Nothing Personal (21 page)

IT WAS THREE
more days before Kate began to get her answers. Three days of fending off voracious reporters, of ignoring the slights and silent accusations of her fellow workers, of bearing the terrible burden as Tim’s parents finally began to realize that their gentle, beautiful son wouldn’t be coming home again.

Kate didn’t sleep and she didn’t eat. She worked with Steve to decide how best to take care of Tim’s things and walked back into the apartment to offer Mr. and Mrs. Peterson the chance to take the little things they wanted until the big things could be arranged. She accepted the grief of Tim’s ex-lover and participated in the careful dance of gay friends he’d gathered in the Central West End as they paid their respects, all too well versed in the masquerade families often demanded of them. She fought to keep Carver, and she dealt with insurance investigators, medical school representatives, and funeral home attendants. And through it all, she kept that conversation with Martin to herself.

Her fault. Billy Rashad had been her fault.

How? Could she have really stepped over her own boundary, so caught up in being right that she sacrificed one of her patients? What she’d told B.J. so long ago had been the truth. She did consider nursing to be the one place in her life she had triumphed. Not perfectly, but always with the most honorable intentions. When she’d had a fight, she’d always had it for the right reasons.

She’d always thought.

What if she’d been wrong about that too? What if she’d gotten too caught up in her personal sense of justice? Wound herself up so tightly in self-righteous indignation that she’d ended up playing a deadly game with a child’s life?

There would be nothing else left from which to resurrect herself. Nothing she could count on as she tried to find her place again.

She was a nurse. A good nurse. A nurse who gave a damn.

A nurse who could at least count on the care she gave, no matter what else had gone wrong with her life.

Finally, that too might be a lie.

“I’m going to give you some names,” Mary said. “Tell me what you think.”

Kate rubbed at Carver’s ears and stared at the wall. White on white, elegant, empty.

She’d insisted on trying to move back so B.J. wouldn’t have more intrusion in his life. She’d seen just how well he slept when she’d stumbled
by his room on the way to the bathroom. He’d been up already, but his bedclothes had betrayed the fact that not all the sounds she heard at night came from the pipes. The mattress was half pulled off onto the floor, and the pillows and covers bunched and wrinkled. She could smell bad dreams in that room and knew B.J. wouldn’t appreciate her asking the privilege of inclusion.

She’d thought if she went home she could get on with her life, so she’d snuck out right after B.J. had left for a two-day trip to testify in Louisville. But she hadn’t even been able to rumple the bedsheets. When she closed her eyes, she swore she could sense violence here, as if Tim’s life had been snatched away so quickly he’d left part of himself behind. She kept looking for the mementos his parents had taken and surprising herself with the empty stillness of the rooms.

“Kate?”

“Why are you so involved in this, Mary?” she asked suddenly, her eyes still on the mottle of shadows on the wall. She could make shapes out of them if she wanted. Unfortunately, they all turned into a long swaying figure of inevitability. “I thought the FBI just took a consulting role.”

Mary shrugged, her neat linen jacket remaining perfectly unwrinkled. “Research. I’d like to learn more about this type of murder. And I keep thinking there’s something wrong here. The pieces just don’t add up.”

“I don’t know anything about you.”

Mary looked up from her notes. “Pardon?”

“I don’t know anything about you. Tell me something.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Where you live. Where you went to school.”

“Oklahoma.”

That made Kate look up. “Really? I hadn’t expected that.”

“One place is pretty much like another.”

“You married?”

“I was.”

“Me too.”

“I know. Have you heard from him through all this?”

“Michael? No. He was never one to like being bothered much. I imagine he’s sitting in his living room in Eugene, Oregon, watching baseball or something. You?”

“Oh, he’s in New Mexico this week.”

“Travels?”

“Rodeo.”

For the first time in almost a week, Kate burst out laughing. Then she stopped, appalled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

Mary smiled back. “It’s not what you’d expect. I know. Junior’s a good man, just not a monogamous one.”

“Junior?” She had no business feeling so delighted. “What does he do, ride broncs or something? I don’t know much about rodeo. It’s not exactly a Saint Louis sport.”

