Nothing Personal (31 page)

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hetty had walked back in the door. She and Mary exchanged glances. Hetty must have shrugged, because Mary did too.

“Easier than trauma nursing, I imagine.”

Kate laughed. Then she nodded. “In that case, I think it’s about time I learned how to saddle up.”

Kate wasn’t exactly sure what she’d been expecting to feel when she finally sat down across the table from the person who had singularly rearranged her life. She’d spent some time fantasizing about the feeling of vindication, of vengeance, of understanding. When she pulled the hard-backed chair away from the Formica table and slid into it, she felt nothing but numbness.

It was now midafternoon, and the day was
turning out to be as grim and depressing as Kate’s dreams. In the Serious Money medical intensive-care unit, B.J. was off the respirator, extubated, and beginning to live up to his reputation among unit nurses. Kate had left him threatening bodily harm on the next person who came near him with a sharpened object of any kind. Here at the interrogation room at the county detective bureau, Kate sat at a battered table and sipped her coffee and wondered just how soundproof the room could be with its worn old walls.

The cop who walked Sister Ann in did so with the air of a man who’d had a few knuckles slapped. He stayed a respectful couple of paces from the little woman in her white polyester dress and veil and left once she’d been seated. Kate didn’t bother to get up.

“How is he?” Polyester asked, real concern in her eyes as she settled into her chair across from Kate. “I’ve been praying for him ever since I got here.”

Kate was much too battered to give her any grief. “He’s doing fine. They think he’ll be out of the unit tomorrow sometime.”

The little nun beamed, nodded her head with satisfaction, and clasped her hands before her on the table. To their left was the mirror, the one behind which Mary and the Little Dick were sitting. John had somehow made himself inconspicuous in the corner with a tape player and note pad. Sister had evidently instructed her attorney to get a drink of water down the hall, like a good boy.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I tried to think how I
could have made such a mistake, but I can’t. I never meant to hurt Doctor O’Brien. Never.”

Kate couldn’t quite come up with any gratitude. “You wanted to talk to me, Sister?”

Mary Polyester leaned forward. “I didn’t realize that you didn’t understand, Mary Kathleen.”

“Kate.”

She smiled, fluttered. “I’m sorry. Of course. You told me.”

It was Kate’s turn to lean forward. “What exactly did I tell you?” she asked.

The little woman patted her hand. “You really don’t remember. I feel so foolish. I wanted so badly for you to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“What I did, of course. Why. I wanted you to know that not everyone is guilty of aggravated neglect. Not everyone wished to punish you for trying to save that little boy—for trying to save your sisters.”

Kate closed her eyes and did her best to pretend it was B.J. sitting there alongside them instead of John. “I told you about them that night?”

“Yes, dear. You did. I think it was to help me understand just how much that little boy meant to you. But I kept my promise. The only person I told was Father, and that was in confession, so of course he can’t possibly tell anyone else. After all, he had to know too.”

“Know? You confessed the murders?”

“Every Thursday since Frances, right in the chapel at Saint Simon’s. I may be doing God’s work, but I know I displease him a little too.”

“And you did kill Attila and the rest?”

For the first time since she’d known her, Kate saw real anger in the little nun’s eyes. “You think you’re the only one who despairs? You think no one else fights for those little lost souls? Something had to be done, Kate. Someone had to begin to put an end to the conspiracy of harm in medicine.”

“But why them?”

For a minute the nun backed away, sought her own counsel. “Frances was an accident,” she admitted. “An impulse. I was so angry at the way she treated you, especially after you’d sacrificed so much for that little boy. After you’d entrusted me with the truth about what you’d been through.” She took Kate’s hand before Kate could back away. “You were in such pain that night. It was as if we were all tearing you apart. I couldn’t abide it.”

Kate heard the words, but somehow they didn’t sink in. She should have at least felt rage, maybe frustration. She felt impatient, as if she were still waiting for something, when there was nothing left to wait for.

She had her answers. She had her confrontation. She should have at least felt relief.

And then the little nun smiled and gave Kate another pat. “I did it for Molly, really. To give her some peace.”

