Nothing Personal (17 page)

She let one crutch rest so she could walk and drink at the same time. It took a little more maneuvering, but she wasn’t interested in aesthetics right now. As she followed the antsy cat into the hallway, she flipped on the light so she didn’t trip over him in the dark. That was when she realized Tim’s door was open.

Tim never left his door open when he slept. Especially if Kate was in a bad mood and needed to listen to music. Carver reached the threshold and turned on her, waiting. For some reason, Kate faltered to a halt in the middle of the hallway.

Light spilled across the cream carpet and illuminated the militarily precise corners of Tim’s bedspread. It was empty.

“Tim?”

Out in the kitchen the refrigerator kicked on. A siren growled and lifted outside, making Kate
shiver. It was silent in the apartment. Suddenly too silent.

Bile rose in her throat. She broke out in a sweat.

“Tim?”

She stepped closer. Carver waited. He turned and looked into the darkened room as if he could see something she couldn’t. Kate followed, her gait suddenly unsteady, her heart stumbling.

And then she saw it. The shadow by the window. Swaying just a little from where the cat must have brushed up against it.

Swaying.

“Mama?”

She was a trauma nurse, trained to act. To face crisis calmly, efficiently. Experienced enough that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d frozen in a crisis. But Kate didn’t hear the drip of liquid as the brandy spilled from the glass she forgot. She didn’t notice that Carver brushed up against her or that the phone began to ring. She didn’t hear the peculiar keening noise in her own throat. The sight of Tim’s body hanging from the plant hanger froze her into complete immobility.

BY THE TIME
B.J. got there, the apartment complex looked like a battle scene. Police cruisers and television trucks clogged the parking lot, and bystanders from all over the campus clotted the grounds in chattering little groups. B.J. shouldered his way through with no more than a nod to the uniforms who held the door for him.

Somebody had done a pretty good job with the scene, moving everybody into the unit across the hall so that only evidence techs and the investigator from his office roamed Tim and Kate’s apartment. John stood in the hallway rubbing the back of his neck.

“Where is she?” B.J. asked before even checking the scene itself.

“’Cross de hall. Wid Jules. She de one who called. Came over to apologize ’bout somet’in’, couldn’t get Kate to open the door, hear dis funny noise like somet’in’ bad wrong, and got Security to let her in. She foun’ Katie jus’ standin’ in de hall like a statue, cryin’ for her mama. Dis fucker’s stopped bein’ funny, B.J. Ya know dat?”

B.J. took his first look at the body and grimaced. “I know that.” Then he walked over to the investigator on call and got down to work.

By the time he reached Kate, he found her surrounded by women. They were still crowded in the apartment across the hall, another shoebox decorated in Fisher Price and Early American. B.J. didn’t see any kids, just doctors’ wives and Jules, every one of them making liberal use of the Kleenex box.

Kate sat on the couch, her hands clenched in her lap, her head down, her eyes the only dry set on the scene. The women tried to press tea and Valium on her. Jules hovered over her shoulder, reduced to ineffective little waves of her hands. Even Mary Cherry had shown up, although it took B.J. a minute to recognize her in plaid shirt, jeans, and muddy cowboy boots. She was crouched down next to the couch with a hand on Kate’s arm.

Kate didn’t seem to realize that any of them were there. B.J. didn’t like it a bit.

“Ladies,” John intoned behind him, “we gonna talk to Katie here. Okay if we do it alone?”

There was general murmuring and not a little sniffling as the room almost emptied out. Mary didn’t budge, and B.J. knew from the look in Jules’s eyes that they’d have as much luck getting her out the door as getting an Administration spokesperson in.

B.J. crouched down right in front of Kate. He could see the careful compression of Mary’s features, a subtle message of worry. He didn’t need that. Jules’s red-faced distress said it all.

“Kate?”

Nothing. Not even a flicker of the eyes. She just kept staring at her hands where they were clenched over her knees. She kept frowning as if she was trying to remember something.

B.J. gently pulled her hands apart and took hold of them. “Come on, Kate. Talk to me.”

Kate never lifted her eyes to acknowledge him. She just stared at their hands. “How did she know?”

B.J. did his best not to give away his relief. “Know what, pogue?”

She lifted her gaze then, and B.J. was treated to a wasteland. Old pain, old guilt, grown hard and ugly. Hidden all this time behind a smart mouth and attitude. It was all he could do to stay there and take what she was about to hand him. He was just too damn out of practice.

“I found
her
, too. Came home from school one afternoon and walked right into the living room without thinking that anything was wrong.”

“Found who?”

“My mother. She’d threatened me for years. Every time I didn’t do what she wanted, every time things got tough. Said she’d kill herself. I guess I stopped paying attention.”