“Calf roping. We’re working on our third national title.”

That finally got Kate’s complete attention. “We?”

This time Mary just lifted one of those elegant eyebrows. “I’m damn good on a horse.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Now, how about these names?”

The time cards. Kate didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to have to suspect people any more than she already did. The distances were great enough over there. She was going to have to go back in to work tomorrow, take up her place in the lounge, and pretend nothing was different. Except that it was. She looked at everyone as a possible suspect, and they looked at her as a traitor. Life couldn’t get much better.

“John’s whittled it down to about twenty,” Mary was saying, eyeing her list. “It would be nice to have some kind of…feedback from you on what we’ve come up with so far.”

Kate got up for some coffee. “I guess that means you didn’t find anything in their background checks, huh?”

“Nothing blatant. If we were dealing with a psychopath here, we would have found escalating criminal pattern. But I think our perpetrator is an attention-seeker. They tend to be less blatant. Products of dysfunctional homes, adult children of alcoholics, that kind of thing.”

Kate reached for the mug she always used and then realized Tim’s mother had taken it. A dumb thing to take, an old university mug with a tiger on it. His mother had cried. Kate reached for a blank white one. “Good luck, then. One study
says about eighty-five percent of nurses are adult children of alcoholics. A lot of cops, too, if I’m not mistaken. It’s that old caregiver mentality. Make things all neat and tidy and happy.”

“You know all about that?”

Kate’s smile was grim. “I know all about that.”

“So do you want to tell me a little about Phyllis, your supervisor? I understand she sat in on a grievance committee with you and several others, like Hetty Everson and—uh, Juliette Pfieffer.”

“Only if you tell me about roping calves.”

The first person she saw when she walked in the next day was Parker. Smiling, clapping her on the back, welcoming her with apparent goodwill. Name number twelve on the list.

Parker. Seducer of residents, holder of a black belt, absorbed sufficiently in a woman’s profession that Mary would happily throw over her prejudices about the perp being a female to include him.

Parker, who stuttered every time he saw a naked woman. He and Lisa Beller must have some interesting postcoital conversations.

“It’s been much too predictable here without you,” he assured her. “We haven’t mounted a fullblown insurrection in weeks.”

Kate just grimaced. “Thanks. I’m sure the minicams outside would love to hear that.”

She was going to get her car back in a few days. The problem was, she couldn’t go far, since good old KSTL had shown the footage of her with
Tim’s parents and reaffirmed her place on the suspects’ hit list. Even her position as victim’s fiancée didn’t seem to cut her any slack. Not only that, but word was also out about the pending lawsuit. Kate was the suspect
du jour
, and nothing was tastier. She would have been far more upset if it hadn’t meant they’d given up on Edna, at least for now.

“Parker,” she said quickly, before anybody else could interrupt them where they stood by the med prep. “I’m sorry. I heard what they did.”

They. The enemy. The other side. No more was ever needed, no more said, as if naming them would give them greater power. Or as if they had such great power already they didn’t even need a name.

“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” Parker said. “I love a challenge.”

For the first time Kate realized he had a tic, a little pull to his left eye when he was lying. She also realized just how big his hands were for such a small person. But Parker was the gentlest of men. She’d seen him lift frail little old ladies as if they were the most precious cargo on earth, smiling that little-boy smile of his that had made Lisa Beller look down from her statuesque height to notice the man behind the stutter.

Not Parker, she thought. It cannot be Parker.

“You let me know if you need any of your shifts picked up,” she said. “As soon as I get out of this cast, I’m gonna need some overtime.”

“Yeah, we heard. They still sticking you with the hospital bill?”

“Until I can remember what happened with Billy Rashad. But then, if I do, I’ll probably just have to testify at my own malpractice trial.”

He used one of those big hands to give her a pat on the back. “Well, then, my contribution to the fund will be well spent.”

Kate smiled. “Thanks.” She was about to clomp on down the hall toward the nurses’ lounge where she was going to be working when Parker reached out to stop her.

