Authors: Eileen Dreyer
The difference was, Mozart kept it on key. And Mozart would never have written a tune for The Diver.
Molly stopped dead in her tracks at the distinctive sound. "Oh, great," she said with a scowl. "The backup band's here."
The Diver was one of their regulars, an old black man who lived in condemned housing down the road and rolled in regularly about two weeks after the welfare checks came in and his supply of Thunderbird ran out. The Diver made a constant, God-awful whooping noise, like the claxons on submarines, that never slowed, never stopped until they managed to turf him upstairs to the floor where they could snow him until they could safely get him back out the door again.
"And he's asking for you to do harmony," Sasha informed her. "We also got the call from City 235. There's a lot of popping and banging over by Terrell Street. We should be getting business anytime soon."
Molly grimaced. "Just in time for me to get the paperwork when I change into my investigator's tights. What a happy thought."
Molly, a twenty-year veteran of the emergency wars, was also the newest part-time death investigator in the city, which meant that after a code team walked out of a room like the one in which Mr. O'Halloran still lay, they called her to figure out what to do next. Her shift tonight began thirty minutes after she escaped this circus at eleven-thirty. If she was lucky.
Sasha was not impressed. "Serves you right for trying to run with the big dogs. The big dogs have more paperwork and worse hours."
"And lousier pay," Molly agreed, spreading the paperwork she'd just collected across the nearest desk so she could finish this mess before diving into another.
"Then why do you do it?" Lorenzo demanded as he unloaded a nest of EKG strips onto the desk from the code. Lorenzo, Molly's favorite tech, was about a hundred pounds stretched over almost seven feet, ebony dark, and on his way to med school, courtesy of a fiery grandmother and a sensible set of Jesuits who had pressed him with a full scholarship. "Isn't working here hassle enough? You got to go out looking for trouble?"
Molly grinned. "I just like riding around in that big van that says medical examiner's office on it. Guys whistle at me at all the stoplights."
Rearranging name tags on the flow board over Molly's head, Sasha lowered herself to a snort. "You just like hanging around strapping young men with guns."
Molly dealt paperwork across her desk like cards. "No. If that were the case, I'd hang around with the highway patrol. Now,
they're
strapping." Especially since Molly barely topped five-one in her tennis shoes, and Missouri Highway Patrol officers seemed to have a height requirement of at least six-foot-four. Molly spent a lot of time at accident scenes looking up noses.
An X-ray tech scuttled by, arms filled with large manila brown folders. "Molly, your lady in four's back from X ray. She needs to be cleaned up again."
Molly didn't bother to look up. "I'll pay you a dollar to do it for me, Suze."
"Not if she were rich and you were famous. You goin' with us tomorrow?"
A good percentage of the evening shift had booked a ride on one of the riverboats to go gambling the next night. Molly was not one of them.
"Thanks, no, hon. I owe enough money as it is. I'll wait until they untangle all the politics downtown and build that new complex by the riverfront."
"You mean when hell freezes over," Sasha offered.
Molly tossed a chart to the surgeon and collected lab reports on two of her other patients.
"It's untangled," Suze retorted.
Molly looked up, surprised. "What do you mean? I didn't hear anything."
"This very afternoon. The mayor gave in and awarded the contract to that hotel group from Chicago. They're going to break ground for the casino in October."
Molly hadn't heard a thing. But then, Molly had been here since noon, and hiding in her backyard before that. "Call me when it's built," she told the X-ray tech.
"Spoilsport."
"I prefer the term
realist.
Who's death investigator on?" Molly yelled across to the secretary's station.
"You work there," Karla snapped back. "Don't you have the schedule?"
"I have
my
schedule, and I'm not on it till midnight."
"It's only another hour. We won't tell anybody you forgot to call."
"Karla!"
Karla made it a point to answer in a near-whisper. "Vic Fellows."
Molly groaned. Great. Mr. We Never Have Enough Paperwork himself. An ex-homicide cop with an old ax to grind, Vic spent his time making sure that he came up with one more question to ask than anyone had the answer for. Just what Molly needed right now.
"Call him!" she yelled anyway, deciding that she wasn't about to let him off the hook just because he annoyed her. The way this night was shaping up, she'd have enough forms of her own to fill out before the end of her own eight-hour shift down at the medical examiner's office.
To the right of the secretary's station, the radio sputtered to life. "Grace, this is City 235. Grace, 235 calling Code Three."
"Shit," three people snapped in unison.
More trauma. Gunshots, undoubtedly. Summer in the city.
Molly needed something for the headache she was brewing. Sasha strolled for the sputtering equipment as if answering a social call, and Suze trotted on back to X ray before anybody could ask her to help out.
From the other end of the hall, Lance Frost tossed a paper airplane that skimmed the top of Molly's hair and stuck into the corner of the PDR at her elbow.
"I'm telling you, Molly," he prodded, just as he had all evening. Just as he had for the four years Molly had known him. "It's easy money."
Dr. Lance Frost, a veteran of more ERs than Molly, had never quite made his certification in Emergency Medicine. He didn't see the need, since his fortune would surely come from any one of the great and fantastic money-making ideas Lance was always conjuring up while lying in the call room. Considering the disproportionate relationship of his girth to his wallet, it was well-known that Lance was better at the position than the inspiration.
Lance also had the questionable distinction of being known as Chicken Soup behind his back for his distinctive brand of body odor, which was cleared up about as often as his credit rating.
"Dr. Frost's Fishy Food," he said, rubbing at his impressive belly like a free-market Buddha. "Just think of it."
"No thanks," Molly answered without looking up. "I'm doing Chinese tonight."
