Nothing Personal (9 page)

A fair enough question. An even better question would have been how Suzie had ended up with
anybody’s
patient. A sharp-tongued, brittle young brunette with a fondness for gold and nicotine and less sense than compassion, she had won the KEFNAR Award from the Pig Nurses two years running, KEFNAR being the acronym for Kept Employed For No Apparent Reason.

It would have at least made sense if she’d been one of Phyllis’s cronies. They all had great job security, no matter how bad the staffing got. But Phyllis didn’t seem any more enamored of this employee than anybody else.

“She obviously didn’t run fast enough the
other way,” Jules said. Suzie was also notorious for managing to be nowhere in sight when anything really serious or unpleasant came in.

Begelman sighed. “Well, there’s not much harm she can do in MRI. I’ll check on her in a second.”

That taken care of, Jules turned to the really fun stuff. “So, Kate, I hear you have a command performance this morning.”

“What did you do now?” Begelman asked instinctively. “I thought you’d managed to put yourself out of action.”

“Not me,” Kate admitted. “Don’t forget, I’m the one who can get herself in trouble while paralyzed and on a ventilator.”

“Remember?” he demanded with an outraged huff. “It took me two days to get your ICP down after that little stunt.”

“How’d you hear already?” Kate asked her friend.

“You kiddin’?” Jules demanded. “You haven’t heard Weiss ranting and raving down here?”

Kate sighed. “Fine. Another voice of paranoia heard from. I imagine his version is that I personally sucked the life out of his patient before he had the chance to pull me off him.”

“We talking about the same Weiss? He’s planning on storming the meeting and personally holding Fleischer from your lily-white throat, girl. According to him, if it hadn’t been for you keeping your finger in the dike till he took over, there wouldn’t have been a patient.”

For a minute all Kate could do was sit there, staring like a landed fish. Maybe she should try
some of that stuff Weiss was doing. It certainly seemed to improve reality. And God knew Kate’s reality could stand some improvement.

“Are you telling me you didn’t dramatically save a life yesterday?” Jules asked with a deadpan face.

Kate opened her mouth a little wider, poised for something to say. When she realized she really didn’t have anything worth saying, she just closed it again.

Jules laughed. “That’s what I thought.”

“What’s what you t’ought?” John asked.

It didn’t bear repeating. Kate took the offensive with her eyes wide open. “Guess what, Jules? John here says that Mrs. Warner was murdered.”

That brought the conversation to a neat halt. Kate knew she was being a jerk. She had no business pulling this kind of stuff. She kept her attention fully on Jules so she could ignore the strangled little noises John was making alongside her.

“Sneaky little bastard, too. Mixed her a cocktail of MAO inhibitors and carbamapezine.”

If John had expected outrage or amazement, he must have been disappointed. All Jules did was wave off Kate’s statement with much the same gesture Begelman was so fond of using.

“Well, shit, that just means it could be anybody on seven floors. Everybody knew she was on the stuff.”

“Ever’body but ever’body we talked to,” John countered softly.

Jules gave him a big grin. “Didn’t talk to the right people, now, did you?”

“Dat why I’m talkin’ to Katie here.”

Jules just laughed. “Hell, she’s not the right people either.”

John remained suspiciously quiet until the room once again emptied. Kate waited, unsure how he’d react, unsure how she wanted him to. No matter what her reasons were, she knew better than to compromise a cop. Especially one who had taken such good care of the people in her ER over the years. With Little Dick it would have been a matter of pride. With John it was cowardice, pure and simple.

He made her wait as he calmly sipped his coffee dry. He was letting Kate sweat.

“So,” he eventually said. “I guess dis means you don’ wanna help us.”

Kate closed her eyes and listened just a little more to the sounds of the ER. The voices of her friends, the people who did their best with what they had, who fought the good fight without a net. Who depended on each other to be there, to stand by them. To stave off the Mrs. Warners of the world.

Kate knew them. She respected them. She needed them.

“No,” she said simply. “I don’t want to help you.”

Not because she was afraid to face a killer. Because she was afraid she’d know the face of the killer.

Which meant, she supposed, that it was only poetic justice that when she finally made it back to her room half an hour later she found the note on her pillow.

It wasn’t much of a note, as notes went: plain white paper, folded in half with the kind of crease that would have won an award from the Anal Retention Society of America. Innocuous. Unremarkable. For some reason, just the sight of it gave Kate the shivers.

