Nothing Personal (23 page)

“Kate, open the door.”

“Go home, B.J.” Her voice was small, careful. He could almost see her in there trying to hold herself together. “I’m okay.”

“Bullshit.”

“Please, Beej, not now.”

“You want me to kick in the door?”

It didn’t take the sound of the odd little gasp in there to make him realize how ill-advised that
demand was. He could almost hear her father’s voice:
Do you want me to kick in the door, young lady? Get out here now and face your punishment, or it’s going to be worse
. It had probably been worse no matter what she’d done.

And she’d buried it all so deeply it had taken a serial murderer to bring it back up again.

“Pogue, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to threaten. I’m worried about you.”

He heard the scrape of the lock and breathed a sigh of relief—another of dread. He didn’t want to see Kate coming apart at the seams. He didn’t think he could handle it.

Leave it to Kate to surprise him again. Her face was wet, but her composure was completely in place. A mask of control, as if it had been a shower he’d interrupted instead of a flashback. He had to shove his hands into his pockets to keep from yanking her right into his arms and smothering her.

“I really don’t want to talk to John again right now,” she said simply. “Would you mind doing that? I mean, after all, you have to report back in to him anyway.”

“Kate…?”

She shook her head. Smiled. A rueful, stretched smile, but a smile nonetheless, a symptom of returning sanity. “Please. I’m going to take about three codeines and get some sleep. I think that’s what I need.”

“Not alone.”

Her eyebrow lifted. She was back. “That had better not be a proposition,” she warned. “I haven’t
had sex in so long I might even do it with you.”

“Humor me, then,” he asked. “Let me stay till you’re asleep. Then I’ll go find John and report in.”

She sighed, took a look over at the closed bedroom door across from her own, shrugged. “What the hell.”

It wasn’t until later, after he’d forced some decaf down her along with the codeine and just enough brandy to warm her stomach, when he was tucking her into that too-neat, too-plain bed, that B.J. got a real smile out of her.

“You’re my best friend, Beej,” she said, holding his hand. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

B.J. squeezed back, woefully short of grace. “You’d find some other poor asshole with a set of pipes and bother him.”

It still made her smile.

“Oh, boy, this isn’t good.”

B.J. stopped midsentence in his report to John and looked over. Mary Cherry, still in her muddy jeans and T-shirt, was holding the new note from a pair of tweezers.

“What’s the matter with it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It’s a copycat. Whoever this was hasn’t even tried to match the precision of the others. I think one of her friends at the hospital may have sent this.”

“Nice frien’s,” John groused.

Mary looked up without noticeable humor. “You still have someone watching her?”

John nodded. “Yeah. We had a man in de
waitin’ room all day, and dere should be somebody in front of de house right now.”

B.J. looked up, even more surprised. “You didn’t tell me that. Who’s in front of the house?”

“Miller. You know him, from narcotics.”

B.J. frowned, suddenly very unsettled. “Yeah, I know him. But I didn’t see him anywhere.”

But John waved him off. “Course not. He’s on stakeout, man. You t’ink he’s gonna sit on de lawn in a cop’s uniform?”

“I’ve seen stakeouts before, John. I’m telling you that I don’t think anyone was there.”

“All right, Mister Medical Examiner. You worried ’bout dat good woman of yours, we’ll find out.”

B.J. didn’t bother with a threat. John was impervious, and Mary wouldn’t have understood.

“So, do you think the note is serious?” he asked as John walked into the other room for a radio. The temporary command center was situated at the back end of the administrative suite where the convent used to be, so there were crucifixes above the flow board and mahogany tables for the telephones.

Mary kicked off one of her cowboy boots. “Probably not. Kate said she was facing some frustration over there. I think it’s just a little more acting out. I would rather she was careful, though.”

“Shit de damn day long!”

B.J. swung around, knowing the answer to his question before he even asked. “He’s not there?”

“Says he followed her over to de hospital ’bout an hour ago.”

