Nothing Personal (18 page)

“Oh, turn it off,” Kate snapped, without opening her eyes. Jules was already on her feet as the news anchor restated the details yet again.

“Hospital spokesmen state that the death was a suicide. Police refuse to comment—”

By this time Kate’s eyes were open and she was halfway to her feet. “Those assholes!” she shrilled at the set.

Jules could do little more than stare.

Kate swung an arm at the offending newsperson, who had already segued into the lovely spring weather forecast for the metro area. “Who told them that? Who the hell told them he committed suicide?”

Jules looked poleaxed. “I don’t know, Community Relations? It had to come from the top, didn’t it?”

“No,” Kate snarled. “It did not. They probably interviewed the goddamn gardener.” She started to pace, sounding like Long John Silver as the walking cast made a hollow sound as it hit. “They’re not going to do this. They are
not—
”

Before she thought about it, she slammed out the door and down the hall to the elevators. She was headed for the carpeting. She was looking for answers.

“But who told them that?” she demanded of Lucy Silhammer, the public relations assistant who typed news releases and dreamed of the big lights of local weathercasting.

“Well, I don’t know.” The young airbrushed blonde defended herself, her gaze darting behind Kate as if expecting rescue. “We just answer questions. Decisions like that aren’t made here.”

“Then where are they made?”

“Oh, well, I’m not sure. It might have come from any of the administrative offices. You know, it
has
been busy here the last few weeks—”

“And you didn’t bother to check it out? You just told everybody in the metro area that Tim committed suicide so his parents could hear that kind of thing on the goddamn news?”

The girl paled a little. “He didn’t—um, commit suicide?”

Kate leaned way over her desk until Lucy
flinched away. “He did not—um, commit suicide. And I want you to tell the press that.”

“Me? Oh, no, that’s not my job. You need to talk to somebody else.”

“Who? Give me a name.”

That obviously put Lucy on overload, because she simply sat there, mouth open, eyes blank as a carp. “Why, I—we get the press releases. That’s all I know.”

“Well, know this. I’m holding you personally responsible. Find out and straighten it out, or I’ll cause you so much trouble you’ll wish you were a fish farmer.”

Lucy actually had tears in her big blue eyes. “You can’t threaten me,” she challenged, lifting her little chin in defiance. “I’m only doing my job. It’s not my fault—I mean, if it’s not true.”

Kate sought her answers elsewhere. She tried to get the lawyer on the phone at his Clayton office. She tried to get past secretaries in Administration to Mr. Gunn or Mr. Fellows, or any of the myriad faceless vice presidents who might possibly have been in charge at the moment the word was leaked to the press. No one was home. No one was responsible. Kate had four secretaries explain that to her. Then she had the nursing supervisor warn her that if she didn’t vacate the carpeted area pretty damn quickly, she wasn’t going to have to worry about her job, much less anybody else’s.

B.J. intercepted her at the door to the elevators. Kate was primed and lit. And B.J. stood there, a cigarette over each ear, the ponytail neatly tied
back, the Dead Head shirt on, hands in lab coat pockets, looking cool as rock and roll. She damn near let him have the first swing.

“What are you doing here?”

“Me?” he asked gently. “Hell, I live here lately. Didn’t you know that?”

Kate snapped to a sudden halt. “Nobody else—”

“No. Nobody else. It’s okay. I came here to keep you from dismembering any of the administrative staff. Am I too late?”

Kate stole a look back at the closed door that led into the soft, sibilant world of Administration.

“Trying to get anything out of them is like punching a roomful of balloons,” she admitted, her shoulders sagging.

B.J. pulled a hand out of a pocket and put an arm around her shoulders.

“I’m not going to cry,” she challenged.

“I didn’t say you were. I just want to make sure you can’t get back in that door and commit mayhem.”

She slumped even more. “Did you hear what they did?”

“Jules told me.”

Jules. She’d obviously made the call, right after Kate had called her names. Kate shook her head. “They’d rather hurt Tim and his family than take any responsibility for another murder. That’s evil, Beej. It’s just—”

“They won’t have much choice soon.”

“It’s finished?”

