Bad Medicine (4 page)

"I've already got The Diver in there."

"Well, he's the only one in here who won't notice that the body next to him isn't breathing. And would you ask one of the other techs to clean up my lady in twelve? I'll treat 'em to a drink later. Lorenzo!"

"On my way!" he yelled, hands already full of fluids and IV lines as he loped toward the room.

Molly was going to have to get in to see Gene soon. She just couldn't take it like this if the rest of the summer didn't slow up. She needed to sleep. It was worse this time than it had ever been. But then, there were more kids dying this summer, and that was what always set her off. At least, that was what her psychiatrist told her. And Gene hadn't been wrong about her yet.

But for now, she ran.

"Lorenzo, get us set up," she instructed, bringing her paperwork right back into the still-cluttered trauma room and pulling out more. Knowing right in her gut that she was going to be in charge of this little boy, both now and later when she changed clothes and jobs. It made her want to vomit.

* * *

She waited to do that until it was all over. Right between the time they pronounced Tyrell donor organs and the moment Molly had to assume both her position as trauma nurse and death investigator and walk into the quiet room to tell his young mother and his young grandmother that Tyrell had been sacrificed to a gang feud.

She was bent over the toilet when Lance Frost found her. "Molly?" he called through the door to the john. "What are you doing in there?"

Molly straightened from where she'd emptied her empty stomach into the can and grabbed a couple of paper towels. "Making my editorial comment for the evening."

"Well, check your watch, because we have another gift for you out here."

Molly checked her watch. It read that she'd been on the city's payroll for some twenty minutes.

* * *

"This isn't any DOA," she said five minutes later as she stood in the doorway to trauma room six, where another small crowd had gathered. "She was DRT. LLT."

On the cart lay a large, probably middle-aged black woman in a state of almost complete rigor mortis, which meant two things. She was definitely Molly's problem, and she definitely should not have been brought into an ER. Not when she was stiff enough to have been lying in one position for at least ten hours.

So she hadn't been DOA, which meant dead on arrival. She'd been DRT. LLT. Paramedic terminology for Dead Right There. Long, Long Time.

"I really appreciate your bringing my work to me," Molly said, still drying her hands as she turned on the very nervous paramedic team. "But I prefer to see only my almost-dead bodies here. The really dead ones do better at the morgue. It's less confusing that way."

"You think I was gonna argue with that family and tell 'em I wasn't gonna bring their little girl here?" one of the paramedics demanded. "Don't you know who that is?"

The truth was that Molly hadn't even bothered to look. She'd quickly scanned the scene, taken in the body, the nightclothes, the stack of brand-new empty pill bottles that shared the Mayo stand with an empty bottle of gin, and she'd come up with an assumption of suicide.

Her first thought had been that if they had any more dead bodies in this ER tonight, they were going to have to take out a mortuary permit. Her second was that she'd rather wade through a pile of trauma victims than one suicide. She hated suicides.

"No," she admitted, tossing the paper towels in the trash and stepping in. "I don't know who it is. Who—"

Molly stopped just as fast as she'd started. Her dropping jaw must have given her away.

"Uh-huh." Her paramedic friend nodded emphatically. "Uh
–huh
."
'

"Oh." Molly groaned, sensing imminent disaster. "This isn't good. It isn't good at all. What's the story?"

The second paramedic, an easygoing, soft-spoken black guy named Dwayne with just about as much experience as Molly, shrugged equably. "We found her just like this, decked out in her best Come-to-Jesus clothes. Mother said she was up in her room for about twenty hours before anybody thought to look. Said she'd been a little down lately, but says her child wouldn't do this. Definitely did not want to admit that she was dead."

"It'll come to her," Lance offered.

Dwayne was right about the clothing. It looked like their victim had pulled out her best nightie. A classic sign in women. For some reason, they traditionally preferred dressing up for that last ride out.

Molly had a bad feeling about this. She really did. She decided, looking down on those half-open, staring eyes, that she should have called Gene while she'd had the chance.

"Lorenzo," she said. "Get my keys out of my purse. In my trunk is a metal case. Bring it in, will ya?"

Lorenzo knew all about that case, which held all the equipment Molly carried into a death scene to do her job. He nodded and headed back out the door.

"Who is it?" Sasha asked as she let Lorenzo by her in the doorway, not interested in entering the room far enough to get her scrubs dirty if she didn't have to.

Since she lived out in the county, which was separate from and had as little contact with the city as possible, and since she preferred watching anything rather than news, Sasha's ignorance could be excused. Sasha had never seen the protracted City Council meetings that were such a daily part of city life. She'd never watched the interviews about funding for stadiums or housing projects or juvenile rehabilitation. She had not, no matter what had been splattered all over the news, watched the details of the public fight over gambling on the St. Louis riverfront.

Molly had. Moreover, she'd attended some of those meetings, been involved in some of those arguments herself. She knew perfectly well that every one of those meetings and fights and the political influence in town would change forever, because the woman lying on her cart was named Pearl Johnson.

"Why, me?" she protested, rubbing at throbbing temples.

"You can see the meds she had there," Dwayne offered next to her. "We brought everything we found in the bedroom, so there wouldn't be a question. Even the stuff that rolled under the bed."

Molly nodded absently. "Thanks. Did you... uh..."

