A Case of You

by Pamela Burford

  The unit was quiet. She saw a few patients in the glass-enclosed rooms, with a nurse tending to one of them. Keeping out of sight, she observed the nurses’ station. A middle-aged woman in white was at the desk, putting away her purse, scanning paperwork, getting settled in. Obviously she’d just come on duty.

  Kit watched for a couple of minutes until the nurse left the desk and entered a patient’s room.

  The station was deserted for the moment as the new shift made their rounds. How long it would be empty was anyone’s guess.

  Silently Kit approached the desk, her eyes on the backs of the two nurses as they monitored their patients’ vital signs and saw to the gadgets and tubes and other accoutrements of the ICU. She slipped behind the desk, making a beeline for the open doorway to the same kind of medications closet she’d seen on the second-floor hall.

  On the shelves were various drugs, same as downstairs. A rolling cart sat under the shelves, with a multitude of tiny plastic drawers, each labeled with a patient’s name. A small refrigerator held more vials, she discovered. And she saw a locked box, presumably for narcotics.

  A large plastic bin sat on a shelf. Kit peered inside and saw two IV bags with labels that had apparently been generated in the hospital pharmacy. One was filled with a nitroglycerin solution.

  Wrong deadly substance, she thought with a wry smile. She was looking for poison, not explosives. The other bag was lying label side down. Taped to it was a small drug vial, the kind doctors use to fill a syringe.

  She hesitated for a fraction of a second to peek out the doorway and make sure she was alone. She turned over the heavy bag and swallowed the gasp that rose in her throat.

  Norcuron. There on the label, along with the name of the patient it was intended for. This bag contained one hundred milligrams in one hundred cc of saline solution. And here it was, just waiting to be picked up.

  Just waiting for that basic psychopath to waltz in and borrow some.

  She crept out of the closet and around the nurses’ desk just in time to avoid another RN coming on duty. First Noah’s office files, she reflected, then his home study, and now this. If she ever decided to give up teaching, she might make a passable prowler. Kit Roarke, sneak thief.

  Well, so much for security at Wescott Community. And so much for the question of how the killer could have gotten hold of curare. She’d just proven that one of the most potent poisons known to man was available to anyone with enough ingenuity, and motivation, to sneak around this hospital.

  It was the motivation part that kept Kit awake at night. Why kill Joanne Merino, after all? Noah seemed to think she’d been the random victim of a copycat killer. If that was the case, the murderer might never be found. But if it wasn’t random, then it must have had something to do with Jo’s book. Jo had said she was afraid of the man she was seeing, once he’d found out about the book.

  Her friend had spent eleven months turning over rocks in this town. What had she uncovered that was worth dying for?

  *

  “YOU SURE YOU don’t have something more pressing to do today?” Kit asked, opening the trunk of Noah’s Cherokee and watching him toss in two bulging garbage bags.

  All of Jo’s clothing was in these bags—all except for whatever Jo had brought to the cleaners. Kit remembered the pink dry-cleaning ticket she was carrying around in her purse. One of these days she’d get around to picking up the cleaning. She knew why she was putting it off. She wasn’t ready to see her dead friend’s clothes freshly cleaned and pressed, stuffed with tissue paper and shrouded in clear plastic bags. Just waiting for their owner to wear them.

  “No problem, Kit. I told you, this is my day off.” Noah shoved the last bag into the trunk and slammed the door shut. He crossed to the driver’s door as Kit settled in the passenger seat. “And I told you I’d help you out while you were in town.”

  “Well, still, you didn’t have to come with me today. But I’m grateful. I wasn’t looking forward to this.”

  As he pulled out of Etta’s long driveway, he turned and met her gaze. I know, his eyes seemed to say. I want to make it easier for you.

  “So,” she said. “This is a school for disturbed children we’re going to?”

  “Emotionally disturbed, most of them. From troubled backgrounds. The Powell School does a lot of fund-raising—like this rummage sale. That and a modest endowment from the founder are all that keep it afloat.”

