And Molly didn't want to.
But she was going to have to. She'd made that decision last night. Then she'd spent the rest of the night regretting it. She'd walked the red mud of Pleiku over and over again in her dreams looking for a face she should have recognized and somehow, couldn't.
“So what are you going to do?” Winnie asked without looking up, as if she'd heard Molly's thoughts.
Molly damn near laughed. Good thing Winnie hadn't asked her what she
wanted
to do. She answered the Medical Examiner like a pro, though. Chapter and verse. And Winnie listened until Molly mentioned her new skills in the world of technology.
“It's illegal,” Winnie said.
“Tell that to all the credit companies and HMOs who tap into computers every day,” she said. “I'm just looking for names. Places. Dates. Patterns.”
Patterns.
“And then?”
Molly thought of all those damn psychological boxes she'd tucked away in her brain, their lids askew, the past whispering out of them like weary ghosts, and she fought the shakes all over again.
“Then I share what I have with Rhett and Davidson and crew and see if we can find a match that rings bells. That shows us ⦔
Patterns.
Her voice stalled. She caught her breath, because she'd just figured out how she could get the information the police needed without having to face the demons she didn't want to.
It was so simple. So obvious. Surely after all these years she couldn't be wrong. Not after she'd played so very many rounds of The Game and lost.
“Shows us?” Winnie prompted, pen poised.
“Patterns,” Molly said, still thinking.
“What?”
For the first time since she'd walked in the office, Molly smiled. “All that mumbo jumbo, Winnie. It's going to show me how to track a killer right to my back porch.”
“And?”
Molly finally made it to the door, still smiling. “And I now have the means to do just that. Bye, Winnie.”
As she was headed down the hall, she heard the dry voice behind her. “Glad I could help.”
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Molly went home first, because the next job on her list was her own victimology, and she wasn't about to do that in front of witnesses. She'd expected to have to at least face Patrick, but Patrick had forestalled that by leaving her a note saying he'd gone in early to work. Molly felt guilty with relief.
She told herself it was because she didn't want witnesses for what she had to do. She knew better.
Still, she didn't take any chances. Before anyone could interrupt, she sat down with her research books, her work résumé, and her revulsion for self-revelation, and she set about reconstructing her own history. And within five minutes, she found herself forced to admit that Rhett was just as good an interviewer as everybody claimed.
When Rhett had compiled her victimology, he'd bounced his questions all around so they had seemed less overwhelming. Where had she gone to school? Did she still have friends she kept in touch with from childhood? From her other jobs? From other cities? It must be tough to keep track of all the people she'd worked with. Did she enjoy moving around, or was it tough for her?
Molly looked at the range of areas Rhett had investigated to complete a thorough victimology and thought how easily he'd gleaned his facts. Looked at in a stark succession, it made her choke up. Asked in that guileless
way of his, as if he were doing nothing more than filling time on a first date, it had been bearable.
Well, bearable or not, Molly had to ask herself the same questions. She had to evaluate her lifestyle, her employment, her personality, her friends, income, family, alcohol or drug use, dress, handicaps, transportation used, reputation, marriage and dating history, habits, fears ⦠.
She had to fillet her life like a dead fish and find the bones that lurked inside. And she had to do it as dispassionately as possible, when she had enjoyed it all so much in the first place she'd made it a point over the years to completely shut it away.
Had she had addictions? Of course she hadâalthough the other people she knew with PTSD tended to call it self-medicating. Molly had spent years on that roller-coaster ride trying to numb a pain no one else seemed to know how to exorcise. Even after a good doctor and an introduction to the newest generation of antidepressants, Molly still had to acknowledge that her alcohol intake rose appreciably during the summer. Not enough to interfere. Not enough so far to inhibit those self-preservational drives that keep everyone chugging along. But enough, sometimes, to make her less careful. Less perceptive. Less hopeful.
She still had nightmares on a regular basis, and, on occasion, flashbacks. None of that should have any relevance to the investigation. But Rhett had asked what her fears were, hadn't he?
Her other habits were unremarkable. She might live in a fancy house, but she sure couldn't afford a fancy life. She worked two jobs, had a dog, several friends, and an adopted Jewish grandfather. She rarely saw her own family and preferred to see them even less. She read a lot, vacationed a little, and drove around in a beat-up, paid-off 1988 Toyota Celica GT because she liked the speed and handling and couldn't afford a real car.
She had no criminal activity in her past beyond the odd antiwar demonstration and one case of trespassing that had involved an ED party, a goat, and a hospital CEO's swimming pool. Nothing, certainly, that would put her in a high-risk behavior category like solicitation or felony drug possession.
Her illicit drug possession had all been of the misdemeanor variety. Her addictions had been prescribed or toted in brown paper bags, not tiny plasticene baggies.
She was, Molly knew, boring. Her likes included both her jobs, her friends, Frank's kids, and, most of all, her gardening, which she'd raised to the status of minor religion. Her dislikes: insurance companies, hospital administration, BMWs, and her family. Her lifestyle changes had, unfortunately, included that family, but Patrick could only be considered an added stressor. He hadn't been there long enough to be considered anything else.
Which brought Molly to the categories she thought most pertinent. What the pros called precipitating events.
