Nothing Personal (32 page)

It wasn’t. What Jules pulled out was a pair of buttery-soft leather moccasins with beads of every color sewn over the top.

“Mementos.” Jules beamed.

Kate scowled, teary. “Whore dog.”

“Slut puppy.” She reached into her nursing
bag and brought out another, larger pair. “Here. I made a pair for your friend. Matching. Isn’t that cute?”

That made Kate want to cry all over again. She hated this. She should have been feeling so much better. She accepted the moccasins anyway and settled both pairs on her lap.

“These aren’t the ones you made for Mr. Gunn, are they?” Kate demanded.

Jules snorted. “Hey, a girl has to make a living. Just ask Suzie—who has asked for a transfer to urology, by the way.”

Kate laughed. “Urology?”

“The ER is too stressful.”

“Hallelujah.”

Jules settled onto the unmade bed, her eye half on the TV, half on Kate, who didn’t realize she was stroking the soft leather of the shoes in her lap.

“You’re really serious about this shit,” Jules marveled softly.

Kate looked up to see true wonder in her friend’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

Jules just motioned to the unmade bed.

Kate fidgeted with the moccasins. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I guess I am.”

Jules nodded. “About time. I mean, I loved Tim. You know that. But you two just weren’t right for each other.”

At least that could make Kate smile. “Yeah. I know.”

Jules didn’t pull anything else out of her bag. Instead, she pulled Kate to her feet. “Come on. He
won’t need his hand held for an hour or so. You’re going to eat lunch.”

Kate’s reaction was automatic. “I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t care. Mrs. O’Brien made it a point to come down and beg me to take care of you, and I’m not going to disappoint somebody that cute and small—she’s not really his mother, is she?”

Kate scowled. “No. He rents her on weekends from her real family. Don’t be an idiot.”

“She’s still too cute to disappoint. Now, come on.”

If Kate had been feeling better, she would have made a stronger show of protesting. As it was, she allowed herself to be pushed out the door and down the hall.

She was tired. For some reason she’d expected some kind of relief. She should have known better. Almost in punctuation, a couple of staff turned her way from the elevators. One look at Kate and they damn near turned to stone. Behind them, the floor secretary caught sight of her and waved hello. The PR department insisted that the hospital was getting back to normal. Kate didn’t see any signs of it. If anything, the arguments were getting bigger, the divisions greater.

Jules was not one to let the obvious go unnoticed. “So,” she said, punching the elevator button. “How does it feel to be the star?”

Kate leaned against the wall by the elevator and sighed. She’d been thinking about this one a lot. As a matter of fact, it had kept her awake.

It had been forty-eight hours, and Kate was still plagued by that feeling of waiting. She’d finally
gotten back into the apartment with its new picture window and locks and spent four hours cleaning up the living room from the last time she’d been there. She’d tried to feed herself from the unopened cans and bottles the police had let her keep after checking for possible poison, and tried harder to relax, cranking up Queen on the stereo and stretching out on the couch with a newly uncorked bottle of cabernet sauvignon Tim had never had the chance to try. She’d still been there the next morning, her eyes still open, the bottle half finished, waiting.

Everyone else was celebrating either the end of the case or the identity of the veiled avenger. Kate listened and watched and wondered what was wrong.

“It doesn’t fit,” she finally said.

The doors opened and the little drama reenacted itself as a gaggle of employees stepped off the elevator rather than be on with Kate. By now Kate was too tired to care. Jules guided her onto the elevator and let the doors shut. “What?”

“It’s like there’s been this tune going on in my head, ya know? We’ll call it the Song of the Serial Killer. And when Mary Polyester was caught, I thought it would stop. But only the high voice stopped. I keep hearing a real funny harmony, kind of like the low drone on a bagpipe after the playing’s stopped.”

Jules shook her head. “You’re not making any sense at all. She confessed. They have evidence placing her at the scenes.”

Kate nodded. “I know. I was there, remember?
But nobody’s ever really given me a really good reason for her killing Tim.”

“She didn’t want you to help the investigation.”

“She wanted me to understand everything she did. Why ask me to look closer and ignore what was going on at the same time? Why set it up so deliberately to shadow the worst moments of my life if she thought she was helping me out?”