  She watched his hands as he steered. They were well muscled, long fingered, tanned, with a dusting of blond hair on the backs. These hands had tossed those heavy birch log as if they were kindling. But she also recalled peeking into his exam room and watching him give the booster shot to his young patient. As powerful as these hands were, they were capable of great tenderness, too, she knew.

  But then, Noah Stewart himself was a man of contradictions. All Dixie charm one moment, downright forbidding the next. Warm and cold. Candid and secretive.

  Good and evil.

  Kit shuddered and chafed the gooseflesh from her arms. She wanted to deny the undercurrent she’d sensed within this man. The fleeting glimpse she’d caught of something... unholy. A secret shadow something—or some thing—as malevolent as an open wound. But it was there.

  It all added up to one inescapable fact.

  Noah Stewart, MD, was not what be seemed.

  Which was why she hadn’t told him her room had been searched. If she told him that, she might as well tell him that Joanne had been robbed the day she died. But perhaps he already knew that. Some man had stood in Etta’s kitchen with Jo when she’d made that last call to Kit’s answering machine—presumably the mystery man she’d been involved with. Kit wanted to believe Noah’s denial that he was that man, but...

  Something kept her from trusting him.

  After a twenty-minute drive, they arrived at the Powell School. The director, Hannah Aaronson, gratefully accepted her donation to their rummage sale and showed them around the school, which was in the quiet lull between the end of the spring session and the beginning of the summer session. When Hannah discovered Kit was a teacher, she became animated, detailing their teaching philosophy and the progress they’d made with their emotionally needy students.

  Kit was impressed with the Powell School. She couldn’t help comparing it to the Harrington Academy, the private school where she’d taught for four years. Harrington had the newest and costliest teaching tools, from the latest politically correct textbooks and workbooks to a state-of-the-art computer for each student.

  Powell had well-worn supplies and secondhand equipment, but it was clear, as Kit gazed at the children’s artwork and reports hanging on the walls, and listened to the dedicated director, that they received plenty of warmth and support from the staff. She couldn’t say that was always true at Harrington, where the emphasis seemed to be split between attracting well-heeled families and maintaining the highest test scores and Ivy League admission rates.

  Kit responded on a visceral level as Hannah told of some of the troubled children the school had worked with and helped. She thought of her own childhood, shared with a too-young mother incapable of satisfying, or even recognizing, her child’s physical and emotional needs. She thought of the rage and desperation that drove her to run away from that hell at age thirteen and move in with Joanne’s family—a move her mother, Irene, never contested.

  She felt her chest tighten and her throat constrict. Remembering. Yes, she could have used a place like the Powell School.

  “I’m not going to beat around the bush,” Hannah said, as she led them back to the parking lot. “I want you to teach my fifth graders this summer, Kit.”

  Kit skidded to a halt, gaping at the other woman. Noah laughed at her reaction. Apparently Hannah had spent the past forty minutes interviewing Kit for a job, with the interviewee none the wiser. She raised her palms as if to ward off the offer. “Hannah, I’m not—”

  “I know. You’re not in the market for a summer job, and I don’t car
e. I need a teacher, and I’ve been in this business long enough to judge people pretty quickly. Though I’ll tell you right off the bat, I can’t pay much, not what you’re used to.”

  Hannah smiled and gnawed her bottom lip as if searching for the right words. Kit felt as if the older woman were peering into her past. “This is right, Kit,” she said softly. “A good match. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re not wrong.” Kit felt her face grow warm. She felt irrationally exposed. To Hannah, and to Noah. As if the needy child she once was were standing there in her stead. “You’re right, it’s a good match, but I’m leaving in a day or two. Going back to Chicago.”

  She turned to look at Noah, seeking confirmation of her statement. He wanted her to leave, after all. He’d as much as told her to go home and leave the investigation to the authorities.