"Try and resuscitate her?" Dwayne asked. "No. The lady wanted a little dignity, who are we to argue? We gave the folks a good show, but we really didn't touch her."

Molly nodded again. For the first time, she heard the rhythmic dip and rise of voices outside, a couple of women, maybe. A man. Praying. After all this time working in disaster zones, Molly knew the sound too well.

"Who
is
it?" Sasha repeated, her throaty voice straining to remain civil.

"Our third lawyer of the month," Molly allowed, pulling out a pair of gloves and assuming her new identity as death investigator.

"Her?" Dwayne demanded, taking another look down at his patient as if she'd lied to him. "Really?"

"Really."

Sasha tried one more time. "Who is she?"

"You know the decision they made today to let the gambling complex be built by the Chicago group over the express protests of the mayor?" Molly asked, stepping on in to do her first quick evaluation of the body on the cart.

"Yeah. So?"

"Did you know that the person who won that fight with the mayor about who was going to build the riverfront complex was the city comptroller, or that the mayor had been accusing the comptroller of taking kickbacks and the comptroller's been accusing the mayor of being shortsighted and stupid?"

"Okay, if you say so. Why?"

Molly looked up. "Sasha. Meet the comptroller."

Chapter 2

She found the suicide note when she was checking the pockets of Pearl's robe. By then everybody else had vacated the room, leaving it just to the death investigator and her client. Molly could hear the babble of voices gather in the work lane as the word spread about who was in this room, still heard the drone of supplication out in the public hallway from those who already knew. She smelled the sour aroma of fresh death and felt the utter stillness of her subject. Taking a deep breath, she snapped on her gloves and began the search she was obliged to make of the body for any signs of violence, any needle marks. Any surprises that didn't fit the scenario.

Any note, which might have been slipped into a robe pocket to be found after it was all over.

The paramedics hadn't needed a note to make their tentative diagnosis. Just the drugs. Six empty prescription bottles for everything from Elavil to Robaxin, which was a muscle relaxant. A small baggie of leftovers, the pills and capsules looking like the beads of a broken, brightly colored necklace. Pink and green and a bright, almost neon blue Molly didn't recognize that seemed too pretty to be deadly. The only surviving evidence of the fact that Pearl must have been swallowing pills by the handsful for a good half hour.

Molly didn't want to think about it. She'd always liked Pearl, a self-made woman from the bad side of town. A pusher, a shover, in the mostly male world of St. Louis politics. Well connected, as any politician expecting lifetime employment in this neck of the woods had to be. Her uncle's best friend was the Speaker of the Missouri House, which controlled a lot of the city budget and all of its police department. Her mother's sister's brother-in-law ran the multimillion-dollar convention complex.

Her fights, though, had all been to benefit her city. Her neighborhood. Her friends, who still lived next to crack houses and feared to let their children out as far as a school bus. She'd fought for the right reasons, no matter whom she'd taken on.

At least, that was what Molly had thought until she found the note. Folded up as neatly as a love note, handwritten in a clear, calm penmanship that betrayed the quiet determination of the act.

The peacemaker made me see the light. Oh, it did,
Pearl's note read.
And I can't live with it. The ends don't justify the means. Never, never, never. I slept with snakes, and his name was William T. Peterson. I got bit. I'm sorry, Mama. Forgive me.

She had slept with snakes. Molly wasn't sure what it meant. She recognized the name William Peterson from somewhere, but she couldn't immediately place it. She had a feeling, though, that he was going to turn out to be trouble with a capital T. Otherwise, Molly couldn't imagine Pearl killing herself to make amends.

Her poor mama.

Now Molly was going to have to go and walk Pearl's mama to the quiet room, and she was going to have to tell her that yes, Pearl really was dead, and she was going to have to pick at her memories and her picture of her daughter to discover why.

Molly really,
really
hated suicides.

"Molly," Lorenzo said, sticking his head in the doorway to drop off her battered silver case. "Here's your stuff. You gonna finish Tyrell, or should somebody else do it?"

"Tyrell." Molly stared at the tech as if he were speaking in Farsi. "What..."

It said something for how long Molly had already been on that it took her so long to remember the job she'd left unfinished.

"Oh, shit. His mother."

She still had Tyrell's blood on the surgical gown she hadn't changed out of. Still had her goggles hanging around her neck from when she'd pulled them down in her hurry to get away from that crowded room and its lonely little occupant. She couldn't face his mother and grandmother this way.

Pearl's mother was going to have to wait.

Another mother. It seemed, sometimes, that this city only had mothers left to grieve. But that wasn't something Molly wanted to think about now, either.

"Is anybody in with them?" she asked, stripping clothing and throwing it in laundry baskets until she was left wearing her scrubs.

"Sasha was in, but you know how well she handles this stuff."

Molly's laugh was dry. Sasha did not believe in death. It was merely an inconvenience in her otherwise perfect schedule.

"Okay. Have the doc meet me in there to break the news. If anybody else needs me, tell 'em they just have to wait. Tell Beth to call down to the ME's office and transfer my calls here for now."

Molly picked up a white lab coat as she passed the last door of the work lane on her way to quiet room one. In the nurse's lounge, the new shift was setting down their stuff on the way out to wade into the high tide of trauma. The hall still ricocheted with activity. Sasha was fielding two separate radio calls on incoming patients. Outside on the streets, the bars hadn't even let out yet. There wasn't a hope in hell things would settle down until at least three.