Please, Kate thought. No more. No more answers. She didn’t want to know, after all. She didn’t want the face of her tormentor to have sweet eyes and a serious heart. She wanted monsters, and she couldn’t find them.

“But how could you send me that note?” she demanded.

“I only asked you to understand.”

“You blamed me.”

Polyester pulled away, stricken. “I would never do that. I don’t chastise the martyrs. You dedicated yourself to others. So did I. I was just trying to help.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Kate tried again. Tried for something solid.

“But why hurt Tim?” she asked. “Why B.J.? How could you do that to them?”

“Tim?” Suddenly the lights were off again. Polyester reached into her pocket and pulled out a worn lacy handkerchief to wring in her blue-veined little hands. “You mean that lovely Doctor Peterson? No, dear. I wouldn’t hurt Tim. That must be a mistake too. I’m sure that wasn’t supposed to be him at all.”

“You hanged him!” Kate insisted, catching those fleeing hands and making her pay attention. “Right in my apartment. You did it because you knew what it would do to me!”

The nun was shaking her head, backing away. “No, oh, no, that’s not right. Are you sure you don’t mean that nasty Dr. Arnstein? Now, he would make sense.”

“And B.J.”

“No, dear. That terrible Doctor Weiss. I told Father how vile Doctor Weiss had been, how he was just another problem. There were others. Oh, yes, there were. Odd how once I started the list it kept getting longer and longer.”

“Long enough to include Mr. Gunn?”

The little woman nodded, her stiff gray hair not moving around the veil. “I did not like that man, Kate. I did not. He didn’t care for the people under his control. Not his staff, not his patients. It could not go on. Now, I realized strychnine wasn’t at all Christian, which was why I was going to use digoxin instead. It would be better, don’t you think?”

Kate let go of the nun’s hands. She wanted out. She wanted some sleep. She wanted to know what it would be like to take a horse up over the high plateaus of New Mexico and not smell one more gomer the rest of her life. She wanted to find someplace free of judgment and contention, and then she just wanted to lie down. She wanted closure, and she was never going to get it.

“You do understand, don’t you?” Mary Polyester begged. “Please tell me you do.”

For the first time since she’d known her, Kate paid close attention to the little nun she’d overlooked all these years. She had wanted to find something reprehensible. What she discovered instead was another victim. Someone who had been stripped of her worth and left to wander her own hospital like a vague, uncomfortable ghost without purpose or direction. An innocent, trained to virtue and deserted by the church and order and career to which she had devoted herself. All Sister Mary Polyester had wanted to do was the right thing. Kate understood so well she actually found a smile for her.

“Yes, Sister,” she admitted. “I really do understand.”

Sister Ann Francis smiled back as if she’d just seen her own redemption. “Up the rebels,” she offered, making it sound oddly like the beginning of a psalm.

Kate nodded. “Up the rebels.”

And then she got the hell out of there.

“You did fine, little girl,” John assured her with a big hug back out in the hallway.

The Little Dick was glowing with good humor. “A slam dunk with clusters,” he said. “Maybe I should be Catholic. They seem to really get off on this confession shit.”

Kate glared at them both. “The rosary was a match?”

“Absolutely, completely, an’ definitely,” John assured her. “Dose were her little brown beads we foun’ on de carpets. But don’ you worry. Your little Sister won’ be hurt any. Dey probably put her in a nice little sanitarium someplace so she can talk to God like she wants.”

Kate nodded absently. “Their order has a nice one in Texas, from what I hear.”

She’d heard it from Sister Ann herself, who’d managed to strong-arm a drunk right to the floor. Who’d gotten a round of applause from the whole staff for it and then blushed like a curtsying deb.

“How did she hang Tim?” she asked anyway.

Little Dick laughed. “You don’t know as much about crazy people as you thought.”

“But he didn’t struggle,” she insisted.

“He had a shitload of barbiturates in him and a pop on the head.”

Kate shook her head again. “So you think she sweet-talked him into standing on her stool with a noose around his neck and a glass of downers in his hands? Or did she just throw him over her shoulder and ease him into place?”

“Dat’s somet’in’ we gonna find out,” John promised. “Okay? Now, you go home and take it easy. It’s all over, little girl.”

