Bad Medicine (30 page)

She ended up not getting much sleep that night, either.

Chapter 15

"It's not our investigation anymore," the intelligence guy informed her bright and early the next morning on the phone. "Hasn't the FBI told you?"

Molly had been on her hands and knees scrubbing the latest surprise Magnum had left on her kitchen floor. "No. The FBI doesn't seem to feel the need to tell me anything."

"In that case, I wouldn't worry about it."

"You wouldn't, huh? In that case, I'll tell these guys who hit me over the head to come get you instead next time."

An hour later, Rhett called.

"It's not my case anymore."

This time Molly was sitting outside on her patio where she'd talked to Rhett before, only this time she was alone, it was cooler, and she was much more unhappy. "What do you mean it isn't your case anymore?"

"No homicide, no case."

"What's going on, Rhett?" she demanded. "I've been threatened within an inch of my life, and nobody's on the case but the FBI, who can't be on the case because they don't really do simple assaults, and a prepubescent Boy Scout named Rowdy. Something's going on, damn it."

"Don't go away," he said shortly. "I'll call you back."

Molly didn't go away. She sat watching Magnum mark every one of the flower beds with great enthusiasm and thought maybe she should have
him
communicate with these guys. He probably understood how they all thought. The phone rang within ten minutes.

"Bond here," she said in very surly tones. "James Bond."

"It isn't funny, Mol."

She laughed, but that hurt. "You're not telling me a thing, Rhett. What's going on?"

"I'm in the lobby on a pay phone," he told her. "So this is going to be quick. Your suicides are the hottest potato in this town since Prohibition."

"Why?"

"This is off the record, Molly."

"I got that message when you mentioned the pay phone, Rhett."

It still took him a minute. When he finally came out with it, he sounded as if he were watching over his shoulder as he talked. "Guess whose name has come up in the gambling investigation?"

Molly had no intentions of guessing. "Not mine," she assured him.

"The mayor's."

Molly closed her eyes in frustration. Rhett was right. This was going to blow the lid off the city. She could just imagine what the city police department looked like with everybody there scrambling for cover. St. Louis was still a city of old-time politics, which meant that no matter how good a job a cop did, he still relied on influence to get him his promotions. And the man with the mojo was whatever mayor was in office. The minute he went down, anybody connected with him found himself beating flames off his ass, too.

Molly bet the central station looked like a bunker. There wasn't a policeman in the state who wanted his fingerprints on this investigation.

"Oh, shit," was all she could come up with.

"So we're really busy on this possible serial killer," Rhett said. Actually, he whined. "Okay?"

"Okay."

So Molly gathered together all her strength, faced Sam head-on so that she could ask him to keep half an eye on Magnum, and called a taxi to take her to the hospital, where she could retrieve her car and her driver's license. It was time to go into the ME's office and get some answers.

"You look like hell," Vic Fellows greeted her.

"I've been staying up nights trying to decide what the question mark means," Molly retorted, already tired of hearing how colorful her face was.

"Did you come up with anything?"

"I think it's a call to rethink masculinity as we know it."

That was quite enough to discourage Vic from further conversation. Kevin showed up, still trying to find Pearl's records anywhere in the city system, and Winnie dropped by to scowl and pat and threaten Molly that if she got sick in her building, she'd have to clean it up. Molly had known Winnie long enough to correctly interpret that as, "You really worry me. You should be home in bed. Don't take chances."

Molly didn't think poring through files would be taking any chances. Besides, she was inside a protected building, right down the block from the central police station. If things stayed slow, she might even get in a nap. She sure wasn't sleeping worth a damn at home.

"Why are you here?" Winnie demanded.

"To look through those suicides again."

"They were suicides."

"That's what I thought. But those men in the van are making me wonder."

"Wonder what? We cleared them." Considering the fact that Winnie was glaring, Molly knew a threat when she heard one.

"I'm just gonna look. That's all."

She looked. Winnie slammed around the building as if Molly had questioned her morals and Kevin kept popping up to poke through loose papers on Molly's desk. Vic, on call, just sat with his feet on his desk, drawing question marks on his notebook and watching reruns of "Oprah" on his little TV in the corner.

Molly fortified herself with more tea and Excedrin, sat her own feet on her own desk and rubbed at the fresh stitches in her scalp while she read from the accumulated data on the three dead people she hadn't handled. She went through them in order, just in case that would make more sense.

Peter VanAck, thirty-five years old. White male, six feet, one-ninety. Black hair, brown eyes, glasses, and a small scar on his upper lip from years playing football for Mizzou. Trial lawyer for a firm that specialized in criminal court stuff. Rising young hotshot who had managed to get an acquittal for the woman who had shot her wealthy husband over alimony. Married, two children, three degrees, and an eight handicap on the links. Cause of death, another gun, this one a 30-ought to the chest. Shoes off so he could pull the trigger with his toe while he sat in his favorite chair in the den. Handwritten suicide note, with samples included to verify victim's handwriting, just saying he was sorry and for his wife Judith to take care of the children. Alcohol level up, no barbiturates or opiates or cocaine by-products found on tox screen. Recent history of stress. Problems with cash flow and a rumor of possible abuse of controlled substances. Rescue squad forced to break into room with fire axes to retrieve.

