Nothing Personal (28 page)

“These murders weren’t a taunt,” she said finally, thinking of the lettering of the first notes as she leaned forward, elbows on knees, words deliberate and slow, as if that alone could create order. “They were a gift. An apology, almost. At least the first three were. Each of those people came into contact with me on the night of the accident. Each could be seen hurting me in some way, Fleischer and Warner by arguing about Billy Rashad and Attila by the rough care she gave me.”

“That’s what you found in the chart?” Mary asked.

Kate nodded, her eyes unfocused, her memory on what she’d read instead of what she remembered. She didn’t even realize that Carver had leaped onto the couch to curl up alongside her. She didn’t see that B.J. had bent back down to retrieve the copied chart that lay in a fan on the floor.

“What about Mr. Gunn?” Mary asked, leaning forward.

Kate shook her head. “I argued with Fleischer, Weiss, Phyl, and Warner. If anybody was next, it should have been Weiss or Phyl. Why would Gunn have been killed?”

“Maybe Jules knew she was running out of time and wanted to go straight to the top.”

Kate shook her head. “I didn’t have any contact with Mr. Gunn.”

“Maybe you overlooked something in the chart. Maybe Gunn was called.”

Kate shook her head. “No. It never got higher than Warner.”

She was fighting a losing battle to keep her attention focused on the problem. There was so much to consider, suddenly, and she was already so very tired. She didn’t want to try anymore. She didn’t want to have to be responsible, and she was.

“Maybe that’s why she used strychnine this time,” she mused, absently scratching Carver’s ears.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that B.J.
had retrieved all the papers and was paging through them. Good. Maybe he could come up with a different spin on revenge and logic.

“Kate?”

When Carver heard the tone of B.J.’s voice, he bolted. Kate damn near followed right behind, especially when she realized that B.J.’s attention was still focused on the reassembled chart in his hand.

Oh, God, she immediately thought. He’s found something.

But instead of reading from the chart, he pulled something out of it: a plain white carefully folded note.

“How long have you had this?” he asked.

Kate stared at the letter in his hand and then at the page beneath. The last page of notes reporting the fact that no transport was immediately available and that Lindbergh would be transporting Billy Rashad. The culmination of everything. The last entry was that the parents had been apprised.

“I haven’t,” she said, dread snaking down her back. “I spent all afternoon looking at that page, and I didn’t see any note.”

B.J. looked down at her. “Then I think we’d better call John.”

Mary grabbed another pair of gloves from her purse and took the paper. “No envelope,” she said. “Otherwise it’s identical.”

Kate made it to her feet as Mary unfolded the note. Kate supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d certainly seen that kind of plain
white paper before with magazine letters that marched across the page in absolute precision and a fold so sharp it could have caused paper cuts.

“Jesus,” she whispered with a sick shake of her head. “Doesn’t this chickie have anything else to do with her time?”

BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO SEEK JUSTICE, FOR THEY SHALL BE CALLED CHILDREN OF GOD. I DEDICATED MYSELF TO DO GOD’S WORK FOR YOU, KATE. FOR ALL OF US. HOW CAN YOU SAY I DIDN’T
.

There was something there, something Kate knew she should see. She could feel it in the same place that said the rest of what was going on was wrong.

“Oh, my God.” Mary yanked the note close, holding it up, holding it away. “That’s it.”

Kate and B.J. looked too. “What?”

Mary’s eyes suddenly held an unholy light. “What’s been bothering me about these damn notes. What didn’t fit!”

She held it for them to see.

“
This
is the way they’re supposed to look! Folded so carefully you could use them for a T square. Absolutely precise. Don’t you see?”

“I see,” B.J. agreed. “What was wrong with the other ones?”

“The letters were all perfectly aligned. You remember? But all the notes except the first one were folded so badly they barely fit in the envelopes. Sloppy. It didn’t make sense.”

Kate looked carefully at the note. “But this does?”

Mary was frowning again. “You’re right. Why change now? Why not look like this all along?”

They didn’t get their answer. Two things happened simultaneously to prevent further discussion. The doorbell rang, and the front window shattered.