Then why didn’t the little girl feel like it was all over? Kate wondered. She didn’t bother sharing congratulations. She just turned for the door.

“And Katie,” John added from behind her, “t’ank you. You are a real sport.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kate agreed miserably as she headed on down the hall. “A real sport.”

The press met her at the front door of the detectives’ bureau. Kate was suddenly the heroine of the piece, the single person in the county, where the police and FBI had had one of the biggest investigations of recent memory going, to finger the Angel of Death. Everybody wanted to know how Kate had figured it out. Kate offered a few four-letter words and hid in Mary’s car.

“You really should get some sleep,” Mary suggested as they pulled up in the emergency garage at St. Simon’s twenty minutes later.

It had been the first words out of either of them since they’d pulled away from the pack of minicams back in Clayton.

Kate could barely get her head off the back of
the seat. She kept her eyes instead on the Lindbergh ambulance that had pulled in just ahead of them. “I know.” But she kept thinking of trying to sleep in that apartment where the litter still lay all across the living room floor from the struggle to save B.J.’s life. Where Tim’s shadow still swayed in her sleep. She had nowhere else to go, but she still didn’t want to go there.

Mary shut off the engine. It still took Kate a minute to say anything.

“Did you ever figure out why the notes didn’t match up?”

“My next order of business,” Mary told her.

Kate just stared ahead as the paramedics unloaded their rig. They had what looked like an LOL in NAD. Little old lady in no active distress. Perfectly coiffed and decked out in her best housecoat, jowls dusty with powder, hands clasped as if offering thanksgiving. A lonely old thing who probably just needed somebody to tell her troubles to. Kate found herself resenting the poor thing for taking up their time.

She’d been right in the unit. She couldn’t go back.

She had nowhere else to go.

So, as always, she opened the door of the car to go inside. “There’s still something missing,” she said simply.

Mary looked over. “Missing?”

Kate nodded, considered the pristine sweep of the white-walled hospital as it lifted into the clearing afternoon sky. It was an imposing build
ing, a testament to health and healing and compassion with its white-on-white expanse, its carefully planted grounds, its meticulously tended ad campaigns.

It was a farce, and everyone who worked in that building knew it. What it was was cutthroat profiteering and any number of sleight-of-hand tricks. It was bad smells and bad luck and bad health. And that was what was wrong.

“The evil,” she said. “Something about all this was cold and calculating and evil, and that little nun saying her rosary back in the interrogation room simply didn’t have it in her.”

“That’s for us to figure out,” Mary said. “You’ve done enough. It’s time to take care of yourself. Okay?”

Too late, Kate thought, opening the door the rest of the way and pulling herself out to go inside. “Okay,” she said instead.

“It’s finally over,” the little blonde from public relations said from the television screen in B.J.’s room two days later. “We wish we could say we knew why Sister Ann had her breakdown. We certainly wish there had been something we could have done to prevent it, to understand it. To help her before it came to this. On behalf of Mr. Fellows and the entire staff of Saint Simon’s, I’d like to say, however, that we are behind her. We would also, of course, like to express our deepest regrets and condolences to the families and friends of her victims….”

“Bullshit and more bullshit,” Jules pronounced from the doorway.

Kate looked up from where she had taken over the easy chair in B.J.’s room to greet her friend on her first day back after what Jules preferred to call her “unfortunate incarceration.”

“Nice to know your recent bout of bad luck hasn’t changed your basic good attitude,” Kate offered, wishing she had a little more enthusiasm for her friend.

“Where is the man of the hour?” Jules asked.

“Down getting CAT-scanned.”

Jules allowed the first sign of worry to creep in. “They don’t think—”

“Nope. But why pass up a good chance to gig his insurance a little?”

That produced a big smile. “Nice to see your attitude hasn’t soured, either. How’s the staff been treating you?”

“Like Hitler, thanks.”

“Ah, screw ’em. One good shift and it’ll all be back to normal. Here, I got something for you. Made it myself.”

Kate did her best not to cringe. She was afraid she was going to see something fur, and after what she’d found on her table, she never wanted to see fur again as long as she lived.