Aaron Goldman, fifty-four. White male, five-eight, one-sixty. Graying, thinning hair, mustache, runner. Found hanging from rafters in barn on weekend farm. Trial lawyer specializing in malpractice. Married to second wife, three children by first. No alcohol, but a long, rambling, mostly incoherent letter to wife claiming infidelity on his part, no need to forgive on hers. Also verified with samples of handwriting. Tox screen showed antidepressants and a couple of items not on any pharmacy list, nothing in the toxic range. Medications included Xanax and synapsapine, the latter starred and noted as an antidepressant.

Harold McGivers, forty. Another white male, five-ten, two-ten. Brown hair and eyes, incipient coronary candidate with questionable taste in clothing. High dive off a short building. In the process of divorce from heiress wife. Three children, one prenuptial agreement. Hardworking public defender with an impressive track record and few friends. Enough alcohol on board to stun a moose, bad form on landing. Note, verbalized suicide ideations, recent appointment with family doc for symptoms of depression.

Molly read through each file once, then went back and picked them apart every way she could think of. She added Peg's file to them and looked again, going through the histories, the forensics reports, the tox reports, the police DD-5s, the pathology reports.

She spent the entire morning in that chair looking for something that would connect each and every one of the victims, and then tie them to a gambling syndicate. She looked for something suspicious. Some question unanswered.

As hard as she looked, there didn't seem to be any. Unless they were dealing with the same guys who had been on the grassy knoll in '63, there was just no way anybody could have murdered every one of these people and fooled everybody involved.

There seemed to have been no poisoned lunches at the MAC. No serial murderer with a fancy for suicide recreations. It just looked like these people had killed themselves.

Molly had sat down to her task so sure she'd find something. There didn't seem to be anything to find.

Maybe it was just something the FBI was going to have to clear up. A connection with William T. Peterson. An investment in the gambling operation that happened to come to light when Pearl had decided her conscience couldn't allow her to cheat, even for a good cause.

Maybe Molly could sleep in peace tonight, because she could say in all honesty that there was nothing more for her to see in these files than honest-to-god suicide.

Except that she really hated coincidence. Especially the kind of coincidence that had an entire lunch group drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid without the help of Jim Jones.

Molly was plagued by the idea that there was something there she just wasn't seeing. Something that would make all the difference.

Something that would explain the fact that somebody was going to all this trouble to stop her from looking.

After working with Winnie for so long, Molly ignored most commotions in the office. That was probably why she didn't realize what was going on until somebody switched on the lights damn near in her face.

"Get out of this office before I toss that camera down the steps!" Winnie was shrilling.

Vic was scrambling to his feet, and Kevin was backing up in Molly's direction, as if fending off the Visigoths from the gates of Rome.

"We just wanted to ask a few questions," a feminine voice suggested in honeyed tones inches from Kevin's chest.

Which was how Molly came to be on the five o'clock news in her jeans and
The one who dies with the most toys still dies
T-shirt.

"Were you in charge of the missing file, too?" the reporter asked, doing an end run on Kevin to shove the mike in Molly's face.

Molly scrambled to her feet, blinded by the light and stunned to passivity by the attack. She knew the reporter. No talent or style, just the Geraldo Rivera school of relentless intimidation.

"The Pearl Johnson file," the reporter insisted, her face intense and interested. "We've gotten word that it has been... misplaced. Was that your fault, too, Ms. Burke? Did you lose it before or after the police picked you up off the street at two in the morning?"

* * *

Out by the intersection of Clarkson Road and Clayton lay a planned community named Woodlawn Lakes, where houses started at the mid three hundred thousands and building sites were sold by the quarter acre. It was where Peter VanAck had lived. Where his wife Judy and his children still resided now that he was gone.

After the disastrous round with the Channel 12 news, Molly had decided that it was time to get back out of the office. She hadn't gotten her answers from the files, so she decided to try a little live question and answer to really make her day.

At least the day was a nice one, not too hot for a change, with traffic that was still fairly manageable and a westerly breeze that ruffled Molly's hair. Molly had changed, of course. One does not approach a suicide survivor in a "The one who dies..." T-shirt. There wasn't anything she could do about her car, of course. In comparison with the cash on the tire she passed along Miller Pond Lane, her Celica had the look of a refugee craft. But then, in the mood Molly was in, she didn't really care.

Molly really wished she could have been surprised by the VanAck house. It was her parents' fault, of course. They might not have had personalities, but they had had exquisite taste. They had demanded no less from those with whom they associated. They would never have been caught dead in this pretentious hunk of brick.

Crouching on its postage-stamp lot like an elephant on a card table, the house evidently couldn't figure out just which architectural style it wished to emulate. Therefore, there were pillars and bay windows and even a rose window in what was probably the bathroom, all topped off with a Dutch roof, which made the overall affect heavy and unwieldy. There was also a lawn with the kind of brutally precise landscaping that made Molly think of hemorrhoids.