She didn’t open it right away. Instead, she checked the room, from radiator to bathroom. She even took a quick look into the hallway. No one lurked beneath beds or crouched in showers. John had left Kate down in the ER when she’d demurred about having to at least comb her hair and change her cap before facing off yet again with the brass. She’d stumped back to her room all alone. She was still alone; her roommate, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, was off for one test or another.

Alone except for the paper on her pillow and a new case of the shakes.

She checked the room again, checked the hall, and spent a long few minutes in the bathroom just running hot water over her wrists the way she always did when she needed to settle down fast.

Finally, there was nothing left but to find out what it was. With Kate’s luck, it was a threat from Fleischer to settle the matter of Mr. Peabody out in the parking lot at dawn. Maybe a request from the lawyer to submit to drug testing to secure her insurance.

It wasn’t. She gingerly opened the paper to see meticulously cut-out letters from a magazine that formed a short, succinct note. It didn’t surprise her. Maybe she’d known all along.

KATE. I DO WHAT I CAN. I KNOW IT ISN’T ENOUGH. UP THE REBELS
.

“Shit oh shit oh shit,” Kate muttered.

She stared at the note and knew she’d been dragged into something she wanted no part of. No part at all.

But then, she hadn’t wanted any part of much of what she’d ended up doing in her life. Not really. She’d just wanted to get by, to get through. To survive. And now that she’d died, it looked like for the first time in her life she might not make it.

KATE KNEW BETTER
. Even so, it was B.J. she called first.

She heard the faint plaintive wail of the vileann pipes the minute the secretary picked up the phone over at the Medical Examiner’s office. “Where is he?” Kate asked.

The secretary, a crisp, knowledgeable mother of four, just snorted. “The contamination room. Like we can’t hear him in there or somethin’. I’m surprised those ol’ bodies in the freezer don’t just get up and walk out.”

“Aw, they’re used to it by now. Sounds like he’s into ‘The Galway Bay Reel,’ Frenetta. Have him call me when he gets through.”

“Gets through? He been in there for two hours already, girl. That racket don’t stop, I’m just shutting the ventilation down in there till he passes out from lack of oxygen.”

“Two hours? What the hell happened?”

“Did a post on a suicide this morning. Fourteen-year-old who blew his brains out.”

Kate heard the faint notes accelerate as B.J.
worked his way through the complicated keying of the old reel. Faster and faster, as if he could scare off the restless souls of the saddest of his cases. The oldest of Irish tributes, music in a minor key, played at a breakneck pace as if it could chase away the sorrow.

If he’d already been at it for two hours, he’d be in a hell of a mood by the time he got out. Kate felt sorry for the rest of the staff over there.

“But he was on yesterday,” Kate objected, as if that would make a difference.

“The boss is in Kentucky in court. He’s covering for her.”

See? She was right. No good deed went unpunished. Kate wished there was something she could do besides complicate his life even more.

“I need him to stop by, Frenetta. Would you mind stuffing a note under the door?”

“I would.” There was a pause, a sigh. “He drove out to that boy’s house himself to talk to the mama. You got any better news for him?”

Kate smiled in spite of herself. For his reputation, B.J. had a lot of women mothering him. With good cause, though. Few people carried their caseloads the way Dr. O’Brien did.

“No,” she admitted. “I’m afraid I don’t. But it’s important.”

B.J. was just swinging into “Cat in the Corn” when Kate hung up the phone. She filled up her free time by pulling a pair of disposable rubber gloves from her Nurseserver. She slipped them on, carefully picked up the note she’d received, and
dropped it into one of the paper bags stocked in the Nurseserver so it would be safe until B.J. came to claim it. Then she got ready to go down and run the gauntlet all over again.

Kate probably would have been in a better frame of mind to meet the suits if she hadn’t happened to see Dr. Fleischer himself in the elevator on the way down.

“I was hoping I’d run into you,” he said, with all the heavy threat he could pack into his voice, as Kate stepped on board. It worked well enough that three nurses and a med tech got off on the next floor rather than ride all the way down with the two of them in the same elevator.

“I’m kinda easy to find,” Kate couldn’t help but counter, intrigued by the bare animosity in the older man’s eyes.

At one time, it was intimated by those who knew, Fleischer had been a fairly good surgeon. Not great, mind you, but competent. Then three things had happened almost simultaneously. He’d divorced his first wife, discovered the lure of power and greed with the second one, and lost his only son in a drowning accident on the boy’s fourth birthday. From that moment on, Fleischer had given himself up to politics and good living, leaving the messier side of medicine to those who still had a desire to look a grieving parent in the eyes.

