Authors: Eileen Dreyer
Edna looked up. “No. Why?”
“Nothing. He was in the waiting room earlier. I thought he might be with one of the patients.”
“Maybe he’s here to keep an eye on all of us,” Edna suggested. “So no one else commits a murder.”
Kate just snorted. “I hope he knows what poison looks like.”
There hadn’t been any cheering this time when Kate walked in. No hero’s welcome. At best,
Kate had received polite acknowledgment. How the mighty have fallen, she thought, as she took a stab at the mashed potatoes she didn’t want. How the guilty will suffer.
Edna was number eighteen, making a match on two out of the four murders with a close for the third. Edna, who had been raised in the old caregiving atmosphere, who had such trouble with high tech, who wore her white lab coat like a nun’s habit.
Edna, who had patted Kate’s hand when Weiss was such an ass.
Sticks was on the list too, and Jules and Lisa Beller, all of them conveniently close to the deaths in both proximity and motive. There were some discrepancies about Weiss’s times, since he was so fond of disappearing when needed, and Hetty Everson matched on three out of four.
Twenty names in all, and Kate was supposed to get them and others in conversation, in the hope of catching some of them in a lie they might have told the interrogators that might belie the normal, nondescript medical kind of background they all seemed to have.
There was a whole team on the thing now, a lot of overtime being racked up at the county homicide bureau. The good news was they’d relegated Dickie to headquarters, to be replaced by one of the detectives who usually doubled in burglary. The bad news was they were all over the hospital, with a command center set up in the doctors’ building to facilitate the investigation. They spent all day doing interviews and checking
typewriters and lounge magazines, phone logs and meds orders. The worse news was the interviews were turning up nothing but frustration and silence. It was up to Kate to catch the reaction.
“They want something interesting,” someone was saying behind her, not paying attention to the fact that the room echoed, “they should try talking to Sue Williamson on the fourth floor. She got caught going to wage and hour over her paychecks, and now they have her pulling every shit shift they can find. She’s got four kids, a husband who hasn’t had a job in four years, and no help, and they’re threatening to cut her time in half if she doesn’t behave. It’d sure piss me off enough to pull out the potassium.”
“What about Buck Taylor?”
Kate could almost hear the general nodding of heads. Buck was an internist specializing in critical-care medicine, fondly referred to as Dr. Death for his unfortunate code statistics. Buck was also crazy as a bedbug. The latest Buckism had him appearing on the unit at midnight during a full moon in black cape and extra canines, howling. It had taken Hetty twenty minutes to convince him that werewolves howled, not vampires.
“Then there’s Lisa Beller.”
Kate’s ears picked up. She hated herself but kept on listening, remembering she had a job to do for Tim.
“I hear she has a pretty big secret to keep.”
“Secret?” one of the aides retorted with a snort of indignation. “Honey, Parker’s no secret. Although, from what I hear, he
is
big.”
“Not that. Something else. Something in her past. Have you noticed she never talks about it?”
“They really don’t understand, do they?” Edna asked all of a sudden.
Kate did her best to listen to two conversations at once. “Who?” she asked. “The floor nurses?”
But Edna was shaking her head. “The authorities. They don’t really care why this is happening, and that’s the most important part.”
“Lisa wouldn’t kill anybody,” the aide said definitely. “She’d just give him to Weiss and let him do it.”
“No,” Kate agreed. “They don’t understand.”
Edna wasn’t finished. “I’ve dedicated every one of my lives to helping others. Every one. And it’s always been the same. You’d think somebody would have figured it out by now. You’d think they’d have some charity for the caregivers.”
“Weiss,” somebody said. “Now there’s a trip down psychosis lane.”
“What about B.J.?” Edna suddenly asked. Kate almost snapped her head around in surprise. “What?”
Edna smiled, inclining her head toward the conversation. “What about B.J.? Doctor O’Brien?”
Kate wasn’t at all sure she was following. “You think B.J. could be doing this?”
Edna shoveled in some spinach. “Why not? He’s around more than any other medical examiner I’ve ever known, and he’s killed people before.”
“That was different,” Kate admonished.
Edna looked up. “Are you sure?”
