Nothing Personal (14 page)

“Don’t do this to me,” Kate commanded. “What’s going on?”

Now Freddie Mercury was singing about champions. B.J. wondered if the tenants upstairs ever complained about the thumping bass in here.

“B.J.,” Kate warned, looking more desperate than threatening.

B.J. knew Kate had no respect for a flanking maneuver, so he hit her with it right down the
middle. “She knew all three people, she’s recently had a pretty big setback, and she’s just the kind of careful, quiet person the FBI profile is looking for,” he said.

“Says who?”

“Little Dick, for one.”

“Little Dick’s the biggest asshole of them all.”

“What about Martin Weiss?”

Now Kate looked as if B.J. had just pulled an active skunk from his pocket. “Martin Weiss is having trouble enough with his own reality. I wouldn’t trust his acquaintance with Edna’s.”

“There’s a murderer out there, Kate. Someone with access to the units and the executive suite and the doctors’ lounge. How many people have that?”

“Anybody in the hospital. You know that.”

“The doctors’ lounge?”

“Oh, B.J., you know better. Where do you think Sticks gets all her soda? She sure doesn’t pay for it. And Parker and Lisa Beller have been sneaking off there on nights for almost four months now for a little suckface.”

B.J. was finally surprised. “Parker?”

He at least got something of a laugh out of her. “Parker may not be cute, but he definitely possesses every other qualification. They usually go there because they don’t want to get caught. After all, it’s one thing for a doctor to screw a nurse, but it’s entirely different if a nurse is screwing a doctor.”

“In the doctors’ lounge?”

She scowled at him. “It’s the emptiest place in
the world at two in the morning. Just ask Weiss. It’s his favorite place to back nurses against the wall when he’s on call. And when you get down to it, why does it have to be a nurse doing this? All you need is a face and uniform everybody’s used to seeing around the hospital to get where you want to go. That means it could just as easily be a doctor.”

Even though he knew he was doing it, B.J. hit right below the belt.

“You mean like maybe a gay doctor who could fool the forensic psychiatrists into thinking he was a woman?”

That brought her to a dead shuddering halt, her eyes as cold and furious as B.J. had ever seen. “Don’t,” she threatened very quietly. “I’ll swear that you did it before I let anybody offer up Tim.”

“Well, they’re offering up Edna sometime this week. She’s being brought in for questioning.”

Kate slumped, pushed a hand through what hair she had. “Aw, shit, B.J., they can’t do that. It’d kill her. Administration’s just doing this so they have another mark against her at evaluation time. ‘Demoted to ER, questioned in a murder.’ Makes it easier to make her quit.”

“I thought you didn’t like Edna.”

“I don’t want to work with her. There’s a big difference. When are they bringing her in?”

B.J. was amazed that he suddenly wanted to know just what was making Kate twitch so badly. Why she felt so caught by this investigation. B.J. never wanted to know about other people. It was just a sneaky way to make him dependent on
them, so when they died or disappeared or lost their sanity, he had to pay as big a price as they did. He had to be left behind alone.

“Nobody said.”

Kate took a solid breath and rested the coffee cup against one hip. Then she faced B.J. eyeball to eyeball.

“Why are you playing for the opposition on this one, O’Brien?”

“I didn’t know stopping a murderer put me on the opposition team.”

She waved him off as if he were a swarming mosquito. “It’s one thing to investigate. It’s another to reopen the McCarthy hearings, and that’s where this is headed.”

B.J. had never heard such illogic from her since the very first day they’d met over a bus accident in the old SLU ER. “You really think so?” he asked quietly.

But she couldn’t seem to muster an answer for him. She took off like a bird in flight, downing that coffee as if it were a boilermaker and then hesitating just long enough for B.J. to know she was a hairsbreadth away from pitching her coffee cup at that pristine white wall.

“There’s never anything out of place here,” she mused, almost to herself. “It’s so comforting never to be surprised. To know just what to expect. I think it’s one reason I like living here.”

Then off she headed again.

B.J. stood his ground and waited to catch her on the next circuit. She made it in record time, skidding to an abrupt halt right in front of him.

“You don’t understand,” she accused him in a curiously small, little-girl voice.

