Authors: Eileen Dreyer
"They've called your number down at the counter," he said with a quiet grin.
Molly yawned and did her best to hide the shakes that always followed her away from a dream. Kevin would never think to mention if she made any noise. Kevin, a survivor of more then one round of bad burnout himself, respected nightmares, no matter when they happened.
"What time is it?"
"About forty minutes before Winnie has to leave. You'd better bust butt if you still want her to do the post on your suicide."
Molly remembered now. Instead of doing Mary Margaret Ryan after Bill Myers, Winnie had insisted that her other cases took precedence. Not just Mustaffa, but a twenty-something-year-old white kid who'd been found dead—in the bathroom—of no apparent causes. Molly wouldn't have minded so much if she hadn't needed sleep so much. If she hadn't been looking so forward to finishing her work here and taking the next two days just to herself.
Molly rolled off the couch and tested her legs. Her right one was asleep from having to be curled up to fit. She shook it a bit until she thought she could take the stairs on it without ending up on her nose. "Maybe my suicide shouldn't have been first," she griped. "But it sure as hell could have been second."
"Didn't you want the shooting board to close the case on those two nice policemen who saved your life last night?"
God bless Kevin, he even had a cup of coffee in his hand. Molly took a good slug of it and rubbed at her eyes. Allergy season in St. Louis lasted from January 1 to December 31. Summers, though, redefined the term
miserable.
They were also handy if a person wanted to hide something less acceptable, like surprise tears, behind the excuse of a pollen count.
"Those were not nice policemen," she said. "Just good shots."
"I warned you," Kevin reminded her.
Molly shot him a grin and got her butt in gear. "Thanks, Dad."
Being the newest kid on the block, Molly had the desk closest to the door and farthest away from the windows. She stopped there long enough to get her paperwork and a pocketful of licorice to see her through the postmortem, which, if she was lucky, would include nothing more than the area of injury and stomach contents to verify the assumption of suicide. Then she trotted on down the stairs before Winnie could accuse her of being late.
She could hear the saw as she rounded the corner for the back. Hercules was holding the top of the head while Winnie, ever the perfectionist, made the circular cut.
Never Molly's favorite part of an autopsy. The big cut into the chest and abdomen never really bothered her. After all, livers were just livers, spleens little bags of blood. No one ascribed poetry to intestines or debated whether the soul lived in the pancreas.
The brain was another matter entirely. It was still as cryptic as the far universe, deep thoughts as likely to reside in those gullies and folds as deep insanity. And yet, it was just gray. Just tissue, like the packets lifted from beneath the ribs and hips. Just cells and connective tissue, like every other part of the body. No magic, no mystery.
Maybe after all these years, Molly was still waiting for somebody to find a soul there after all, and all they lifted away was a sluggish, semi-set Jell-O.
"Where's Rhett?" she asked.
Winnie never looked up. "I told him to go home after the Myers kid."
Her pen poised to catch any pertinent info, Molly looked up in astonishment. Compassion now. This was not like Winnie at all.
"I also told him you'd call him with these results."
"Sure. What did you find on that last kid?"
Winnie never looked away from her work as she examined the ruined remains of a once-firing system. "Bad luck. He had a big Berry's aneurysm. At least Kevin didn't have to tell his mama he'd been stuffing shit up his nose."
Berry's aneurysm. Genetic, unpredictable, deadly as a snake sleeping in the dark. A weakness in the blood vessels of the brain usually discovered when the holder of same keeled over in his bathroom.
Winnie was right. If there was good news in a dead young man, it was that he hadn't earned it.
"Ya know," Molly mused. "If you think about it, we're not just getting a run on lawyers, we're getting a run on head cases."
Winnie did look up for a millisecond, as long as it usually took her to consider anything. "Good point, last week it was allergic reactions to front bumpers. Next week it'll be something else."
Molly just nodded. "What's Mary Margaret's final?"
"Three-fifty-seven aneurysm."
"Gets the job done."
"Waste of my time. Go ahead and release her. There's nothing here to see but bullet prints."
Molly checked her notes, found the funeral home the parents had chosen. Waited until Winnie snapped her gloves off and Hercules approached to clean up before calling and arranging for the morticians to pick the body up at their convenience. Case closed, shift ended. Molly made it home by one and finished Sam's paperwork by four and considered herself lucky.
The next morning, clad in one of her few dresses, Molly stood uphill a little from the rows of blue-uniformed officers at Resurrection cemetery. A moaning wind snaked through the trees and the sky was lowering and close. Theresa Myers stood across the casket, her dark head bare, her eyes wet and tired, each hand filled with the smaller hand of a child, all of them at perfect attention.
Molly didn't know Theresa. She did know the cops who lined up on either side of her. She saw the flag-draped casket and wondered if it had been smart to come after all. Her head was filled with old sounds, old hurts, old friends who had come home the same way. She could smell the mud again, the sharp stench of astringent and cordite, the musk of trauma. She looked at the cops lined up and thought of the kids she'd cared for two decades ago, their eyes just as distant, just as ruined.
It never changed. It had just become a different war.
At a barked command, seven rifles were lifted. Fired. Lifted. Fired. Lifted. Fired. Molly watched Theresa Myers flinch at the sound. She saw the cops stand rigid, every one of them, even Rhett in his full-dress uniform with the black electrical tape across his shield as a sign of mourning, his gloves crisp white and his eyes red. She said good-bye to Bill Myers, who had tried his best.
She heard the whine of the bagpiper, who stood alone on the hill above them as he began "Amazing Grace," and she let herself cry.
Winnie had been right. They'd had no right to try and take care of Mary Margaret Ryan first. Mary Margaret Ryan, being laid to rest somewhere on the other side of the cemetery in an hour or so, had thrown her rights away.