Which was when Kate realized she’d tried to
handle this much too early. She couldn’t keep Edna straight, much less the people around her. Luckily, though, she didn’t have to take her seriously.
Which was why she was so angry four hours later when she saw B.J. again, because suddenly she couldn’t help but wonder, even for a moment, if Edna could be right.
She actually heard him before she saw him. She’d just finished a grueling forty-minute stint with two middle-aged parents in what was euphemistically called the quiet room, and her throat hurt almost as much as her head and leg. So she wasn’t in the mood for games.
“No, Duke, don’t!” she heard through the nurses’ lounge door. “Don’t open the letter!”
Kate almost didn’t open the door at all.
The Sands of Iwo Jima
, B.J.’s favorite movie, although Kate couldn’t figure out why. It was playing on one of the local channels on the lounge TV, and it was obviously the moment when John Wayne bit the big banzai bullet. Kate opened the door just as he met his fate.
“Aw, no,” B.J., protested, throwing up his hands.
“Not again,” Kate moaned with a shake of her head as she trudged on over to the sludge left in the coffeepot. B.J. met her arrival with surprising equanimity, considering the fact that he hated being caught having fun.
“He never listens. You look like hell.”
Kate turned to take him in and came to her own surprised halt.
He was in a suit, as neat and pressed as a yuppie lawyer, all gray pinstripes and white monogrammed shirt, his loafered feet on the coffee table. B.J., who had participated in his share of war. B.J., who never once talked about it. It still couldn’t be B.J.
“My, my,” Kate acknowledged with a shake of the head. “I thought I’d never see the day.”
“Not a word,” he warned.
She never bothered with his threats. “You’re either due in court or trying to buy a condo in Ladue.”
She had her coffee, so the only thing left was to get her leg up. She did that in the one comfortable chair in the room, her attention on the first hot sip of primordial goo in her cup.
“Hey, Beej,” she said, closing her eyes. “What do you think of the rodeo?”
“The what?”
“The rodeo. Did you know that Mary Cherry is a calf roper? I think it sounds like fun.”
“I think it sounds like you might have sustained more brain damage than we’d thought.”
“Think of it,” she said, her eyes open again, her voice just a little too intense. “Wide open spaces, the smell of honest work and leather in your nostrils, the simple life of the cowpoke.”
B.J. just ignored her, which Kate knew was probably a good idea. “Do you have any information?” he asked, pulling out a new cigarette to mutilate.
She slumped. “Three new affairs and a floor secretary who thinks he’s Ted Kennedy’s illegiti
mate child. I’m woefully short on murder suspects, though.”
“You talked to them?”
“Not all of them. I don’t get around as quickly as I used to. And then Phyl keeps sticking me in with upset parents because I’m on light duty. What could be more light than telling a mother her sixteen-year-old should have worn his seat belt?”
“I thought you had pastoral care or something for that.”
“After the last round of cutbacks, the only thing pastoral care does is interfaith services in the morning and a visit to the pre-op patients, just in case they want to get something off their chests before the big moment. Mostly what the patients end up getting is Sister Mary Polyester.”
“What about the priest?”
“Priest? There hasn’t been a priest around here in three years. They couldn’t seem to work twenty-four hours a day for minimum wage. We get a rent-a-priest from the local parish for Sundays.”
“Any idea what’s next?”
Kate shook her head. “After Tim, all bets are off. I thought I knew how this wanker was thinking. But I’ll be damned if I know what’s going on now. I don’t understand it at all anymore.”
“You think it’s changed?”
“Don’t you? I mean, poisoning is a polite way of killing people. You know, almost shy, as if you don’t want to get in your victim’s face. Tim did not die a polite death.”
“I told you, Kate. He didn’t suffer. He just
passed out from lack of blood to the brain. He went to sleep and that was it.”
“But he saw who killed him. He talked to her. He knew he was going to die. And then whoever did it took the time to clean everything up before leaving again. That’s cold, Beej. It’s really cold.”
“Who do you think is responsible, Kate?”
Kate pushed herself to her feet and walked over to where Phyl had set up a computer link for her to complete her paperwork. The cursor was blinking over last month’s numbers. She exited and shut the system down for the next shift.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Who?”
