Bad Medicine (39 page)

* * *

"What are you doing on my computer?" Sasha demanded. "Come to think of it, what the hell are you doing here at all? You're not scheduled tonight."

Molly didn't bother to look up from the screen. "I don't have a computer at home. I'll be just a minute. I swear."

"As long as you tell me what's going on."

"Maybe an answer to what's been going on around here. Maybe nothing."

Molly slid in the disk and punched in the command to read drive B. With just a flutter of sound, the screen scrolled up a menu that was nearly forty items long. The first item on the list was Argon Notes. The last was, ingenuously enough, My Diary.

"Son of a bitch," Molly muttered, too afraid to go on.

Sasha peered over her shoulder. "What is it?"

"It might be the answer to why people keep getting hurt around me."

Molly flipped a mental coin and chose the diary first. The computer chuckled a little and then fed her a line.

Password.

"Password?" Molly blinked, her fragile enthusiasm threatening to crash. "I need a password?"

"Welcome to the twentieth century, hon," Sasha said to her dryly as she pulled out a cigarette and switched on the small smoke filter on her desk at the same time. "This is called protection."

Molly punched up Argon Notes, then Veldux Notes. Each denied her access with a simple request:
Password.

"Shit," she snapped, smacking the keyboard. "There's got to be some way. Somebody must know..."

Password. Password. She'd just heard something like that. Something about the password on my diary...

Molly sat up straighter. She tried very hard not to hope, because she remembered.
The password on my diary would read Elizabeth, not Joey.

It hadn't connected at the time what a strange thing that had been to say. It connected now. Her hands trembling, Molly typed in Joey and waited.

The computer hummed and clicked. Lights blinked and senseless code scrolled down the screen. And suddenly, like a gift from a genie, there it was. Peg's diary. And there, right on the opening page, was the proof Molly had found that she'd been right all along.

Chapter 19

What Molly found was Peg Ryan's suicide note.

Peg had left it right on the first page of the diary, a personal apology to her mother she evidently hoped the people who found her would never discover. Or maybe, that even she hoped her mother would never find.

Mom. I thought that this was where I'd say I'm sorry, since you know how fond I've always been of diaries. This is my last entry. I'm sorry. I've done stupid things in my life, but nothing this stupid. Some of my friends are already gone, and I can't think of anything to do but join them. I can't stop and I can't go on. I always thought I'd have time to correct my mistakes, but Transcend doesn't give you any time. It takes everything, and I'm the one who found it. I'm the one who gave it to my friends. I'm the one who made them all die.

Try and understand. Peg.

Molly had had it all along. Now that she saw it, she still couldn't quite believe it.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," Sasha murmured over Molly's shoulder. "Is this on the level?"

Molly turned on her charge nurse. "Don't tell anybody. Not till I know what to do about this."

Sasha actually looked a little dazed. "This is very hot stuff. The crows are going to want it."

"Especially the crows at Argon. I wonder how long they've known."

Sasha took another look at the notes on the screen and shook her head. "Don't be stupid. They've known all along."

Molly was looking the same way. "But if the stuff is this deadly, how can the testing be so benign?"

"Ask the pharmacy."

"I asked. I got a great company line. Transcend is the way of the future. Transcend will change our lives."

"I'm not talking real pharmacy, which gets a good deal of its funding from running tests just like this one. I'm talking James."

For the first time in at least twenty-four hours, Molly smiled. James. Of course. The evening supervisor with the taste for reggae and simple carbohydrates. If anybody would tell Molly the truth, it would be James.

She checked her watch. "He won't be here for another couple of hours. I have to finish reading this."

"Not here you don't. Borrow my portable and hide."

Molly looked up and thought about how open this room was. How she didn't want Sasha to suffer for helping. As quickly as the hospital grapevine worked, it would be all the way to the administrative offices in an hour that Molly was using Sasha's hospital computer to sabotage a very valuable drug test. And who knew, these days, just who else might be listening in on the hospital grapevine?

"I don't suppose you have any spare disks on you," Molly asked.

"Not a one."

Molly sighed. "I make a hell of a spy. I don't even come prepared."

Itching to find out what else was on Peg's disk, Molly grabbed Sasha's computer and locked herself back in the last doctor's call room, where she had access to the equipment she needed and the security of knowing that nobody would think to look there for a nurse. First she pulled up the diary. After that, once she'd talked to James, she would go through the notes on Argon. Who knew what Peg had put in there for somebody to find? Who knew whether she'd deliberately thought of a way to bring the company down after her death?

The first entries were innocuous. Musings on the firm, on success, financial gain, and the lure of dark clubs and fast men. It was along about spring that Molly found her first surprise.

Peg Ryan had not been assigned to the Argon account. Peg Ryan had brought the Argon account to the firm. And the person who had introduced her to the Argon brass had been none other than City Councilman Tim McGuire.

