Bad Medicine (8 page)

Molly asked the questions, filled in the blanks, and looked just about anywhere but into Ettie Johnson's eyes.

"I don't know," the woman had answered. "I don't... just the last few days, she been so... quiet. Sittin' in her room all night and not telling me why. Just tellin' me she was sorry. What for? What should my little girl be sorry for?"

Molly thought she knew. But Molly didn't have the proof anymore, so nobody else really wanted to believe her. It didn't matter. She still had enough points for a depression, enough factors for a suicide. Molly gave Pearl's mother the numbers for Crisis Intervention, for Grieving Support Groups, for Suicide Survivors. And then Molly had gotten the hell out of Warsaw.

"Her mother has been treated for bi-polar disorder for years," Molly told Rhett, focusing her gaze over to where she could see people strolling out on Euclid through the cedar trees that isolated her. "My guess is that Pearl got her first taste and did the big dirt dive. The people at city hall said she'd been uncommunicative for the last two or three days, smelled alcohol on her breath. Anxious. Not eating. And she missed the biggest press conference of her career."

"And her alcohol level was two-fifty?"

"Yup."

Rhett nodded, understanding.

Alcohol, the great suicide toggle switch. Everyone, at one time in his life, dabbled with suicidal ideations. Maybe just a quick flirtation, an ugly temptation. A way out of weariness or pain or loss. Maybe serious courtship with the danger of death. An answer to desperation.

Most people, no matter what, walked by the lure. Laughed or cursed or simply closed their eyes. Unless there was alcohol on board.Something about alcohol blocks up every self-preservational instinct in man. Something about alcohol makes man impatient, uncertain, unreachable.

Something about alcohol disintegrates the distance between temptation and reality.

Molly never drank in the summer. Never.

"You never did find the note?" Rhett asked.

It actually took Molly a minute to pull her thoughts back to the conversation in her backyard. Overhead, the trees creaked, and beyond a plane threaded through the dim and milky sky. Water chattered over the rocks at the edge of her pond. Life was quiet and ordered and pleasant, just as her parents had wanted to believe.

"I did everything but put on waders and dive into the trash compactors in the basement," Molly admitted. "I don't know what happened to it."

Rhett bent his attention to the notes he was scribbling. "There's a lot of talk downtown that there was no note."

Molly kept her silence long enough to force him to look at her. "Is that why you're still on it?"

Rhett was beginning to sweat. "You know who William T. Peterson is, Molly?"

"No, I don't. Do you?"

His nod was minuscule, as if his complicity could be kept at a minimum. "He used to own several casinos in Vegas. Got sent up for racketeering in 1980, and has been banned from holding a gaming license anywhere in the United States since."

Molly slumped back in her chair. "Oh, God. That's it. He must have his fingers in that American Federal bunch."

"It's the only reason I can think he'd be linked to Pearl Johnson... that is, if he was. "

Molly gave him the kind of glare a forty-something-year-old woman could give a twenty-something-year-old kid and get away with. "I know you wouldn't question my word, Rhett," she said. "Especially after I helped you today."

He was beginning to squirm like a toddler in church. "Molly, I have to cover all bases. You know that. I just wanted to make sure that, well, you remembered right. I mean, you know, it was a busy night and all...."

"Suicide notes are tough to forget, Rhett. And tough to invent. Find somebody else to go after."

"Could it have been murder?" he asked.

She sighed, wishing for the hundredth time that she could remember what she'd done with that damn note when she'd run off to deal with Tyrell's mother. Wondering what could have happened to it in the interim.

"Everybody and his sister-in-law was in that ER last night," she said rather than answer him. "And every one of them knew about that note. Could it be as simple as somebody also involved in this Peterson business lifting the incriminating evidence?"

Rhett actually flinched. "Please don't make suggestions like that. My life's complicated enough as it is."

"Tell me about it."

All the same, the two of them stayed right where they were for quite a while, considering the implications. Of a suicide note. Of a theft. Of the possibility that nobody, in the end, was going to believe Molly that a note existed at all so that Pearl's supporters on the board could blame her death on anything but a guilty conscience.

After all, Rhett asked, why would Pearl choose the exact moment of her triumph to kill herself?

Molly knew. But then, Molly knew all about guilt. But it wasn't something Molly thought about during the summer, so she asked instead what would happen next. Unfortunately, Rhett didn't know that, either.

Molly spent the rest of her evening finishing her reports and half of Thursday giving an affidavit about the note only she had seen. She spent Thursday afternoon in the senior death investigator's office discussing implications and the early evening in her lawyer's office discussing precautions.

By that time, the media had discovered her role in the little drama and proceeded to splash her picture—and history—across the televisions of the entire metropolitan area. Half the members of the Board of Aldermen were calling for her resignation, and the other half were calling for an investigation into the murder and subsequent cover-up by the police, the Medical Examiner's Office, and the FBI, which had no idea what anybody was talking about.

"The death investigator in question," the vacuously handsome anchor of the six o'clock news reported, "has a history of problems on the job. Just over a year ago, she was part of a lawsuit against Metro Health Center alleging negligence and malpractice, which was settled out of court for a figure reported to be in the millions. Ms. Burke has worked since that time in the ER of Grace Hospital."

