Nothing Personal (6 page)

And now he wasn’t just back, he was right in her face, which made Kate truly appreciate the term
ambivalent
. Especially at this moment, since she did not want to discuss tunnels or lights or feelings of warmth of any kind with B.J., who was only a little more obsessed by near-death experiences than he was by his pipes.

“She was buried in full uniform, ya know,” Sticks proclaimed, sending Kate’s and B.J.’s heads around in some confusion.

“Who?” B.J. made the mistake of asking.

“Attila.”

“Her nursing uniform?”

“Don’t be silly. Her Star Fleet uniform. Wish I could have seen it.” Sticks gave way to a wistful smile. “Her husband came as Kirk, and the boyfriend came as Picard. Says something about changing times, ya know?”

Kate snorted. “And they were both screwing Spock.”

Jules gave her head a mournful shake: “The old battle bridge just isn’t what it used to be.”

“I have to go,” B.J. offered with some bemusement.

Jules flashed him a four-point smile. “Play ‘Misty’ for me?”

B.J. did all his commenting with one eyebrow and turned.

“What the hell does
pogue
mean?” Sticks demanded. “You two are always calling each other that.”

Kate’s grin was private. “It’s kind of an Irish endearment.”

“I was an Irish soldier on the field at Drogheda, you know,” Edna mused, watching B.J. settle back in. “I was slaughtered by Cromwell himself. It’s why the pipes make me cry. And I can’t take care of people with sword injuries. Too personal.”

For just a moment, every other person—at least in the hospital party—stared at the nondescript woman in her still perfectly pressed uniform. Then they turned on Kate, who simply shrugged.

It was Parker who recovered first. “So,” he
said, leaning over Kate so she couldn’t miss him. “Now that you’ve taken care of Attila for us, who’s next?”

Kate waved her beer at him in objection. “My career’s over, thanks.”

“Oh, fine,” Jules retorted. “Get our hopes up and then back out. I mean, just think of the possibilities.”

Kate ignored her. “Up the rebels!” she yelled, loudly enough to make her chest hurt.

“Up the rebels!” the room answered in thunderous ovation.

The band members lifted their beers in salute and bent back to coax magic from their instruments. A waitress paused over Kate’s head and pointed at her Guinness. Kate just nodded. She’d been right about not needing pain medicine. Probably wouldn’t hurt sometime soon to get some food in her, too. The memory of it might help her survive the steam-and-fry cuisine back at the hospital.

“Hypothetically.” Parker nudged Kate on.

“Hypothetically, hell,” Jules shot back. “Our wages just got frozen for the third time.”

Kate looked up, amazed. “You’re kidding.”

The group answered in one low snarl.

“Oh, that’s right,” Jules said. “You haven’t seen the notice. We’re having budget problems. Hiring and wage freezes for the foreseeable future, at least in the critical-care areas. Although I think the new CVICU is getting more money.”

Well, that took care of that. Kate drained the beer in her glass and began her wish list. “I say we go for Phyl first.”

“Don’t waste your time on middle management,” Edna intoned seriously. “Go right to the top.”

It took a minute for anybody to get past the shock to answer.

“All right,” Kate managed, an eye still on the placid features of the former unit supervisor. “How ’bout Salvatore? I heard he was the asshole who refused the helicopter transfer on my baby.”

This time it was Jules who shook her head. “He never got the chance.”

Kate spent a moment focusing on her. “What do you mean? He was the pediatrician on duty that night.”

“But he wasn’t the trauma doc on that night. I take it you still don’t remember?”

“Less and less as the night goes on. Who was trauma?”

Jules’s smile was not a pretty sight. “Sam the Sham himself.”

Well, at least it was an answer that made sense. Dr. Samuel Fleischer, M.D., F.A.C.S., chief of surgery. A much, much bigger fish to protect than one pain-in-the-ass ER nurse. The kind of surgeon who did his best to diagnose and treat over the phone, which in a surgeon is an unpopular trait.