B.J. REACTED FIRST
.

“Down!” he yelled, slamming into Kate even before Mary had her gun drawn.

Kate hit the floor with a thud and a
whoosh
, just about the time she heard the crack of a rifle somewhere outside. She wanted to curse. She wanted to scream or demand answers or yell. She couldn’t so much as breathe, especially with B.J. on top of her.

She did see Mary crouch into position, her gun in one hand, the door knob in the other. She saw the agent yank the door open. She saw the poor guy from maintenance damn near wet his pants when he saw Mary’s pistol barrel in his face.

“Jesus!” he yelled, hands up, tools down. “I’m only supposed to change the lock! I got no money, lady!”

Mary straightened carefully. B.J. climbed to his feet and edged around to the corner of the window so he could peek out. Not that it was going to do him much good. Even with all the lights in
the world on, there were just too many damn bushes planted along the drive to hide behind. Kate would have told him that if she’d had the breath to do it.

“I’m sorry,” Mary apologized to the poor distraught workman as she lifted her gun out of the way. “Did you see anything outside?”

“Are you nuts?” he demanded, shaking worse than Kate. Then he saw Kate lying on the floor, her chest heaving ineffectively, her eyes wide with the effort to get a breath. “Hey, Kate. What happened?”

All Kate could think of to say was that whoever fired the rifle hadn’t been a bad shot. He’d nailed one of Matisse’s bright birds right through the chest feathers. She wondered if he could hit something that moved.

That made her want to giggle. The sight of B.J. and Mary remembering they’d left her on the floor made her want to giggle even more. The two of them hurried her way, one more flustered than the other.

“Are you okay?” B.J. demanded gruffly, as if it was her fault he’d been more interested in the source than the destination of the bullet.

She couldn’t quite answer him. He gave her a hand to yank her up, but she couldn’t quite do that either. Her body had evidently decided it had had one shock too many and was refusing to work at all.

When she didn’t answer, his face immediately crumbled into uncharacteristic distress. “Kate, damn it, talk to me!”

He was down on his haunches, pulling her up
to him as if he were gathering broken parts, checking her with a doctor’s hands. Kate wanted to laugh.

“She had the wind knocked out of her,” Mary offered.

B.J. didn’t bother with the opinion of a mere law officer. So Kate supplied her own.

The pressure system in her chest must have finally righted itself, because this time when she tried to haul in a breath, air rushed in. She choked with the unexpected pleasure of it.

“That’s it, O’Brien,” she managed on a rasp. “Next time I’m on top. You’re too damn heavy.”

“You’re shaking,” B.J. accused three hours later as he downed his second straight shot of Jameson in almost as many minutes.

Kate wished she could laugh. “I have a right to be.” She wasn’t far behind with the brandy. “I think you broke a couple new ribs when you threw me down.”

He yanked the rubber band out of his hair and dragged a hand through it. It was still damp with sweat. “Old instincts die hard, pogue. I’m sorry.”

Kate waved off the apology. She was sore, her nerves were shot to hell, and her butt was momentarily in one of B.J.’s chairs. She should have been settling down a little. But even with the stereo and TV both droning in the background to ward off the silence of a Brentwood night, she couldn’t quite manage to close her eyes. Even ten
miles away from St. Simon’s, with the brightest lights coming from the high school track field and the neighbors walking their dogs in the late spring night, Kate couldn’t overcome a sense of desperation, the feeling that it was all getting past her. Like a good ER nurse, she specialized in delayed reaction, and she was having a beaut.

“It wasn’t Sticks,” she insisted again.

“Probably not. They’re talking to her anyway.”

“Fine. That ought to raise my stock with her.” Kate rubbed her chest and then rubbed at the burning in her eyes. “It’s got to stop, Beej. I just can’t take much more.”

“I know, pogue. I know.”

She shook her head. “No, you don’t. You know just what you can survive. I don’t.”

“You’re more of a survivor than I am.”

