Nothing Personal (24 page)

“Maybe you can help us,” John offered.

Jules brightened noticeably. “You want Kate to stay with me?”

“No,” B.J. answered. “She’s staying in Brentwood for now.”

Jules just nodded. Kate watched in silence, her urge for warm water making a quick rebound.

“No,” John said, pulling a sheet of paper from his pocket. “But Katie’s gonna need help rememberin’ dat night. De accident. You know?”

Which was when Kate figured out just what it was John held in his hand. A fax. A fax with more four-letter words on it than a boys’ bathroom wall. Evidently Jules figured out the same because first she blanched, then she reddened all over again, her eyes swinging in an accusing arc toward Kate.

Kate just sank into the chair behind her, too tired to convince anybody of anything.

“Don’ be lookin’ at her,” John warned. “You de one couldn’t keep her hands off de equipment. We foun’ dese little gems when we were checkin’ phones. You know, anybody mighta called Tim de day he died, or maybe, oh, I don’ know, threatened one of de victims.”

“I stopped!” She defended herself as if referring to smoking or shooting up heroin.

John just nodded. “I know. But I figure Mr. Gunn don’ have to know we foun’ who been sendin’ dese little love notes.”

Jules eyed him with greater suspicion than Kate. “So I should just consider this as a magnanimous offer to find out what Florence is doing before anybody else.”

“Florence?” Mary asked.

“Florence Fucking Nightingale. The current hospital nickname for the killer.”

John inclined his head like a high king granting clemency. “T’ink of it dis way, girl. You be protectin’ your poor dead animals.”

“My animals, hell. I need to protect Kate. The way she pisses people off when she’s not even trying, she needs a bodyguard. After what happened tonight, I’d say she’s already pretty much
pissed off Florence, so it’s a dead cinch she’s gonna need some watching at work.”

John announced the end of the festivities by gathering together his stuff. “Well, if we all very lucky little chil’ren, we won’ have to worry ’bout dat. We’ll catch her by good ol’ police know-how an’ you’ll never have to worry ’bout her ’gain.”

No, Kate thought. That wouldn’t be lucky. That wouldn’t be what she needed. What she needed was just what they were all afraid of, a face-off with Florence. She needed to be right there in the middle of it all. To redeem herself, she needed to look right into Florence’s eyes and pay her back for what she’d done.

Oddly enough, it was Jules who gave her the idea.
She’s already pissed off Florence
, she’d said. It was an idea. It was almost a plan. It was better than sitting in that damn lounge doing nothing. For the first time since all this had started, Kate began to feel a little better.

“Katie girl, you listenin’?”

She looked up. Smiled. Pretended to pay attention. “I’m sorry, John. What?”

“First t’ing in the mornin’ you get dese locks changed. I don’ want nobody else wanderin’ t’rough, no matter where you spend de night.”

“I’m spending it here,” she said deliberately.

B.J. stiffened and didn’t say a word.

“Da’s fine wid me,” John said, not noticing. “Long as you got company. Den tomorrow, you can start on de chart. We’ll have it den. Okay?”

It actually took Kate a second to figure out what he was talking about.

“De chart, girl. You gonna be ready?”

All she could do in the end was nod. The chart. The little boy. The truth. She wanted nothing to do with it, but she knew somehow that Mary had been right. Her answers would begin there. Her campaign to win would begin there.

“I’m gonna be ready.”

She’d lied. John delivered the chart at about noon. It took Kate until four even to crack it.

In the meantime, she sincerely hoped she went a long way toward pissing off Florence Fucking Nightingale.

“What are you doing?” Sticks asked, peering over Kate’s shoulder as she tapped at the keyboard. Sticks, who could be depended on to carry all information straight to the grapevine without passing
GO
. Kate called up another screen. “It’s just amazing what you can tap into on this thing. Don’t tell Phyl, but I’m getting employment records for everyone. I think I know just what’s going on in this hospital, and it has nothing to do with altruism.”

Sticks leaned in a little closer to try and read the screen, which made the feather in her left ear tickle Kate’s neck. “You mean Florence?”

“I mean Florence. I mean I think we’re all getting sold a bill of goods. If she’s an angel of mercy, I’m the pope.”

