Nothing Personal (15 page)

He’d spent a career dealing with people in pain. He’d learned to keep his opinions to himself when they would have served no purpose. He’d been in this house no more than three minutes, and already he was having trouble doing just that.

He took another look at Kate, searching for direction. She was already seated, taut and silent and haunted. So he sat down alongside her on one of the brocade couches and faced the inquisitor herself. Small, bright-eyed, with dull gray hair and papery skin. Maybe she’d had beauty of some kind once, but the permanent displeasure on those features had long since robbed her of it.

“Nice to meet you,” he said diffidently and noticed that his voice echoed as if he were standing in the middle aisle of St. Mary Magdalen.

The old woman nodded and finished taking that drink, her attention all on Kate, the sparrow hawk spotting small brown feathers. “You owe considerable interest for being late.”

“It’s there.”

A sharp nod. “Well, that’s a start at least. Maybe there’s actually some hope after all this time, Mary Kathleen. I’ve despaired so often that you’d ever learn anything, considering the miserable childhood your mother gave you. You can’t blame me for it, either, you know. After all, look at the shambles you’ve made of things so far.”

B.J. looked over at Kate, waiting for the fireworks that would have gone off if anyone at the hospital had tried this little act on her. But this play had been rehearsed much too well. Kate’s face was as tight as a twelve-hour-dead body as she dug into her sweatshirt pocket for the check she’d already written out. Her hand was trembling. B.J. held on to his silence and his temper with herculean effort.

“Five thousand five hundred twenty-three fifty,” she said, handing it over.

It was snapped up without hesitation and examined as if it had been the original Magna Carta. “I do have to give Mary Kathleen that, Doctor O’Brien. She does try to be punctual. It may not be much, but we should be thankful for even small things, don’t you think?”

“I think—”

He never finished. Kate shot him one single look that shut him up faster than the back of her hand. Pleading. She was begging him just to watch. To understand without her having to explain. It might have been the toughest thing B.J. had to do since crawling around in elephant grass with an M-16 in his hand, but he did it. Barely.

“After all,” Kate’s aunt expounded, warming to her subject, not even aware B.J. had spoken. “If you had known her mother, you’d understand. Mary Kathleen is just like her: flighty, undisciplined. High-strung, they used to call it, as if it were an attractive thing. All the girls were. Maybe Mary Kathleen’s father could have made a difference with them, we’ll never know. He was driven out, driven out of his own house. A bad turn that woman ever came into his life. A bad turn for everyone, isn’t that so, Mary Kathleen?”

“She did her best,” Kate responded, as if repeating a well-learned line.

Her aunt laughed, and B.J. thought of dead leaves across a road. He was getting sick to his stomach. “Her best. Is that what it was? Well, she drove off her own husband because she wasn’t
wife enough for him. And she certainly taught you girls well. Good heavens, you divorced and your sisters…just what are your sisters doing now, Mary Kathleen? Do you even know, after all the money you spent on them?”

B.J. was sure he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a Tennessee Williams play. This old gal couldn’t possibly be real. Kate couldn’t be affected by this crap.

But she was. He was appalled to find that she shrank before it, Kate who had stood toe to toe with psychotics and neurosurgeons and never given an inch. She looked suddenly like a very small little girl who wouldn’t recognize a word of praise if somebody painted it on her forehead.

And sisters. B.J. had never heard a word about Kate having sisters. God, he wanted out of here now, before it was too late.

“At least I can coerce Mary Kathleen to come see me,” the old woman went on, evidently not expecting any answers. “Her sisters, on the other hand…well, I can’t say I’m surprised. They certainly showed their true colors, didn’t they, Mary Kathleen? Even more like your mother than you are.”

“Leave them out of this, Aunt Mamie.” Kate was looking even more pale, and her fingers were wrapped around her crutch strap as if it were a lifeline—or a weapon. “They turned out fine.”

The old woman just huffed, as if Kate were the most callow creature on earth. “How would you know? You haven’t heard from them in six years. How would you like sisters like that, Doctor
O’Brien? Did Kate tell you about the loan she took out? To get her sisters as far away from me as possible. Well, she did. She did that. But they won’t see her either.”

That was it. B.J. didn’t care what Kate wanted. There was only so much torture he could witness without intervening.