“With about ninety milligrams of codeine in her system?” B.J. demanded. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, he gonna check de halls. You want ta come wid me and we’ll check on her?”

She was awake. She couldn’t say how or why—or for a minute, where she was.

It was dark, the silence oppressive. It was late. Nothing seemed to move outside.

There was something wrong. Carver was on the bed.

Carver.

That one little thing flipped all the cognitive switches, just like in the unit.

There was something wrong. Something in the apartment.

Tim.

No. No it was too late for that. She hadn’t been able to save Tim. There was something else going on here.

And then she heard it, unmistakable: the scrape of the door.

Kate held her breath, tried desperately to will her heart to silence. Someone was in the apartment. Someone who might want to hurt her.

B.J. Had he left already? Was he asleep in the living room? Or was he just trying to sneak out without waking her up?

She looked over at the clock radio to find it was almost midnight. Surely B.J. would have left by now. Besides, Carver liked B.J. He wouldn’t hide from him.

She listened, straining through the wash of silence. Praying with all the instinct she’d never lost that she was wrong.

Outside, a car slowed and turned onto the grounds. A tree brushed against her window, sounding like a snare drum on a slow song. Inside, though, there was nothing. Nothing but the refrigerator and the hum of Carver’s nervous purr.

Kate simply couldn’t wait anymore. Throwing off the bedspread, she looked around for a weapon. A quiet, easy weapon. There was nothing: shoes, a belt, a lamp. Her purse was in the living room with its can of mace, and all the knives she could ever want were in the kitchen.

Feeling even more stupid than terrified, she settled on the lamp. She unplugged it, lifted off the shade and crept to the hallway.

Shadows. Terrible shadows, just like that night, inciting shivers of memory, stealthily stealing her balance so she had to lay a hand against the wall to keep the trembling in her knees from pushing her over onto her nose. She wanted to yell, to scare the bandit into moving. She wanted to flip on a light and dramatically expose her tormentor.

She looked for a sleeping form on the couch. It was empty. She looked for a moving shadow in the dining area. It was still. She took in a deep breath and realized something was there. She could smell it. The smell of trauma, of disaster. Kate put her free hand over her mouth and came to a sick halt and didn’t want to look anymore.

She didn’t listen to the sounds around her, didn’t feel the warm nudge of the cat against her ankles. She didn’t bother to look away from her dining room, because she knew what was there, even though she couldn’t see it, and it was making her sick and afraid.

That was why she never heard the key in the door.

But then the light flipped on and Kate screamed.

Three people dove like a gymnastics team, two of them pulling guns. The third came right back to his feet and headed for Kate. Then he saw what was on the dining room table and faltered to a halt.

Parts of it had fallen onto the beautiful gray carpet, leaving dark, ugly spatters like a Rorschach test. The fur was matted and greasy, a lump of brown and red on the classic teak table.

“Goddamn it!” BJ snarled.

“What the hell is that?” Mary demanded, regaining her feet, reholstering her weapon.

“Road kill,” Kate told her in a perfectly quiet voice. “Someone came in my apartment and left it on my dining room table.”

“CALL JULES,” SHE
pleaded, her gaze still on the dead thing on her table.

“Are you all right, pogue?” B.J. asked instead.

“Did you see anyt’ing?” John wanted to know, slipping his gun back into his shoulder holster.

Kate faced all three of them, the terror taking her breath. “Call Jules, please. Make sure she’s all right.”

“Do you know her number?” Mary asked, circling the table like a priestess discovering sacrilege. “Do you want to call?”

Kate couldn’t answer. No, she didn’t want to call. She didn’t want to hear that Jules wasn’t there. She didn’t want to know it had all suddenly gotten worse.

“She was working until two,” B.J. offered, his arm around Kate’s shoulder, his posture stiff. “Try the ER. And can we get that thing in a bag?”

“My God,” Mary said. “How’d she do that to your TV without you knowing it?”

“She didn’t,” Kate said simply. “I did.”

“There’s still glass there, pogue,” B.J. warned,
finally relieving her of the lamp. “Don’t walk that way in your bare feet.”