Since Kate had been on duty the night his son had been brought in, she couldn’t hate him. Since
she’d been on more than one other night when he’d come in too drunk to accomplish any more than sexually harass the nurses, she couldn’t really respect him either. Which was why when he glared at her like that she didn’t really tremble. Knowing Fleischer, it was more than enough to get her on his shit list for the length of her career.

“I’ve spoken to Administration about you,” he said, his faux Dr. Welby looks darkening considerably and his fingers tightening to a sickening white around the handle of the caduceus-decorated mug he kept polished to a gleam and drank from every day, as if reminding the peons just who he was.

“I know,” Kate answered as agreeably as she could, when all she could think of was the fact that so far Fleischer had forgotten to put anything in his cup to drink. “That’s where I’m going now. How’s Mr. Peabody?”

“That’s not the point! You do not now nor did you ever in your life hold a medical degree. Am I right?”

Nothing to do but take it. The door opened again to her left, but the crowd waiting for transportation to lunch dissipated when they saw who was already occupying the elevator.

“You are.”

“Then the equation is simple. You, the nurse, carry out the doctor’s orders. End of sentence.”

“There wasn’t a doctor there.”

“There is never a doctor in the whole hospital?”

You weren’t there, you asshole, she wanted to say. You’re never there. She wondered again what it was she’d done to this man that could have
stirred such heat. This wasn’t usual stuff. It was more like a Weiss rage.

“I’m not going to apologize, if that’s what you want. I probably won’t do it again either, though, after Administration gets through with me.”

The doors finally opened onto the carpets and Fleischer held them open in a kind of twisted show of chivalry. “You’re damn right you won’t. If I had my way you wouldn’t be working here at all anymore.”

Which meant she still had a job. She wondered why. She wished she felt more relieved.

And then Fleischer leaned very close to her so she could smell the malt he was trying to hide beneath all those breath mints and coffee. “What I really want to know is this,” he said, and Kate thought she’d never seen such rage in one person’s eyes in her life. “Are you screwing both Weiss and Peterson? Is that why they both defended you?”

Kate had been ready to get off the elevator. At his words she faltered to a halt, dumbfounded, silent, only the tiny bells in her earrings answering as she backed away from him.

His smile was not pretty. “Remember this, miss. A medical license is a hell of a lot more precious than easy pussy. And I hold their licenses.”

After that, a session with Fellows and the lawyer was almost an anticlimax.

“All this just for me,” Kate muttered, setting her crutches down on the plush carpet of the boardroom.

“All this just for you,” Mr. Fellows answered with a deprecating smile from where he sat. He didn’t seem to notice that Kate had some trouble negotiating her chair. It was just Fellows and the lawyer this time, with Sister Mary Polyester for choral backup and general support. “We’re sorry to bring you back, Kate, but there’s something new we have to talk about.”

“I think I just had that conversation in the elevator with Doctor Fleischer,” Kate admitted, hoping the admission would shorten things. It didn’t.

The lawyer looked to Fellows, who looked to Kate.

“Ah, well, that. Yes, we need to discuss that. But we have another problem.”

Kate refrained from giving her opinion on the point. She just held on to the arms of her chair, as before.

“Yes?” she answered noncommittally, forcing herself to look at Fellows.

“In fact, it was Sergeant McWilliams who suggested this in the first place.”

The light dawned and Kate’s stomach sank. “Oh.”

“Oh?” Fellows echoed. “You’ve talked already?”

“Just a little. He wanted me to help in his investigation.”

Expressions brightened all around the room. “Exactly,” the lawyer concurred, leaning forward so that his paisley power tie rested against the table. “It would be most helpful to the hospital. And you have the time right now….”

“And nothing to do,” Kate prompted dryly.

“Kate, we’ve had a murder here,” Fellows said, as if Kate weren’t fully aware of the situation. “One of your own co-workers. We’ve pledged our complete cooperation.”

“You mean you’ve pledged mine?”

Fellows shook his head. The lawyer ran a hand through a very expensive haircut. Kate couldn’t help thinking that except for Fleischer’s gray hair, the three men were physically interchangeable. Manicured good looks, feral eyes, and power suits. Faceless players in the big game of hospital politics. A trio from the old boy network at the Missouri Athletic Club who effectively ran and ruled the St. Louis community. It didn’t noticeably increase her desire to help them out of their jam.

Then Fellows leaned forward, and his paisley tie rested right alongside the lawyer’s, like a display at Brooks Brothers. “This can’t go out of the room,” he said, folding his hands over an unopened file of some kind.

Completely against her better judgment, Kate was intrigued. “What can’t?”

This time Fellows sighed. “It seems…well, the police are having a difficult time eliciting help from the staff.”