B.J. just nodded. He’d done the physical
autopsy two days ago as Kate had paced his house, but the tox and evidence work had backed up. Kate had accompanied Steve out to the airport to pick up his parents from Florida and then escaped to the hospital so she wouldn’t have to face their stark-eyed grief another minute more than she had to. After all, she was going to spend the next two days in close proximity with it at the funeral home.

B.J. took her arm and turned her away from trouble. “We’ll talk about it later. Let’s get out of here.”

“Where?”

“John and Mary want to talk to you,” he said. “But I thought we’d do it someplace different.”

“Different how?”

“You’ll see.”

“All this,” Kate said forty minutes later in a suspiciously small voice, “just for me?”

“Just for you,” B.J. answered from behind her.

Kate couldn’t quite get her breath. The sunlight was hurting her eyes, that and the color. She wasn’t used to the color.

B.J. had brought her to the gardens. It was how she thought of them, just the gardens, as if they were personally hers, a few acres in the south city where she could go to rest when things got too noisy or stressful.

“I’d forgotten.” She was trying to figure out where the hell all the color had come from while she wasn’t looking: reds and pinks, blues and yel
lows and whites and greens. Especially greens, every hue and shade. Greens so sweet you wanted to take off your shoes and soak your toes in them. Greens that took your breath away.

Kate hadn’t realized until now how bound she’d become by the sterile walls of the hospital. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d missed all this.

“Forgotten what?” B.J. asked alongside her.

She gave a startled laugh, and thought how stupid she sounded. “Spring.”

B.J. just nodded. “I thought so.”

Kate felt like walking right over to the velvety grass and lying facedown in it. Behind her the Latzer Fountain shot water twenty feet into the air. The breeze ruffled a thousand trees and showered apple and cherry blossoms onto the lawns. Beneath a canopy of oak and ash, dogwood and redbud bloomed, and along the walks, flower beds exploded into a paint box of tulips and hyacinth and daffodils, pansies and phlox and columbine.

Shaw’s Garden was a civilized place. A soft, sedate place where Kate had once known how to restore herself.

She stumped along toward the chimes and waterfalls and arbors of the scented garden on the left of the fountain, her head on a constant rotation, the beauty of the place hurting hard, like a too-bright light against sore eyes. She’d never come here with Tim. Suddenly, she couldn’t remember why.

“I have a history with this place,” she said, almost reintroducing herself.

Alongside her, B.J. laughed. “I know. I was one of the interns you dragged over here after surviving a bad night, remember?”

Kate wasn’t likely to forget the looks she got when, still in scrubs, she’d dragged the scruffy, impatient physician through the doors into the sunlight. “I didn’t want to see you commit mayhem. I figured a few hours here in the trees would calm you down a little.”

“Saved my life.”

She did offer a little private smile then. “It was a tough night.”

A brutal night. It had taken B.J. two solid hours beneath the trees and three circuits of the seventy-nine-acre complex with its rolling lawns and sculpted flower beds to overcome his already famous rage at the frivolous carnage they’d waded through that night.

Kate had a picture taken here, too. Not of B.J.; a formal picture, taken by the rose garden, of Michael and her on their wedding day. She’d wanted so much that day. She could still see it in the tentative smile she’d worn, in her Laura Ashley wedding dress and her nasturtium-and-lily bouquet. She’d hoped for escape and comfort. She’d ended up with emptiness.

It hadn’t all been Michael’s fault, she thought, as she reached the arbors and collapsed on one of the secluded little benches by the reflecting pools. He was a cop who defined himself by his rule books. She was a nurse who was never satisfied unless she was mounting an insurrection. Life had been a hell of a lot more fun with Tim, sex or not.

“Where are John and Mary?” she asked.

“We’ll meet them at the restaurant,” B.J. told her. He stretched out alongside her, his face up to the sun.

Kate reached over and squeezed his hand. “Thanks, pogue.”

His smile was dark and knowing. “That’s okay,” he said. “I owed you.”

Actually, John and Mary were waiting for them in a corner of the restaurant patio.

“I don’t suppose we could hijack a tram and have this discussion over by the Japanese garden,” Kate suggested, as she eased into her chair. They’d let her have one facing the fountain, so she wasn’t quite so upset. She could watch the kids play tag with the water and listen to amateur botanists discuss the plant life hereabouts as the four of them talked death and destruction.

