Nothing Personal (20 page)

No wonder he’d wanted her fired. She wondered just who else she’d personally insulted on the way to getting Billy Rashad out the door.

“Is there anything else?” B.J. was asking.

John and Mary were both reviewing their notes.

“Prob’ly not,” John admitted. “Besides, we can always fin’ you, little girl.”

He’d meant it to be funny. Kate wasn’t in the mood for any of them anymore. Out in the garden, a brace of women wheeled carriages toward the English wooded garden, where the dogwoods would create ivory lace and the ground would be carpeted in columbine and azaleas. A couple holding hands strolled back along the path from the lily garden, their eyes only on each other on this fine
spring day. The trees sent up a susurrus chorus as the wind fingered through their young leaves. All Kate could think was how sad the wind sounded.

“Tell you what,” she said, her eyes on the sculpted beauty of the gardens. “I’m going to take a tram ride around the gardens now. You want me, you come after me.”

And before John or Mary could intervene, she did just that.

Unfortunately, Mary waited to take Kate up on her offer until sometime around one o’clock the next morning. Kate had been lying on B.J.’s living room couch, unable to make even a pretense of sleeping, while she waited for him to return from the scene of a multiple homicide. So she’d turned the TV to the weather station, the radio to rock and roll, and left all the lights on to scare away the shadows. A half-empty wine bottle and a half-full glass sat on the coffee table, from where she’d been fortifying herself for the morning to come. Just another perfect evening at home.

The first time the bell rang, she ignored it. She was not in the mood for company, especially the kind of company that couldn’t tell time. But her visitor rang again and then again. Kate didn’t want somebody else mistaking her silence and breaking down the door, so she climbed off the couch and yanked the door open.

Mary walked right on through into the living room.

“Tell me about that night,” she said, turning back to find Kate still standing with the doorknob in her hand.

“What?”

Mary smiled. “I’m sorry. Kate, may I come in? I think it’s important. You should probably close the door now.”

Kate at least had the presence of mind to do that. “Do you know what time it is?” she demanded, and thought how stupid she sounded. She was in nothing but her nightshirt, sweatpants, and a set of earrings the shape of bananas. Mary, on the other hand, was still in her working uniform and managed to look neater than she had that afternoon.

“I’ve been thinking about this,” Mary offered, claiming the chair and motioning for Kate to take back the couch, as if it were Mary’s house rather than B.J’s, “and I think that whatever happened the night of the accident is important.”

“Is to me,” Kate retorted from where she stood. “I’m being sued over it.”

“I think you have more at stake than that. I’ve been on the phone most of the night with one of my friends at Quantico, and he agrees. We think this might be crucial. Would you mind telling me what happened?”

Kate finally pushed herself away from the door. “Why?”

“Humor me.”

Kate wished she were more alert. She wished she’d never answered the door, but that was a regret she’d probably get over. So she reclaimed
the couch, reclaimed her drink, and preceded to tell Mary about Billy Rashad. She kept the tale short, succinct, and to the point, and still ended up with an empty glass by the end of it.

Kate noticed Mary had pulled one of those little notebooks from some pocket and was making notes.

“You don’t remember any of it?”

“Nope. Why?”

Mary looked up, and for the first time Kate realized the agent could look positively avid. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe it’s nothing. You got into a fight with your superiors over the little boy, though.”

“Evidently. Otherwise, I doubt I would have been fired. They hate to pay unemployment too much to throw me out for nothing.”

Mary was nodding, scribbling, a few strands of hair working themselves free. Kate wished all this activity was making her feel better. She was still trying to assimilate the fact that she’d been fired. That she’d deliberately hurt Fleischer with the memory of his own son.

“There is always,” Mary said suddenly, dragging Kate’s attention back, “a precipitating incident. Something that sends the murderer over the edge. A divorce, a fight, an imagined slight. At least in traditional serial murders. You never received a note before the night of the accident.”

Kate knew how to play straight man. “No.”

“There hadn’t been any suspicious deaths among the staff before that.”

“Not unless you count Janet Preston down in
the lab. But then, I’m not sure how suspicious bungee-jumping incidents are.”