“What are you talking about?”

Kate called up another file. “Attention, pure
and simple. She wants people to notice how smart she is. Big deal.”

“Oh, come on. That’s stupid. I heard she sent you some kind of notes about the murders, helping out or something.”

“That’s just to get me to pay attention. And as for helping out, I don’t consider what happened to Tim helping out. Do you?”

Sticks had the good grace to blush uncertainly, her skin darkening to an unhealthy brick.

“If she was so great, why kill him?” Kate demanded. “Nope, what she did just made me madder. I’m gonna nail her if it’s the last thing I do.”

Piss her off. Get the word around that Kate had something the cops didn’t. Keep the attention away from friends and right on Kate.

She repeated the lie to Edna and Weiss and a few of the nurses from day shift. “Not only that,” she embellished, when Lisa Beller was sitting there. “I have something she wants.”

Lisa looked up from the
Cosmo
she was reading. “What’s that?”

“The bead she dropped. The brown one.”

Kate had asked John if she could bring up the necklace. She just hadn’t said she was going to claim ownership.

Lisa ended up dropping the magazine in her lap. “Why are you going to all this trouble?” she asked.

Kate hid her hands beneath the table. She didn’t want to admit just how much this meant to her. “Because I’m tired of being the audience.
We’re all being taken advantage of here, and I want it to stop.”

“I thought you didn’t want to help in the investigation.”

“That was before Tim was killed.”

Lisa nodded, frowned, her features tight. “Take no prisoners, huh?”

Kate settled back in her chair. “Wanna tell me about it? Maybe I can keep it where it belongs.”

“Parker said everybody knows.”

“About that they do. I’m talking about whatever it is you don’t want the powers-that-be to know about your past. Somebody’s gonna find out, Lisa. Somebody who doesn’t like you.”

The two of them sat there for a while in silence, Kate with her screen blinking in the middle of a list of patients seen in the ER by month, Lisa considering the big-breasted, barely dressed woman on the cover of the magazine.

“Have you ever watched anyone die of ovarian cancer?” Lisa finally asked.

Kate sat up a little straighter. “I’m a nurse, Lisa.”

But Lisa smiled, which didn’t make Kate feel any better. “You’re an ER nurse. Swab ’em and ship ’em. You turf the really sick ones out as fast as you can, so the longest you see somebody is three hours. Not weeks. Not months. Not wasting away, babbling and defecating and screaming for relief.”

“Your mom?”

She took a deep breath. “My mom, my aunt, my older sister. It seems to have an affinity for my family.”

Kate knew where this conversation was heading. She knew what she wanted to say. She felt herself pulling away even as Lisa spoke.

“I am not—”

But Lisa didn’t get any farther, because Weiss blew into the lounge looking for something to munch on. Wiping his nose, scratching, hopping a little as he moved. So close to the edge he should have had windburn. Kate wasn’t sure whether to be scared or sorry.

Lisa climbed to her feet and fled, leaving Kate to deal with Weiss’s unpredictability.

“You heard the latest?” he demanded, just a little too loudly. “We in the know have heard that by this time next month we’re going to be swapping bed linen with Central Medical.”

“Central Medical?” Kate asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Saint Simon’s is going to be three hospitals, not just one anymore. The papers are going to be signed any day on Central Medical’s two, in North County and Saint Charles. Isn’t it nice? All those fine young urban warriors in the outreaches will now have Serious Money to save them.”

“Well, we were the last to really eat a hospital,” Kate demurred. She’d wanted more time with Lisa. She knew she’d have to seek her out soon. Instead, she was stuck here with her numbers and Weiss, so she chose her numbers.

The ER census figures she’d been going through were impressive. Higher than she’d expected, higher than she and the staff had been led to believe. They were seeing more patients
with less staff than they had three years ago. What the figures didn’t betray, though, was that the patients were coming in sicker. With less insurance, less hospital time, less room to be sick, they waited just long enough to require the really high-tech stuff, which drove up their bills just about as fast as the frustration levels of the caregivers.

But then, Kate imagined that frustration wasn’t a quantitative figure to be included in takeover calculations.

