Bad Medicine (19 page)

He got Molly's attention. "Lack of witnesses, or lack of surviving witnesses?" she asked.

She just got that all-purpose cop shrug.

So Molly took another look at the hamburger wrapper. Another at the list in Pearl's handwriting. She thought about what had happened that night, played it every way she could, and still couldn't come up with anything different.

"Do you guys think Pearl was murdered?" Molly asked.

"We think it's still a real possibility."

"But all the drugs she took were prescription meds. All prescribed for her."

"You're sure."

Molly thought about it. The tox screen hadn't come back yet. She was going to have to check on that. After the Feds left. Molly's parents had taught her to be cooperative, but she'd long since learned that you took care of your hometown team first. That meant she let out her information when Winnie and Rhett said it was okay.

"As sure as I can be," she said.

"But there might have been something else in her bloodstream you hadn't counted on," Jones persisted.

Molly laughed. "She wouldn't have needed anything else. She had enough on that nightstand to drop Godzilla in full charge."

"Still..."

Still, she didn't have the tox screen. She would have heard if the tox lab hadn't found any of the expected drugs in Pearl's blood, but they wouldn't have known to look for any surprises.

"And you think that this Peterson guy wants me dead, too," she said, amazed that she sounded so matter-of-fact. "Why?"

Molly got another silence that stretched into discomfort.

"I told you. Because you saw the note," Jones finally said, as if she should know better. "Because you have Peterson's name."

"And?"

"And what?"

Molly was losing patience. "And now
you
have it."

"You say you saw the name on the note connecting Pearl with Peterson. That's hearsay evidence. Not admissible unless you're present to testify, shaky even with a deposition. So, even if Pearl did commit suicide and that was her final will and testament you saw, it still points the finger right where Peterson doesn't want it. Remember, there's something like forty million dollars involved here. His chance to be a player again."

"Did it occur to you that Mustaffa might just have been pissed off because one of his posse died in my ER?" Molly demanded.

"It did. We discounted it."

"Also, if Pearl was murdered to protect Peterson, what the hell was the note all about?"

"Peterson's people might not have known the note was there," one of the Feds responded evenly. "Just because a note says somebody's sorry doesn't mean it's a suicide announcement."

"But if it was, and she did commit suicide, that means Peterson managed to get somebody down to my ER pretty damn quick to get rid of it," Molly retorted. "That's just a little too much conspiracy theory, even for me."

All the same, they were making her think. Well, not think, really. React. Worry. Too much had happened today for her to have anything in her head but white noise. They were sure planting some sharp-nosed little moles in her stomach, though.

Molly couldn't think of anything to say. No disclaimer, no protest, no suggestions.

"So, assuming you're right," she said. "Now what?"

This was' definitely not an inspired group.

"Now, we wait," one of the Feds said.

Molly wished she'd been paying closer attention when they'd been introduced. She'd never gotten which was Lopez and which was Hickman. She figured it probably wasn't politically correct, but she was going to decide that the guy with darker hair was Lopez, and the blond was Hickman. At least she had statistical advantage on her side.

"We wait for what?"

"For the investigation into the rest of the Board of Aldermen," Lopez said. "For some kind of concrete link between Peterson and this new gambling casino."

"For them to actually kill me so I can write out a name in blood before I die."

Molly was expecting at least a small protest. What she got was stony silence. That was exactly what they were waiting for.

"Peterson's an awfully long name to spell when your blood pressure's bottoming out," Molly protested faintly.

"We're keeping an eye on you," one of them said.

"Are you tapping my phones?"

"That would be illegal."

Molly was the one who laughed this time. "Silly me. I know you haven't been in my file, either."

Her FBI file she'd amassed in school when Richard Nixon was more afraid of students who didn't believe in his war than he was of the communists. Molly hadn't believed in his war, but she'd gone anyway. She bet the FBI guys were still shaking their heads over that one.

"We're not allowed to hold someone's youthful indiscretions against them anymore," Hickman said, and damned if Molly didn't think there was a hint of a grin somewhere behind those eyes.

"Anyway," Jones said, standing, "if there's anything you can think of to change the equation, let us know."

"I will," she said like a good girl. "I promise."

Then she waited for them to make it outside before dialing up the tox lab.

"No surprises here," the tox lab said. "We found a real smorgasbord of lethal pharmacopoeia in her blood. Everything from Valium to Lithium to birth control pills. There's a match with every prescription bottle you brought us. There were some mystery extras in the baggie you brought that we have calls out on, but I doubt they'd make much difference."

"You don't have that info, yet?"

"We've been a little busy over here, ya know?"

"Busy?" Molly retorted, figuring that the death of a city official possibly on the take would hold some precedence. "With what?"

"Haven't you read the papers?" the supervisor asked. "This is going to be a record year for homicides. Not only that, but the narcs pulled in a huge haul of dust and crack yesterday. In the great scheme of things, suicide gets bottom billing."

Until that morning when she'd spent her off-hours with a homeless vet and people telling her that somebody was trying to kill her because of a suicide, Molly would have understood completely.

"It's getting really important," she hedged. "If you could scoot on it, I wouldn't have to tell Winnie you still weren't finished."

Molly knew the tech well enough to not be offended when the answer she got was, "Bitch."

"And I speak so well of you," she answered with a grin and was relieved to hear a chuckle in return.

* * *

Molly had been waiting to get back home all morning. For some reason, she didn't go right there. She drove, instead, across to Locust Street, where the Wainright building sat in rehabbed splendor, a neat square redbrick building with elegant terra-cotta friezes around the roof, all tucked neatly away amid all the glass and steel like a well-mannered aunt among the rowdier children.