Mary actually bristled with impatience. “Then it may just be that something happened on the night of the accident to make our murderer think you understand so well. The reason the murders started at all.”

Kate shook her head. “That kind of thing goes on all the time.”

“Maybe, but serial murder doesn’t. Our friend keeps thinking you know something you don’t seem to. Maybe it’s as simple as retrograde amnesia. Maybe something happened on the night you can’t remember that changed this person’s life.”

“So what do we do?” Kate asked.

“I’ve already talked to John. He’s taking care of interviews. We also got a court order for the Rashad records. What I’d like to do is go over them with you tomorrow, if that’s okay.”

No. It wasn’t okay. Suddenly everything was moving too fast. Because Kate knew that, as much as she’d asked for this all along, the last thing she wanted to know was exactly what had happened that night.

She shook her head. Poured out the last of the wine into her glass, as if that were going to help. “No. Not tomorrow.” Tipping the glass, she damn near emptied that one too. “Tomorrow,” she said, taking a deep breath to quell the newest surge of nausea, “we have a different kind of appointment altogether.”

Kate hated funeral homes. It wasn’t that she found them as barbaric and useless as some people did. Kate had seen too many sudden deaths in her career. She’d held too many people who simply couldn’t find closure because they hadn’t had the chance to say good-bye. Maybe someday somebody would find a better way than formaldehyde and flowers, but the tradition of wakes and funerals at least gave the survivors a chance to finish their business.

No, Kate’s problem was that she’d spent far too much of her childhood in funeral homes. It was a predictable side effect of coming from a once-large Irish Catholic family. Funerals were just as much social events as reunions and weddings—and, in Kate’s family, far more frequently attended. It had been her mother’s one acceptable excuse to get out of the house. Kate had always been dragged along as an impartial witness for her mother’s defense.

Kate still woke up with the scent of old flowers and thick perfume in her nose. She could hear the thin threnody of the two old harpies who had always seated themselves at the back of the room, the back of the church, to provide sufficient grief for the occasion. Only later had Kate realized that the old girls weren’t even related. It was simply their function in the community.

She could still sense the whispers of approval over cosmetics designed to cover the ravages of cancer or cirrhosis, the stifled laughter of the men who clustered together in a kind of protective pack by the men’s room, the commiserating hum of women
entertained by yet another chapter in the desperate life and times of Mary Margaret Ryan Manion.

Funerals. The only recreation Kate was allowed, since as the oldest she would inherit the duty after her mother was gone. They were the first thing she foreswore after she’d been left in charge, the last thing she wanted to do on a spring day that promised neither sun nor solace.

She’d done her best with Tim’s parents, a pair of retired professors who met the entire situation with a kind of bewilderment that made Kate think they expected Tim to appear and laugh at the apparition in the casket. They hadn’t ever known about Tim’s imminent excursion from the closet. Steve, haggard and distracted, had begged Kate to keep it from them. Since it had never been her family, and since it had been Tim’s decision to make all along, she agreed. So she played the bereaved fiancée for everybody and actually found some comfort in the distracted affection of these two bespectacled people who bore absolutely no resemblance to either son.

The press had hounded them from door to door, and the funeral home had been packed all afternoon. It helped and it hurt. Kate didn’t get any rest, and she didn’t get any relief from the decisions she’d made.

“See anything that might be helpful?” Mary asked in her ear as they stood at the wall farthest from the casket.

Mary stood by Kate because anyone else would be too obvious. B.J. simply did not do funerals. Dickie was too much of a jerk to let
loose, and John would have stood out like a bear in a snowbank. No one in the room but Kate knew Mary carried a nine-millimeter automatic beneath her severe gray suitcoat.

“I see a lot of angry, upset people,” Kate said, instinctively slipping her hands toward where lab coat pockets would be. Except she too was in a suit. Bright, outrageous aqua and purple, spring colors Tim had once pressed on her in a moment of whimsy, topped by the flamingo earrings that had been his last gift. His mother had smiled. Phyl, perched on one of the stiff, uncomfortable couches like a mound of congealing mashed potatoes, looked as if Kate had arrived wearing a teddy and spiked heels.

