Bad Medicine (34 page)

"And you think Transcend smells wrong."

"That's the best way I can put it. It's like the cops are always telling me. Look for what
doesn't
belong at a scene. Those pills didn't belong with any of those victims. At least I don't think so."

"And what do you think this means?"

This was the crux of the phone call. The crux of everything she'd been doing for the last twenty-four hours. "I don't know," she admitted. "There's just so much going on. I mean, first I have to find out how they got hold of the medicine. Was somebody in the program and decided to share the wealth? Was this the free gift Peg's dealer was handing out with cocaine? Did one of them roll a drug salesman? And what the hell does it have to do with their suicides?"

"You do think it was suicide."

"I do think it was suicide. At least one of them was on Prozac. We could have an old-fashioned drug interaction situation on our hands, especially if these five were taking medicine they weren't supposed to."

"Then why the threats?"

"I don't know that either. But I'm going to find out."

"Why?"

Molly ignored another round of ringing. She even ignored the fact that Magnum finally seemed to have had enough and started barking at the noise. She couldn't believe what Frank had just said.

"What?"

"Why go to all this trouble, Molly? It was suicide. Leave it at that."

"When was the last time you were thrown out of a speeding van into the trash, Frank?"

"Probably the last divorce case I handled. Pardon me for sounding thick, but isn't that all the more reason to see things their way?"

"I'll tell you something, Frank," she admitted. "I'm tired. I've been called a liar and a thief, I'm held captive in a house I hate by people I don't respect, and I've lost some of the income I needed to get by since I was raped by a certain lawyer I know in full view of a civil courts judge. I just want to do my job and go home. This is my job."

"You're a nurse," he said. "Not a detective."

Molly felt an odd chill at his choice of words. The words her kidnappers had used. "Well, I don't have a hell of a lot of choice, now, do I? The detectives are busy protecting their own asses."

For a second, all she heard from Frank's end was silence. Her end was full with the hum of outdoor gatherings. Magnum was growling again.

"Molly," he finally said, his voice for once dead serious, "I don't know how many ways to tell you this. Remember that cute little kid I brought with me the other day? I'm attached to her. I don't want to hurt her. I especially don't want her going through having another parent die. And I don't want her to go through that simply because you're trying to redeem yourself for fucking up in the Wiedeman case. Take a nap, Molly. Adopt a pagan baby. Leave this mess alone before it burns the both of us."

Molly had been ambushed so many times by now, she felt like a wagon train in Kansas. Still, this one hurt. It hurt like hell.

"Oh, Frank," she said, her voice so low even the puppy lifted his head. "And here I was actually beginning to believe you might be human."

"Never jump to conclusions, Saint Molly."

She knew she shouldn't say it. She shouldn't have to. She couldn't help it. "I did not fuck up the Wiedeman case."

"Of course you did. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gone after you."

"You son of a bitch," she hissed. "What do you know? What the hell do you know about what happened that night?"

Molly thought she couldn't have been more angry. She could. She found that out when, of all things, Frank laughed. "The way I figure it, Mol, you were just trying to get through your shift that night. Trying to get by. You had a doctor on who was an ass and a patient who came in every three weeks for one complaint after another, each one of them more trouble than the last. You didn't take her seriously, so you didn't do a full-court press to get her treated, because you had to live with the doc after she left."

"I broke the skin on my knuckles trying to get him out of that door."

"All the same," he said. "You could have done something. You could have called his supervisor or one of the other doctors on. You could really have started the tests yourself. You know it, and that's what makes you so mad at me. 'Cause I know it, too."

Molly struggled to keep her voice even. "I guess I wasted my time, Frank. Forget I called."

"Molly—"

"Just one thing, though. So I'm covered. I found Pearl's suicide note, the one that started this whole thing. It was in the office of the medical examiner."

"Why are you telling me?"

"I don't know. Just in case. I haven't said anything to anybody else until I hear from her about it."

"And you haven't heard."

"No."

He sighed, and Molly wondered why the hell his voice sounded so much like a parent's. "Oh, Saint Molly," he said mournfully. "I was right the first time. You shouldn't be let loose alone."

Molly hung up the phone and walked out her back door. Two newsmen tried to scramble over her fence. She closed the door and stood in her kitchen, in the house she hated so much. She was cornered. Furious and exhausted and alone. There was no one to call and scream at, no way to vent her anger. No friend she could ask for help.

In the end, all she had were the rest of her mother's cookbooks. Heavy, elaborate works culled straight from the great chefs of Europe. Leather-bound and gilt-lettered and rare. Molly picked one up and heaved it. She heaved another one. She didn't even notice her dog cower under the table behind her as she threw and threw again.

She kept heaving the books until there was a pile and Magnum crouched beneath the table whimpering, and each time she threw, she told herself that Frank Patterson couldn't possibly have understood how Mrs. Wiedeman had died. She threw and she sobbed and she swore, because she'd almost begun to trust Frank and he'd betrayed her. He'd told her the truth.

Chapter 17

"Are you crazy?"

Molly looked up from where she was reading her mail to find Sasha glaring at her from the doorway of the nurses' lounge. "It's been suggested at one time or another. What's the matter this time?"