He nodded. “I know.”

She dipped her head. “So what you and John and the Little Dick have decided is that since the evidence is going to be too tough, you’re going to try and catch the killer by why-done-it instead of who-done-it. And that’s why you want me to play along.”

“You know more about what’s going on with the staff than damn near anybody else.”

“No, I don’t. That’s Sticks. Talk to her.”

“People tend to confide in you.” He tried a deprecating smile that brought up all those night shifts they’d shared. “It’s a gift.”

She didn’t buy it. “It’s a goddamn curse. And they don’t confide in me. They just want me to take responsibility for them so they can sneak by without getting hurt. Besides, I only know the people in the critical-care areas. Not OB or ortho or anything.”

“You really think this is the work of an OB nurse?”

“I don’t know. You’ve never met some of the OB nurses. They’d put the SS to shame.”

Again he waited. She didn’t move this time, just consulted with the tops of her feet in silence, her brow furrowed and her hands clenched, her head moving ever so slightly as she waged some great argument inside that lightning-fast brain of hers, scored by the driving bass and drums of Queen.

She didn’t look up at first. “You’ve never met my aunt.”

“Nope.” Nobody had.

Kate took a deep breath and faced him, looking suddenly more tremulous even than the time B.J. had walked into the triage desk to find her facing a junkie with a loaded gun. “Would you take me down there?”

They’d known each other damn near eight years. This was quite a first. B.J. was even more surprised to realize that he was going to do it. He wanted to meet this mysterious aunt who had made his own mother wrinkle her nose in distaste. Sarah Brinkley O’Brien did not waste her time dissing other people. She simply…wrinkled. And she had definitely wrinkled about Mrs. Mary Anne Henderson.

“Is now good?”

Kate took another breath and straightened as if she’d just been introduced to a firing squad. “Now would be perfect.”

B.J. nodded agreeably. “Right after I see that second note.”

In 1904, St. Louis hosted one of the greatest world fairs in history in a place called Forest Park at the edge of the city. The world did indeed come to St. Louis and, with it, great notoriety. With the notoriety came money, and with the money came a boom in surrounding real estate. The wealthier families of the city set white flight into motion by building huge mansions in the neighborhoods that surrounded the park, big stone and brick and granite behemoths that had
lasted through several cycles of prosperity and neglect with their grace virtually intact.

The area was once again fashionable, the homes renovated and tailored, and the money back, at least in the areas close enough to Highway 40 where crime didn’t breach the barriered streets.

B.J. had spent his share of time in Forest Park as a kid, skating at Steinberg in the winter and taking dates to the free seats at the Muny Opera in the summer. He’d driven by the great old homes that ringed it without once wondering about them. It would never occur to an ex-air force brat from Brentwood that he’d ever be invited inside one of those old places.

It was where they were headed today.

Kate had said she owed her aunt some money. She failed to mention the fact that the old bat would never need to see it repaid in her lifetime. A paternal aunt, from what little Kate said on the way down, Mary Anne “Mamie” Manion Henderson had overcome her Irish Catholic heritage and married well into the very WASPish upper class of post-World War II St. Louis. She’d moved into her in-laws’ house on Westmoreland and never moved out, even after her late husband, Henry Howard Henderson, passed away in the sixties, leaving them without issue or heir.

B.J. had known about Kate’s aunt for at least a couple of years. He’d never asked for details. He was sure he shouldn’t now. He shouldn’t have to know what it was that made Kate leave her gaudy earrings behind on the coffee table or go rigid the
minute she climbed into the Jeep. He shouldn’t be so curious all of a sudden about a past she’d never wanted to share anyway.

So he drove and he ignored the fact that Kate was holding her Cardinals cap in her hands as if it were a weapon, and he pulled out the bottle of Dr Pepper he hadn’t finished yet.

“Want some?”

She never looked away from the traffic ahead. “How long’s that been in here?”

B.J. took a second to shake the bottle. When he saw the lack of bubbles, he smiled. “Just long enough.”

She couldn’t even seem to manage a reaction. If she hadn’t been so wired all along, B.J. might have thought she was simply enjoying the weather. The day was warm, the sky high and clear, the sun creating colors where there hadn’t been any. But Kate wasn’t focused on the sun or the forests of daffodils the highway department had planted. She was grim and stiff and silent, and B.J. retreated to his driving and his Dr Pepper.