In the career of any serial killer, there were precipitating events that seemed to propel the killer over the next, higher wall of restraint. Maybe a breakup with a girlfriend pushed the killer from the fantasy stage to his first kill. Maybe a loss of job pushed him into a faster cycle, or more violent crime. Maybe a direct challenge or desertion pushed him into multiple murder. Whatever, each precipitating event could be plotted against an escalation in antisocial behavior like a chemistry reaction.
The question was whether Molly would find any incidents on her own graph that might correspond to blips on the killer's. So she wrote down the events that had been recently noteworthy to her.
If she just tracked the last two years, she could include getting sued, losing her job and life savings, meeting Frank, finally securing her job at Grace Hospital, the very last hospital in town in which she'd ever considered working, and her job at the ME's.
Molly looked at that list and laughed. Too bad they weren't hunting a mass murderer. Based on that list of stressors, she would have been a prime candidate. But then, her entire life had been comprised of ridiculous little clusters like that.
Okay, next. She had gone to work at the Medical Examiner's office as a part-time investigator. That had translated into a little more pay, a lot more stress, and several shots at public exposure. It had also led to a case just this last summer that had sent a half dozen people to prison and tumbled a few political figures in St. Louis. But any threats she'd received from that had been direct and simple. And not one had involved body partsâother than hers, anyway.
Her most recent appearances in public had involved the Wilsons and
Sharon Peters, both of whom she'd spoken to news crews about. But both had been uninvolved, impulsive acts of rage and control that would never have fit the profile of this kind of serial killer. This guy wasn't impulsive at all.
Molly stopped there and looked out her window.
Serial killer. She'd said it again. She'd admitted it as the fact she knew it to be.
The phantom they'd all been trying to wave back into smoke was fast solidifying instead. And nightmares and superstitions be damned, Molly had the most unholy feeling that this was what he wanted her to do. He wanted her to bring him out of the vapors.
He was looking for a sense of himself, and she was obliging.
But he
was
a serial killer. Molly could no longer deny or pretend. She knew just what kind of serial killer she was dealing with the way she knew all hell was about to break loose in her ED. Her gut was churning. Her chest was tight as a tripwire. She could feel feet dancing on her grave, and she never ignored feelings like that.
So he was real. He was looking for her. She had to stop him, no matter what anybody else did. And even with all the data she and Rhett had compiled, she still had no idea of where to start.
Without realizing it, Molly turned back to consider her résumé. Eight pages, thirty years, at least seven cities. Too, too much data to comb through in the time they had, with the dearth of information they had. Too many people to consider.
Most of whom had no idea where she was.
That stopped her cold. For a long moment, Molly could do no more than just look at the list she'd compiled, the names of just about every man she'd ever known scribbled in haphazard fashion.
Still with an eye to that list, Molly got up to let Magnum out the back door. Then, refilling her straight tea, she sat back down, stunned by such a simple revelation.
They had no idea where she lived.
Most people didn't. Molly wasn't in the phone book. Both the hospital and the Medical Examiner's office protected her private information like the palace guard. She hadn't kept track of anybody she'd worked with from
the other cities, which meant they wouldn't have easy access to her address. Besides, if they'd come back into her life, she would have recognized them. She would have at least been assailed by that “out of place” feeling one gets when one sees someone in the wrong environment. But she hadn't felt that at all.
She'd lived in St. Louis off and on until her twenty-first birthday when she'd gone to Vietnam. She'd come home three times since, once to marry and twice more when her options elsewhere had run out. She'd come home to stay five years ago. And each time she'd worked in a hospital in the metropolitan area. Two of those hospitals were now joined in the merger that had eaten Grace.
Molly could look back at every single person she'd met all those years on the road. She had a feeling it would be a waste of time.
Her answer was here. In sight. Close enough that something she'd done within the last few weeks had set the person off.
The person here in St. Louis. The person who knew not where she worked, but where she lived.
Molly took a quick look at the rambling list of names on her yellow legal pad and knew she could take off about half. At least for now. Which meant she had a place to start. As soon as she could get in to work and ask Sasha for time on her computer.
Sasha might very well drop dead from the shock. For the second time that day, Molly smiled.
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It figured that once she found a viable direction to follow, Molly didn't get the chance to take it. As if hearing her plans, the city went nuts and poured, in toto, into her ED.
The weather was bouncing around, which set off pulmonary problems like the spring spread thunderstorms. The people who weren't hacking were either brought in backboarded from post-Christmas-party demolition derbies, or hunched over and puking from the Yule cheer they were spreading around. And Molly, who so enjoyed the season anyway, found herself immersed in its celebrants like a monk at black mass.
The only time she got at the computer she spent limbering up her skills, which resulted in no more than humiliating rebuffs from an inanimate
object that considered itself smarter than Molly. That probably, in all fairness, was.
By the time Rhett finally returned her call the next afternoon, Molly was surly and tired. Rhett promptly made it worse when he gave his update on police activity.
A detective was checking Soilex and hydrochloric acid suppliers. Another was double-checking missing persons reports from as far away as Springfield, Illinois. A third, the canvas on Molly's neighborhood. But the current consensus remained that they were going to need another bone to point their way.
Molly arranged to get Rhett her notated list of names, suggested her own theories, and returned to practice her computer scales in Sasha's office.