Nothing Personal (19 page)

“The note that was pinned to Tim’s shirt,” B.J. said simply.

KATE CLOSED HER
eyes and battled back a surge of nausea. She heard a shuffling sound and knew Mary was about to intervene. She heard the sudden silence and knew B.J. had stopped her.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t see it. I just saw…I saw Tim and couldn’t move. What does the note say?”

“Nobody else knows about it,” Mary warned. “We’d rather keep it that way.”

Kate got her eyes open. It seemed enough to give Mary pause. She nodded as if conceding the point, then opened her notebook again.

“Um, here. ‘
THE RESPONSIBILITY IS OURS, AS ALWAYS. YOU MUST UNDERSTAND. YOU ARE THE REASON
.’”

“I’m the reason?” Kate echoed. “What do you mean, I’m the reason? What the hell is she talking about?”

An older couple at the next table looked over at the sound of Kate’s raised voice. She willed herself back into control so they wouldn’t have to move this discussion somewhere inside.
Somewhere away from the sun and the trees, where shadows weren’t just an illusion of the sun but a message.

It was Mary, in her quiet, too calm voice, who brought Kate back. “That’s what we were hoping you could tell us.”

“Well, I can’t.”

“Maybe you can”—the agent nudged gently—“but you just don’t know it yet. Maybe if we just talked a little—about the people at work.”

“Is this all absolutely confidential?”

“Of course,” Mary said.

Kate gave all her attention to B.J. “Just like the other morning when I told you about those little ‘indiscretions’ the staff had committed?” she demanded.

He didn’t even have the grace to look chagrined. “I only talked to John about it.”

“Well, somebody talked to Administration, because one of those people has already had his file pulled.”

It was John who swore. Fluently. “Dickie,” he snapped. “I’ll roas’ his skinny white butt.”

“That’s what I’ve been talking about all along,” Kate insisted. “Lately Administration’s been using pressure to get people either to submit or quit, especially anybody with time served. The information you’re asking for from me is the kind of stuff that makes them happier than a shark in a wading pool of new shavers.”

“Jus’ us,” John promised her. “Unless somet’in’ concrete turns up. Please, Katie. B.J.’s no help. He don’ remember nuttin’ ’bout how hospitals are
run. All he remember is bad food, long hours, an’ stupid nurses.”

Kate snorted. “Typical resident.” For a moment she retreated into silence. “What do you want?” she asked finally, knowing perfectly well that she sounded more tired than determined.

“A way to focus in,” Mary said. “Something more than the popular refrain we hear over there of, ‘If someone else hadn’t done it first, I would have.’”

Kate managed a wan smile. “Last week I would have been singing that tune myself.”

“It’s really that bad?”

“It’s really that bad. And it’s worse for the few of us left who give a damn about what we’re doing.”

“If you get dat much mail, it can’t be jus’ a few of you,” John suggested.

Kate shook her head. “We’ve reached the point where we’re staffed by new grads and agency nurses, because the good nurses are too expensive or too burned out. The ones who have hung in there have a price on their heads.”

It wasn’t getting her anywhere and she knew it. She tried taking a drink of her tea, but she didn’t taste it. She was really in a corner this time, and it meant she was going to have to offer somebody up, somebody she cared about; she just knew it.

“Go through the time cards,” she said, not strong enough to face them. “At least for Fleischer’s murder. He drank out of that cup every damn day of his life, the minute he finished
rounds in the morning. And don’t be surprised if our girl had just clocked out when it happened. A lot of overtime happens at that hospital that isn’t compensated, because you get reprimanded for running up your time card.”

“Can you focus a little tighter?” John asked. “Dickie’s already pullin’ cards, but dere are so many. An’ askin’ doctors don’ help, ’cause half of dem don’t even notice which face goes wit’ what uniform. Other half say God got Fleischer for his sins.”

Kate made a show of thinking about something she’d done nothing but think about for the last week. “It’s somebody with access to the surgical intensive-care unit where Attila worked. Don’t bother with any of the medical or coronary ICU crew. They wouldn’t be caught dead in SICU, and if they did the SICU crowd would run them out with pitchforks and torches.”

“Why?”

