Nothing Personal (30 page)

Phyl didn’t answer right away. She didn’t move either, like a handler eyeing an unpredictable snake. “Furious.”

Kate nodded. “Sticks said the only people really upset that night were the ones directly involved in the case. I figure one of us got so upset she took off after some of the culprits.”

Kate managed to get out the door before Phyl said anything else.

“You’re going to talk to me,” she threatened Sticks a little later.

“Or what?” Sticks retorted as Kate helped her clean a room after a trauma. “You’re going to turn me in?”

“I’m trying to keep Jules out,” Kate insisted.

“So I guess that means the next candidate for the rack is Doctor Beller,” Sticks snapped, clanking instruments together like dissonant handbells. “Or maybe Parker. Or me.”

“You were there.”

That at least got Sticks’s attention.

“Phyl said I disappeared for a while,” Kate said before Sticks could escape. “Do you know where?”

“No.” She turned away. Slammed a chest-tube tray on the counter and shook open another trash
bag for the debris left on the floor. “But when you came back you’d been crying.”

Kate found herself standing in the center of a bloody, littered room, staring at Sticks as if she’d lost her mind. Crying. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried at work. She couldn’t understand why she would have done it this time. Hell, she might have fought for her patients, but she didn’t get personally involved. That was a sure path to suicide. She patted and soothed and protected. She held and healed and conversed. She did not take her patients or their problems home.

What could have brought her to tears that night?

“And Edna didn’t say anything about where she’d found me?”

Sticks just glared at her. “Edna didn’t kill anybody.”

“Please, Sticks.”

“No. She just said everybody should have left you alone. All right? You happy?”

No. She wasn’t. But there were only two more people she could talk to who might have her answers. Three, actually. Mrs. Rashad. But Mrs. Rashad wasn’t killing anybody in this hospital. One of the other two women was.

“You’re doing what?”

“You heard me,” B.J. heard her say. “I’ve been talking to people all day, and I’m convinced that this twenty-minute gap on the night of the accident is the key.”

B.J. settled his aching head into his hands and tried to concentrate. “So you’re inviting her over to discuss it.”

At first, he just heard static. Then Kate’s voice, suddenly young and unsure. “I think I might have said something then about the girls. I need to know what it is.”

“Not alone with a serial killer you don’t. I told you. We have the results on Gunn and it was strychnine. Lots of strychnine. Don’t be an idiot, Kate.”

“That’s why I’m calling you,” she insisted. “B.J., I have to know. I have to find out what I told her. Why she’s doing this for me…. Please, Beej.”

B.J. had made it through more close calls in his life than he wanted to count. He’d been afraid. He’d been so close to a man with a gun who wanted him dead, he’d been able to smell him. Could still smell the sharp stink of his sweat every night when he woke screaming. But he couldn’t ever remember fear like this.

Damn her. What did she think she was doing? Didn’t she realize he couldn’t survive this again? It had been bad enough when he’d been blindsided that night by the call from the ER to tell him she was hurt. When he’d shown up to find her shaved and swathed and intubated, damn near as close to dead as didn’t matter, so that all he could do was hold her hand and curse. He could still see her slack, silent features every time he closed his eyes. He could call up the terror of knowing she might simply not wake up. He couldn’t do it again. Goddamn it, she couldn’t ask him to help her.

He couldn’t stop her, either.

He looked down at his hand where it was resting on the pile of paperwork still spread across his desk. It was shaking. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat, and he wanted to puke in the worst way. His eyes hurt like hell and his stomach hurt worse.

He’d just put it all down to a hangover until it wouldn’t go away. Which meant he’d either picked up a bad case of flu or somebody’d been doctoring his coffee too.

And now Kate was asking him to help her develop the same symptoms. And he was going to do it.

With conditions.

“Wait until I get there,” he demanded, wondering if he could get somebody to drive him over. He’d ask John, except John was already there somewhere. Besides, John wouldn’t let Kate face her demons in the privacy of the apartment. “You hear me?”

“B.J.? Are you all right?”

He closed his eyes and thought of what a hypocrite he was for yelling at other people for wasting their lives when he’d wasted his for so long. No matter what, he wasn’t going to do it again. Whatever happened after this, he wasn’t letting Kate out of his sight as long as the two of them lived.

