From http://nodejs.org/api/debugger.html:
Advanced Usage
The V8 debugger can be enabled and accessed either by starting Node with the –debug command-line flag or by signaling an
existing Node process with SIGUSR1.
Find the PID of your node process and then sending SIGUSR1 should do the trick:
kill -s SIGUSR1 nodejs-pid
Then run node-inspector and browse to the URL it indicates. More in this tutorial.