“No one is more territorial than a critical-care nurse. The ER nurses think they know everything, the medical ICU nurses think the ER nurses are idiots, and the SICU nurses think everybody but them got their nursing degree from the Betty Crocker School of Nursing. ER’s up there on admissions all the time, though. So get them and surgery, recovery room, anybody working cases that would have been brought in. And get ancillary care: respirator, lab, central supply, X ray, medical services. Anybody with a right to be in the units. House staff, too.”

B.J. looked up. “House staff?”

Kate gave him a wry grin. “Not everyone overcame their idealism before entering medical school like you did.”

“What ’bout other staff?” John asked. “You know, floor nurses?”

Kate shook her head. “They’d stand out like a sore thumb, especially if they spent enough time there to doctor Attila’s coffee with so much potassium. You might check the pool nurses, but I don’t see them wandering through the doctors’ lounge with impunity any more than the floor nurses would. And not many of them know me well enough to send love letters. No, B.J. was right. It has to be somebody in the critical-care areas: most judgmental, most intense, most decisive, highest burnout.”

“Regular staff nurses,” Mary offered. “Like you.”

Kate sighed and shook her head. “Not necessarily,” she admitted, thinking of her little tête-à-tête with Phyl. “Head nurses and supervisors probably have six times the frustration level we do—at least the ones who still try. Oh, and you might want to talk to the housekeeping staff. I think Wanda and Albert are still the day crew up there. They see everything that goes on, and nobody pays any attention to them.”

John looked at his list and sighed. “Great. Dat mean we gotta run times on ever’body on two floors.”

“Better than everybody on eight floors. You still think it’s a woman?”

Mary looked up as if she’d been overheard plotting sedition. “Why do you ask?”

Kate focused on the glass in her hand. “I just can’t see Edna having the upper-body strength to…to…”

Mary nodded. “If it hadn’t been for the notes, I’d be tempted to say Tim’s was a different murderer. But they’re identical. My best guess is she coaxed him up on the stool.”

“She got him to hang himself voluntarily?”

The man at the next table looked over again, his features disapproving. Kate’s second outburst must have done it, because the couple picked up their trays and decamped, leaving the corner empty. Kate was relieved. She had the feeling she was going to give way to a little more emotion before this was finished.

“Tim died of anoxia to the brain,” B.J. said, “not strangulation. I think he just slumped against the rope and cut off his carotids. He also had a subgaleal hematoma from a hit on the head. A tough combination to beat.”

“It still doesn’t make sense,” Kate protested.

“No, it doesn’t,” Mary agreed. She picked up her pen again and doodled on the edge of her napkin, neat concentric circles in perfect proportion. “But nothing here makes sense. I have a feeling I’m missing something on this one, but I can’t tell what.”

“Have you heard back from Quantico yet?” B.J. asked.

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“You’re definitely calling this serial murder?”

“We have four murders, each one separated by a degree of time. That’s all the definition you’re
supposed to need.”

Still, her expression said, she wasn’t satisfied. Neither was Kate. But then, Kate wouldn’t be until she invited whoever had killed Tim up onto a step stool where a rope hung from the ceiling.

“Why Tim?” Kate asked again. “Tim was one of the last good guys around.”

John scratched the back of his neck. “As a warnin’ to you, little girl,” he said.

“Yeah, but if this whole thing is about frustration over the condition of medicine today, does it make sense that she’d kill one of the last few pure hearts around, even to threaten me into compliance? She had plenty of more sullied souls to use over there, me among them.”

Kate saw the look on Mary’s face and instinctively turned to B.J. for confirmation.

B.J. nodded. “The man made Schweitzer look like a hack.”

“We’re not saying she’s completely sane here, Kate,” Mary warned, using the pen to tap a kind of counterpoint to her words, as if there were some energy source building in her.

“But crazies are the most logical people around,” Kate objected. “What they do has to make perfect sense, or they don’t do it. Especially crazy people with a mission.”

“Why assume her logic system matches yours?”

Kate almost smiled. “Because more than once in my career I’ve fantasized about doing what she’s doing. I had my list drawn up years ago. Sticks has an imaginary bus on which all the
bureaucrats, every asshole physician, and every nasty patient with an attitude gets a seat. Then she shoves the bus in gear and sends it over a cliff somewhere. But you ask her. She’ll tell you. The last person she’d put on that bus would be Tim. The very last, no matter what.”