  She wasn’t prepared for what she read in his expression. Something suspiciously close to anticipation. His lively hazel eyes searched hers for an answer. Those thick, dark eyebrows rose fractionally. Well? they seemed to say. Will you stay?

  “I...” She swallowed hard and made herself look away. She faced Hannah. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” Chicago was where Kit belonged. It was where she’d made her life. Pratte belonged to Jo.

  Hannah accepted defeat more or less graciously. “Well, think about it, Kit. If you change your mind, classes start on the twelfth. There’ll be staff meetings the week before.”

  As they drove back toward town, Kit surreptitiously studied Noah. His expression, so open minutes before, was now shuttered, revealing nothing.

  “Why did I get the feeling,” she asked slowly, “that you wanted me to say yes to Hannah?”

  He was silent a minute, his eyes on the road. At last he said, “I know you have to do what you came here for, Kit.”

  “But you want me to go home.”

  He took a long, slow breath, his expression never changing. “I did. Maybe I still do.”

  “You don’t know?”

  He gave a half laugh. “You’d be amazed at what I don’t know.”

  Kit let that enigmatic statement hang there.

  “How’d it go at the library?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  She shrugged. “I went through the old newspapers and the town history. Maybe there’s some way I can locate the police reports from thirty-two years ago.”

  “I thought you were looking for similarities between the victims.”

  “Well, I am.” I’m looking for whatever Jo found that got her killed.

  After a long pause, Noah said, “I have copies of all those old police reports.”

  “What? What are you doing with—” She stopped abruptly, not at all sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “And the old autopsy reports—Anita’s and Ray’s. I’ve got all of it. It’s sort of a... special interest, you might say. I live in the man’s house, after all.”

  And he’d named his dog after Ray’s. How far did the similarities go?

  “I also have a ton of Ray’s old photo albums, business papers, personal correspondence... even his grammar-school notebooks, for God’s sake. His widow, Ruby, left it all in the attic when she moved.”

  “Why tell me?” she asked. “You know I’ll just hound you till you let me look at it.”

  “You don’t have to hound me. It’s all yours. After all, Bryan’s pawing through it. Why not you?”

  She hesitated only a moment before asking, “And Jo? Did you let her ‘paw through it’?” Kit knew without asking that her friend would have sniffed out Noah’s cache of memorabilia in a heartbeat—and done whatever was necessary to get to it.

  He took his eyes off the road for an instant, long enough to shoot her a crooked smile. “Now, what on earth would Jo want with a bunch of musty old papers? They have nothing to do with the Pratte Citizen. Jo wrote about things like park renovations and the annual town meeting. You know that.”

  He was teasing her! He knew all about that goddamn book!

  This guy, he found out about the book. And... well, that’s not good.

  Kit licked her suddenly dry lips. “When did you find out?”

  “When she got desperate.” Noah turned off the highway onto a two-lane road leading into town. “She held out as long as she could.” He chuckled. “It took her no time at all to figure out what kind of goodies were entombed in the Whittaker attic. I knew she wanted the stuff, I just didn’t know why.”

  “And that’s when she came on to you,” Kit guessed.

  His smile disappeared. “That’s right.”

  “But you didn’t take advantage because of your high moral and ethical standards.” At the moment she didn’t care how bitchy she sounded. Noah held all the cards, and she sensed he’d share only the information that suited his purpose. Whatever that was.

  He stopped for a red light and turned to look at her. She almost regretted her big mouth. This was the cold Noah.

  “I told you before, Kit, I don’t date my patients. And I don’t really give a damn whether you believe me or not.” He turned away from her, waiting for the light to change.

  Despite his protests, Kit sensed that he did give a damn what she thought of him. “I can’t say I’m surprised at her methods... knowing Jo like I did.”

  “She was...” He scowled, remembering the Jo they both mew. “I don’t think she had such a healthy self-esteem.”

