Bad Medicine (36 page)

Molly understood. She empathized. She knew just how hard it was for Winnie to admit her own mistake. She knew what Winnie had probably gone through every day she'd opened that drawer to find that letter in there, what she must have felt the first day she'd found it gone.

Molly even tried to forgive her for allowing Molly to take the fall for it. She couldn't quite make it to verbalization, though.

"And you just held on to it."

"I was sure Kevin would find it when he went looking for the file."

"Do you have that, too, Winnie?"

This time, there was life in the voice at the other end of the line. "How dare you? Of course I didn't take that file."

Molly tried so hard not to judge. She was too human, though. "I never thought you'd stake me out as a sacrificial goat, either."

Winnie had no answer for that. The silence stretched across the line like cooling glass, and Molly knew she couldn't stay here much longer.

"I really have to go, Winnie."

"I told Kevin."

"Thank you. I mean it. If you're going to be in tomorrow, I found something out that might make a difference in Pearl's death."

"Not tomorrow," Winnie said. "Not until city hall's calmed down."

"Then I can expect the press on my lawn again tomorrow?"

"I'm trying, Molly."

Just that admission reflected what this was doing to Winnie. Molly rubbed at her head where the pain never seemed to go away anymore. "Well, let me know when it's safe to come out again. I'll bring all the information I have about those five suicides with me, and we can figure out where to go next."

"I told you before," Winnie said, finally sounding like the old Winnie once more. "Be careful."

"Okay."

Molly was still sitting in that chair trying her best to move on to the assessment she'd been about to do on Mr. E when she heard herself paged.

"Molly Burke, line one. Molly Burke, line one."

Molly picked up the phone. "This is Burke."

"You don't listen well, do you?"

Molly forgot Winnie. She forgot the patient she'd left in room twelve, and Lorenzo, who was probably getting real tired of being blessed. She knew the voice on the phone. She knew it so well that just the sibilance of its whisper made her want to vomit. She could almost feel that hot, stale breath against her cheek.

"Listen," she said before she had a chance to think about it. "I'm real busy right now, and I'm sure you have a long list of people you still have to threaten tonight, so why don't we just consider me warned and be on our way?"

"Smart little bitch like you, I thought for sure you'd learn a lesson when it was given."

Molly found herself fighting against just saying the word
Transcend
and seeing what happened. "And don't think I didn't. I'll never park in that lot again as long as I live."

"Last time I was nice. I think that was a mistake, wasn't it?"

"Uh-huh. Well, thanks very much. Bye now."

"Don't blow me off, bitch. You don't want your next lesson."

Molly didn't even bother to answer.

By the time she hung up, Molly was actually clammy with sweat. The funny thing was, she wasn't afraid. She was furious. She was tired of all the threats. At least these guys had had the decency to threaten her outright. Other people had couched their coercion in solicitude, when Molly knew damn well where their concern had lain. And then there were all the people standing in line to throw her to the wolves, just because it was easier that way.

"Molly? You okay?"

Molly looked up to see Lorenzo at the door. She smiled for him. "Just fine," she said. "It was just a follow-up call from the guys who hauled me downtown, to see how I was recovering."

Lorenzo came right to alert. "What do you mean?" He looked down at the phone as if he could see them through it. "They
called
you here?"

Molly shrugged, as if it didn't matter. "Better than showing up."

Lorenzo was not amused. "I'm calling the police."

"Don't bother," Molly said. "I'll do it. But don't be hugely surprised if they don't run right over. Is Lance finished in there?"

Lorenzo handed her the chart. "He left the room right after you did."

Molly nodded. She should think about that phone call. Somebody knew she was back out asking questions. Somebody was upset enough about this to offer another warning, and Molly was beginning to believe she knew just who it was.

When she got up tomorrow, she was going to have to fend off the press long enough to ask Sam how he thought a company would react if somebody threatened the survival of the product that was going to save it.

The problem was, Molly had the feeling she'd already found out.

Eventually she got back to work. She didn't see any police, at least not unless they were accompanying assault victims. She wasn't surprised. In the morning she'd call Rhett and Rowdy, which sounded like she was going to notify a team of strippers. She'd do a lot in the morning. All she wanted to do when she got home was sit outside and listen to her garden.

* * *

When Molly first saw it she thought she must be mistaken. The night was overcast, with the lights of the West End reflecting back off the bellies of the clouds. Molly caught the shudder of multicolored strobes when she turned off Maryland and figured it was just neon reflecting from the streets.

She didn't notice the van. It was late, and she was driving on autopilot, her attention on getting home, on the possibility that finally, at two in the morning, she'd have the chance to sit out in her yard and enjoy her flowers and her pond without having somebody drop in over her fence to ask questions. So she didn't see the van's headlights flash on. She didn't notice the clatter of an engine turning over. But as she passed, the van swerved a little toward her, and Molly looked up.

It was a plain dirty white, the kind a business would use rather than a family. She saw that it drove more slowly through a residential street than it had to. She saw the dark figures inside and suddenly recognized it.

"Oh, my God..."