Kate turned to see those eyes on her like lasers. What a stupid time to feel comforted by the fact that B.J. never backed down from anything. “I think,” she said, “it’s me.”
“
WHAT DO YOU
mean you’re responsible?”
“I think that every one of those murders is some kind of little message just for me. Some kind of gift or punishment for whatever happened the night of the accident.”
“You really think that’s what set this off?”
“I don’t know. Yes…yes, maybe I do. Whoever it is seems real intent on making some point, like I’m the biggest idiot walking not to have figured out how clever she is. And the only big hole in my reasoning powers happens to have occurred that night.”
“Then who’s next?”
“I don’t know. Martin Weiss and I sure got into it, evidently. Should I warn him or make sure he isn’t packing arsenic?”
“Who else?”
She downed her coffee in a swallow and tossed the Styrofoam at the trash. “I don’t know.
I don’t know
.” She shook her head and faced her inquisitor head on. “And I don’t think I’m the one who’s going to find out.”
“Why not?”
They heard the footsteps just in time to shut up before the door opened.
“Shit, fuck, fire, folks, it’s the end of the world.”
It was Jules, knitting bag in one hand, her jacket in the other. There was blood on her hands, and she hadn’t even gotten onto the work lane yet.
“Looks like you struck gold on the highway again,” B.J. offered without inflection.
She beamed. “Literally. You’d think by now the possums would at least spread the word to watch for things that make growling noises and emit smoke, especially when I’m late for a five-to-two shift. Good thing it’s pretty cold out, or I couldn’t have left the little devil in my truck. I’ve never seen you so dressed up before, Doctor O’Brien. You bein’ married or buried?”
“Court. I forgot to change before coming over.”
Impossible. B.J. could change clothes faster than a chorus girl in a Broadway musical. Kate had seen him do it in the back seat of his Jeep once or twice. Well, not seen, heard. She’d been trying to drive at the time. It made her wonder who the act was for, especially since it was so well known just how seriously he hated getting suited up.
“No kidding,” Jules said as she dropped her stuff and washed her hands. “I always kind of pictured you up there in your Guns ’n Roses T-shirt. I’m bitterly disappointed.”
For that, at least, she got the semblance of a
smile. “It’s tough to get a jury to take you seriously in your jeans.”
Her expression tightened just a little when she looked at Kate. “You two putting your heads together on who to report to Administration today?”
“No,” B.J. said evenly. “I’m knocking her head against the wall. I came back from out of town to find she’d decamped to the apartment. I wanted to intercept her before she decided to try it for another night, so I came here right after my court appearance.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Kate retorted blackly. “I can manage on my own.”
Those odd silver eyes glinted at her like burnished metal. “Not right now you can’t.”
“Get her to talk about it,” Jules suggested nonchalantly as she headed for the coffee. “She looks like hell.”
“Get off my back,” Kate retorted, a little too hotly.
That got raised eyebrows from both of them. Kate glared, took a steadying breath, and grabbed for her bag. “I’m going home now. If anyone wants me, my phone will be off the hook until the press find someone more fun to torment.”
B.J. never moved as Kate stalked out of the lounge. By the time she clocked out and made it out the garage door to walk to the apartment, though, he was lounging against the outside wall, cigarette already half unraveled in his hand.
“You’d better have been kidding in there,” she warned, limping by.
“What kind of pain meds are you taking?” he asked, following, his collar already unbuttoned and his tie fluttering from his jacket pocket.
“Tylenol with codeine. And as you can see, I’m not operating any heavy equipment.”
The news trucks were suspiciously absent for once as the hospital settled in for the evening. Kate noticed that and nothing more as she began what seemed like an endless trek across campus.
“Why don’t you think you’re going to learn anything?” B.J. asked.
She stopped and wheeled on him, suddenly very tired of this line of questioning. “Because no one wants to talk to me, that’s why. That’s what tends to happen with traitors. Besides, just what the hell do you think I’m going to hear? You think Parker’s going to ask me the digoxin dosage needed to kill off a hundred-and-seventy-pound man? I’m getting frustration and rage and a great deal of anticipation, and that’s it.”