“The man with no hemorrhoids,” she retorted blackly.

“The perfect asshole,” the rest of them chanted in unison.

“Well, then, it’s settled. He’s next.”

“Not good enough,” Edna insisted, already to the bottom of her beer and turning to the second half of her boilermaker.

“What?” Kate demanded. “You wanna just take a squad in there and level the whole place?”

“Not the whole place. Merely the head of our happy little family.”

With the alcohol sloshing around, it took everyone a moment to come up with a common name. It was up to Sticks to blurt it out.

“Gunn?”

Edna shrugged her bony shoulders and slammed down a shot of twelve-year-old Hennessy’s. “And why not? Can you think of anybody more deserving?”

“You want it alphabetically?” Jules asked and then bent to Kate’s ear. “Good thing we’ve got the ambulance. I think she’s a Saint Patrick’s virgin.”

“Not anymore,” Kate assured her sincerely.

“It’s perfect,” Edna insisted, her eyes glazing with disconcerting speed. “It’s toward the beginning of the alphabet, he’s the biggest asshole, and he told me to my face I was too old to look good in a white uniform.”

“Well, hell, let’s kill him three times,” Sticks drawled.

Jules lifted a glass. “May he sleep with the fishes.”

Another glass rose. “Swim with the cement.”

It was beginning to look like a beer forest. “Suck wind with the gomers.”

“You sure we can’t try one of the fire board members first?” McMillan whined.

“All in good time, my son,” Jules assured him with a pat. “All in good time. These thing must be done…delicately. Up the rebels!”

“Up the rebels!”

“Death to the enemy!”

“Death to the enemy!”

“Say your prayers, Gunn, because Kate’s comin’ back to get you.”

Actually, Gunn wasn’t the next one to die. It was Mrs. Warner.

Three days later, just as the day shift was ending and the staff was clotting up elevators, one of Mrs. Warner’s subordinates found it necessary to enter the inner sanctum. Under normal circumstances, no one was encouraged to breach Mrs. Warner’s door. She didn’t really see a need to socialize, and the people who knew her agreed enthusiastically. But Tina Parkway was too new to appreciate the barrier. So when she knocked on the closed door before she went home for the day, she didn’t think anything of opening it right up, just as she would have any other office in the hospital.

It was then she realized that she’d been hearing Mrs. Warner’s printer stuttering away without stop for the last hour or so, the kind of subliminal sound that doesn’t break through until it doesn’t accomplish anything except create a round or two of “If only…”

If only Tina had paid closer attention, she might have actually seen Mrs. Warner die instead of just found her slumped sideways off her chair, completely covered in computer paper as it rose off the machine and folded over her like a perforated shroud.

Tina wouldn’t have stepped farther in to find that only one line of type appeared on the computer screen, that being:
I GUESS PAPERWORK ISN’T AS IMPORTANT AS I THOUGHT
.

Tina would have screamed anyway. Even working in a hospital, she hadn’t seen that many dead people, especially ones who had just made her work through her lunch for the fourth day in a row. Which meant Tina wasn’t sure whether she screamed because she was startled, frightened, or ashamed that she was so relieved. It didn’t matter. In the end it accomplished the same thing: another round of Harass Kate, who happened to have been witnessed arguing with the decedent not too long before her death.

THIS TIME IT
was the Little Dick doing the questioning. Kate mostly just sat there and held her head, which was still sore from the beating it had taken three nights ago.

“You didn’t like her.”

Kate laughed. Then she winced. “Let me count the ways.”

“You threatened her when you were in the ICU.”

“Actually, B.J. threatened her.”

“He’s being questioned too.”

That got Kate’s head up. She laughed all over again, which made the waterfall of silver bells on her earrings tinkle in response. “He’s doing the autopsy on her.”

That didn’t please Dick at all. “How do you know?”

“He told me, right after he told me she became one of her own statistics. I made him a bet that her chest cavity was empty.”