He held on tighter. Not just for her sake but for his. He heard Jules’s instinctive moan of emotion and ignored it. Fought every urge to run and held on to Kate’s hands, Kate’s gaze. Kate’s pain.

She looked up beyond B.J. He imagined she’d finally realized that John was standing back there. Then she shook her head. “The note threatened
me
. Me. I just thought—”

“Katie, chil’,” John said, as gently as B.J. had ever heard him. “I know dis is bad, but we gonna need to talk.”

“You took him down, didn’t you? Please tell me you took him down.”

“He’s down,” B.J. promised.

Her eyes returned to B.J.’s. “I just stood there, Beej. I couldn’t even—”

B.J. didn’t give her a chance to get going. “He’s probably been dead at least a couple of hours, pogue. There wasn’t a damn thing you could have done.”

“I’m a trauma nurse….” Still in the dreamy half-awake voice, as if she were only working on half volume. “I’m a…”

Finally, the tears welled up and spilled over. Her shoulders began to shudder. Her mouth opened wider, as if the words needed more room to work their way out. But there weren’t going to be any more words. In their place came the sobs, and she folded in on herself like a slowly deflating balloon. There was nothing B.J. could do but catch her and hold on.

Kate figured somebody finally spiked her coffee to get her to sleep, because she woke up with a furry tongue and a fuzzy head. One thing remained crystal clear, though. Tim was dead.

The sun was out when she woke, pouring through the blinds in B.J.’s rumpled den like butter to melt against the wall. Even so, all she could see were shadows. Shadows and nightmares, the
purple faces and swollen tongues and wide eyes of the strangled.

Tim, her sweet, tormented, protective Tim. The sacrificial lamb in a grisly ritual Kate didn’t understand.

Kate fought the nausea, fought the tide of guilt. If she hadn’t been involved, he might be alive. If she’d been faster. If she’d listened or believed or taken better care of him. An old litany that didn’t seem to get any easier to bear with repetition.

What she didn’t fight was the fury. There, deep inside like a well of black fire, threatening to char everything else in her.

“You’re awake.”

Kate didn’t bother to look away from the neatly trimmed lawns out the window. “No thanks to you.”

B.J. shuffled a little uncomfortably in the doorway. “You’re still not as strong as you think, Kate. You couldn’t have taken much more without just imploding.”

Kate sighed and rubbed at her swollen eyes with the heels of her hands. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

Kate looked up in some surprise to see the shadow of a rueful grin beneath all that strain.

“Steve’s coming over a little later,” he said, one hand propped on the doorjamb, the other already shredding a cigarette. “He wants to talk to you about the lawsuit.”

Kate shook her head. “Screw the lawsuit.”

“Give Steve something to do,” he suggested.
“Besides, he wants to be there when you’re questioned again.”

Kate just shrugged. She took a minute to look around the house she’d always thought would be decorated in early dust and fast food bags. It was unkempt in a papers-and-magazines kind of way, but not dirty. More cozy, with what looked like cast-off furniture from his parents and overflowing bookshelves. Kate had spent the night on a brown tweed foldout couch across from a top-of-the-line sound system.

“I’ve never been here before,” she said.

“I don’t spend so much time here myself.”

Kate knew just what his offer had meant the night before. She would have placed bets he’d never had a woman spend the entire night, no matter what kind of calisthenics they’d been involved in. Now that she was coherent enough, she felt honored.

“Thanks. I didn’t really want to go all the way to Jefferson County. Besides, Jules just would have wrapped me in some dead animal and force-fed me orange juice and game shows.” She rubbed her head a moment, memories skittering a little from the time after she’d dropped off on the couch the night before. “Did I hear the pipes last night?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded. “Just wanted to be sure. I was worried it might have been the banshee.”

That actually made B.J. smile a little. “Tim probably would have liked the idea of a banshee.”

Kate almost got a grin out as well. “Tasteful
but emotional. Good point.” The grief caught her by surprise, sharp as new needles. “Oh, Beej,” she whispered. “What am I gonna do?”

B.J. never moved. “You’re gonna go on,” he said simply. “Just like always.”

She faced him with every ounce of determination her fury had borne. “I am going to get her,” she said. “I’m going to pay her back for this.”

“You’re going to help?”

“I was going to help before this happened. I just wanted to do it on my own terms, so I could protect my friends.” Tears blurred her vision for a minute. “But I couldn’t protect my friends, could I?”

“Hey,” he said, his eyes and voice belying the levity of his words, “life sucks. That’s one of the rules.”

“Yeah,” she admitted. “It is, isn’t it? And I don’t even have any pipes to make me feel better.”

“We’ll go down to McGurk’s when this is all over and have an Irish wake for Tim. How’s that sound?”