Along the sidewalk at the base, police tape still held back the curious. A couple of units shared the street with the medical examiner's van and the transport vehicle, a dark blue van with no identification. It had once been labeled METS, for Medical Examiner's Transport Service. Unfortunately, the baseball fans in town had mistaken it for a vehicle belonging to the New York Mets, and regularly egged and spray painted it with colorful opinions of the team and its players. Since that didn't look appropriate on the ten o'clock news, the acronym had been painted over into anonymity.

Vic was standing there with a couple of uniforms, his clipboard and measuring tape in hand, his thick black hair stuck to his forehead from the heat and humidity. At his feet lay an untidy bundle hidden by a dark tarp. The tarp couldn't cover all the blood, though. It had been a mess.

"What are you doing here?" he asked as Molly walked up.

Hands in pants pockets, she shrugged. "I had to come by this way. Thought I'd check and see how you were doing."

Vic went back to his work. "Sorry, no politicians, sports figures, or actors. Just a lawyer in the middle of a divorce and a bad year at the stocks."

Molly couldn't seem to take her eyes off the lumpy tarp. "No questions?"

"Only the ones about why a successful lawyer would have such bad taste in clothes. But hell, that could have depressed him, too."

Molly looked up, saw the open window nine floors up. Saw the shadows of curious observers just inside. Probably wondering what it would take to open a window and step out into air. Wondering maybe if they saw a little of themselves in this man who worked in their offices every day.

"Molly?"

Startled, she looked up to see Vic frowning at her. She gave him a quick grin. "I was just thinking that I'm going to rip up that law school application I've been working on."

Vic snorted unkindly and went back to writing. "Oh, don't do that. If this keeps up, just think of all the open positions to be filled."

Vic never noticed that she left.

A cold front was hovering just west of the city, pushing thunderheads inexorably before it. Molly climbed back into her car with an eye to the thick, dark clouds that were boiling up to the southwest. The wind was kicking up, spinning paper and leaves in little eddies along the streets and pushing up the skirts of women scuttling to lunch. The humidity climbed, as if it had been squeezed between the clouds and the river, so that the air, even though it was moving, seemed stifling. There was a change in the wind, as the weatherman said.

Molly turned her car back down toward the morgue and the highway entrance that rose alongside it. She had her windows open and her sunroof up so the wind could batter at her. She was gearing down so she could get a decent acceleration on the entrance ramp. She checked left so no one would cut her off.

And there she saw him.

Bent, shuffling, anonymous. An upright pile of rags holding a plastic bag full of aluminum cans. Standing there alongside the morgue parking lot as if waiting for something. Wondering about something. All but invisible to the rest of the city, to her on any other day she might have flown by him in a fast sports car. Today, though, she saw him. Like a sign. A warning. A memory and a promise.

Molly turned deliberately away, her hand clamped to the gearshift as if it were the magic wand that would carry her safely away from his eyes. His voice. She shifted down until her car screamed. Then she swept onto the entrance ramp and left him behind, where he belonged.

* * *

It didn't work. By the time Molly reached home, it was that lost, lonely man who stayed with her, even after the wind had pulled everything else away. It was the formless lump on the sidewalk she saw instead of the trees that bent and writhed along the street.

The rain was coming, which meant Molly couldn't sit outside. She wouldn't watch her fish or listen to the birds argue in the trees, or wonder what the people were talking about in the patios of the restaurants down the block.

Molly parked her car in front of her house and headed up the walk. She slid her key in the lock and opened the front door. She stood there in the high, echoing entranceway, watching the shadows climb the walls of the living room and run over the furniture like dark water.

She couldn't stay here. Not when she was trying to sort out everything she'd learned today. Not when she had to think about death and suicide and hopelessness. When she stood in this house, she heard her parents' voices. She heard disapproval and dismissal and disinterest. She heard the years of polite denial pile up around her like trash on the pristine gray carpet.

"I suppose I'm not surprised you want to be a nurse, Melinda Ann," her mother had said, composed on the Chippendale settee like a ruler weary of her less disciplined subjects. "A career of subservience. You can spend the rest of your life without having to excel or take responsibility. Disappointing, but then I've come to expect that from you."

Her brother Martin Francis had not disappointed. A foreign consul by the time he was twenty-six, he was now undersecretary of something or other. A real Burke. An achiever, a brilliant star in the right universe who had made his parents proud in the years before their mostly untimely demise in a foreign post. Married, father of the two heirs apparent to the Burke name and legacy, the real owner of the house with its treasures and heritage.

Molly, the also-ran, the child who was born to disappoint, had none of these things. Just as her mother predicted, she'd failed at it all until she faced her forties alone, childless, and caught between a career she'd once found challenging and a lawsuit that threatened to bleed her dry.

She needed to talk to somebody. Run what she'd heard past understanding ears and get feedback. Reassurance. Logic.

The problem was, Molly had no one to talk to. No one who'd lasted through the years with her, no one she'd ever let close enough to burden with that kind of turmoil.

Burkes never discussed their problems. That was because they never admitted them. Problems were messy and distasteful and unpleasant. Above all, Burkes believed in the myth that all of life should be quiet and well-mannered and private. Which was why perfect Martin Francis had a great job, a host of stress-related health problems, a wife who drank herself into oblivion, and two sons who were doing their best to earn their places in the Young Psychopaths Hall of Fame. Which was why Molly stood in this empty house hearing echoes of misery instead of seeking out friends.