“I have to get Kate back now, Mrs. Henderson,” he spoke up, working hard to keep his voice even. “She’s still not recovered from her injuries. You might have noticed—”

Another moue of displeasure. “I noticed. Such a shame. Your one good feature, that lovely Manion hair, and it’s all gone. Which reminds me. I refused to wait until it’s too late, so I called Marshall to represent you in this…unpleasant matter. After all, he knows us. He might minimize—”

Kate was suddenly on her feet. “No. No, Aunt Mamie, I have a lawyer, thank you. No one will bother you over this.”

“Well, they already have. My heavens, this morning one of those dreadful tabloid shows called me. If you’d been more responsible, Mary Kathleen, none of this would have happened. But you just don’t have a drop of your father in you, I’m afraid.”

“I…I’ll be back in six months,” she said simply. “As we agreed.”

“No,” the little woman contradicted hastily. “As
you
agreed. I was just a convenient source of the cash you needed to get yourself away from your family.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

B.J. found himself on his feet with a hand on Kate’s arm. “Come on,” he said, battling the urge to break something. “Let’s go.”

For a second, Kate hesitated, her eyes on that withered, empty woman on the couch. Waiting, although for what B.J. wasn’t sure. Hoping?

In the end, the woman waved them both off as if they were bootboys. “Go on, don’t bother about an old woman like me. I’ll just wait six months until you decide you can’t put off seeing me any longer.”

B.J. didn’t let Kate hang around for more. He just pushed her right back out the front door.

She didn’t even make it to the car before she was on her knees vomiting.

B.J. grabbed hold of her, right out on the sidewalk. Pulled out his handkerchief to wipe her face. Tried his best to pretend he didn’t notice the tears. He wasn’t good at this, damn it. He didn’t know what to do. She was shaking and retching, and her cap was on the grass, and he couldn’t think of anything to say except he was sorry, which wasn’t going to do any damn good.

Finally Kate straightened and accepted the handkerchief with trembling hands, her cheeks mottled with embarrassment.

“This is so stupid,” she protested.

B.J. bent to retrieve her hat, never releasing his hold on her. “I was thinking more along the lines of symbolic.”

He didn’t even get a smile out of her. She just went still, her gaze out to the wide street rather than the house she’d just left. “Aunt Mamie
practically raised my father,” she said simply, as if that would make all the difference. “I don’t think she ever got over the fact that he settled for someone so very much like their parents when he married my mother.”

“She’s a selfish old bitch.”

Thankfully, that finally brought at least a semblance of a smile. “Well, yeah, there’s that too.”

B.J. settled the Cardinals cap back on her head and steered her for the Jeep as if nothing had happened. She looked abashed and pale, but better by the minute since she’d walked out of that decorated tomb.

“You never told me you had sisters,” he said as he settled in.

She didn’t bother to look over at him. “Twins, younger than I am. They’re…they moved away quite a while ago. They’re on the West Coast.”

“When did your mom die?”

A breath, deep and hungry, as if air were courage. “When I was fourteen. She never got over the fact that my dad left, I guess. After that, Aunt Mamie was in charge.”

For a minute B.J. just considered the street before them, wide, elegant, well-manicured. As carefully put together as the decor in Tim’s apartment. A proper facade that could hide all kinds of secrets. Then he turned over the engine and headed back through Forest Park toward the highway.

The traffic was heavy through the park on a day as nice as this. The sun glinted on car roofs
and the sky sparkled over the soft green trees of early spring. B.J. found he’d lost his enthusiasm for the nice weather.

“Do you know where your dad is now?”

Kate kept her attention on the scenery as they passed the manmade mountains of the zoo. “Nope. Don’t care much, either.”

“He drank too?”

This time Kate shot him a look that reminded him too much of those moments back in that mausoleum. Dread. He wanted to go back and hit that old woman for doing this to her. Then he wanted to find her father and hit him too. Hard. Just like the old man had probably hit Kate.

“Unless I’ve wasted all these years playing down at McGurk’s,” he said instead, “that old lady in there was throwing back straight vodka.”

Kate faced front again and twisted her hands in her lap. Made a curious shrugging motion.

At that moment B.J. knew everything he needed to about Kate Manion. Even so, he found himself pushing farther.

“Why don’t you tell her to just get screwed?”

“Because I still owe her five thousand dollars,” she said, eyes out to the street. “Because she’s right. Except for my nursing, I
have
made a shambles of everything in my life.”

B.J. didn’t insult her by telling her she was an idiot. She already knew that. At least the adult Kate did. But it wasn’t the adult who was forced to walk back into that house. It was the child Kate, abused and frightened and unsure, who had learned her sense of worth from dysfunctional adults. B.J.
thought of how he’d spent so much of his own teen years trying to hurt his father for being so protective and strong. He was glad the old man had lived long enough for him to apologize.