“I’m fine. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Don’t do anything until I get there. And for God’s sake, don’t drink or eat anything.”

“Don’t worry,” she answered, already sound
ing stronger. “I won’t. I have one more person to talk to before I face her. You’ll be here in plenty of time.”

He hung up and then called Mandy in. She arrived no more than three minutes later, looking curious. When she saw B.J., the curiosity crumbled into concern.

“B.J., my God. Are you okay?”

B.J. wiped the sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand and struggled out of his lab coat. “I need you to do something.”

“You need to go home and get under the covers.”

“Run a tox screen on me, Mandy.”

That finally brought the toxicologist to a full stop. She took another, more considered look at her boss. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

B.J. tried his best to glare. He had a feeling he didn’t look very intimidating at the moment. “I’m talking about a simple blood and urine sample. Now do it. And call the results to Kate’s as soon as you get them.”

“Kate’s? Are you crazy?”

He actually smiled. “Yeah. I think I am.”

Kate couldn’t hold still. She stood and she sat and she paced. The stereo was on and the Matisse print was back on the wall with a Band-Aid over the violated bird, but the view out front had been boarded up until a new window could be found, and Carver had decamped to another doctor’s apartment until the danger was over.

Her invitations had been accepted. She was going to get her answers today. Soon.

She couldn’t do this. It was enough to be responsible for her father and her mother and her sisters. She’d spent her life carrying that backpack around with her. She didn’t want to find out she was the catalyst for this one too.

She didn’t want to know that Tim would still be alive if it hadn’t been for her interfering, or her not interfering soon enough, or her not understanding what was going on.

She didn’t want to bear the collective traumas of all the suspects who had been prodded and poked and accused on the way to the truth. She didn’t want to hurt anyone else.

“I talked to Mrs. Rashad,” she said, her chest tight with dreadful anticipation. “She said that you and I left the quiet room together and didn’t come back.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Kate tried once again to sit. She tried to hold still long enough to get the answers she so badly needed. “I need to know and I can’t remember,” she admitted softly, instinctively trusting this woman with her gentle eyes and sincere heart. “Did I talk about my sisters?”

She didn’t get her answer. The abrupt knock on the door startled both of them. Kate had been expecting B.J., but not this soon. She jumped to her feet to forestall the answer she wanted, the answer she wasn’t sure she was ready for just yet.

She wanted B.J. here for this. For the confrontation when it came. She wanted his help.
More, she wanted his vindication. Only B.J. could be trusted with what she’d evidently given away the night of Billy Rashad’s death. Only B.J. would keep it safe for her.

She pulled open the door and forgot everything.

“Jesus! Oh, Jesus, Beej, what’s wrong?”

Without even thinking, she grabbed onto him. Held him up where he swayed in her doorway, ashen and sweating, his mouth open to breathe, his hand clutching that stupid bottle of Dr Pepper to his chest.

He was cyanotic and wheezing. His body moved in fits and starts and his pupils were pinpoints, but his eyes stayed focused on Kate. She saw the chagrin in them. “Fuck me for…stupid…I didn’t listen…to my own…advice.”

Kate caught him as he faltered and got him across the threshold. Instinctively she reacted with the yell any medical personnel left in the apartment would recognize and respond to. “O-o-Oh, shit! Help!”

“Not in my ear,” B.J. gasped, struggling to get to the couch to sit. “It hurts…everything hurts.”

Kate turned just enough to include her other guest. “Call for help,” she barked before she even thought about it.

Instincts honed over almost forty years had the passive little woman picking up the phone. Kate turned to B.J., pried the bottle from his grasp, tried to get him up to breathe better. Heard the call to 911 and the next one to the ER, heard the door slam upstairs and knew help was coming.

It wasn’t soon enough.

“B.J.?” she shrilled, seeing his eyes begin to roll. “Stay with me, damn it!”

He grabbed onto her arm as if physically trying to hold on. Kate spun around, desperate.

“What is it?” she screamed at the frightened woman by her phone. “What did you give him?”

But Sister Ann Francis, the ex-pharmacologist who had the run of St. Simon’s, who was so innocuous that no one could remember just where she’d been seen, couldn’t seem to drag her attention away from B.J. to answer, because just then he began to convulse.