Jules had her answer even before Kate finished. “She got one wrong. She misread your cues. Who knows? I mean, hell, Kate, she’s never really been wired to code, ya know?”

Kate flushed with quick frustration. She understood the reaction. Every person who had donated to the original defense fund had echoed it. Polyester was the folk hero now. Polyester was the Florence Fucking Nightingale they’d all manufactured. Righter of wrongs, defender of the working stiff, avenger of the mistreated. The money in the defense account had been rerouted to her, even though the Little Sisters of Good Grace had promised full support of their wayward and confused member. The Fax Fairies had sent wanted posters with a bandolier-strapped, machine-gun-toting nun promising that she’d be back, and the Pig Nurses had given her an official cap in absentia. They had needed her, and she had fulfilled their darkest fantasies.

It wouldn’t be the same if there was more to it than that. They wouldn’t be quite so vindicated. Their cause, somehow, wouldn’t be as just. And Kate, who was resented for turning in the hero, would be even more resented for unmasking her.
So Kate kept her suspicions to herself, which left her sleepless and restless and afraid to walk in the apartment where Tim still seemed to wait to remind her of something.

“The funny thing is,” Jules admitted, “I miss her. She may have been a commissioned officer in the space cadets, but she was always around when you needed a little hand-holding.”

Kate just nodded. She’d heard this part too. Never speak ill of the dead or the recently indicted.

“I mean, I had to run interference in the cry room this morning. We had a DOA from out in the boonies, and of course the entire goddamn township shows up for the wailing services, and I don’t even have Polyester to be a warm body. I felt like the only can of mace in a roomful of mad dogs. And, of course, you know what it’s been like to get anybody from social services down there lately, so we didn’t even get one of those, much less a friggin’ priest like the guy’s wife kept begging for. Shit, I almost dressed Parker in a cassock and pushed him in with a Bible, just to shut ’em all up.”

Kate had only been paying marginal attention as she watched the floor lights blink toward ground level and waited for Jules to finish canonizing Polyester. Suddenly, though, what the big nurse was saying sank in.

The elevator doors opened onto the teeming lobby. Jules stepped off. Kate couldn’t move.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered, not seeing the people staring at her.

She was trying hard to remember everything
she’d heard. Wanting so very badly to be sure about this before she put herself squarely back on the shit list again. Almost as terrified that she was right as terrified that she was wrong.

But she was right. She knew it. She felt it strike that low harmonic instinct like a perfect fifth. “I should have remembered.”

Jules leaned in to nudge Kate in the right direction. “Remembered what?”

Kate followed her out, not even aware that half a dozen people were glaring at her. It couldn’t be right. It was too simple. Somebody should have picked it up.

Reaching the foyer, she started searching, her heart suddenly racing. A phone. She needed a phone.

“Kate?” Jules insisted, following right on her heels. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

But Kate didn’t answer. She’d reached the information desk that held, among other things, a phone and a hospital directory. She checked, blinking a couple of times to read the number. She was so damn tired she couldn’t even see anymore. She wasn’t so tired she couldn’t be afraid.

“Pastoral care, may I help you?”

Kate held her breath. Closed her eyes. Asked the question that might change everything or consign her once and for all to the wasteland of wondering. “Hi, I have a question. I heard that you’d recently been able to get a priest to do confessions. Is that right?”

On the other end of the line, the voice hesitated.
“Uh, no. I’m sorry. Is there some way I can help?”

“You’re sure?” Kate asked. “I could swear somebody said they were seeing a priest every Thursday morning for confession here.”

“No, I’m sorry. We haven’t had a full-time priest for three years. A local parish priest says mass on Sundays and holy days. Although our chaplains aren’t Catholic priests, they do offer spiritual support. May I refer you to one of them?”

Kate automatically shook her head. “No. Thank you, though. You’ve been a great help.”

She hung up the phone, feeling worse. Lightheaded with the knowledge. Damn near clammy, as her mind stuttered to life amid the myriad questions that followed.

“What was that all about?” Jules demanded.

“What that was all about,” Kate said, focusing on her friend, “is I want to know how the hell Polyester could have been confessing her sins in the Saint Simon’s chapel like clockwork every damn Thursday when we haven’t had a priest here for three goddamn years.”

It took Jules a second. People shoved past them, some none too kindly, but Kate and Jules remained there, stuck in place in the middle of the tile floor by the information desk.