“I really am sorry about Tim,” he said.

Kate accepted his smile and his good-bye, and then she didn’t move. She watched Parker walk away, a sturdy Popeye character from the back. And she thought maybe it couldn’t be Parker, but it had to be someone here. Someone who had walked into that funeral with downcast eyes and heartfelt expressions of sympathy. Someone who had been cold enough to pin a note onto Tim’s shirt as he died.

Parker strolled into one of the rooms. Farther down the hall Becky Faith, one of Phyl’s favorite nurses, was checking crash carts and complaining to Frank Mendoza, the full-time pediatrician, about the weekend staffing. Edna, still on days for her orientation, was on the phone, her brow pursed in concentration. People came and went: supply techs, housekeeping, doctors and nurses, lab staff. People Kate saw every day. People she took for granted. And for the first time she appreciated the scope of John’s task. He had to wade through a thousand frustrated suspects, a thousand alibis and motives and histories. And somewhere in there, he
had to find someone so clever she could murder three people right in the busiest building in the county without anybody noticing.

Someone so calculating she could manage to murder Tim in the middle of the only afternoon Kate was sure to be away.

“Kate? You okay?”

Kate started at the sound of Frank’s voice. Something was bothering her. Something about the idea of the murderer being calculating. Something that suddenly felt wrong.

“I’m just fine, Frank.”

Frank hadn’t been a St. Patrick’s virgin for a long time. A tall, balding man with a long upper lip and a longer forehead, he was slow and steady: a good man in a pinch, a pain in the neck when he stitched, because he tended to try for the perfect scar on every bucking, screaming kid.

“Just getting used to being back at work.”

He nodded and turned to walk on with her. “How’s it feel?”

Truly? She wasn’t feeling anything at all. She wouldn’t. Not until Tim was taken care of. Just as she did with tragedy or trauma, she distanced herself from her feelings. Tucked them carefully away in someone else’s locker where they wouldn’t bother her.

“Great, as long as nobody expects me to run down to X ray for a code.”

“I like the cap. It’s the perfect touch.”

She might have tried to wear the chartreuse one, but somewhere in the midst of the move home it had disappeared. So she’d settled instead
for a white corduroy ball cap with a black stripe across the brim and
RN
in black letters. On the back, in parentheses, it read,
real nasty
.

“I’m starting a pool on how long it takes Phyl to write me up for it,” she admitted.

“You think she’ll let you keep it on?”

“Yeah. There’s a rule somewhere discouraging the display of recent brain surgery to the public. Tends to sap their confidence.”

“Phyl’s looking for you,” the secretary announced without noticeable warmth.

“Put me in the pool for two hours,” Frank offered. “I need the money.”

“They cut your time again?”

“There’s a brand-spanking-new cardiovascular man they want who looks much better on camera. So they’re giving him the gift of a new surgical suite in return.”

Kate nodded and stumped on down toward Phyl’s office. “Two it is.”

“Welcome back, Kate,” Frank offered in farewell.

Becky looked up from her work with more than the usual amount of venom in her eyes. Kate never looked away.

“It’s good to be back,” was all she said as she walked on.

She saw him the first time when she went to the waiting room for a soda. The machines were lined up to the left side, right across from the television, so that visitors tended to clump there, bags
of chips in their hands, their eyes glazed as they looked up at fictional mayhem while waiting for the results of their own.

It wasn’t that he was particularly noteworthy. Especially in a crowd that almost always included at least a brace of concealed weapons and enough tattoos to redecorate the Sistine Chapel. He was just a nondescript kind of guy sitting along the back wall where he could watch the main halls, a newspaper in his hands, his young brown eyes not paying much attention to the stories before him.

So Kate couldn’t say why she noticed, except for the fact that he was the best-dressed guy in here, for a Saturday afternoon. She got her caffeine and clumped off to the nurses’ lounge, where she was set up.

She saw him again later when she went to lunch.

“Edna, do you know that guy?” Kate asked as she set her tray down at the table. A couple of other nurses had been heading for it too. When they saw Kate sit down, they sidled away. She decided not to notice.