“Well, don’t go anywhere without me,” the agent said yet again. As if Kate would forget. As if Kate
could
forget.

Victims. She didn’t see the people here so much as suspects than as potential victims.

Kate held her place against the wall by the guest book as Hetty Everson stalked up, eyes bright with unshed tears she never would have wasted on her own patients in the unit, her gait uncertain in unaccustomed heels.

“Who’s this?” Mary asked under her breath.

“Nurse from surgical ICU,” Kate said. “Took care of me after the accident.”

Opinionated, aggressive, burned out with the best of them.

“The press said he committed suicide,” Hetty accused Kate as if no one else had thought to do it. “Did he?”

Kate shook her head, always mindful of where
Tim’s parents were. “No. He didn’t. Anything else you want to know?”

“It’s been going around the hospital that you two had been having your problems.”

Kate might have laughed if she’d been anywhere but in a room full of gladioli and straight-backed chairs. “No,” was all she said, knowing it wouldn’t make any difference. People would assign blame as they saw fit. “We weren’t.”

When Sticks approached an hour later, she had a completely different spin on the subject. She wasn’t any happier about it, though. “You gave in and he paid for it.”

“I gave in?”

The kohl-rimmed blue eyes were desolate as the girl twisted lank hair around a finger. “You’re collaborating with the enemy, and it cost Tim his life. Isn’t that right?”

What kind of answer could she give? Kate spent a minute looking over the crowd for any sign of rescue, anything that might make her laugh or relax or even cry. There was just a press of taut faces, familiar faces with judgments already in place. Tim’s parents got handshakes, hugs, tears. Kate got suspicion and reticence.

There was nothing Kate could do but face the girl head on. “Give me some options, Sticks. Give me some help.”

Sticks was not amused. “Fuck help. Give yourself a seat on the bus,” she said, pulling her hand away so the feathers at her ears trembled like leaves in a gust of wind. “I thought you’d be the last one to crumble.”

Sticks, who still demanded protection from the world, still needed absolutes. What was it Dickens had said? Nothing is so finely felt in the small world of children as injustice. He would have recognized Sticks in a minute.

It was, of all people, Martin Weiss who offered a shoulder. “Don’t let the assholes get you down,” he said when he came up, his fingers tattooing an edgy rhythm on Kate’s sleeve. “They’re not worth the trouble.”

Kate saw the groups beginning to form already, even here, and sighed. “Yes, they are.”

Martin surprised her by not just drifting back off into the crowd. “Oh, bullshit,” he objected, running a trembly hand through his beard. “You never needed their approval before.”

“I never needed
your
approval before,” she countered with a slow grin. “There’s a difference.”

The look she got was far too serious. “No,” he said, “you haven’t, have you? Everything might be a lot different if you had, just once…just once.”

Kate found herself squinting at him, as if that would help pull him into better focus. “What do you mean?”

But Martin’s eyes were across the room, where the new chief of surgery was greeting Mr. Fellows by Tim’s casket. “Three more glorious months,” he muttered with a too-bright smile, “and then it’s my turn with the portfolio and the takeover bids. I’ll make sure that
I
show up at one of my residents’ funerals just in time to catch the minicams out front. Although how they managed with their
hands halfway up the ass of Central Medical Center, I don’t know.”

“Martin,” Kate said, her hand now on Martin’s arm, “this is important. What would be different?”

He turned back to her, but it took him a second to refocus.

“What would be different?” Kate asked. “Are you talking about the night of the accident?”

She could almost hear the gears turn, the cogs slip before they caught and held.

“You were on that night.” She nudged him, her hand a little tighter around the slightly disheveled tweed. “Weren’t you?”

“Of course I was,” he said. “You know that.”

Kate shook her head. “I don’t. I have complete retrograde amnesia for that whole shift. Martin, tell me, please. What was it I did that set this whole thing off?”

“Set what off?” he demanded. “The lawsuit? That’s easy, honey. You personally held up that kid’s transfer until it was too late. That’s what you did.”