“We may be the last,” Weiss claimed, “but we’ll come out the best. I’m just amazed they’re playing ball with somebody as sleazy as Gunn.”

“Don’t speak ill of the signature on your checks, boy,” Kate suggested. “He’s made this hospital what it is today.”

Weiss opened his arms and bowed with a smile that was just a little too bright. “I rest my case. Central Medical must be hip deep in shit. Especially considering the fact that they’re still playing ball with a place that’s been re-nicknamed Saint Serial Murder.”

Kate wanted to tell him he wouldn’t be invited to the party if he didn’t straighten up. She wanted to plead for all the brilliant talent being drowned in desperation. She knew better. Kate Manion was the last person Martin Weiss would listen to in this or any other incarnation. So she waited for him to scoop up his calories and bounce back out, and then she sat looking at the door to the hallway wishing someone else would come in. Anyone else. Because she was running out of excuses not to get down to that chart.

No one saved her. The door out to the hallway remained resolutely closed, and Kate remained alone. She had no choice left but to get down to business. With sweating hands and faltering courage, she finally picked up the manilla folder in front of her and opened it.

She’d said she’d wanted this. She’d lied.

The handwriting was hers, the notes thorough. Kate skimmed them once, checked the lab results, the X-ray results, the doctor’s notes and transport sheet provided by Lindbergh’s 256 rig. Pepper and Theresa.

Kate tried her damndest to conjure up pictures from the scrawled medicalese, the dry passionless descriptions of a little boy’s pain, his parents’ nightmare.

She read again. She felt the sweat begin to break out between her shoulder blades. She couldn’t come up with a thing. It was like looking at herself in the mirror and not recognizing her own face. Like seeing pictures of a day she’d spent on a beach and not knowing where she had been. She felt disoriented and frightened.

And then she really read over the notes and saw that even the picture she could see was flawed.

The little boy, Billy, had been awake and cry
ing when he’d come in. Fracture of the left leg, two fractured ribs, lots of abrasions, the kind the crew called “road rash.” One big one to the left temporal aspect of his head. Cleaned and debrided and slathered with antibiotic ointment. Fracture stabilized in a traction splint. IVs in, total body films done. Initial evaluation done by Dr. Salvatore, the pediatrician on. Dr. Fleischer, notified as trauma surgeon on call, recommended transfer to Cardinal Glennon Hospital for Children, where, since the child was basically stable, his needs could be met without insurance.

The notes looked perfectly acceptable. Treatments, assessments, phone calls, consultations. Kate knew how to read between the lines, though. Weiss had been right. She’d stalled sending that little boy down.

She’d called their ER, called the pediatrician on, the neurosurgeon on, the orthopedist on. Called Fleischer back twice when he’d refused to come in and see the child for himself and forced him into that room when he’d appeared at the hospital on an unrelated matter. She’d demanded that the pediatrician have Martin check too and then argued with him over his basically negative findings. She’d futzed and fiddled and kept from moving that child to the point where she noted repeated discussions with Mrs. Warner, the administrator on call for the shift.

It didn’t make sense. If Billy was okay, why stall so long? If Billy was in such bad shape that she had to convince a fire district team to help her get him to another hospital, why had she waited?
And why didn’t anything show up in her notes that suggested a problem?

Was she responsible after all?

No other nurse was involved. No other initials appeared beside the evaluation or treatment notations. Only brief mention of the parents, who had spent the time in the quiet room rather than sit with their child as the taps and IVs and X rays were done.

If she’d thought something was wrong, why hadn’t she put it into writing? And if she’d thought it, why hadn’t she said it?

Closing the file, Kate hobbled over to where the schedule hung. Put together four months at a time and not subject to last-minute change unless for a noted sick day, it accurately reflected the state of the ER the night of the accident.

They’d all been on: Sticks and Jules and Parker. Her friends. Her cohorts, who for some reason hadn’t had anything to say about the accident.

Jules, so certain Kate hadn’t hurt anybody. So unwilling to talk about what had happened. Kate fought a clutch of fear. Jules knew something Kate needed. Jules, confronted head on, might be able to give Kate the answer to why that little boy had incited so very much.