Dick’s brow darkened noticeably. They were sitting in Kate’s half of the room, the other bed
temporarily empty and surgically made since her newest roomie was down in the OR for a bowel resection. The room faced west and the afternoon sun, which flooded in to brighten the ubiquitous tan wallpaper that graced all the patient rooms except down in OB, where flowers ran riot over the walls. A couple of straggly plants sat on the windowsill, and a walker waited unused by the bed. Kate was stretched out in the easy chair, her casted leg propped on the ottoman.

She’d graciously given Little Dick the hardback chair, where he now sat as if impaled on a post, notebook in lap, his mud-brown polyester detective sports jacket with its county emblem as limp as his brown-and-white check shirt and brown tie. Dick was a full head shorter than Kate, even sitting down. His hair was lacquered, his mustache full, his eyes glittering. He did everything but go on point.

“You want to make this easy, or you want to make this tough?” he asked in his just-too-high voice. “You’re already under investigation for one suspicious death in this hospital.”

Kate knew she should have been paying closer attention. But her head hurt. Her chest hurt from trying to get used to using elbow crutches. Beset by an increasing claustrophobia, she was waiting for Tim to show up to escort her away from this hall of moaning, muttering people. For some reason, this made Dick seem just a little sillier than usual.

All Kate could think of was that polyester-emphysema corollary of Parker’s. Dick had a real fondness for double knits and tobacco, two
definite danger signs. Maybe she should warn him.

“What were you doing between noon and three yesterday afternoon?” Dick asked, eyes on his notebook.

Kate didn’t even have to think. She moved her head a little again, just to hear her earrings. “I was napping. I do that a lot lately.”

“Did anyone see you doing this?”

Dickie was not good for Kate’s health. He kept making her want to laugh, and that hurt too. “Well, if I’d been awake while I was doing it, I’m sure I might have noticed.”

Dickie just glared.

“I was asleep, Dick. And the door isn’t locked. Check the notes on my chart. Tracy might have peeked in around change of shift.”

He wasn’t appeased or amused. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“Who, Tracy? She was just in ten minutes ago.”

Dickie wasn’t in the mood. “Mrs. Warner.”

“Oh, her. Saint Patrick’s Day, around four in the afternoon. We had a charming little chat about the debt I owe the hospital.”

“A situation that still hasn’t been resolved, from what I hear.”

“My lawyer’s looking into it.”

“Have you ever heard anyone threaten any member of the staff here?”

Kate thought of the other evening at McGurk’s and smiled. “No. I don’t suppose we can hope she was just called to her maker in a timely fashion?”

They couldn’t. B.J. knew it perfectly well. But he looked anyway, sure he’d find something else that could possibly excuse Mrs. Walker’s ungainly nosedive into her data base. This was a task he was performing in the postmortem room at the George Gantner Memorial Building, where the county medical examiner’s office was located. His hair pulled back and his jeans traded for gown and surgical gloves, he was bent over the heart everybody swore Mrs. Walker didn’t have, inspecting its arteries as Jimi Hendrix echoed around the room like a chain saw on high speed.

“Nada,” he muttered impatiently, tapping a forceps against the countertop so the sound echoed in the empty tile room. “Come on, old woman. There had to be something wrong with you. I don’t have all day.”

The majority of the old woman he was addressing lay behind him on one of two metal tables, naked and staring and gutted, her organs long since sacrificed to the gods of forensics. B.J. had checked her lungs, her heart, her digestive tract, her blood. He’d looked for any kind of tissue beneath her fingernails, defense injuries on her hands and arms, suspicious contusions or breaking of the hyoid bone. Needle marks. Anything. He’d found nothing to explain the fact that Mrs. Walker had probably had a hell of a near-death experience, right before she had the real thing.

The only option left was to peel back her scalp and lay open her brain, on the chance he’d find evidence of a catastrophe, one which would have been enough of a surprise that she would
only have had enough time to type that enigmatic little message on her computer before her own system crashed. But from what he’d found so far, he didn’t have much hope.