“Who’s odds-on favorite for next victim?”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “Martin Weiss. And me. In that order.”
He nodded. “In that case, you shouldn’t be staying by yourself.”
Kate sighed and started walking again. “Don’t protect me,” she said. “Protect my friends. Our murderer knows just what yanks my chain.”
“Yeah, but the last time she yanked, you popped off in the opposite direction.”
“All the more reason to protect the others. It’s my modus operandi, after all. Defend the innocents, no matter what.”
“What if she decides it’d just be quicker all round to get you out of the way?”
Kate waved him off. “Just her and me,
mano a mano
, huh? Not a bad idea.”
B.J. actually spun her around. “Kate, I’m not kidding.”
But Kate wasn’t playing. She was too tired, too stretched, too afraid to walk into that apartment again. She wanted it over. Better, she wanted it all just to disappear, the entire last few weeks, so she could go back to pretending she was a capable strong adult working in a career she still loved. She wanted her delusions back intact, because now that they were crumbling, so was she.
“Isn’t John supposed to be having this conversation with me?” she demanded instead. “It’s his case.”
“You’re my friend,” he retorted. “And I wasn’t kidding in there. I want you back at the house, at least for now.”
She wanted to cry. It was those damn silver eyes, one minute so distant, the next as liquid and deadly as mercury. The only reason Kate had been able to stay so close to B.J. all these years was that he only let the real emotions loose in rare, flashing bursts. She couldn’t stand more. She knew he couldn’t.
Well, damn it, he was letting them loose now, and just this brief glimpse was enough to make a girl wish for things she knew were off limits. She wanted to comfort and hurt and torment all at once, just as women had wanted for the men in their lives since time immemorial.
So Kate looked away, looked down at the new grass, at the dusting of white violets on the spring lawn, on the slow drift of tobacco as it fell from a shredded cigarette.
“I don’t think you get it,” he said, in an abrupt way that betrayed the cost of his words. “You were dead, you idiot. And I had to stand there and do nothing.”
“I’m all right, Beej.”
“Well, I’m not.”
That brought her head up. She shouldn’t have. She should have left it down where she was safe. She wouldn’t be safe with B.J. ever again. That careful wall they’d erected so long ago had suddenly disintegrated, and it scared her more than anything else that had happened since she’d awakened to the sound of a respirator.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, another support disintegrating. “You really did forget to change.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. To keep from throttling her, she thought. “I’m not going to stand here in the middle of the lawn arguing with you.”
“Then feel free to come to the apartment. I’m not going back to your house. Especially now.”
“Why especially now?”
“Because I think we’re on the edge of doing something stupid, that’s why.”
In the end, all B.J. could seem to do was stand there, his hands jammed in his pants pockets, his eyes locked solidly on the lights of the hospital behind them. “It’s one thing to lose people you…people who mean something to you when you
can’t do anything to stop it. It’s something else entirely if you can stop it and you don’t.”
Kate was jangling like a high wire in a windstorm. There was only so much more she could take before snapping loose. She wanted to hole up in silence. She wanted to be held, when no one had really held her in years. She wanted to be able for once to be perfectly, simply selfish. And there was B.J., looking for all the world as if he were even closer to snapping than she, his features tight and his eyes brittle as hell.
Fine, she thought. If that’s the way it’s going to be.
“Come on, damn it,” she said, and grabbed him by the arm.
He almost managed to pull loose before she turned him toward the apartment.
“I am not going to argue about anything this important in front of everybody I work with,” she told him, shoving him in the right direction. “Now, let’s go.”
His reaction was, for B.J., pretty sheepish. “Can I get my jeans out of the Jeep?”
“Holy shit, Beej, where’d that come from?”
B.J. stopped right in the middle of pulling his T-shirt over his head. “What?” he asked in a muffled voice.
Kate just kept staring. “That chest.”
Down went the shirt to conceal the pertinent anatomy and reveal not a little irritation. “Don’t be an idiot. You’ve seen my chest before.”
“No,” she admitted, even more surprised than he. “I haven’t. I think I would have remembered.”
He was glowering now. “It’s just a few scars.”