That was if she ever ate. If things didn't slow down out there, she'd be driving the medical examiner's van through the drive-up window at McDonald's on the way to answer a homicide call. She was hungry, she ached to her hips from running the halls, and she didn't imagine she was going to get any time off until at least dawn.
"Come on, Molly," Lance Frost wheedled, as if she'd ever given in before. "I already have the perfect formula, and fish are going to be the pets of the future. We can make a fortune. All we need is salesmanship."
"I don't want a fortune, Lance."
Lance laughed as if Molly were the funniest thing he'd ever heard. "I'm serious. Come on, you're single. You have that expendable cash and no one to spend it on but me. I mean, you're not gonna do something dumb at your age like have kids or anything, are you?"
Filling in the particulars on the ME's questionnaire, Molly ignored him. Lance wasn't cruel, just thoughtless. A fine trait in a trauma physician. No, Molly wasn't going to have kids or anything. But that wasn't a subject she broached with anyone, especially Lance Frost.
"I thought you were investing in that new experimental drug the hospital's testing," she said without looking up, "You know, the one that will make Prozac obsolete."
Of course, every new antidepressant that hit the market was touted as the one that was going to make Prozac obsolete, but that was beside the point with Lance.
"I'm gonna be in gravy in a year," he said. "I would have preferred to be their front man. You know, the team researcher who gives the official party line to the medical masses about how wonderful the product is in exchange for only a small fortune and free travel. But I didn't get into psych fast enough. Besides, fish food is fast return on your money. And I don't have to share it with corporate bigs."
"Maybe next time, Lance."
"What's wrong with a little success, Molly?" he demanded, seriously offended by her disapproval. "Tell me that. Why shouldn't we get ours?"
"Molly doesn't have any money," Karla insisted from behind her protective barrier. "She's got all that legal stuff to pay off, Lance. You know that."
Karla, on the other hand,
was
cruel. She didn't like Molly. She didn't like nurses or doctors or anybody who gave her work or made more money than she. As always, Molly ignored her too. The lawsuit was another matter entirely.
A little more than a year ago, an emergency physician at a prestigious county hospital had decided that hiding in the bathroom would keep him from having to hear about the new patient Molly wanted him to see. It had. In the end, it hadn't mattered one bit to the jury that Molly had done everything but break down the bathroom door to get to him. The patient's family's lawyer had convinced them that it had been just as much Molly's fault as everybody else's that the patient had eventually had a stroke and died, even though she'd come in complaining of abdominal pain.
"Oh, God," Lance whispered. "That's right. The lawsuit." Said like other people said
ca
ncer. "Where does it stand?"
"Stand?" Molly retorted easily. "It doesn't have to stand. For that kind of money, it can sit wherever it wants."
"Vic Fellows, line four," Karla called out.
From one treat to another. Molly picked up the phone. "Hello, Vic. It's Molly."
"You couldn't have just shelved this until you came on?" was his answer. "For God's sake, it's not even an hour."
Molly ignored that too, and told him the particulars of the case. As investigator, he would take all the information, make sure the body got to the city morgue, and then coordinate the case with the medical examiner, the lab, and the police. Vic spent the time while Molly spoke making disparaging grunts and sighs. That is, until she gave him the capper.
"He has a tattoo, Vic."
Silence. Molly knew just where to get Vic. He was the tattoo collector on the team. A necessary position, a vital clue in identification of some of their less-obvious victims. Vic just enjoyed his task a little too much.
"Better than the question mark?"
Vic had taken to the question mark like Champollion to the Rosetta Stone, certain it meant something they couldn't fathom. He'd been driving everybody nuts with it.
"Easier to figure out."
"What is it?" he demanded.
Molly thought of the double take the trauma surgeon had done at the unveiling and smiled. "You'll see."
"All right, then," he said, suddenly enthusiastic.
Well, Molly figured. Everybody had to have a hobby. She would have preferred porcelain frogs, herself.
"Method of death?"
Not a question Vic should be asking at this point. Not one Molly should technically answer. The method of death, by what vehicle the victim died, was pretty obvious, although it should never go in a death investigator's report that way. When she was a nurse, Molly had a lot more leeway to say "Possible gunshot wound to the forehead." As a death investigator, she could only go so far as, "four centimeter defect to left temporal region of skull with tissue and bone loss, exposed brain matter." The city figured that since it paid those big bucks to have a forensic pathologist on staff, it should give the doctor the honor of classifying that defect as being the result of a bullet. Or pellets, as the case might be.
"Big load of buckshot to the left temporal artery," she said anyway, hoping Vic would have the sense not to make that an official statement.
The next question, the only other one of interest to the Medical Examiner's Office, was manner of death. The manner of death was defined as why that tissue and bone was missing. What—or who—put that gun to that forehead. The four basic classifications were natural, accidental, homicide, suicide. And not one should be determined before all results were in.
"Manner of death?" Vic asked, just as Molly knew he would. Another question that was not theirs to answer.
"Woman scorned in the first degree."
Woman Scorned, of course, being the subheading B to manner type three.
Vic took it like a professional. "I hate when that happens."
"Molly!"
Molly whipped around at the sharp sound of Sasha's voice.
"We need your room. Peds is bustin' out, and we gotta eight-year-old coming in. Drive-by to the neck."
"Send transport for our man," Molly told Vic, who was already sputtering in protest, not yet having heard what the victim had for lunch, or what his mother had worn to her wedding. "Gotta go."
"Stick him in holding," she informed Sasha, already on her feet, adrenaline honing the edge of the anxiety that always lived in her chest.