Jules shrugged. “Easy. She imagined him.”

Kate shook her head. “But what if she didn’t? What if she was laying out all her plans every Thursday like she said?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying it suddenly occurs to me that
maybe Mary Cherry was right all along. Maybe the reason it looked like there were two people involved in this damn thing is because there were. And we only have one of them.”

“SLOW DOWN. I’M
still a sick man.”

Kate did her best to rein in her anxiety. “It’s what Tim’s been trying to tell me all along,” she insisted, knowing how little sense she was making. “We only have part of the picture.”

Still trussed up with IVs and attired in a unit gown, B.J. rubbed his face and sighed. “You’re telling me. What the hell are you babbling about?”

Kate took a breath, paced a little to try and order her thoughts. “Mary Polyester. She’s been absolutely honest all along, and we’re not listening to her.”

B.J. gave up and closed his eyes. “I know you’re going to tell me all about it.”

“Nobody’ll listen to me, Beej. Everybody’s so thrilled to have an answer, they’re not using common sense. Why would she be happy to admit to three murders and not more? Why would she be so insistent that she didn’t kill Tim, when one of her notes was pinned to his chest?”

“You’re asking me?” he demanded. “You know perfectly well I don’t get involved in that shit. I do bodies. Period.”

“Well, I don’t. I’ve been thinking about this, Beej. It makes sense.”

“Nothing makes sense,” he assured her. “I can’t even think in complete sentences yet. Why don’t you talk to John?”

“There was a little girl murdered last night. They’ve all moved on to that. I can’t even get him to answer the phone.”

“Mary over at the FBI”

“They say she’s not available. I think that means she’s in Albuquerque roping cows with her ex-husband. And nobody’ll let me talk to Polyester without permission.”

That brought him straight up. “No,” he told her, his eyes hard. “You are not going to go off half cocked and play Nancy Drew.”

“Why?” she retorted. “Do you think I could be right?”

“No,” he answered. “I think you could piss off Mother Teresa when you try, and right now I’m not in a position to run interference.”

For just a moment they glared at each other. Then they grinned in a weird kind of relief. Things were getting back to normal.

“Just listen,” she begged. “Just tell me if I’m that far off the mark. If I am, I’ll shut up.”

“No, you won’t.”

“All right, I won’t. But I know I’m right.”

B.J. slumped back against the pillow. “In that case, theorize away.”

Kate paced again, sought out the sunset beyond the highway, then the door to the hallway, where staff meandered by at an odd, almost ataxic pace.

“It’s the feeling I’ve been getting all along that the murders don’t fit the same pattern. Sometimes I’ve felt the murders are impulsive, almost apologetic. Attila, Warner, Fleischer. Polite, ya know? Just like Mary said. But other times I’d get this cold feeling, like there was someone watching. Someone who was hiding behind the black curtain pulling the puppet strings. Someone who was taking advantage of Sister’s frustration and desperation for other goals.”

“What goals?”

“I don’t know. But Polyester herself said she’d changed her mind about the strychnine. She was going to use digoxin instead. But Gunn got strychnine. Gunn got it big time and died in agony.”

B.J. couldn’t seem to help a grin. “Kind of.”

“And Tim—”

“It’s always going to come down to that, isn’t it?”

She stopped and faced him. Faced herself and her ghosts. “It doesn’t matter whether Tim died painlessly or not. His death was cruel. His death was deliberate and well planned to create a particular effect. To send one message. To me.”

“To remind you of your mother.”

“More,” she admitted, and turned away. “To remind me of Molly.”

Behind her, B.J. rustled uncomfortably. “Your sister?”

Kate looked for the sun again, but it was gone. “I’ve been lying to Aunt Mamie, Beej. My sisters aren’t on the coast. They aren’t fine.”

“Molly?”

Kate took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and offered up the last of her secrets. “Molly’s dead. She killed herself five years ago, just like Mom. I’ve never told anybody.”

“Come here.”

She turned. “What?”

His movements were impatient. “Come here.”

She did, where he could hold her as she talked. Kate didn’t know whether that hurt worse or less. It hurt better, though.

“You told Polyester that night, didn’t you?”