But Kate was shaking her head. “Honey, it wasn’t the scars I was looking at.” She shook her head again and hid herself back in the day’s mail so he couldn’t realize that she was even more upset than she was surprised. B.J. was the last person she expected palpitations over. “All this time, and I wasted it.”
“Kate…”
She was grinning, humor the only way she knew to defuse a situation. “I could have sold you to the highest bidder.”
He forgave her by heading out to brew up some coffee. “Where’s all your mail?”
“This is all my mail. I’m off the hit parade, didn’t you know?”
Electric bill, insurance bill, Visa bill, hospital bill. She wasted time opening that one.
“Oh, wow.”
B.J. stuck his head out of the kitchen. “What’s the matter?”
Kate didn’t even bother to look up. Her chest was tightening again with the thought of all the years she was going to have to work to pay this baby off. And just when she’d finally thought she’d be clear and free for the first time in her life.
She never noticed B.J. approach. “I thought they were going to help you with it.”
“I told them to get screwed.”
He nodded. “Seems reasonable when you’re talking five figures.”
She dropped the thick computer printout onto
the dining room table and sighed. “I was kinda hoping I could prove it was workmen’s comp.”
“You seen the chart yet?”
She just shook her head. Then she let her other bills follow the hospital charge, which left her with two envelopes. One from the hospital, which she tossed with the bills, figuring it was just another of the same. And one more, a clean, kind of rumpled envelope that seemed innocuous. Too innocuous. Especially since it didn’t have a postal cancellation on it.
“Oh, shit.”
B. J. must have had the same reaction. He grabbed it from her hand and held it up to the light. “Call John,” he said.
“We don’t know—”
“Yes, we do. I can see it through the envelope.”
Kate leaned in closer, trying to see, too. “What does it say?”
“Stop. Just that. Stop.”
Kate didn’t move. She could damn near hear the blood pulsing in her neck. “Do you think if I left a return message in my mailbox she’d get it? You know, one calling her out?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous?” She waved at the offending envelope, and suddenly her hand wasn’t that steady. “That threat is personal. To me. RIght to me. The mesage is to me. And even if we do get this thing figured out, nobody’s gonna let me stand up and face whoever’s doing this.”
“You’d better hope to hell not.”
“I’d better hope to hell so. Damn it, Beej, I’m
the one being attacked. I’m the one everybody in this whole goddamn hospital is leaning on, one way or another. And it’s gonna be just like work. When they want me, they can find me just fine. But when I need a few answers, I might as well try and get God on the phone. Don’t I deserve a little personal satisfaction?”
“Not at the risk of your life.”
“My life’s already at risk. My sanity’s at risk, damn it!”
She ended up at the window, the heels of her hands up against her eyes to rub away the flashes of memory that seemed to accompany this emotional bus ride.
“I never once got the chance to fight,” she admitted, seeing herself again and again, just holding off the worst. “I never got to get back at them. They all made decisions without even asking us what was best. They kept ignoring us, and I never once got the chance to do anything about it.”
He came close, right up behind her. Too close, so that it set off old alarm bells she hadn’t heard in years. She reacted instinctively, spinning away.
“It’ll be different this time, pogue.”
She didn’t even realize she’d picked up the vase. “It will
not
be different this time!” she shrilled and hurled it as hard as she could.
B.J. wondered if Kate was shaking any harder than he was. He was still trying to figure out what
happened. How a simple act of frustration could cause such a terrifying reaction.
He was standing outside the locked bathroom door, listening to the strangled rasp of Kate’s breathing echoing off the tile. He could almost tell where she was just by the sounds, just by years of doing autopsies on battered children. Curled up on the floor, in the corner next to the toilet where she prayed she’d be safe in the only room in the house that locked.
He’d seen kids do it on occasion, the little ones with the lank hair and carefully quiet eyes. Act out and then run, because they knew what was next. He’d never seen an adult do it. He’d never once anticipated that Kate might do it. But then, he’d never had the guts to find out.
“It’s just a television set,” he coaxed, his eye on the shattered screen, glass littering the gray rug like glitter. Two of the doctors’ wives had knocked on the door to make sure Kate was okay. The sound of that thing going had been impressive. Impressive enough to shatter not only the tube but all the defense Kate had built up to protect the raw spots.