Kate actually found a grin for that one. “I think he’d rise up and haunt me.”

“Up the rebels.”

She took a fortifying breath. “Up the rebels.”

“You can’t come back to work. You’re not well yet. You don’t even have hair.”

Armed with her new walking cast, a determination the color of steel, and the knowledge that she finally had the upper hand, Kate leaned forward a little in the burnt-orange chair that faced
the Formica-and-metal desk in Phyl’s office and stared her supervisor down.

“You can let me do light duty,” she said. “Answer phones, make call-backs. That kind of thing. You did it for Suzie when she had her tubes tied.”

“That’s different.”

Someday Kate would ask why. Not today. She didn’t have the patience, the sense of proportion. Tim had been dead three days, and Kate needed to be doing something. She needed to be around people who might know something about how he died. She needed to be away from the thick silence in that apartment.

“Please, Phyl. I’ll behave. I need the money. I need to be busy.”

Phyl’s expression immediately crumbled a little. “I really am sorry, Kate,” she admitted, digging her fingernails into the pencil she’d been juggling. “Tim was…special.”

“Yes,” Kate answered. “He was. Please, Phyl. Help me out.”

Phyl spent a moment consulting the pencil, as if someone had left a message to her imprinted on it. All Kate saw was
NO. 2 SOFT
. Finally, she sighed. “There
is
some paperwork you could do. We’re trying to pull together numbers for re-accreditation.”

“Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me.”

“Have you thought about Administration’s problem?”

Kate nodded. “Give me a little time, Phyl. Let
me see how I do just coming back. I have to take this one step at a time.”

Phyl nodded and settled the pencil in among a drawerful of about two dozen identically sharpened mates. “I’ll tell Human Resources you’ll be back part-time after the funeral. All right?”

Kate thought to protest, but she knew what her energy level was like. She just nodded and levered herself to her feet.

“You
are
looking better,” Phyl finally said, a bit stiffly. “I’m glad your accident wasn’t worse.”

For just a moment, Kate almost snapped something ugly. Something that would have implied that four dead in one crash was quite bad enough for her, that this hospital should have taken its responsibilities more seriously.

But too much had happened since then. Too much. She just smiled and mumbled her thanks and got the hell out of the office.

Jules was waiting in the nurses’ lounge. When Kate walked in, her friend looked up from the moccasin she was sewing.

Kate closed the door and leaned on it. “I’m back,” was all she said.

Jules smiled. “A celebration is definitely in order.”

Kate just wished she agreed. “Up the rebels.”

Jules went back to her work. “Up the rebels.”

Since things were slow between lunch and the evening shift, Kate and Jules had the lounge to themselves. The old tan Naugahyde couch they’d inherited from the doctors’ lounge was littered with nursing journals and romance novels. The refrigerator held warnings about food dating and
hepatitis outbreaks. The television, a gift from a long-ago doc, was tuned to the closing credits of a game show. Jules commanded the only decent chair in the place, homespun and dyed yarn spilling over her bag and sections of soft leather taking up the table. Kate chose the couch.

“So,” she said, leaning her head back against the wall and thinking she should have stolen some more aspirin before she’d made a stand. “You want to tell me just what sedition you’re spreading?”

When Jules looked up, her expression was the soul of innocence. A dead giveaway. “Sedition?”

“The fax machine has your fingerprints all over it, old girl.”

Jules set her work down. “So what was the deal? You come back to work and keep an eye on the little people for them?”

If Kate had any room left to feel anything, that would have hurt. And she’d thought focusing on something other than Tim might help.

“Thanks,” she retorted. “Your faith in me is overwhelming.”

Jules’s color changed perceptibly. “Well, just what did you expect me to say?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How ’bout, ’Gosh, Kate, you’ve got your hands full enough right now without me adding to it by playing juvenile games with the hospital communications systems?”

“Do you know what they’ve been up to since you’ve been gone?”

“I know they’re just itching to use this investigation as an excuse to clean house, damn it. And
if I found out you’ve been playing Captain Midnight, don’t you think they will?”

“They’re too stupid to figure out I’m parking in the front lot.”

Kate tried to give Jules the glare that statement deserved. She probably just looked afraid. “I’m not going to last without you here, and they’re gonna get you. I’ll guaran-goddamn-tee it, Jules. The dogs are out.”

“Are you one of them?”

Kate didn’t even bother to answer. She just closed her eyes and willed the chaos in her to ease back down a notch so she didn’t physically hurt someone.

“And now for the news at the top of the hour,” the television intoned. “Investigation continues into the latest mystery at Saint Simon’s Medical Hospital, the death of senior surgical resident Doctor Timothy Peterson—”