He recognized the house immediately when they pulled to a stop in front. He’d seen it every time he’d driven by, a four-story gray-granite mausoleum that squatted at the center of the block without grace or charm. Twenty or thirty rooms with nothing but one old lady and two retainers to take up space. It made B.J. wonder what a childhood spent inside must have been like. But then B.J. had grown up in a series of small base houses and now lived in a four-room house in Brentwood his mother lovingly called the Cave.

He almost made the mistake of helping Kate from the car. She didn’t even wait for him to get his own door open before climbing out, cap firmly in place. Even with the crutches and cast, she marched up the walk like Carrie Nation heading for a saloon. B.J. just followed behind, obviously there simply to witness what went on.

“Are you sure you’re up to this?” he asked, intrigued against his will.

She sucked in a breath as if it were the last cubic meter of air on earth and knocked. “I’d better be.”

The massive oak door swung slowly open to reveal what must have been one of the retainers, a pencil-thin specimen of mummification clad in serviceable gray and silent as death.

“Miss Chambers.” Kate greeted her without noticeable inflection.

The woman backed away just enough to let them through. “We’ve been expecting you,” was all she said.

Not exactly B.J.’s idea of a homecoming, considering the fact that his first weekend back from Philly he’d had to wade through about three dozen shouting relatives just to get to the kitchen.

He waited for Kate to make the first move. She did after a moment’s hesitation most other people wouldn’t have noticed. B.J. did. He wasn’t intrigued anymore. He was worried. Even in the sunlight her color wasn’t all that good. In the unrelieved gloom of that entryway, she looked cachectic.

To call the house they stepped into dismal would have been a euphemism. B.J. was sure
when the original owners put the thing up they’d probably trimmed it with all kinds of gewgaws. The original stained-glass windows still scattered shards of color across the gray marble floor. But the rest of the place looked like a cross between a morgue and an old high school, with stairs curling every which way and footsteps echoing endlessly throughout the high-ceilinged rooms. The cold-storage freezer in the Philadelphia morgue had been more inviting than this, and that had been older and not nearly as well decorated.

Kate didn’t give him much more time to ruminate as she turned for the entryway to their left.

“Well, I see you couldn’t put it off any longer.”

Even B.J. straightened to that voice. He’d heard it often enough in the person of Sister Mary Alphonse, his fourth-grade teacher. The sound of it made him want to pull his hands behind his back to save them from the ruler. As for Kate, she lost even more color.

“I came as soon as the doctors let me, Aunt Mamie,” she said.

B.J. couldn’t help shooting her a startled look. In all the time he’d known her, through all the disasters and challenges, the fights with Administration and physicians of every ilk, he had never once been witness to this. She stood so straight somebody could have hung a sail from her, head back, chin up, eyes cold as glass. But her voice didn’t match the brittle posture at all. In fact, it was cowed. Quiet, with just a trace of shame in it. B.J. was tempted to nudge her in the
ribs and tell her to knock it off until he realized she barely remembered he was there.

“Well, you might as well come in,” the voice offered, with just enough self-pity to make it sound as if Kate held the keys to the dungeon. “And who’s that with you? Come in here so I can see you better.”

The living room itself was straight out of
Citizen Kane
, big enough to bowl in, with an arrangement of couches and chairs dead center, all the color of dust. Perched on one of the chairs like the queen mother with bad hemorrhoids was Aunt Mamie, unsmiling, grim, disapproving. B.J. had the feeling that if Kate had brought Jesus Christ into this room, the old lady would have complained about his beard.

“Aunt Mamie, this is my friend Doctor O’Brien.” Kate introduced him as she edged into the living room, the crutches making a curious hissing sound on the floor. “He drove me down.”

That got the old bat’s attention. She stopped, a tumbler of clear liquid halfway to her lips. “A doctor? Really? This doesn’t mean you’ve finally decided to behave like an adult and stop causing trouble, does it?”

Any other time, B.J. might have laughed. Not Kate, he wanted to say. Kate’s expression kept him silent.