IT WAS MARTIN
Weiss who heard her, Weiss in his bike shorts and muscle shirt, who careened into the apartment as Kate pulled B.J. off the couch and onto the rug.

“What the fuck is going on?” he demanded, shoving furniture out of the way.

Kate was overturning her nursing bag, scrabbling for the airway she always kept there. Everything fell out: books, scissors, trauma cards, pen lights, syringes, tourniquets, lint-covered taped tongue depressor. Rosary.

Brown plastic rosary with the oddly carved little beads Sister Mary Polyester had pressed on her that day in her hospital room.

“What did you do to him?” she screamed at the stunned woman as she wedged the tongue blade between B.J.’s clamped teeth and struggled to get the airway in. He was in a full grand mal seizure, and Kate was on autopilot.

“To him? Why would I ever—”

“You’re the one poisoning people!” Kate screamed. “I saw you in the unit!”

“Well, of course. But I’m sure I didn’t do anything to this nice man.”

“What do you have?” Weiss demanded, down on his knees beside Kate as she tried in vain to hold B.J.’s arms still, as if that alone could stop the seizures.

“Headache, constricted pupils, diaphoresis, nausea…he said he hurt…everywhere….”

“Oh, dear,” Sister said behind them.

Kate heard the ambulance. She heard shouts and the stuttering rumble of a rolling cart and knew the ER crew was beating the paramedics to the scene. She’d never felt so helpless in her life. B.J. was dying and she didn’t have anything to help. She who could do anything in the ER suddenly realized how useless she was without her equipment and rule books.

“It’s—uh, does his breath smell like garlic?” Sister asked, joining them on the floor.

“This isn’t arsenic,” Weiss informed her.

“No, dear. TEPP. An anticholinergic insecticide.”

Martin leaned close. Sniffed and nodded. “Bingo.”

“Well, do something!” Kate shrilled.

Weiss raised the calmest eyes she’d ever seen on him. “As soon as I can get some atropine and Valium in here.”

“But he’s the wrong person,” Polyester insisted yet again. “I wouldn’t ever hurt this nice young man.”

That nice young man had a pulse so thready and irregular Kate was sure the team wouldn’t arrive in time. His eyes were rolled back, and his body flailed uselessly on the carpet.

“They’re coming,” Polyester crooned, patting Kate on the shoulder, “and then we can talk about your Molly.”

Kate swung on her, hand up to strike. “Shut up,” she snarled, stopping just in time. “Just shut up.”

Lisa and Parker slammed through the front door, wheezing under the weight of the code equipment, and Sister Ann Francis sat back down in her chair and shut up.

“Kate, I wouldn’t lie to you. He’s going to be all right.”

Kate nodded. She didn’t move.

“You have to go home, honey.”

Honey. Now it was honey. Kate shook her head at the nurse and held on to B.J.’s hand and wondered if this was what he’d felt when he’d visited her in the ICU, helpless and frustrated and afraid. He was slackened and silent, with tubes and lines and machines attached everywhere until she had trouble finding the person beneath. She held on to his hand as if that alone would connect him to the humanity the units kept away, all the while threatening him that he’d better damn well not be having another goddamn near-death experience at her expense.

She cried and she prayed and she held on to the little brown rosary Sister Mary Polyester had given her as a talisman against death. The talisman that had been the physical link between Sister and a string of murders already becoming known as the Sister Merry Murders.

Kate would think about that in a while. She’d think about what she still had to say to the little nun, who had turned around after poisoning B.J. and saved his life.

It had been Polyester who’d kept her composure when the room filled with police and paramedics and doctors and doctors’ wives. Polyester who’d calmly given Weiss the pertinent information as he stayed one step ahead of the deadly seizures and arrhythmias the poison produced. It was Sister who’d suggested that B.J. must have been ingesting small portions over a sustained period to have been able to cope so long.

That had been twelve hours ago. Kate hadn’t slept and she hadn’t changed and she hadn’t paid any attention to the ambivalence of the staff who understood her terror and yet shunned her for handing Mary Polyester over to the police.