“Uh huh.”

Fellows leaned forward again. “Kate, you know so many of the staff. They confide in you. All we’re asking is that you help the police by sharing any…suspicious information you hear. Any—oh, I don’t know—feelings you have one way or the other.”

Kate stared at him. “Feelings.”

“It would be perfectly confidential. To stop the killer, of course.”

She’d actually been wavering just a little since getting that note. She’d been thinking of maybe just sitting down with John, just for a few minutes: talk about the hospital, share a few anecdotes. She’d been considering it.

She looked for something from these faces that might tell her she wouldn’t be hurting her friends more than she’d be helping them. She couldn’t see anything at all. And then the lawyer upped the ante.

“Do you know what publicity of this kind can do to the hospital?” he demanded, pulling his tie away from the table. “There are already television stations calling for information.”

Kate sat very still. She waited for one of them to redeem himself. She waited for a reason to help. She waited until the two men twitched in their seats with discomfort.

“Kate,” Mr. Fellows suggested gently, his attention on a folder he’d opened in front of him. “I know you don’t need any coercion to do the right thing, but you might consider the fact that you broke any number of hospital regulations yesterday. If Doctor Fleischer exercised his right to fire you or revoke your license, you wouldn’t even have the health insurance to cover your hospital stay. And to be perfectly frank, it would be much easier for us to get another nurse than for you to get another job.”

Extortion now. The famous “You need us
more than we need you.” The way the grapevine worked in this hospital, the two of them knew perfectly well that whatever savings Kate had amassed had been wiped out in securing her divorce. They didn’t know a debt the size of Texas still hung over her head. A debt she was supposed to have made a big payment on ten days ago.

That did it. Kate saw red. She clutched the arms of her upholstered chair to keep herself in place. She reminded herself to breathe. There were some things that made Kate angry. Some that made her furious. One or two that shattered her control like a wineglass at the sound of a high C, and Mr. Fellows had just hit the winner dead center. He was manipulating her, and Kate wanted to hurt him.

Mr. Fellows tried to twist the knife in a little deeper. He painted the manipulation in guilt.

“I don’t think you fully understand, Kate,” he said quietly. “After we talk to you, we have to meet with the police again. They’ve asked the medical examiner to do more testing on the case on Frances Crawford. They think there’s a good chance she was really murdered as well.”

And B.J. hadn’t bothered to tell her? When had they decided? Or did they suspect her in both cases after all?

“Mary Kathleen?”

It was the good sister, papery fingers wrapped around Kate’s arm. Kate battled for control. She knew if she reacted now, she’d at least scare the hell out of the little nun. And look what kind of trouble it had gotten her into before.

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped instinctively. “Ever.”

Polyester shrank a little, injured. Kate squeezed her eyes shut rather than deal with the hurt in the little nun’s eyes. Kate didn’t think twice about facing off with people who needed it, but she’d never been accused of beating up innocents before.

And here these people were punishing her for it. For trying to protect the victims.

Finally all Kate could think to do was run. “I really…don’t feel well,” she lied. “Could we talk later?”

Craven cowardice. She should tell them what they could do with their squeeze play. She should tell them what they could do with any one of their orifices. If she did, she’d be out of a job almost as fast as she’d be out of a bed. Her mother had always told her to pray the Hail Mary for patience. Kate spun through it six times without a pause and still couldn’t see past the anger.

“That would be fine,” Mr. Fellows acknowledged with an uncomfortable smile. “I’ll just leave it to Sergeant McWilliams to follow up, all right?”

Kate couldn’t manage much more than a nod. Then she saw Fellows and the lawyer exchange a meaningful look and realized the show wasn’t completely over.

“Um, Kate, there is one other thing,” Fellows admitted, already on his feet for a quick getaway. “Doctor Fleischer did have a legitimate complaint. You acted completely without doctor’s orders yesterday. Mr. Gunn has decided that a verbal warning will be recorded on your file. All right?”

All right? No, not really. The rage flared again. Kate wanted somebody to at least acknowledge that she’d only done what she should have done. But she knew better. So she closed her eyes and quieted the firestorm in her chest and gathered her crutches for the long walk back to her room.

Halfway down the hall, she saw Mr. Gunn coming her way. Another suit, almost interchangeable with the crew she’d just left, but with a little more self indulgence visible in his florid features. Dark hair, dark eyes, a man who fondled his tie when he spoke as if enjoying a little vicarious transference. The kind of hospital CEO who’d had a private dining room installed next to his office so he never had to break bread with his staff.