  “I guess it’s safe to say that someone willing to barter her body for a peek at some old papers suffers from low self-esteem,” Kit said. She’d never deluded herself about Jo’s faults before, and she wasn’t going to start now. Her friend had been a survivor, like Kit. They had just chosen different survival strategies.

  At the green signal, Noah turned in the direction of his home, not Etta’s. “When seduction didn’t work,” he said, “Jo tried honesty as a last resort. She told me about the book she was writing and swore me to secrecy. And I let her have full access to all that crap upstairs.”

  After a few moments of silence, he added, “I was Jo’s friend, Kit. Probably the only real friend she had here.”

  Kit couldn’t speak around the sudden lump in her throat. The simple sincerity of Noah’s words struck her like a hammer blow. She laid her hand over his on the steering wheel and let her touch say what her voice couldn’t. Slowly he looked at her, his eyes dark and intense, exposing more of himself than she’d ever seen. At last she found her voice, harsh and unsteady as it was.

  “Jo needed a friend, Noah. I’m glad she had you.”

  *

  “THIS PLACE IS a gold mine.”

  Noah watched Kit thumb through an album of black-and-white snapshots, pictures of the Whittakers and their friends and relatives. She stood between him and the lone window in the hot, stuffy attic room where Ray’s things were stored. She wore the same long, gauzy, oatmeal-colored dress she’d had on earlier that week when he’d found her plundering his office files. Only this time she was backlit by shafts of sunlight arrowing through the dingy windowpanes.

  Remarkable thing, light, he mused, studying her. It can make the invisible visible—all those dust motes pirouetting around her like snowflakes, for example—and turn an otherwise opaque dress transparent. At the very same time. Remarkable.

  He commended Kit’s practicality in eschewing a slip on this warm day. Such a sensible girl.

  Reluctantly Noah crossed behind her to raise the window, knowing that if he stood there much longer trying to read the label on her panties, he’d only succeed in raising something else.

  “Those boxes over there contain personal letters and business correspondence,” he said, grunting with the effort of budging the old window. “The ones behind them are mostly souvenirs and such, Debbie’s artwork, that sort of thing. And over there—” he turned and pointed to the cartons piled on the other side of the room “—are Ray’s books. Most of these boxes are labeled. You’ll find it’s all pretty organized.”

  She gazed around, clearly awed by the sheer vo
lume of material available to sift through. Noah’s attic consisted of three huge rooms, and the largest was crammed with the Whittaker family’s personal papers and memorabilia, just as he’d promised.

  “Those police and medical reports are in my study,” he added. “You can look at them later.”

  “It would take me weeks to go through this stuff,” she said, squatting to open a cardboard carton filled with boxes of photographic slides.

  “Jo spent about seven months at it, actually.” He looked around for the light box he’d lent her to view the slides.

  Kit gaped up at him. “Seven months? Up here?”

  “Two or three hours a day. She needed to be meticulous, don’t forget. Her book demanded it. She set up at this desk.” He indicated the beat-up old oak desk and chair near the window, flanked by a sixties-style floor lamp.

  “You didn’t let her take any of this out of here?”

  “Only to use the copier in my office. She wanted copies of some stuff to take back to Etta’s and study at her leisure.”

  Kit opened her mouth to say something, then snapped it shut again.

  Go ahead, he was tempted to tell her. Say it. All those photocopied pages, along with her laptop, disks, and everything else pertaining to the book, were gone. Stolen the day of her murder. He knew the internal battle Kit was waging over whether to trust him with these details. She didn’t know how much he already knew, and it had to be killing her.

  Kit was smart. Too smart for comfort. If he let on that he knew about the theft, it would take her about a nanosecond to figure out how he knew. And to link him with Jo’s murder, snapping the fragile thread of trust he sensed developing between them.

  He cursed the insane impulse that had made him bring her up here. He should be trying to keep her in ignorance, dammit, not foster her trust. He propped a hip on the desk and watched her hold slides up to the window, peering intently at the tiny images.

  What would happen to that trust when she found out he was responsible for Jo’s death?