The rest of her had been as clean as a baby’s conscience. Well kept, astringent almost, as if she’d purged herself regularly to flush away the residue accumulated from her work. No signs of abuse, but no signs of celebration either. Her insides had been as tight and unpleasant as her face, which didn’t help B.J. in the least. He had a bad feeling about this.

Focused on purple haze and unblocked arteries, it took a minute for him to realize the door behind him had hissed open.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve missed you too, sweetheart,” came the rather acerbic voice.

B.J. didn’t exactly smile as he finally looked up from his work to find a sprite with a punk haircut and spotless lab coat perched in his doorway. “Spit it out, Mandy.”

The laugh was purely feminine. “What makes you think I have something?”

“That superior tone of voice. And the fact that I haven’t found anything but the healthiest dead woman I’ve seen. Now, what is it?”

“Weird,” she said, easing in to lean against a counter, her head bobbing instinctively to the music, her fingers littered with rings. “Where’s the Little Dick?”

“Where do you think?”

“Amazing how convenient those calls are he
gets. Right about the time you start digging deep, isn’t it?”

B.J. did his best to keep his temper. “What’s weird?” he asked, as gently as he could, considering the fact that he had no answers, no help from the detective of record, and no aspirin to take care of the hangover he’d collected at McGurk’s over the weekend. “There was quite a bit to choose from.”

“The coffee. We’ve run it three times, and we sure came up with something, but we’re damned if we can figure out how it could kill somebody.”

“What?” he damn near shouted.

“Carbamazepine.”

B.J. found himself staring down at the shiny red organ in his hand: silent, still for the first time in over forty years. Possibly felled by a felon—a felon with imagination.

Carbamazepine. A very effective little drug used for seizure disorders. Of which Mrs. Walker had no history. Which would logically mean she would have no reason to put it in her coffee or anyplace else. On the other hand, it shouldn’t have killed her all by itself.

It was time to open up that brain and see if her secrets lay there.

“She’s not on any prescription medicines,” Mandy offered, obviously having peeked at the investigator’s notes.

B.J. balanced the heart in his hand as if weighing the problem. “Yeah, I know. There wasn’t anything else in the coffee? Nothing that maybe wouldn’t mix with the carbamazepine?”

Mandy shook her head. “Cream and fake sugar. I found neither on a contraindicated list.”

“You got the blood and vitreous started?”

“Spinning down now.”

B.J. nodded. If there was anything to be found, Mandy would find it. One of four toxicologists on staff at the ME’s office, she held a Ph.D. and had the street sense of a Crip. She also had one of the best tox labs in the state no more than twenty feet down the hallway in which to work her magic.

“Well,” B.J. allowed, his attention returning to the organ in his hand and the victim to whom it belonged, “something killed her. Let’s find out what.”

“And then call the Little Dick,” Mandy suggested. “I heard him say something about going over to grill Kate Manion.”

“Good for him,” B.J. said. “It’ll put hair on his chest.”

B.J. turned back to his work, thinking he’d just wander over to check on Kate later anyway. There were very few people left in this world B.J. counted on. Kate was one of them, and he’d damn near lost her a couple of weeks back. He’d actually visualized her there on his table, open and staring like Mrs. Warner, all her sass and sense lost to his shiny knives, and it hadn’t pleased him at all. His mother would have said he was getting sentimental in his old age. He just knew he’d already lost too many friends to suit him, so the ones that were left meant more.

Besides, he wanted to know what she’d seen
as Arnstein had pumped her heart into action with his bare hand. He wanted to know why she wouldn’t tell him.

“Because nothing happened!”

Kate saw the astonishment in B.J.’s eyes. “What do you mean nothing?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” she repeated. “Zip. Zero. Blackness, void, and then the circus in the unit. I had neither tunnels nor lights nor otherworldly visitors—except for a few dead relatives I was chatting with in the unit, but I put that down to the morphine. Besides, they certainly wouldn’t have been there to guide me to a better place.”