Kate finally turned to him, and what he saw was a Kate no one else had ever seen. “Do you understand?”

Kate, the oldest child of an alcoholic. Kate the caregiver, Kate the protector. Kate, who was still paying for siblings who had in the end deserted her. Kate, who was even now being squeezed between the demands of her job, her friends, and her very acute sense of justice.

B.J. did understand. He understood that she knew perfectly well she was being unreasonable. He understood that in the end she couldn’t be any different. He understood he had been sent to manipulate her into betraying her friends anyway.

Goddamn it, dead people were so simple. They didn’t have Aunt Mamies to screw things up anymore. They didn’t have to worry about divided loyalties.

“Yeah,” he said simply, his attention out to the street. “I understand. But it’s not going to help.”

Kate just sighed. “I know.”

After that, B.J. simply kept silent. Not because he was troubled by the admissions Kate had made, but by the understanding that no matter what she’d said, or what it was going to cost her, he was going to have to go back and make her do exactly what she didn’t want to do. He was going to have to make her betray her friends, a woman
who was still trying to protect two absent sisters from the spider who’d raised them all.

He was going to have to play for the opposition, and it didn’t make him proud of himself at all.

SHE WAS GOING
to have to do it. Kate had known it all along. She just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

Somebody was killing people. That she could almost live with. After all, the victims weren’t people she’d ever cared for. They wouldn’t create any kind of hole in her life. Their deaths had yet to instill any sense of urgency in her.

Even the notes had failed to incite any kind of response. They were too impersonally polite to be anything but annoying.
Thanks for paying attention to my acting out, but don’t interfere before I’m finished. Have a nice day
. How can you possibly take something like that seriously?

But Kate knew just how surgical the Administration’s strikes tended to be. At one time there had been too much unrest in the ER, so instead of addressing the problems, or even listening to the complaints, the Administration had just broken up the staff and transferred them elsewhere. It had taken two years and a lot of bad press to get another good team together, mostly by transferring
remaining members of the original team back where they belonged. Kate knew damn well that every person she liked or loved or even respected would be indiscriminately raked over the coals, which might just net the police a killer but would definitely break the spirit of the rest of the staff in the process.

Just like Sticks’s little forays into the lounge for soda. Big deal. The doctors had a separate dining area, free refreshments, compensated trips to the Caribbean for seminars. The rest of the staff got free use of the parking lot and the chapel. But Sticks was poaching on the physicians’ estate, and Administration was tough on poachers.

And Parker. What would they do to him once they realized he was seriously satisfying one of their senior residents? He wouldn’t exactly get a reprimand, but the weight would be felt in small ways: scheduling, attention to details, a sudden escalation of anonymous complaints.

And then there was the fact that Edna had often caught movies on the doctors’ lounge television. Edna claimed that because of a bad lightning problem in a former life, she couldn’t allow any antennas or cables that might attract lightning at home. So if she wanted to see Sylvester Stallone on TV, she did it on the best set in the hospital.

Little secrets. Little indiscretions that by themselves would have gone unnoticed. Which Kate was privy to. Which, combined with the information about the three murders, could easily be damning.

She had to try her best to keep the investigation
from getting out of hand. And she knew the minute she did, she’d pay for it. No matter whether they wanted justice done or not, her friends would never forgive her for turning against them. They’d never understand that she would be doing it to protect their confidences rather than betray them.

And once again, just like six years ago when Mary Ellen and Molly had found out the truth, Kate would be left alone.

She thought about it all through the meal B.J. sprang for at Steak ‘n’ Shake, and then on the way over to Clayton, where they went to talk to John about the second note. She thought about it as they stood downstairs in the lobby of the detectives’ building waiting for the undercover narcotics officers who shared quarters there to get into some kind of hiding before the civilians were buzzed upstairs. She thought about it and fought the sudden rush of claustrophobia.

She’d tell them later. After she’d had a chance to talk to Jules about it. After she’d watched a little on her own. After she’d had a chance to talk to Tim.

Later.

“Well, don’ you look de young t’ing.” John greeted them at the top of the stairs with one of his big alligator smiles.

“Save the flattery, John,” Kate retorted, clumping past him. “I’m not going to do it.”

“You wanna talk to your frien’ anyway? I bet she’d like to talk to you.”

Kate whipped around so fast she almost overbalanced. “What friend?”