She wasn’t going to get her resolution after all. After they’d swept B.J. up onto the cart and run him out the door, John had read Sister Ann Francis her rights and guided her out behind. Kate hadn’t seen any of it. She’d stayed with B.J. She’d fended off well-meaning co-workers when they’d tried to get her to back out of the treatment room while they intubated him, and screamed at the less well-meaning when they’d tried to keep her from helping out. She’d battled her own demons as she’d seen him stripped and mauled and invaded, just like all the trauma patients she’d ever cared for, his singular mind and body nothing but meat for the knackers.

And there beside her had been her most unlikely champion. Weiss again. Suddenly sensible,
sharp Martin Weiss, who had kept the interlopers away and let Kate help as she could. Who damn near single-handedly pulled B.J. through with nothing more than the lightning-quick speed of his decision-making skills. Martin Weiss, whom Kate had written off as lost, pulling a rabbit out of his hat just when she’d needed it and then turning his considerable wrath on anyone who tried to keep Kate away.

He must have made an impression, because nobody had yelled at her for at least six hours.

So she sat in the only place where she felt she could make a difference, knowing she’d never get the chance to face Sister Ann Francis so she could demand explanations, knowing this time wasn’t going to be any different from any other time. The person responsible would simply disappear and leave Kate holding the bag, the system that should have prevented any of it silent and unhearing.

“What the hell are you doing back up here?”

Kate barely heard the voice. She recognized it, though: Hetty Everson. Hetty, who had taken such good care of her, who hated visitors more than body lice, who had been so angry about Tim.

“I told his mom I’d stay with him while she got some rest,” Kate said without turning away.

Mrs. O’Brien was in the hospital somewhere. With her bad heart, though, she simply couldn’t suffer with her son through this. Her family shielded her down in the cafeteria or the courtyard while Kate held watch. Kate was perfectly comfortable with the arrangement. She didn’t want to have to face the grief in that lovely woman’s eyes.

So here she sat, watching the terrifying stillness in B.J.’s face while the world went merrily on around her.

“Seems awfully soon to be this upset about somebody else,” one of the wags in the background said, as if they’d been the first one to think of it. “Just how long has Tim been dead after all?”

Kate didn’t care. Hetty turned on them with a vengeance. “Shut up, you asshole. Didn’t you ever figure it out? Tim was gay. Now leave her alone.”

Kate managed to look up at that. “Nobody knows,” she said instinctively.

Hetty huffed as she pulled her stethoscope from around her neck and started her patient evaluation. “Of course they do. We just didn’t want to believe it. Have you had anything to eat?”

Kate didn’t bother to answer.

Hetty went right ahead with her work. “This stupid son of a bitch should have been dead. Did you see what his cholinesterase level was? I’ve never read it in negative digits before.”

They had him on Dilantin and phenobarbital drips for the seizures, a dopamine drip for his blood pressure, a bretylium drip for the dysrhythmias, a regular dose of steroids and atropine and Tagamet for everything else. Circling IVACs, they called it. An addendum to Murphy’s Law that claimed the chances of a patient’s survival were inversely related to the number of automated IV infusers hung over a bed. And B.J. was over the magic number of four. Hetty checked them all, checked the monitors and Swan and the ART line and the respirator that just clicked and sighed
along without interruption. High-tech medicine at its finest. Terrorism at its most terrifying.

Then it sank in that Hetty was out of place. Kate craned her neck for a glance. “What are you doing here? You don’t work MICU.”

Hetty’s smile was almost piratical. “Everybody else is scared to death of your friend over there. So since I survived him during your recent tour in surgical, I volunteered. I am being tolerated.”

Kate almost managed to give a smile back, because she knew just who had the bigger attitude problem among the units. “Fuck ’em,” she said anyway.

Hetty laughed. “Up the rebels.”

Wrong answer. It almost made Kate cry all over again.

“What can I do to help, Hetty?”

Hetty never hesitated. “Go home and get some sleep.”

Kate shook her head. “I feel so goddamn useless. At least let me feel useless here where I know what’s going on.”

Hetty lifted B.J.’s head to replace the tape on his tube. Kate shut her eyes.

“Notice any spontaneous movement?” Hetty asked.

“His hands, I think.”

Kate could hear the snip and slash of tape being prepared.

“Won’t be long,” Hetty said. “We’re tapering all his doses to see how he tolerates it. You know the FBI’s looking for you. I think Edna was holding them off in the ER.”

“She tried. It didn’t work.”