B.J. shoved his hands deep in his jeans pockets and stared out the window. “I was counting on you.”

Kate snorted a bit unkindly. “I did my best,” she assured him. “But I guess if I’m not going to get anything inspirational after a fifteen-minute cardiac arrest, then I must not be on the near-death-experience tour list.”

She could see frustration bunch up his shoulders. Kate knew she was the closest thing B.J. had to a friend in this town. She was certainly one of only a handful anywhere in the world who knew what had happened to him in ’Nam. In fact, she might be the only person alive who knew that Brian Joseph O’Brien had more than a passing acquaintance with a near-death experience himself.

He’d told her about it almost eight years ago, one night in December in the St. Louis University
Hospital ER, when the two of them had been hip deep in the flotsam of holiday parties and ice storms. B.J. had been pulling his ER rotation, and Kate, fresh from school, had been working one of her first nights in charge.

They’d had a really bad one, teens who’d been tossed out of a sports car and under a truck. Trauma was trauma, but when the faces are too young to die, they have to be purged. B.J. had offered his story of transformation and understanding in a small bemused voice, as if he could somehow infuse the restless souls of those children with his own certainty.

Scrubs bloody and rumpled, hair still matted with sweat, obligatory can of Dr Pepper in one hand and cigarette in the other, he’d spoken of how he’d lost his fear of death at the ripe old age of seventeen in an evac helicopter over Da Nang in 1972 when his heart had stopped beating seven minutes shy of the evac hospital where they were rushing him. He’d floated, he said, lifting away beyond the chopper to watch the medics frantically pounding on his chest, squeezing fluids into him, screaming at him to hang on. He’d been drawn into the tunnel, seen the light, heard the soft sounds of comfort. He’d barely made it back from what he’d once half facetiously called the sea of love.

In B.J.’s words, the experience had screwed with his priorities in life. After all, once you’ve been seriously dead, the little shit just doesn’t carry the same weight anymore.

It was the reason, finally, that B.J. had found
his way to forensic pathology. B.J. had simply reached the point where he couldn’t converse with people who wasted their lives having anxiety attacks over parking spaces and the price of toilet paper. That kind of interchange was never a question with his patients, who had no problems left with priorities. The fact that his work could still make a difference to the few living souls he could tolerate, like Kate, had been the bonus.

Absurdly, Kate felt as if she’d finally let him down. “Hey, pal,” she accused. “Imagine how disappointed I am. I’ve been getting this hard sell on what a strange and wonderful trip it is, and I didn’t even get to go.”

B.J.’s answering smile was just as irreverent as Kate had hoped. “And here I thought I’d be able to teach you the secret handshake.”

“Knock, knock.”

They both turned to see Tim standing in the doorway, his blond hair framing his chiseled face like a halo. Angels would have wept to look that good. Raphael would have grabbed a paintbrush. Kate thought about the waste and smiled anyway. She’d deliberately broken her alarm clock right after moving in with Tim, just for the pleasure of having him wake her every morning.

“Hey, big boy,” she said with a grin. “Wanna go get some Guinness?”

Tim stepped in, hands, as ever, in the pockets of yet another pristine lab coat, the perfect foil to B.J.’s rumpled comfort. “I hear you’ve been given an honorary chair down there after the other night.”

“The one in the bathroom,” B.J. retorted dryly.

Tim and B.J. did that little male shuffle of acknowledgment as Kate went about getting in another set of earrings—sparkly moons and diamonds this time—and reached for her newest best friends, the metal elbow crutches that were still making her ribs grate. At least they gave her mobility. She did her best not to vocalize any of the chorus of displeasure her body set up as she stood and swayed with the dizziness that always surprised her with movement, another pleasant reminder of her mortality. Her luck: she got all the grief and none of the glory.

“Where are we going?” she demanded. “Tony’s? Kemoll’s? Dominic’s?”