His smile dimmed noticeably. Maybe the Little Dick enjoyed harassing the staff, but John didn’t. “Dat sweet lady from ICU. Edna? Dat her name?”

“You know perfectly well that’s her name.” Kate turned her glare on B.J., who managed to look completely stunned, which for B.J. was a first.

“John?” he demanded. “You were going to wait.”

John just shrugged, that same kind of shrug that implied interference by the gods in mortal affairs. “We were, till Dickie foun’ dat sweet Edna’s name on a big order for potassium. At de very wrong time, you know?”

“Oh, bullshit,” Kate snapped. “She just happened to be the one ordering that day, that’s all. Where is she?”

Where she was was in one of the offices in the back, her face pale, her unremarkable gray eyes wide, her hands trembling in her lap. When she caught sight of Kate, she almost came right off the hard-backed institutional green chair.

“You too?” she asked.

Kate caught her breath. “No. Are you okay, Edna?”

“We haven’t broken out de hoses, if dat what you mean,” John drawled from behind her.

Kate didn’t even bother to answer. “Edna?”

“I…you knew I was a prisoner in ancient Egypt, didn’t you, Kate? You never get over the feeling.”

Kate slid into a free chair at the small Formica table and sighed. “Of course you don’t, Edna.”

“Hi, Kate. You’re looking better.”

Kate had not even noticed the other member of the inquisition squad in the corner: Mary Cherry, once again decked out in a surgically tailored suit, her hair pulled back in a bun that would have made Kate look like an Irish washerwoman but only highlighted the FBI agent’s spectacular cheekbones and lustrous eyes. And Kate hadn’t thought she could feel worse.

She nodded. “Mary.”

Edna sniffed and unraveled a Kleenex in her hands. “You know Miss Cherry, Kate?”

“We’ve met. Do you have a lawyer, Edna?”

“John offered,” Edna acknowledged. “But I didn’t want to bother anybody.”

Kate did her best not to grind her teeth.

“What brings you down here?” Mary asked, somehow managing to look elegant in a crowded room decorated in governmental notices and procedural manuals.

“Another note,” B.J. said from the doorway, where he and John had followed Kate in.

John already had it in his hands. Mary came right to her feet, forgetting Edna, forgetting Kate, forgetting the note pad she’d been scribbling on.

“Note?” Edna asked.

Kate settled her head into her hands. She should call Tim. He’d be heading home sometime soon and wonder where she was. She had the feeling it was going to be awhile before she’d get a chance to join him.

“Shit.”

Kate got her head up and turned it. She couldn’t
imagine what could make Mary Cherry swear. It sounded so unnatural. What she saw was John standing in the doorway, the note carefully held up in a gloved hand so Mary could read it. Mary was bent a little, and she was frowning at the thing as if it had somehow betrayed her.

“Shit what?” Kate asked.

“Do you think this will show up on my record?” Edna said, wiping the table in front of her with the tissue. “I’m not doing very well down in the ER so far, and I’m too old to try and move to another hospital, you know?”

Kate found herself patting the woman’s hand. “I know.”

No one else seemed to be paying attention. John and B.J. were watching Mary for some further sign, and Mary was still watching the note, all three of them crowded in the doorway as if to prevent people from leaving. Kate wondered if she’d missed something.

“Shit what?” B.J. echoed.

Mary plopped her elegant hands on her hips and sighed. “Shit I don’t know,” she admitted. “Something’s not right.”

Both men bent to look closer. Edna rubbed at a spot that had probably been on the table since the Nixon administration. Kate waited.

“It’s just like the first one,” John prompted, his accent fading as he concentrated.

Mary nodded emphatically. “I know. Same tone, same precision, same everything. But something’s wrong.”

That was evidently when she realized her
chief suspect for sending said note was sitting not five feet away. Looking over, she actually scowled. Then she turned to Kate, who was watching the whole thing not just with mounting trepidation but with perfectly reprehensible curiosity.

“Can you hang around for a while so I can talk to you?”

“I’ll need to call Tim and tell him. And then lie down for a few minutes.”

All three looked at one another. “We have holding…” John offered.

There was a summary shaking of heads.

Kate sighed again. “Never mind. An office chair will do. After working nights this long, I can sleep damn near anywhere.”

She proved just that after leaving a message for Tim on the answering machine, picking up her own messages, and trying very hard to get through to anyone in Administration who had information on the Rashad case.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Phyl said bluntly on Kate’s machine. “The papers have been served here, just like I said.”