“Tough to keep your paperwork from flyin’ away,” John said, anchoring his with a glass of iced tea. “How you doin’, little girl?”

Kate took a minute with the scenery. “Better, thanks. Did you hear what the hospital said about Tim?”

“It wasn’t suicide, you know. B.J. here tell you?”

“Not yet. What do you two have on your minds?”

For the first time since Kate had met her, Mary looked less than composed. Once again outfitted in work clothes, today she didn’t seem quite as
pressed and orderly. Strands of hair snaked out of her chignon, and she kept fingering her Cross pen like a worry stone.

“You gonna help?” John asked.

Kate glared at him. “Don’t insult me, John. How ’bout we just get on with it?”

“Dat why we sittin’ here instead of out in de county where we belong. Okay?”

Kate couldn’t manage much more than a sigh. “Okay.”

“Kate,” Mary said without preamble, squinting against the sun, “did you notice anything…anything unusual when you went in that night?”

Right from the sublime to the terrible. Kate wanted to watch how the light dappled them all like a Monet painting. Instead she steeled herself to the job at hand.

“Besides the obvious?”

Nobody answered.

“I’ve been going over it in my mind. You know about the process server—”

“We talked to him already. He never went in. Only watched the front door. Since he was just looking for you, he didn’t really notice who belonged to what other white coat.”

“I didn’t see anybody else. You talked to the tenants? The house staff is in and out of that place at all hours.”

“We did. Nobody remembers anybody unusual in the hallways. No unusual noises, although it must have happened at cartoon time. The women said they could have missed something during Ninja Turtles.”

Kate forced herself to look back. Examine every detail in search of the one that would indict her for negligence, just like she always had with her mother.

“I didn’t notice anything,” she mused, not even feeling the sunlight on her face anymore. “The only thing out of place was Carver.”

“Carver.”

“The cat. He made me go in and look. He was antsy as hell.” Images flashed relentlessly, old ones too easily superimposed over new, nightmares and reality dancing too close to separate. Suddenly she looked up, surprised. “There wasn’t any struggle.” She hadn’t even realized she’d held the memory until she gave it away. “His room was absolutely clean. The whole place was.”

Mary nodded, consulting her note pad. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. There was an overturned stool, but the plant hanger held, which means there wasn’t a sudden drop, or the whole thing probably would have pulled away.”

“Then how?”

“Dere’s more.” John now. “Doctor Peterson had a big dose of quick-actin’ barbiturate in him.”

“How?”

“We’re checking. When we arrived, the dishwasher had been run a little while earlier. He might have gotten it in a glass. It was enough to kill him all by itself.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Kate insisted.

“You’re right,” Mary said. “It doesn’t. That’s
why we need your help. We want you to go over what we found with us.”

“Found? You got something else?”

Mary nodded, checked her notes, checked B.J. for clearance. “We actually got some fibers this time. White cotton-polyester blend.”

Kate managed an unhappy laugh. “Well, that narrows it down to anybody wearing a lab coat or uniform.”

“An’ a small brown bead,” John added. “From a necklace, maybe. You don’ wear dat kin’ of t’ing, do you?”

“Jewelry and makeup?” Kate countered dryly.

“Whatever for? I don’t meet anybody but doctors, and I’d rather date a snake, thanks.”

“You were living with one,” Mary reminded her gently.

Kate didn’t bother to set them straight. Tim’s sexual persuasion wasn’t an issue here. She just smiled and shrugged, wishing like hell she had a better epitaph. “Tim wasn’t really a doctor. He cared too much.”

John and Mary both checked B.J. for a reaction, but he was busy fondling a pack of cigarettes and didn’t seem to notice.

“So the necklace wouldn’t have been yours,” Mary said.

Kate shook her head. “Most everybody I know wears gold with their lab coats,” she said. “But who knows?”

“What about the note?” Mary asked. “What are your thoughts on that?”

“Note?”

This time all three of them paused. Looked at each other. Kate found herself wishing she had more than iced tea in her glass.

“You didn’ see a note?” John asked.

Suddenly Kate didn’t want to be here anymore. “Come on, kids. Stop yankin’ me around. What note?”