“I must have. I think maybe I was trying to get her to understand just how frustrated I was about that little boy. I mean, it was just like with the girls, ya know? Nobody listened to me. Nobody. I tried to get somebody to understand about my dad. I tried to get them to take the girls from my mom, and then from my Aunt Mamie, because I knew what it was doing to them. I pleaded, Beej. I told them I’d stay with Aunt Mamie, but I wanted the twins safely away.”

“And the girls blamed you for trying to get rid of them.”

Kate turned, all the old evils spilling free once and for all. “Wouldn’t you?”

B.J. held on tight to her hand. “Yeah, probably. If I didn’t know any better. What about your other sister, Mary Ellen?”

Kate didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She never did with Mary Ellen. “She finally did escape. She’s living in a cloister in Minnesota where she never has to see me again.”

“Then she made it okay.”

“No. But at least she’s safe. But what I’m saying is that Polyester really hurt for Molly. I could tell when I talked to her in the interrogation room. And if that was true, why would she send a note about her?”

“I thought she didn’t. I thought somebody from the hospital did.”

“Exactly. Except the only person she told was the priest she confessed to every Thursday ever since she killed Attila.”

“Priest.”

Kate nodded.

“But there isn’t a priest at Saint Simon’s anymore.”

Kate rewarded him with a tight smile. “Now you see why I’m beginning to think there’s something else going on here?”

If she’d thought B.J. would be excited by her news, she was sorely disappointed. For a moment he thought about it, his forehead puckered, his hand tapping a tattoo on the bed rail. Kate waited, knowing his synapses were still a little fried. She knew he’d catch up with her. She knew he’d give her the great aha! so they could get to the point where Kate really could get closure.

Instead he shook his head. “Shit, pogue. I have to get you someplace safe.”

Kate all but pulled B.J. right out of the bed when she jumped to her feet. “Don’t you dare start this again,” she demanded.

“What are you talking about?”

“Get me someplace safe.” She glared at him, appalled. “Don’t be an idiot. Get yourself someplace safe. I’ve never been the target.”

“Who says that hasn’t changed?”

“B.J.,” she pleaded. “This isn’t a game. I have to know.”

“Pogue—”

“Don’t pogue me,” she retorted. “Help me. Nobody else will listen, and if they don’t, whoever this guy is will get away with it.”

“No, he won’t,” B.J. assured her. “I still have to sign off on Gunn. I won’t until I’m satisfied, all right?”

Kate almost broke down on the spot. “All right. Now, what do we do next?”

“We find out who had the most to gain from Sister Ann’s little crime spree.”

Kate tried again to get hold of John. She tried Mary. She even tried Little Dick, but he wasn’t interested in the phantom priest theory, since it would just generate more work on his part.

She had her best luck getting in to see Sister Ann Francis, who by now was hand-holding without bond in the county jail. It took most of the afternoon and evening, but she secured permission from Polyester’s lawyer, another silky-smooth carnivore with an agenda. After spending another night with nothing but a half-finished wine bottle and a cat, she got in to visit first thing in the morning.

Trying to get used to the sight of Polyester in drab prison dress instead of habit was tough. It was like suddenly seeing your favorite old auntie in jeans. Nevertheless, Kate knew she couldn’t
waste any time. She asked the little woman specifically about the priest, whom Polyester had never seen except behind the screen. She asked about the murders, to be told once again that Sister had no desire to hurt that nice Tim or that nice Dr. O’Brien, and oh, my heavens, it really was strychnine Mr. Gunn died of?

“What about those notes?” Kate asked the little nun through the Plexiglas barrier. “Did you really send those to me?”

Polyester frowned a little, as if Kate hadn’t been paying attention. “Why yes, dear. Of course I did.”

“Which typewriters did you use?”

“Typewriters? I didn’t use typewriters. I used magazines. The old ones in the admitting waiting room. Only ones over a year old, you know. They should have been thrown out anyway.”

Kate shook her head, impatient now. “No, Sister. I mean on the envelopes.”

“Envelopes? I didn’t use envelopes, dear. Why would I? After that first note on your bed when you were still a patient, I simply taped them to the inside of your locker. After all, you were at the hospital so much, and I couldn’t remember exactly which apartment you were in.”

Kate did her best not to jump at the barrier that separated them. “Then you were never in Tim’s and my apartment.”

