Molly smiled. “You're welcome. Now go on upstairs and make your bed. I'll have the rules printed up and taped to your door in an hour.” Patrick was set to turn around, when a thought occurred to Molly. “By the way. What were you going to do with the Rembrandt? You don't know anybody in St. Louis to sell it to.”
He didn't bother to face her. “I don't know ⦠I guess I wasn't thinking.”
Molly didn't believe him for a minute. But she figured she was going to have plenty of time to get the real story. In the meantime, she took a step closer and spread her arms, intent on sealing her welcome with a hug.
Patrick startled like a horse faced with fire.
Molly had never felt so ineffectual. She'd hugged families she'd never met, patients and parents and paramedics. Other nurses, children by the dozen. For some reason, though, she couldn't manage that elementary act with her very skittish nephew.
A simple hug. A pat on the back. And standing three feet away from one of a handful of blood relatives she had on earth, Molly knew he wouldn't accept it. So she threw off a casual little wave and left it at that.
Patrick turned and headed toward the stairs, and Molly sighed. Too bad it was too early in the day for a drink.
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“And just what are we supposed to do with this?”
Perched on one foot in front of the mahogany desk of the St. Louis Medical Examiner, Molly looked from the bagged femur to the rigidly furious woman holding it like an unhappily discovered rat.
“I don't know,” she said. “Wait for the left one to show up and make book ends?”
Dr. Jemimah Winnifred Sweet Harrison did not smile. Seated before a wall decorated in ferocious African war masks, she was the most ferocious presence in the room. Tall, elegant, with smooth mocha skin and almondshaped eyes, she had the posture of a model and the temper of a longshoreman. Winnie was the best. Which meant that she had no time for anything or anyone who wasn't.
“I suppose you're going to want this tested,” she challenged, her voice as sharp as a gunshot.
Molly sighed. “Not me. I voted to ignore the whole thing. I'm telling you it's a harmless prank that ended up in my possession by mistake.”
“There's another Molly Burke in your neighborhood who might consider this amusing?”
Molly couldn't take her eyes off her own name, painted in gold poster paint, swinging slowly before her eyes.
“If necessary, I'll find one.”
Winnie went very still. A bad sign. “And?”
And.
Molly shrugged, disconcerted at how quickly her cavalier disregard for her own safety should come back to haunt her. She'd kind of forgotten to share some now-relevant bits of news with Winnie. “I've, uh, been getting notes.”
The handsome face tightened into a scowl of epic proportions. “I know. I found that out, too. Not from you, of course. From some jumped-up meter maid named Plante from the Fifth, who, by the way, thinks you're doing this to yourself for the attention. Seems she's read a book on Munchausen by proxy.”
Molly lifted an eyebrow. “The detective can read?”
Both of them wasted a second on half grins, and Molly had to admit that sometimes she was as impatient with the rest of the world as Winnie.
Winnie dropped the bone with a clunk that let everybody in earshot know that this wasn't a cheap plastic imitation. “I want a list of people who might want to threaten you. Plante might be right. You may be doing this because you're bored. But I won't be made a fool of if you show up dead and this was serious all along.”
Molly barely controlled a laugh. “I don't think anybody's mad at me,” she protested. “Well, except for a few people still waiting trial from the summer. But this doesn't strike me as that kind of thing. I thought the notes were more the âYou let my mother die'âtype thing.”
She'd
hoped
the notes were more the “You let my mother die”âtype thing.
“It doesn't matter. I want the whole list. And I want that adolescent out of the Medical Examiner's offices.”
Molly turned around to see Patrick perched on the edge of Winnie's secretary's desk smiling down at the woman as if she were a centerfold on the verge of unstapling.
“No problem.”
Molly was creaking her way to her feet when Winnie finally noticed the obvious. “You get hit on the head with that bone, or is this some other little indiscretion you failed to notify this office about?”
It actually took Molly a second to figure out what Winnie was referring to. “Nothing for you,” she finally said, “unless you suddenly get a surfeit of clowns in for autopsy. We had a clown-kicking commando in last night, and I happened to be the first clown she kicked.”
Winnie nodded briskly. “Well, get it taken care of.”
And here Molly thought stitches and pain medicine
were
taking care of it. “You bet.”
“One more thing before you go.”
Molly sat down. She knew that tone of voice.
“You get all the evidence in on the Wilson case yet?” Winnie demanded.
Molly took a second to regroup.
The Wilson case.
She didn't want to talk about the Wilson case. She didn't even want to think about the Wilson case.
Latesha Wilson was a twelve-year-old girl who had gone missing. A task force had searched for her for eight days. Posters, ribbons, pictures, rewards, the works. And all along the little girl had been lying alone in a wet, cold basement two blocks from home, nylons tied around her throat and her clothes in a pile in the corner.
Molly had been unlucky enough to catch that call. It had been her responsibility to take control of the body at the homicide scene, assessing it just as a homicide cop would, but with a medical as well as a forensic eye. She'd taken pictures and body temperature and documented rigor mortis, liver mortis, decomposition, insect activity, and every injury, great and small. She'd wrapped that thin, small child in a white sheet to protect microscopic hair and fiber evidence while the mother had screamed nonstop on the stoop outside, and she'd transported little Latesha back to the city morgue.
Now Molly was in charge of coordinating the information about the forensic findings from the Medical Examiner with the police and DA's office until they could get a perpetrator to trial.