That was it. End of message. Unfortunately, when Kate tried to track down somebody for enlightenment on what the lawsuit would specifically mean to her, she came away empty-handed. It seemed that now the hospital had determined she was on her own, they couldn’t quite decide who might have the necessary information she needed or the authorization to share it. So nobody gave it to her.

She left her last message with Tim’s brother,
Steve, and sat back in her chair to wait for the news to sink in.

The worst nightmare in a nurse’s career: a lawsuit. A big one, judging by the careful reaction of the secretaries at St. Simon’s. She should have been panicked. At any other time in her life, the very idea of forfeiting not only every penny she had but her career as a whole to the gaping maws of personal-injury lawyers would have sent her screaming into the night.

Maybe she’d just been through too much. Maybe she was just anticipating what else she was going to have to suffer. Or maybe a person could only take so much terror and rage at once. Because it simply didn’t sink in. In fact, by the time Mary finally came back to discuss the note, Kate was sound asleep in a metal-and-cardboard chair with her casted leg up on an overturned trash can.

The nap helped restore everything but her temper. By the time B.J. drove her home after another two hours of Twenty Questions, Kate was stretched too thin even to feign politeness. She simply wanted to get away from all the pressure. Just for a little while, she wanted to be left alone. Which was why she kept her news about cooperating to herself, and her eyes shut all the way home. There was only so much she could share in one afternoon.

The grounds of the hospital had once been a quite parklike place. Unfortunately, that had been
before Interstate 270 was built, medicine boomed, and ancillary care centers became all the rage. Now the campus looked like public housing without the flower beds, stark cubes of white that crouched amid the surrounding office buildings and fast food franchises like an elephant hiding in the bushes. Kate felt the pull of ambivalence the minute she spotted it.

It was home. It was hell. Well, she thought with a sigh as they pulled up the driveway, at least nothing much had changed in her life.

Tim’s car was in the apartment lot, and Jules’s truck was in the ER parking. Another small indiscretion. Jules hated walking in from the employee lot, so she parked in the free parking out front by the ambulance entrance. An offense punishable by firing. So far Security was more afraid of Jules than of Administration, so she got away with it.

Kate decided that after all the caffeine John had poured in her, she was much better suited to sit in ER than in the pastel pillow of Tim’s apartment. Besides, Tim listened to nothing but chamber music. It was enough to make Kate homicidal. She had B.J. drop her off right behind the Maryland Heights ambulance that had just pulled up.

“You’re sure?” he asked, looking uncomfortably paternal.

Kate shot him a scowl that would have silenced a psychotic. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

Even B.J. knew when to back down. He just nodded and headed off. Kate spent a minute stretching out the kinks she’d picked up from sitting in office furniture of the Marquis de Sade
school and B.J.’s Jeep with the shot suspension, and then she followed the noise inside.

Maybe she’d been hoping it would be better each time she walked in. It wasn’t. The place was packed to the rafters with the latest flu epidemic, a rash of the accidents that always happened in nice weather, and general spring depressions. Within minutes, Kate spotted Parker and Jules and Sticks, all barking at each other and tossing charts with a purpose that could only mean another twist of the rope from the bosses.

Wonderful. And she’d been looking for support.

With a healthy sigh, she resettled her crutches and headed down the hall to get herself some aspirin from the med prep. A few people said hello, but the volume level from the patients was enough to provoke more grimaces than smiles.

Right across from the med prep, Sticks was trying to shave a chunk of some guy’s head in room four while he pissed and moaned about some woman sneaking up on him at the wrong time. He had a faceful of blood and, from the sound of it, a gutful of beer. The denizens in their natural habitat. Kate just grabbed her aspirin and some water to flush with.

She had one tablet halfway down her throat when she was interrupted.

“Excuse me.”

Kate turned at the polite request and almost aspirated her aspirin. A very nice young man with bright blue eyes and long blond hair stood before her draped in nothing but what looked like his mother’s best chintz drapes, curtain rings and all.
But then, Kate thought, she was a nearly bald woman in a cast, a red sweatsuit, and a baseball cap backward on her head. He probably felt right at home.

“Yes?”

He smiled and nodded. “Can you tell me where I might find Persephone?”

“Persephone?”

He nodded, shyly excited. “Yes. I’m Spring, and I need to tell her it’s time to come out.”

“Oh.” Kate nodded. “Of course. Persephone. Hey, Jules, didn’t I see Persephone over there with you?”