The phone rang. B.J. ignored it. The news crews had showed up on the tail of the first police cruiser to answer the shooting call and hadn’t left them alone since. Even Aunt Mamie had gotten through to Kate before she left the apartment. Not only was her aunt not amused by all the notoriety, she was furious at Kate for asking whether she’d talked to anyone about the twins. Mary Anne Henderson did not tell tales out of turn. Kate had been forced to sweat through another round with her aunt with the evidence crew not ten feet away.

“Who could have told Florence?” Kate asked again. “How could she have known?”

“About your sister?”

Kate looked up, surprised she’d spoken out
loud. “Aunt Mamie said she never mentioned a word about them to anyone. How could Florence have known?”

“You didn’t tell anybody?”

“Just you. And you didn’t tell anybody.”

B.J. just shook his head. Climbing from the chair when the Cream CD ended, he popped in some Stones. Kate took another slug of brandy and watched him.

“It might be a good idea to try and find your sisters,” he warned, his back still to her as the side started with driving drums and guitars. “Before the press does.”

It was Kate who came off her chair this time. Panic drove her across to the window and back again. “No,” she said with every last ounce of control. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She shook her head. “I just can’t.”

“Then how ’bout some sleep? You really look like you could use it.”

Kate almost slammed into him as she turned for another circuit of the room. The brandy was making her warm. It was not making her sleepy. “You really know how to make a girl feel good, O’Brien,” she accused halfheartedly.

B.J. simply stood in her way to keep her in place.

Kate damn near bolted over backward to get away.

“Want me to tuck you in?” he asked.

She came much too close to saying yes, and not because she needed sleep. She saw B.J. react
even before she answered, two porcupines testing each other’s quills. She wanted to laugh and run at the same time. And then B.J.’s beeper went off.

The tension broke like a soap bubble. “I’m on call,” he apologized.

“You’d better call in,” she said at the same time.

They laughed and backed to safe corners. B.J. headed for the phone in the old tile kitchen, and Kate sat on the couch and very slowly and deliberately drained the last of the brandy in her glass. Then she settled her head against the back of the couch and closed her eyes.

It was autumn. It was always autumn, where the leaves curled into crisp little gloves and the sky looked empty. Where street sounds echoed against brick and asphalt. Where ghosts roamed, and sorrow was a physical thing.

Of course it would be autumn. Autumn was the bad time. Her father had disappeared in the autumn. Halloween, when the girls had waited for him to come home from work so he could take them around to the other houses on Tamm Avenue. When the three of them had sat on the green sofa in the living room, stiff-legged and silent in their too-small ballerina dresses, until their mother had finally locked the front door and sent them to bed. There hadn’t been any Halloweens after that.

She walked up the steps to that house again, where the leaves skittered across her feet and the
door creaked in sympathy. She looked up, just like always, slowing, suffocating. Afraid. She saw the shadow through the screen and stopped, mesmerized by the sway. Terrified by the silence.

But this time, finally, she opened the door. This time she saw who it was. She saw her and knew why she’d never finished the dream before.

Kate bolted upright and struggled for sanity. For a minute she didn’t know where she was. She remembered sitting on B.J.’s couch with the lights on and the stereo pounding away. Now she was somewhere silent and dark and terrifying.

The den. She could see the window now. She could hear the faint sounds of suburbia. B.J. must have gotten her into bed on the foldout couch.

Then she heard it again, a harsh cry of terror, and she knew what had startled her awake. It never occurred to her to stay in the den where it was safe.

“Go back to bed,” B.J. ordered as Kate reached his bedroom doorway.

The bathroom light betrayed his secret. Kate could see him sweating and shaking and trying to escape the tangle of bedclothes. He was breathing even faster than she was, the respirations of a runner. Kate thought how she stood away from her dreams and observed. B.J. seemed to drown in his.

She never bothered with turning on a light. “I couldn’t sleep either,” she said, heading on in to help.

B.J. leveled a look at her that should have frozen her on the spot. For some reason, this was one threat Kate had no problem facing. “I have dreams about people hanging,” she said, picking up one of the pillows that had landed over by his pile of well-thumbed science-fiction books. “I bet yours are far more interesting.”