It was when Kate realized that she was still bare-legged, clad only in her nightshirt and cast, that the shakes set in.

John called. After pulling out the gloves he seemed to carry everywhere and handing them around, he dialed first the evidence unit and then the ER.

“They say she went off to break ’bout half hour ago,” he said. “I’m goin’ now to check on her. Don’ touch anyt’ing till de van gets here, okay?”

Kate was on the couch by now, useless adrenaline flooding her with urgings to flee. John’s news only made it worse. She focused on the Matisse on the wall, consciously closing Jules off until they knew. Shutting all systems down so she could deal with what she had to. Just like she always did. Just like she had since she’d been five years old and first understood what it meant when her father walked in the door with that funny sweet smell on his breath.

She knew the van showed up and the evidence techs swept in and dusted and tweezered and Scotch-taped the place for prints and latent evidence. She knew they scooped up the animal on her table and took it back out the door, and B.J. sat beside her through it all, waiting for her to make the first move. She knew she couldn’t make the first move, because it would be right back into the bathroom, and B.J. had suffered enough from that one for one night.

She knew it took John a long time to come back.

“Did you find her?” she asked as he walked in the door. She didn’t notice how surprised Mary was at the sound of her voice.

John came right over. “It okay, little girl. She was jus’ off havin’ some time by herself.”

Kate finally had the guts to look him in the face. “She’s okay?”

He crouched down right in front of her. “Sassy as hell. I t’ink I caught her dallyin’ wid somebody.”

That got through. “Jules?”

John’s smile was piratical. “Some nice young man wid a lab coat an’ not much hair.”

Jules had been married to Harve Pfeiffer for twenty years now. Kate knew damn well she wasn’t going to leave him, even though Harve was another of those perennial no-working nurse husbands. No matter how useless Harve was, he was still the father of her kids. But a…dalliance? Kate hadn’t known. Jules hadn’t even hinted at it, and Jules told Kate everything. Or she used to.

“Now,” John said. “How ’bout you?”

Kate took a careful look around. Came up with Mary sitting on the black tulip chair and John still crouched on the carpet. B.J. waited patiently to her left, his features betraying not a thing.

And she felt stupid. Just like always. Knowing she’d reacted too strongly or too childishly, demanding attention she shouldn’t have had.

She did her best to smile past the embarrassment. “I’m furious that I couldn’t have put that lamp to good use.”

John’s expression immediately clouded up. “Little girl—”

“It’s no use, John,” B.J. offered dryly. “I think I let her watch one too many John Wayne movies. She thinks she’s going to take our killer on single-handed.”

“She broke into
my
apartment,” Kate countered, with all the control she could muster. “I should at least get first crack at her.”

At her. At one of her friends. She wondered when she’d really begin to believe it.

“Maybe we should pull you offa dis,” John mused.

Kate came right to attention. “No,” she answered, much too quickly. The very intrigued glances she got made her back down, at least a little. She couldn’t quit now. She could feel them taking control away from her again, all of them, and she couldn’t let that happen. “Be kinda silly, wouldn’t it, after all the trouble you took to get me in the first place? Besides, I have a personal stake in this.’

“But you aren’t safe anymore,” Mary said.

“I won’t be any safer if you shut me out. The whole hospital’s already made up its mind I’m involved. Now let’s stop dickin’ around and
do
something.”

In the end, none of them could come up with anything, at least on Kate’s late-night visitor. Kate had only been awakened when the intruder left, and by the time the three of them had driven John’s car from the far end of the campus, there had been no intruder to see. No footprints in the
mud except those from a child’s size-three feet. No witnesses, no explanations.

Only the word of Bose Miller, the chagrined narcotics cop who’d been slouched in his ’76 green Charger, that he’d seen someone he’d mistaken for Kate leave the apartment building for the hospital at about eleven. No, he said, he couldn’t say for sure, since he’d never met Kate before this. But he had seen that baseball cap, the chartreuse one with the big RN on it, that John had told him about. And earrings. And she’d definitely been tall and slim, wearing sweats, short hair, and a limp. So he’d followed and gotten himself a cup of coffee in the ER waiting room.