“But Sticks didn’t know Tim was gay,” B.J. said quietly. “Maybe the killer does.”

“That doesn’t make any difference!” Kate instinctively retorted.

“Gay?” John asked, eyes widening.

“That
would
make a difference,” Mary admitted. “Who knew besides you?”

Kate turned on her, anxious. “Nobody knows.”

“But if the killer did, she might feel betrayed. It might be an excuse to use Tim to make a point with you.”

“But why not just go after me?” Kate demanded, finally voicing what she’d been thinking ever since seeing Tim there. “Why take it out on him?”

She didn’t even notice the change in her own voice as she used old words, responded to old instincts. She didn’t see Mary’s eyes soften in a very unagentlike way.

“Would hurting you have made any difference?” B.J. asked very quietly.

Kate spun on him, ready to bite. Ready to hurt him, because he knew. He understood more than she’d ever told him. With one visit to that house on Westmoreland, he understood that the hold on her of that horrible place, of all the horrible places she’d lived, had not been her own life, her own pain and loneliness and acceptance. It had been
the twins. It had been Molly and Mary Ellen, cowering behind her in the corner, so terrified they wet themselves, too silent, too small, too vulnerable. The hostages for Kate’s presence, the tiny blue-eyed girls who could never leave that house, no matter how far they ran. Who didn’t call anymore, because even the sound of Kate’s voice dredged up every one of those dingy, small, smelly corners.

“But nobody knows,” she objected in a half whisper, the ransom just raised.

B.J. didn’t even smile. “Maybe not. But everybody in that hospital knows you have an unfortunate habit of championing unpopular causes. They know you tend to go out on a limb without noticing the chain saw, like the night of the accident. Don’t you think they knew that what you did for that little boy meant your job?”

She almost didn’t catch it. “My job?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

He looked at her for a moment, those deepset eyes enigmatic as usual. Out in the sunlight, the breeze caught the fountain and sent the water soaring. Children caught in its path squealed with delight, and the wind chimes sang. Kate didn’t hear any of it anymore.

“You wouldn’t have been working after that night, pogue,” B.J. said simply. “Your locker was already cleaned out when they wheeled you into trauma one.”

For a very long moment, it seemed that only Kate and B.J. inhabited that table. She faced him, trying so hard to remember. Wishing she weren’t so angry that he had a piece of her memory she
didn’t. Wondering why it suddenly seemed so important.

“They were going to fire me for that?” she demanded. “How did you find out?”

He pulled out a new cigarette and rolled it between that long spatulate finger and thumb. “There was a lot of shouting going on about it that night. Next morning, suddenly it never happened. That’s all I know.”

Kate caught herself fighting for memory again, any memory. Something to clarify the five-hour stretch in her life that evidently defined everything that had happened since. Almost an entire shift, so completely lost she felt as if everyone had made it all up.

“So it’s back to that again,” she said, rubbing at her eyes.

“Back to what?” Mary asked quietly.

Kate shook her head. “Why I’m doing my Sinead O’Connor impression,” she said, without looking up. “The whole incident that got me thrown into the hospital and put Attila in my clutches in the first place.”

Mary was tapping again. It was annoying Kate no end. She wanted to go home. No, she didn’t. She never wanted to go there again, not while the flicker of Tim’s shadow still hovered at the back of her mind. She didn’t want to face the once-soothing silences and spaces of that orderly little place. She wanted to find a new home, set of rooms without memories, where she could be safe.

She wanted peace, and no matter how far she ran, she couldn’t seem to find it.

“I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it,” Kate said. “That’s the kind of thing the defense fund would have loved.”

“I heard ’bout it,” John admitted. “From Fleischer. It’s what he was beginnin’ to tell me when he took de big dive. Dat it was de las’ straw, you draggin’ him in to look at dat little boy. You really were popular wit’ dat man, Katie girl.”

So that was it. It was too late to ever apologize, but at least Kate understood why Fleischer had been so virulent about that night. Another little four-year-old boy. She must have been crazed to drag him the last place he wanted to go in this lifetime. She probably said something really smart like, “Damn it, are we going to just sit by and watch this kid die?”