Sweaty, ineffectual Tim has a purpose in life after all. After putting up with him at Shitkickers for almost four months, he came through yesterday by introducing me to a couple of his classmates from Country Day who just happen to be heirs to the Argon fortune. Chemistry is good. I like their connections, they like my aggression. Tim says the Argon stock is going to be the investment of the century. Maybe. I'm more interested in the company retainer and the heir's ass.

Tim McGuire. Who could have guessed?

Tim McGuire, who always seemed to be around when something went wrong with the office. Tim McGuire, who had shown up at the building with no visible pretext, right about the time Pearl's file had disappeared.

Molly stopped dead in her tracks. This was stupid. She might as well just put herself up for the Oliver Stone Conspiracy Theory Award. After all, she'd just made her second giant leap back across the chasm.

But what if Tim were involved? Who better to throw up a convenient smoke screen by slipping out with an important file and then pointing fingers at the one person in the office who was going to cause trouble? And not to the gambling consortium. They were already under fairly well-known scrutiny by federal officers without humor. To the people involved with Transcend.

It was ridiculous.

It was just as plausible as anything else that had happened.

Molly needed a little more proof to take to Kevin. She needed some kind of smoking gun with Tim McGuire's fingerprints on it. She bent back to her reading to see if she could find it.

Molly was sure she'd only meant to skim Peg's diary. After all, what she really needed to see was the notes on the Argon transactions. Before she knew it, though, she'd been reading for two hours as Peg Ryan took her through the classic course of an addiction, the more unnerving description of the peculiarly intense Transcend reaction. From April to August the notes changed, following discovery, intoxication, addiction, and death. From exhilaration to megalomania to despair.

Several people had remarked to Molly that the suicide victims had seemed like developing manic-depressives. Intense highs and then intense lows. Maybe they had been, although these wild swings seemed to originate with the drug, like a longer, higher, headier hit of crack that came down even harder.

As Molly read Peg's journal, she also got her first real feel for the woman she'd found on the bathroom floor. Peg had been a risk-taker, a thrill-seeker. The youngest in a family of caregivers, the one who had been given all the care, Peg had never learned consequence. She'd worked her cases like video games and considered her parents almost laughably out of touch, only living with them because she hadn't yet learned how to move beyond immediate gratification. So when she'd found this new, potent high unlike any other she'd dabbled with, she'd embraced it like Babe Ruth had embraced baseball.

Is this a great job or what?
Molly read from a June entry.
Not only do I get the company perks but the private ones as well. I owe Randy for slipping me the pills. I've never felt so high in my life, and I've done high in all kinds of different languages.

So Frank Patterson had been right.

But there were also notes about Joe. About finding him after thinking all those years that he was dead. About visiting him, coordinating with Frank for his care, listening to his terrors and gentling his nightmares. Peg had honored his wish not to tell her parents about him even as she'd vilified those same parents for deserting the son they were supposed to have loved without condition.

I went looking for his military records today to try and get him benefits. He had the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. They never said anything about that. Never. Like the life he's living negates what he's been. I guess the same goes for being their son, too. I wonder how he can forgive them. I can't.

So Frank Patterson had been wrong, too.

For the first time, Molly felt as if she knew the face of one of her suicide victims. Molly walked alongside this phantom as she took inexorable steps to her own doom. First the challenge, then the thrill, then the confusion, finally the inevitability.

God, what's going on? How could Pearlie have done that to us? We were waiting for her, so we could share the triumph, and she was dying. Just like Peter. Just like Aaron. I can't believe it. I just can't believe it anymore.

In the end, not only had Transcend been a lie, it had been a lie Peg Ryan hadn't been able to escape.

The perfect drug for the nineties. This would make Argon the new Colombian cartel.

Molly knew that this journal alone might well scuttle the drug's future. All she had to do was print it out and give it to the press.

That made her smile. The same snapping dogs who wouldn't give her a moment's rest, would now be put to good use. Let them go after Argon instead.

But first, she had to get the rest of her information. Molly checked her watch and realized that James was due on his shift. Visiting hours were also on in the units. She'd take a break. Visit Joey and visit James. And then she'd get back to Argon Pharmaceutical.

Good thing she'd moved into the call room. Molly spent ten minutes figuring out how to work the equipment and another five using it to save the files. Then, closing the computer, she got up, grabbed her purse, and slipped on the lab coat that was her hospital camouflage. Taking one last look around to make sure she hadn't left anything behind, Molly slid the disk into her pocket and unlocked the door.

* * *

Joey was asleep when Molly saw him. Sedated and restrained so he couldn't hurt himself, a desiccated husk wound in tubes and tape. One look at him negated any lingering high the discovery of Peg's journal had produced.

"He okay?" Molly asked the nurse who was caring for him.

"Him? Oh yeah, sure. It's against the rules of trauma for homeless guys to die from stab wounds. Only young mothers and priests do that."

Molly didn't bother to lecture the nurse about Joe being a human. She'd made the same kind of off-the-cuff assessments herself, especially after a long shift when it seemed that only the hopeless got better and the good people sank like rocks.

"His name is Joey," she said instead. "You'll probably get better response from him if you try it."

The nurse looked up. "He's listed as a John Doe. You know him?"