B.J. sighed and climbed out of bed, his movements just a little off-balance with the effects of shedding sleep. He wore only his gym shorts, and his skin gleamed with fresh sweat.

“It’s nothing,” he insisted. “I told you. Some things are just harder to forget than others.”

Kate nodded. “Uh huh.”

“Jules will be released in the morning,” he said, straightening up bedclothes without making eye contact.

Kate didn’t know what to do with her sudden distress. His hands were shaking; she’d never seen that with B.J. She retrieved another pillow as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “Good.”

B.J. nodded, as stiff and uncertain as she. “There isn’t any more information on the guy who put the potshot through your window. I talked to the office.”

“I know.”

“Damn it, Kate, stop looking at me like that.”

Kate didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Another level of fear, of involvement, of everything she’d been avoiding all these years. Damn him, damn him, damn him for complicating this so much. Damn him for making her come over here where he really lived.

Because suddenly it wasn’t enough anymore that she hurt, that she was terrified and confused and guilty. One lousy nightmare and she was hurting more for B.J. than she was for herself. And damned if that wasn’t what dropped the last barrier.

“So if I fell in love with you,” she said in a very small voice, past the acid in her chest, “would this happen very often?”

That brought him to a sudden and thorough halt. It finally got him to look at her. And she finally knew just what B.J. had kept locked behind all that legendary control all those years.

“This isn’t the time to be making jokes,” he warned.

Kate couldn’t so much as smile. “Trust me. I’m very short on jokes lately. In fact, I think this is the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Do you want a drink, maybe?”

He at least had the grace to smile. “My head hurts from the last round.”

She nodded abruptly, the admission making her awkward. “Mine too.”

All Kate could think of was that this was the very worst time to ask him to make love to her. It wouldn’t ease either of their nightmares. It wouldn’t do a damn thing but complicate their lives beyond redemption. But at the moment, Kate didn’t really care.

“You’re shaking,” B.J. accused gently.

Kate’s nod was jerky. She felt fresh tears of frustration burn the back of her throat. “Help me out here, pogue,” she pleaded, suddenly gawky and afraid.

He took a step forward. Halted. Took a breath as if girding himself for battle of some kind. “This is gonna change everything, you know.”

“I know.”

It did.

It might have been the greatest mistake either of them had ever made. But it didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt simply like the punctuation in the conversation they’d been having for a very long time. They fit together easily, even in those well-wrung sheets, and there in the small hours of night when pretense disappears, B.J. was as passionate and fierce and tender as Kate had always known he would be. And Kate, who had spent too many years barricading herself against getting involved, laughed with the unexpected pleasure of abandon.

They never quite fell back to sleep. Some barriers were just too strong to overcome all at once. So they lay there waiting for the sun to come up and pretended that nothing had changed.

“So, why did you marry Michael?” B.J. asked, chewing on an unlit cigarette.

A little preoccupied by the pleasant lethargy she’d all but given up forever, Kate shrugged. “Because I thought he was safer than you, I guess.”

“Was he?”

“Sure. He never found out any of my secrets. But then, he never talked to me either.”

B.J. didn’t move from where he had one arm curled around Kate and the other curled around that third pillow he seemed to need. “Asshole.”

“Why’d you go to Philadelphia?”

“Same reason.”

Kate nodded. Grinned. “Asshole.”

It was when they were getting ready for work that Kate noticed B.J. rubbing his temples.

“Rubber band too tight?”

B.J. just scowled as he kept an eye on the morning news while stuffing his regulation monogrammed shirt and silk tie in his carryall for those quick-change moments at the office where he kept his one and only suit. “Remind me never to drink with you again. I never feel like this the morning after a bottle of Dr Pepper.”

“Too much activity,” she retorted. When he reacted with rare discomfort, she added in a deadpan voice, “At the apartment, when you were throwing people all over the room.”

He went back to packing. “I saved your miserable hide.”

“Yes,” she admitted, with just the right hint of subtext. “You did.”

That didn’t make him any happier. She shut up completely. Kate knew perfectly well what the words “too soon” meant.