Kate heard that voice, too, and refused to react. She opened her eyes to see Mary Cherry settle herself against the far wall out of Hetty’s way. “He looks better,” she offered, the way lay people did in intensive-care units.

“He looks dead,” Kate and Hetty replied simultaneously, because, of course, he did. Then both of them laughed, because Mary looked so discomfited by their honesty. Oddly enough, it was the first time Kate had felt better since opening her apartment door to find B.J. standing there the evening before.

Mary must not have gotten home since then, either. She was rumpled and disheveled and rubbing at eyes that for once weren’t made up. She kept her place and her silence as Hetty finished her work. Kate tried to ignore her, even though she knew it wasn’t going to do her any good.

And then, too soon for Kate’s tastes, Hetty left to take care of her other patients. And, just as Kate knew she would, Mary got down to business.

“I need to ask you a favor, Kate.”

Kate didn’t bother to make eye contact. “I think I’ve already done you a favor,” she said.

Periodically she’d squeeze B.J.’s hand, hoping to feel a response. She didn’t really expect it, not with the load of sedatives they had in him. Even so, she desperately needed that proof of all the optimism around here. He really did still look dead. He had since his seizures finally stopped for good about five hours earlier.

If Kate had been waiting for an apology from Mary, she was going to be disappointed. Mary wasn’t the type. Which was probably why Kate liked her, no matter what she looked like.

“Sister Ann wants to talk to you.”

“That’s nice.”

“She won’t talk to us until she does.”

Kate couldn’t even summon the energy for a sigh. “I don’t really care, Mary.”

“Really? You don’t want to know how she managed to kill Tim?”

“I don’t even want to know how she managed to damn near kill B.J.”

“She says she didn’t.”

Kate nodded. “I heard. If she didn’t try to kill B.J., how’d she know about the insecticide?”

“She says she mixed it up for Doctor Weiss.”

That one wormed its way through the fog. So Polyester had been meaning to kill Weiss after all, just as Kate had thought. Weiss, who had worked himself into an exhausted sweat trying to keep B.J. from dying.

Ever since Attila had first died, Kate had been waiting for a reaction to what was going on: grief, regret, anything. Funny that it should finally happen with Weiss. Weiss, who had personally fileted several layers of skin from Kate’s professional hide. Weiss, who could be such an ass, such a pompous, self-serving jerk.

Weiss, who had held her when she’d finally broken down in the ER when B.J. wouldn’t stop seizing.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, surprised at her
own outrage at the thought of losing Martin Weiss. “I’m really glad she didn’t make it.”

“Well, she almost murdered B.J.,” Mary said. “Aren’t you interested in seeing that she takes responsibility?”

Kate got her attention around to find that Mary wasn’t exactly the objective professional she’d thought. There were tears in the agent’s eyes as she considered the husk on the bed.

“Did she say anything at all?” Kate asked.

“Nothing but that she’d meant for Weiss to be next.” Mary never bothered to look away. “I did think it was interesting that she’d mixed poison for Weiss and ended up putting it in B.J.’s Dr Pepper.”

Kate held on harder. “I always told him that shit was bad for him. He should have stuck to the hard stuff.”

“That’s what he thought it was in.”

Now Kate knew she didn’t want to hear more. She tried hard to focus on the agent just as the sun topped the parking garage and shot a beam of light to highlight her very blond hair. Blond hair like Tim’s. Perfect, beautiful, damn near white. Kate wanted to cry.

But Mary wasn’t as compassionate as Tim. She turned her attention back to Kate and let her have it. “He had one of the toxicologists test him before he left the office. Told her he thought it was in the Jameson at his house. And then he went to see you.”

“I’ll go when B.J. wakes up,” Kate said, ignoring the agent again.

Mary sighed and shifted position against the
wall. “We really need to get this thing going, Kate.”

“Tough shit.”

“I thought it was what you wanted.”

So did she, Kate thought, as she watched the sun gild the machinery that crouched by B.J.’s bed. So did she.

She’d thought she’d wanted a lot of things. The last few weeks had only proven her wrong.

“How hard is it to ride a horse, Mary?” she asked, concentrating on the hand she held, with its long spatulate fingers and callused palm. A hand she’d never seen still until now. A hand that had so much strength and grace, and she’d taken it all for granted for too long.