Which meant, of course, that Molly spent Friday morning in Gene Stavrukos's office yelling at the poor psychiatrist as if he, rather than the action news, had been the perpetrator.

"It makes me sound like a public menace!" she protested. '"Mothers, keep your children away from this woman."

"It's the press," Gene reminded her calmly. "They'll forget all about you in another week."

Molly stared at the same mountain photo she'd looked at every time she'd been there for the last twenty years. She'd inspected it so thoroughly she could almost swear she'd be able to find it just by landing at the Denver airport and walking west. Sharp, ragged peaks, a cool mountain river slicing through meadows of columbine and daisies. Aspen trees and blue spruce and a hawk high against the sun. Nirvana, Shangri-la, heaven.

The rest of the office didn't match as well as it used to. A little more tired-looking, the paint scratched, the carpet worn. A lot of grief and guilt scuffing it all up over the years.

"I just don't feel like going through this all over again, Gene."

"I know, Mol. That scab's a little too fresh to be picking at."

"I'll tell you the scab I'd like to pick," she retorted, boiling all over again, the pain and humiliation indeed too fresh to have it dissected in public. "Frank Patterson. That asshole's probably driving to work in the friggin' Mercedes he bought with the money he made off me."

"The lawyer?"

Molly had been seeing Gene during the trial, just so she could maintain her composure on the witness stand when she had to stare down the slick, carnivorous good looks of the opposing attorney.

"The lawyer," she snarled.

"He was just doing his job, too," Gene protested mildly. "Just like you. Just like me."

"Not like you or me," Molly protested immediately. "You and I are trying to help people, Gene. He's trying to retire to the Caymans."

Gene smiled, but for the first time Molly could see that he was tired, too. Worn-out like his carpet. "He's just trying to get by. It's what we all do, Mol."

Molly closed her eyes, fought surprise tears that betrayed just how much she was enjoying herself in the renewed notoriety. "I don't know, Gene."

"Yes, you do. You're a survivor, Mol. You're gonna make it through."

Molly sighed. Thought about the nightmares she'd been having every night, where she'd somehow found herself wearing her old fatigues as she tried to stem the flood of street kids who poured through the ER doors.

Well, they said you saw one war you saw 'em all.

"Yeah, Gene. I'll make it through."

"But you'd like some help?"

She sighed again. "I'd like some help."

Molly took the prescription in hand and hoped for the best.

She wondered what her best was going to be when she found a bottle matching hers at the site of her fourth lawyer suicide three days later.

Chapter 4

"Molly what are you doing here? The sun's up."

Molly squinted up to where a uniformed cop leaned against the railing on the second floor of the Gateway Motel. "I'm an investigator, Mort. Not a vampire. Pete's on vacation."

The minute she'd driven into the parking lot of the economy motel that sat just off Highway 44 near the Zoo exit, Molly had spotted the certain signs of disaster. The motel, a two-story, U-shaped prefab kind of gray-and-tan economy motel with cracked pavement and pressboard walls, had outside entry so the guests could park beneath their rooms. Halfway down the nearly deserted parking lot, a city patrol car sat at right angles to an unmarked, their radios chattering. Alongside sat a city ambulance, the lights off, the paramedics wiping sweat off their foreheads as they finished their reports. The evidence van was next to that.

The vehicles and the open door on the second floor said that something bad had happened. The fact that nobody was moving fast said that it was already too late to help.

Mort and another uniformed cop bracketed the open door. A twentyish brunette woman in slacks and a polo shirt with a walkie-talkie stood at the head of the outside concrete steps, and a thin teen with a straggly goatee and grimy Metallica T-shirt sat about two steps down, his face in his hands. Molly bet that when he lifted his face, it would be pasty. She also bet he'd been the unfortunate winner of the "Guess what's hiding behind that locked door?" award.

The police had gotten the call at 10:30 a.m. for a possible overdose. Locked, chained motel room, no answer when the maid had called. No sounds coming through the very thin walls that might have meant the guest was showering and simply couldn't hear. All the lights on, clothing strewn over the room, nobody in sight.

Or no body in sight, as the case might be.

The cleaning crew had called maintenance to get into the room. Maintenance, Molly figured, probably now wished he was working at Burger King.

Opening the van's side door, Molly yanked out the metal case. It was showtime. Today she was dressed in death investigator attire. Khaki cotton twill slacks, peach crew neck shirt, and hopsack jacket. Striding across the parking lot, she figured she looked more like she was making a sales call than a forensic search.

It was too hot to be out today. The sun hurt her eyes, and the humidity made her hair stick to the back of her neck, and it wasn't even noon. She hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. Instead, she'd repotted all her indoor ferns and plotted out the new beds she was going to plant in the fall. About four, she'd just sat out in the backyard and listened to the night.

She was paying for it now, when all she wanted to do was lie down.

"Were you the one who found her?" she asked the teen as she stopped on the stairs next to him.

He lifted his head and she won all bets. "Yes, ma'am."

Molly laid a hand on his shoulder, knowing there wasn't much more she could do for him, feeling all the same for this kid who was just trying to make his car payments with a job at the motel.

"You okay?" she asked quietly.