John questioned the ER triage staff where this person should have shown up, but it had been change of shift, the computers had been on the fritz, and a carload of children with the flu had been decorating the floors. Nobody noticed the woman or the cap.

“So: tall,” Mary said over coffee at Tim’s coffee table. Kate had scoured the dining room table damn near down to bare wood, but nobody really wanted to sit there anyway.

“And thin,” John added. “Leaves out Jules.”

“And Parker,” Kate offered. “He’s built like a very short gorilla.”

“We can also count out Hetty Everson, who was up in the unit the whole evening, and Doctor Weiss, who was with her. Screaming, evidently.”

Only Mary seemed perplexed by this statement.

“It had to be somebody central enough to dis t’ing to know we put a tail on Kate,” John said.

“I didn’t know about it,” Kate protested.

John didn’t bother with apologies. “You didn’ need to.”

Her temper flared again, surprising her. “Goddamn it, John,” she snapped, jumping to her feet, “that’s what I mean. Do you know what a Little Dick attitude that is?”

Kate desperately wanted to hit somebody. Instead, she stalked into the bathroom, planted her cast and bare foot on the cool tile, and placated herself with hot water. Cheap tranquilizer, but it had worked ever since she was a little girl.

“Kate?”

Kate opened her eyes, saw just what she looked like in the mirror, and closed them again. No wonder he sounded cautious. Even she could see that banked fire look in her eyes. Incipient zealot, she called it. Sense-of-humor shutdown.

“Door’s open,” she offered, as calmly as she could.

It took B.J. a second to get up the nerve to take her up on the offer. “Kate?”

She opened her eyes again to find him staring at her wrists.

“Pogue,” she admonished, “I wouldn’t invite you in here to watch me slash my wrists. I just like the feeling of warm water on my hands when I’m upset.”

He took another look at her hands and then shook his head. “I’ve told you I’m no good at this shit.”

Oddly enough, that’s what made her smile. “I know,” she said, pulling her hands out. “I’m sorry
you got dragged in. Hell, I’m sorry
I
got dragged in.”

“So you’re okay.”

She laughed. “Define okay.”

He just looked at her a minute, his eyes enigmatic, his hands back in his pockets. “So,” he finally said. “If I did something stupid like fall in love with you, just how often would we have to go through this?”

Kate couldn’t answer him. She couldn’t breathe. She wanted him to tell her he was joking. She knew he wasn’t by the look in his eyes. She knew he wouldn’t allow her to hide, which made it worse.

She stuck her hands back under the water.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, her gaze fixed firmly on the water as it splashed across her very active pulse points. “This is the first time it’s been this bad since I walked away from the convent.”

If she wanted a stunned reaction, she sure as hell got it. “The what?”

That actually got a laugh out of her. “I was only twenty. I thought it would be a great place to hide. It wasn’t.”

But B.J. was already shaking his head. “I’m
really
no good at this shit.”

Kate didn’t even bother to turn off the water. She just lifted her wet hands to his shoulders and kissed him. “That’s what makes you so lovable, you idiot.”

She didn’t expect him to respond. She definitely did not expect him to kiss her back, and not like that. Not holding on to her as if she were the only thing holding him up. Not with every ounce
of anger and pain and loneliness she’d known had been there inside him all along.

She didn’t expect to react to it, either, but she did. She did until they were both breathless and just a little dizzy, standing there in the bathroom with the cool tile against her one bare foot and the water splashing into the empty sink.

“You all ’bout finish in dere?” John called, his voice sounding suspiciously amused.

Kate wasn’t sure she had the breath to answer. She was absolutely certain it would take a minute to get her legs moving in the right direction, though. Hormones now. Instincts so rusty she had been sure she’d never recognize them again. As clichéd as it sounded, lightning.