* * *
It would have been the last Molly thought of Mary Margaret. It would have been the last attention she'd given any of the suicides. Molly didn't like to think about suicides. She didn't want to ask the questions or demand the reasons or wonder about prevention. Nobody did, really. They only went through the motions, because suicide made them angry.
It was so hard, most days, because the fight to save lives was stacked against them. Death was capricious and nasty and clever, and always, always hungry. If law enforcement and trauma teams and everyone down the line in the system worked full-out a hundred percent of the time, they still lost. They lost children who begged and mothers who wanted just a little more time and policemen just trying to do their job. And no matter how tired or sad or empty, the good guys still fought like hell to keep just one more victim alive.
And then they were expected to fight just as hard for somebody who didn't give a crap.
Suicide made them afraid. Afraid to look in the eyes of somebody who had decided to quit, afraid to ask why, afraid that whatever the person had who had just swallowed all those pills, was contagious. Especially to someone who was so empty from burnout that they could no longer remember exactly what was worth fighting for in the first place.
So, when suicides came in, people like Molly took care of business, because that was what they were trained to do. They yelled sometimes at the ones who didn't quite get it right, and they flipped coins to see who'd have to care for them, because nobody liked doing suicides.
And as soon as they got them out of sight, they forgot them. They tried, anyway.
Molly, with more practice than most, succeeded. Which was why, when she got the call to come down to the office the next day to answer the accusations of a crazy man named Joseph Michael Ryan, she couldn't figure out why.
* * *
Molly wasn't in the mood to mollify anybody. It was supposed to be her day off, and she'd been all set to spend it up to her elbows in the dirt. She'd even been planning on sharing shoveling tips with the guys who'd shown up again at the corner to watch. One look at the man waiting for her in the foyer of the medical examiner's building assured her that at least she wouldn't be far from the dirt. It would just be on the other guy.
"Mr. Ryan?" she asked tentatively, since the receptionist wouldn't say a word. The only clues Molly got from that direction were a frantic nodding of the head toward the far end of the lobby and a very emphatic wrinkling of the nose.
Molly could hardly blame her. The man who turned was damn near unrecognizable as a human. Long, tangled hair and beard, filthy features, layers of ripped, oily clothes that had seen at least one Salvation Army bin in their lifetime, and boots that had newspaper sticking out the sides of the soles. Molly thought he was white, but she wouldn't have sworn to it.
"You're Molly Burke?" her visitor said in a raspy voice. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet as if he couldn't hold still. He didn't approach, though.
For some reason, the guy triggered a sense of unease in Molly. "Can I help you?"
Although the more she thought about it, the more she wanted to just pretend she'd never seen him.
Then he lilted his head to face her and the unease gestated sharp wings. It wasn't just the dirt or the desperation. It was something more. Something dark Molly responded to in that old, tired face and frantic smile. Something she didn't particularly want to deal with when she was this tired and stressed out.
It was his eyes. Ghostly pale, the color of ice, stark against all that grime and hair. Familiar. She thought she recognized them from somewhere. She sure as hell knew the look. The thousand-yard stare. Ancient, lost, drained out like a glass knocked over on the floor. She'd seen that look in the eyes in her nightmares. She'd seen them twenty years ago, while she'd slogged through the red dirt of Pleiku. This guy wasn't just homeless, he was Vietnam homeless. And that made it all different.
"Can I help you?" she asked again, her voice lower. Hesitant. Less a city official than a woman facing old ghosts.
She knew other guys from the Nam. Other homeless guys, balancing on the edge of reality with little cat feet. But other guys didn't make her feel crawly with dread like this guy.
"Yeah. Yeah, you can. You can help me."
This time, he moved, that same, oddly graceful gait some of the homeless guys got, as if dancing, or maybe avoiding hot spots or cold spots or filth on the sidewalks where they slept.
He smelled as if he slept in the sewer. Molly barely noticed. She was watching those eyes, those eyes that were suddenly squinting at her, as if he were the one trying to fit her face to a memory.
"Lieutenant?" he said, stopping in front of her.
Her smile was more hesitant than his voice. "Captain, actually."
His nod was jerky and stiff. He sighed. "Thought so. He said so, but now I know."
"He said so?" she asked. "Who said so?"
Her visitor crammed his hands in the pockets of his pea jacket and stared over at the receptionist. "Where, ma'am?"
"Seventy-first Evac at Pleiku," Molly said, understanding perfectly. "'70-71. You?"
"First Cav, '68. I'd tell you where, but some days I can't remember."
First Cav. First Cav. The niggle of memory got sharper, but it couldn't work its way free just yet. Molly was still trying so hard to get over the feeling that this man could hurt her, when she could see that he was only interested in hurting himself.
"Molly," the receptionist said suddenly. "You got a message a little while ago that the police need to see you about that Johnson situation. You want me to call them?"
Interpretation: You want me to save you from this?
Molly turned to the twenty-five-year-old receptionist, who had no idea what was going on between Molly and a homeless guy, and she smiled. "No, thanks. I'll call them back. I need to talk to Mr...."
Then it clicked. The picture on the wall. The I-can-do-anything glare beneath that military buzz cut. The shiny, perfectly aligned teeth that screamed orthodontics. The more mature pictures that weren't there.
Molly spun around on her guest and almost sent him running for the door. As skittish as any of the homeless guys, as desperately uncertain. A wild, frightened thing caught on the streets.
"Would you like some coffee, Mr. Ryan?" she asked gently, now even more unsettled by those shifting, startling eyes. "We could talk in the conference room upstairs if you'd like."
His nod was quick and feral. "Yes. I need... uh, I'd like to talk, if I could."