wedding with his wife, Kimberly, but he does not pass up his first Somerset homicide assignment. The next morning he observes the autopsy at the Medical Examiner’s Office, completes the paperwork, and reports to Braun by telephone. The deceased is McKinley Crews, an older Black man who appears to have had nothing visibly wrong with him. At first, the death seems to Braun like the kind of hospital call that might leave him enough of the weekend to go to his cabin. The case’s scale becomes clearer only after another call from Forrest, four days later.

Somerset Medical Center and the Unexplained Incidents

Forrest sends Braun and Baldwin to Somerset Medical Center, the town’s largest employer. Its scale is visible in a century of renovations and additions, most recently a vast, newly built lobby funded by corporate gifts. A small black box plays calming classical music from a player piano. The detectives initially respond to the hospital’s polished surroundings with skepticism; once they enter a conference room crowded with senior figures, they realize the call is not routine.

The hospital’s lawyer, Paul Nittoly, explains that Somerset is not reporting a homicide in so many words. Instead, the hospital has experienced a series of unexplainable incidents in its Critical Care Unit. There have been five over the preceding five months, followed by a sixth involving Crews. Senior vice president William Cors reads out the names: Joseph Lehman, Frances Kane, Jin Kyung Han, Florian Gall, Francis Agoada, and, last, McKinley Crews. Crews died only four days before the meeting; only after his death did the hospital contact the prosecutor’s office. The delay and the group of cases transform a single death into a question about a pattern—and about what the hospital knew before it called for outside scrutiny.

A Base for the Expanding Investigation

Somerville’s public offices and institutions become working ground for the investigation. In one early-morning episode, Braun watches daylight reach the courthouse hill before closing his office door to make a private call. He reaches Montgomery Hospital through its switchboard and speaks to Vice President Barbara Hannon. Although Braun calls as a private citizen, he introduces himself as a Somerset County homicide sergeant and tells Hannon that she should remove a new nursing hire from that night’s schedule if she wants to keep her patients alive. He cannot disclose Cullen’s identity or background, or explicitly call him a serial killer; he knows the warning may not be legally safe, but makes it anyway. Somerville is no longer simply the comfortable posting he once expected: its offices give Braun a position from which to act on a danger that reaches beyond the county.

The Somerset County Jail in Somerville later gives the investigation a more sustained rhythm. Charles Cullen has a cell, spy novels, time to exercise or shower, and visits with Catholic clergy. Guards escort him across the lawn to the prosecutor’s office, where he sits with Baldwin or Braun and reviews electrocardiograms, final flatlines, and bloodwork. Boxes of charts arrive nearly every week, documenting sixteen years of deaths at nine hospitals. What began with six incidents at one local medical center has become a painstaking review of thousands of patients and records. As the investigations close and the public commotion fades, Cullen returns to his cell to serve his life sentences. Somerville’s significance lies in that transformation: the same town that promised Braun an easy approach to retirement becomes the setting for an inquiry whose scale keeps widening.