And Molly wasn't the only one involved in the case who knew without being able yet to prove it that that screaming mother had known all along that her own boyfriend had killed her baby and stuffed her in a basement.
A terrible, lonely way to die. But standing down in that horrible basement, Molly had also thought of what Latesha Wilson would have had to look forward to had she lived.
No wonder she wasn't anticipating Christmas. Especially with another cast-off child on her hands.
“I'm still waiting for the lab to finish microscopics and DNA,” she told her boss. “Everything else is there for you.”
Winnie was nodding briskly, making a note to herself. “Just make sure this office doesn't screw up. I intend to have all the evidence the police need for a conviction.”
“Me, too. Anything else?”
With her sharp gaze, Winnie kept considering the bone Molly had brought her, until Molly could almost believe that she could discern its secrets without a microscope.
“Tell me why this thing makes me nervous,” Winnie suggested.
This time Molly did laugh. “Probably because whatever your idiosyncracies may be, femur tossing just isn't one of them.”
“Or femur decorating.” Winnie shook her head. “Is this something I should expect from you on a regular basis? If it is, let me know now. I hate surprises.”
“Don't be silly,” Molly scoffed. “If you hated surprises, you would have worked in a hospital lab. Not a city morgue.”
Winnie didn't react past lifting the bone. “Here. Give this to one of the techs to sign in. We'll pass it along to the forensic anthropologists and see if it's a problem.”
Molly accepted the bone and headed out of the office for the morgue downstairs. She hadn't made it four steps before Patrick popped off the secretary's desk and followed her.
“This is
such
a cool place,” he said. “Why didn't you tell us you worked here? There are, like, bodies back there, aren't there, Aunt Molly?”
Molly stopped dead at the bottom of the stairs and faced her tooexcited nephew. “Whom you are not invited to visit. Stay here. I'll be right back.”
“You could get me a job here,” he suggested to her back.
“No jobs open.”
She could almost hear his cold displeasure, but he remained on good behavior by visiting with the receptionist whose desk was the only thing in the echoing foyer of the old white granite block building. Molly continued on back to the morgue area where she could pass the bone off to one of the intake techs who logged in bodies and protected personal effects.
The tech was even more excited than Patrick.
“It'sch real pretty, ischn't it?” Lewis asked with a decided lisp when he saw the bone. Lewis was shorter than Molly, roly-poly and disheveled. And, unfortunately, he had a lisp. It seemed to Molly, suddenly, that everybody was hissing at her.
She found herself staring at him. “What do you decorate your house with, Lewis?”
He grinned to show a gap or two in his teeth. “Wouldn't you like to know, Misch Burke? Wouldn't you juscht like to know?”
Miss Burke was sure she just didn't. She hadn't worked with Lewis long, but she figured they should be past the Miss Burke stage by now. But then, Lewis was unfailingly polite and devoted to the details that would have driven Molly insane. And, to be frank, Lewis wasn't exactly waiting for that big astrophysics grant, which made him content with the odd hours and odder clients.
“Winnie would like it logged in,” she said, motioning to the bone in its bag. “It's going to need to be tested.”
“One bone full of red and gold paint,” he said, taking hold with short, square hands. “What'sch to tescht?”
Whether or not the bone was from a medical supply house. Whether it was an old bone, the kind that kept popping up in the St. Louis area every time the mass transit needs crossed old, untended cemetery land. Whether it really was enough to give Molly fresh nightmares.
Oh no, she thought with a mental shake of her head. That was a path she did not plan to follow. Her nightmare schedule was already booked up, thanks very much.
“Winnie has a call in to an anthropologist,” Molly said and thanked him. And got out before she let Lewis creep her out, too.
“Now,” she said, picking up her nephew from where he was making the receptionist smile. “Let's go find you a job.”
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They found him a job. Even better, they found him a job with hours that almost matched Molly's. So they bought him black pants and white shirtsâon his credit cardâfor his bussing position and got him keys for the house. And for the next three days Molly redesigned her life to accommodate another person.
“It's not really that bad,” she told Sasha on the fourth day as the two of them drew up meds side by side in the medicine alcove.
Sasha snorted. “Wearing pantyhose is not that bad,” she retorted. “Inheriting a teenager is a disaster.”
“Yeah, well, I guess this is God's way of letting me know once and for all if I could have made a good mother.”
Sasha stopped cold. “You are not being a mother,” she informed Molly. “You're being a baby-sitter. You are keeping the little monster out of prison until his parents come back from wherever the hell it is they are to lock him up in his own city.”
Molly grinned. “That's what I love about you, Sasha. Your almost maudlin sentimentality. Trust me. I have no intention of making this a permanent situation. I'm too old and poor for that. Patrick is a kid who needs deep pockets ⦠and deaf parents. You should hear what he listens to. I am really not used to that.”
“My point exactly.”
“Besides, what with the notes and all, it's kind of nice to have somebody else in the house.”
“As long as he isn't the one writing the notes.”
“They were mailed in St. Louis, Sash. Besides, he hasn't even seen me in six years. How could I make him that mad?”
Patrick had also really seemed surprised by the sight of that femur. The femur Molly hadn't told Sasha about. But then, there was just so much disapprobation she could handle in one eight-hour shift. Especially one as busy as this.
“Hey, you guys,” one of the brand-new nurses greeted them on the run, her eyes wide like a bunny. “What do you know about giving thrombolytic treatment for MIs?”