“Well, I was never invited.”

“You never sent me a note that said Molly was my fault.”

Polyester smiled again, and Kate was remind
ed of all those grade-school teachers who had reacted to her inappropriate behavior. “Now, why would I do that after I went to all the trouble to tell you I understood?”

Kate just nodded, not yet equipped for more. “Why the cut-out letters and all?” she asked. “I mean, if you wanted me to know anyway. What difference would it have made?”

“Well, I knew you wouldn’t tell the police unless it was necessary. Besides, isn’t that the way it’s done?”

Of course. Kate wished her own logic system were so simple.

“And you discussed everything with the priest.”

“Why yes, dear. A confession is only good if it is a full and sincere confession. I told Father all my plans. All my reasons. Everything. Otherwise I wouldn’t ever be forgiven. I already told the police that, though. In fact, I told them about the digitalis I’d been collecting to give that terrible Doctor Babbit. You know, the one who swears at her patients while they’re under anesthetic and throws instruments at the nurses? I’m afraid she’s been mistreating some of her patients. I mean, since I’m doing it anyway….”

By the time Kate walked back out into the lobby, she was jittery with exhaustion. She had more questions than answers, but at least they were pointing in a certain direction. She’d also found herself promising to visit Sister again in the
future. Now that she knew what she should have realized all along, that she’d been right about Polyester not being able to kill Tim, she felt sorry for the little woman. After all, wasn’t she back in the same old rut? Her idealism taken advantage of by someone for his own gain?

Maybe Polyester should have been the patron saint of the hospital after all.

Kate made it back to work in time to drop off her information with B.J., who was still waiting for somebody from Homicide to call him, and to get onto the hall to clock in before eleven so she wouldn’t be docked another day’s pay.

She’d stopped by the apartment to change, only to find herself straightening up the rooms yet again, and she sat down to have something to eat, only to find herself making a list of people who could have had access and motive for killing the two people Polyester didn’t.

It came down to either Gunn or Tim, the two people Polyester swore she had nothing to do with. Tim or Gunn who might have incited murder above and beyond the delusional needs of a burned-out idealist. So Kate made up a list of anyone who might want either of them dead. Tim’s was too short and Gunn’s was too long. She dropped both off with B.J. and headed down for work without saying a word to anybody about what she was up to.

Kate was putting her nursing bag down alongside the row of other bags in the lounge when Phyl popped her head in the door. “Can I see you in my office?” she asked.

Kate sighed, slipped her lab coat on over the fresh scrubs she’d changed into. Phyl backed out even before Kate’s answer, as if she needed to settle herself behind her own walls before facing Kate.

Kate felt as if she were walking blindfolded over old bogs. The world was treacherous out there, only she couldn’t see where. So she took a moment to compose herself by reading the notices on the bulletin board before going. There had been a time when it had been full of parties and ball games and baby announcements. Now, besides the usual health department updates on things like hepatitis and AIDS and the anticipated rise in suicide rates with the good weather, there was a notice that mandatory meetings were being held to teach the staff how to present a more pleasant attitude toward their clients. Below this was an in-house memo that as of this date, overtime would not be paid unless previously approved by the administrator on call. And, as of almost the same date, laughter would no longer be tolerated on the halls, since this presented a negative image to clients and their families who sought serious medical care at this facility.

Kate’s stomach did all her protesting. Maybe if she could eat something she’d feel better. But she was tried. She was frustrated at having to watch everyone for undetected motives. She was afraid, because it wasn’t all over, after all.

“It’s over,” Phyl said, five minutes later.

A very popular theme in the last few days. Kate decided it bore questioning anyway. “What’s over?”

Phyl waved her hand over the stack of paperwork in front of her, as if trying to make it disappear. She smiled. “Your problems with the hospital bill. The workmen’s compensation board has reconsidered and decided that you should be given full compensation because of the fact that you were transferring a patient to another facility.”

Another smile, bigger, begging reaction. Kate felt even more nauseated than before.

“No fifteen-thousand-dollar bill?” she asked.

Phyl shook her head. “Completely covered.”

Kate could see that Phyl was truly relieved and expected Kate to be, too. For some reason, Kate felt more hemmed in than ever. She heard that damned dissonant chord, because this was simply not the way the hospital worked.