Molly slammed on the brakes. The van lurched into gear and sped past her. Molly didn't know what to do. It was the guys who'd kidnapped her, the big guy and the medium guy. She was sure. Molly could see that at least the guy on the passenger side was wearing a ski mask. And that he was smiling. She would have sworn to it. The van skidded around the corner onto Taylor and disappeared. They'd been waiting for her, Molly realized. Sitting along the side of her street until she showed up. Sitting on
her
street.

That was when she realized that it hadn't been neon she'd seen after all. A block and a half down there were emergency vehicles clogging up the street.

"Oh, Jesus," she breathed, slamming her car back into gear.

Two cop cars, an ambulance, a fire engine, right in front of her house. Clots of people in uniform, a couple knots of neighbors standing cross-armed in their bathrobes on nearby lawns.

Molly didn't see smoke. She didn't see anyone near the front of the house. They seemed to be walking up the driveway that separated her house from Sam's. Molly skidded to a stop behind one of the units and tumbled out of her car. She didn't even notice the neighbors who were watching her. She had eyes only for the figures she could see farther back toward her yard.

"What's going on?" she demanded.

There were a couple of shrugs, and one of the cops turned toward her.

"You can't..."

Molly saw the untidy group of people in her backyard and shoved right past him. "It's my house."

God, please, she thought. Don't let it be Sam. Don't let something have happened to Sam.

She could see cop hats and flashlights, the lighter blue shirts of paramedics. Something lay on the ground. Somebody. Molly ran harder.

She slammed through the gate, startling a couple of the cops. Inside the house Magnum was barking like a wild thing. Molly tried hard to see who was on the lawn, but the paramedics were in the way, their synchronized movements half a turn from frantic in the weak, flickering light. Molly remembered, suddenly, that not four hours ago a man had told her she wouldn't want her next lesson.

"Sam?" she called, frantic. "God, Sam!"

A figure separated itself from the shadows. Reached out to her. "It's all right,
bubeleh.
I'm here."

Molly grabbed the old man by the shoulders and damn near shook him for scaring her. "What happened?" she asked, her voice too shrill and her hands shaking too hard. She'd thought he was dead. God, she thought they'd used this old man for her lesson.

"I don't know," he said, half turning back to where the paramedics were crouched over the bundle on the grass.

The cops were directing flashlights to where IVs were being started on limp arms and oxygen was being administered by portable tank. Molly saw dark stains on surgical gloves that meant there was a lot of blood somewhere.

"You live here?" one of the cops asked.

Molly tried to catch her breath. "Yes. I do. What happened?"

"The dog has been barking," Sam was trying to tell her. "I came out to look. This is what I found."

"Do you know this man?" the cop asked, and redirected the light.

Molly leaned past the crouched paramedic to get a look. She saw the blood and the clothes and the pasty features the flashlight illuminated. She felt Sam grab hold of her when she almost ended up on her knees. "Oh, God," she moaned. "Oh God, no."

The message the men in the ski masks had left on her lawn was Joey Ryan.

Chapter 18

"They were smiling at me," she kept saying, as if that would help her make sense out of it. "Smiling! I could see their teeth."

Leaning against the far wall, Frank didn't bother to answer. They were in the hallway by surgery where the trauma team was trying to stem the damage done by a twelve-inch fishing knife and a set of expert knuckles. Joseph had been typed in as Mr. M, just another bit of flotsam in the night's stream of wounded. Molly could have told them what his real name was. She should have. By the time she reached the hospital, though, he'd already been on his way down to OR. When she'd called Frank to tell him what happened, he'd begged her not to let anybody else know.

So she'd followed the circus down toward surgery and waited outside, where she wouldn't get in the way. Frank had found her there no more than five minutes earlier.

"Smiling," Molly said again, shaking her head. "I can't believe it."

"I'm not really wild about it either," Frank admitted.

Molly didn't even bother to look over at him. Pulled from a sound sleep at three in the morning, he still looked as if he were headed to the tennis club for brunch, all chinos and polo shirt and tasseled loafers. The only thing that betrayed how fast he'd put himself together was the windblown look of his unbrushed hair. And damn it if it didn't make him look all the more appealing. No fewer than three of the night crew had escorted him back to where Molly was waiting.

And then the son of a bitch had done the unforgivable. He'd walked up to Molly without a word and just put his arms around her.

"You okay?" he'd asked, sounding as if he'd really meant it.

Molly went rigid. "I'm not the one with the stab wound."

Frank had pulled back as if he hadn't noticed how uncomfortable she was. "Yeah, but if I know you, you're taking it harder than Joey."

He hadn't come near her since. Molly was relieved as hell. Besides, he hadn't pulled the I-told-you-so routine yet, and Molly knew it was coining. Worse, she knew she deserved it.

"Do the police know?" he asked as she went by again.

Molly kept her attention on the passing squares of terrazzo. "I told them everything. They said they were going to call Rhett anyway, since this might very well end up a homicide."

She walked faster, back and forth, until it finally dawned on her that it wasn't doing any good. That left her against the wall, right alongside Frank, her gaze on the closed doors to the surgical suite, her hands in her pockets.