“Get screwed, John,” B.J. retorted.

Then John did laugh. “I’m sorry, Katie girl. You right. Mary say I acted like a chauvinist pig. Forgive me?”

Kate wondered if she was supposed to feel better. She didn’t. B.J.! Jesus, how stupid could the two of them be? How the hell could she have been so close to him for eight years without knowing he could kiss like that?

Kate was positive she had more blood in her cheeks than she’d had since the accident when she walked back out into the living room. B.J. scowled as if somebody had just stolen his Jeep. John grinned and Mary paid very close attention to the notes she’d been taking. And then Jules entered the fray.

John answered the strident knock. Jules barely saw him.

“Your lights were still on,” she all but accused as she stalked into the room, her color even higher than Kate’s. Kate figured there must be some kind of redness scale for just who it was you’d spent your time kissing. If at least one partner was married, the hue increased geometrically.

She did her best to appear aloof. “I didn’t want any of these people to bump their noses on the door on their way out,” she said equably.

That did get a smile out of Mary. She still didn’t look up from her work.

“Things a little too quiet over here?” Jules demanded, striding right up to where Kate stood, still in her nightshirt and cast. “You decided to send the bloodhounds over to spy on me?”

“Bloodhoun’s?” John protested with noticeable lack of emotion.

“I was worried about you,” Kate said.

“I’ll bet. I heard you’d been gathering gossip today. I guess you were afraid you’d miss me in the report.”

Kate stared at her, disbelieving. “I was afraid you were dead.”

“Oh, come on….” It took Jules that long to get past the indignation and fully assimilate the situation. “You’re in your nightgown.”

Kate looked over at John in disbelief. “Didn’t you tell her?”

“Tell me what?” Jules demanded.

“She was distracted,” John said. “I hadda get back.”

“Tell me what?”

“Missing anything?” B.J. asked quietly.

“Yeah,” Jules retorted with disgust. “How’d you know? Some asshole stole my possum. I was gonna…” Again she stumbled to a halt. This time her eyes widened and she looked around. Saw the splotch that hadn’t come out of the carpet, the graveyard of coffee cups the evidence guys had left in a sink she knew damn well Kate kept better cleaned than an OR suite. Took in the fact that Mary was in her riding attire and B.J. was almost completely through a two-liter bottle of Dr Pepper.

She swung back on Kate. “Oh, shit. Oh, my God, Kate. Not on Tim’s good dining room table?”

Kate nodded, eyes deliberately away from where she could still seem to see red goo. “On Tim’s good dining room table.”

Jules distressed was quite something to see. “You didn’t think I’d do something like that, did you?” she demanded, red enough to set off alarms.

“I thought somebody was telling me you were dead too.”

Jules never bothered with second thoughts about her actions. She just engulfed Kate in a massive bear hug.

“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. Oh, shit, I should be shot. I’m such a dumb shit, a real grade-A gold-plated sorry kind of asshole. I’m sorry, Kate.”

If she could have breathed, Kate would have forgiven her. As it was, she just patted her friend on the back.

“They walked in on me with Davy Gorman,” Jules explained, finally backing away, reddening
all over again, looking around as if there might still be anyone in this room who didn’t know. “From the lab.”

“I know Davy,” Kate admitted. She didn’t tell Jules that even in her affairs she could do better. Davy was as slick as goose snot. Kate had the feeling he was twice as nasty.

“You won’t tell them, will you?”

Just once, Kate wished she had a face that discouraged confidence. What she wanted to tell Jules was that she didn’t think Administration cared what she did with Davy. What she told her was she wouldn’t say anything, just like she’d told the twins, just like she’d told her mother. She knew the staff who depended on the largesse of the hospital administration for their jobs felt just as trapped by whim as any child of an alcoholic. It might have been why she’d given up all their secrets with such difficulty in the first place. Nothing was more demeaning, more demoralizing, than knowing your livelihood often hung on the balance of a bad mood. Nothing bred frustration better than being trapped in a system that insisted it didn’t need you.