"What's the matter?" Sasha echoed in high dudgeon as she swept the rest of the way into the lounge. "What's the
matter?
Are you actually telling me that you had two sick days left, and you failed to take them? Do you realize that that is an offense punishable by hanging?"

Molly went back to her mail. "Go right ahead. I probably wouldn't notice."

The halls outside the lounge had patients stacked in them like cordwood. Gunshots, accidents, high fevers, DTs. Tattoos and body odor, foul language, and at least three concealed weapons. At one end of the hall, a pregnant woman was in four-point restraints so she wouldn't rip through her stomach with her bare hands to get at the baby inside she insisted was Satan. Full moon fever at its finest.

All Molly had been able to think about upon catching her first assessing glance was that there was enough murder and mayhem on these halls to last her a lifetime. She could keep busy, fill up her eight-and ten-and twelve-hour shifts each and every day with the detritus of humanity that walked, crawled, and slithered through the doors into triage and get her paycheck without ever again putting in extra time or extra effort or extra tears. After all these years of working at it, it seemed stupid she hadn't figured that out yet.

She hadn't. Not even after what she'd put up with today.

She'd spent the hours until work praying that the press would leave her alone. For the president to declare war on some third world country or a rock star to be caught committing murder so the hard light of attention would focus itself somewhere else. But there had been no hard news. Nothing more interesting than the possible scandal in the city government and the woman the mayor was now calling a "rogue" in a trusted position.

She'd answered the phone every time it rang just in case she'd find Winnie on the other end, only to find more press. She'd cleaned the broken books off her kitchen floor and reminded herself that the last person on this earth she should trust was a lawyer.

Just like the good old days. Fighting her way through a pack of cameras just to get to her car, isolated and vilified and branded with the word
alleged.
"Just what was your relationship with the comptroller?" they'd asked. "We understand you have priceless artwork and antiques in that house, Ms. Burke. Exactly how do you afford that on a nurse's salary?"

Unanswerable questions from an uninterested press. Silence from the employers who should have supported her and attacks from people who didn't really know her. Raised eyebrows and quick assumptions in a circus atmosphere. Nothing new under the sun.

And now, Sasha was standing over her like the lord high executioner demanding more answers she didn't have. "Does this have something to do with that other job problem?"

Molly actually laughed. "What a nice way of putting it. No, it has to do with the fact that I'd rather be here than trapped inside that house listening to reporters make up my life. Besides, I found out something interesting in those five suicides, and I want to find out what it means. Is Chicken Soup on tonight?"

"Frost?" Sasha asked. "Yeah. He's due in soon. What suicides?" The minute she said it, she realized what it meant. "The lawyers?"

Molly nodded, folding away the letter she'd just scanned and placing it with its three identical mates in her bag.

"And?"

Molly looked up. "And what?"

Sasha looked truly confused. "What's the point? We are talking lawyers, aren't we?"

"I know I'm disappointing you," Molly said. "Hell. I'm disappointing myself. Especially after I opened my mail. Do you know that it has been about seventy-two hours since I got scooped off the parking lot, and I had four letters in my mail today—four—from lawyers who are salivating over the prospect of suing the hospital for me for only a thirty-three percent fee? And Frank wonders why lawyers have such a bad reputation."

"And you want to help them."

"It's my tragic flaw. I can't leave well enough alone."

"Well, that's the God's honest truth. You look like hell, ya know."

She knew. She felt like it. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

Sasha reached into her lab coat for her illegal pack of cigarettes. "I just don't want you dropping over one of the patients in the middle of a code."

Molly picked up the phone and dialed psychiatry.

The unit answered, a vague-sounding woman who wanted to know what she could do for Molly.

"Is Ms. Harlow on this afternoon?" Molly asked, and then ignored the expression on Sasha's face. Haldol Harlow, as the psych supervisor was fondly referred to, was a nursing recruiter's worst nightmare. Petty, surly, protective, and unforgiving, she looked more like a two-hundred-pound sack of cement than a legendary screen star, unless it was the great white in
Jaws.
Nonetheless, Ms. Harlow was the one with the skinny on what was going on in her unit. Ms. Harlow was the first person Molly had to talk to.

* * *

"I'm sorry," Ms. Harlow said twenty minutes later as Molly sat before her desk in an office decorated in dozens of Precious Moments posters. "I can't give you that information."

"General information," Molly nudged with what she hoped was a bright smile. "We had a patient downstairs Dr. Stavrakos put on Transcend, and I wanted to know what his prognosis was."

"A patient..."

"Allan Betelman. The duckman."

Ms. Harlow did everything but get red. But then, Ms. Harlow was the classic example of the staff needing the treatment more than the patients. Ms. Harlow had been married three times, two of them to patients. She'd also been through a gross of twelve steps. Probably not a bad candidate for Transcend herself.

"Nobody ever tells us anything," Molly all but whined. "We treat people and then we never know what the long-term prognosis is. From what I hear about this Transcend, we're going to be handing it out like aspirin inside three months' time, and I wanted to be prepared for once."

"Not even that long," Ms. Harlow informed her as if Molly had given a wrong answer in Pharmacology 101. "The study is wrapping up now."