Bad Medicine

  Bad Medicine

  A Suspense Novel

  by

  Eileen Dreyer

  New York Times bestselling Author

  BAD MEDICINE

  Awards & Accolades

  4 ½ Stars, Gold Medal, Romantic Times Magazine

  "With her own unique blend of dark humor, complex motivations and riveting suspense, Eileen Dreyer is a very tough act to beat. Molly Burke is an extraordinary character whose life experiences have made her a woman performing a delicate balancing act with mental and emotional stability. A nerve-shattering suspense."

  ~RT Magazine

  Published by ePublishing Works!

  www.epublishingworks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61417-361-8

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  Please Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The reverse engineering, uploading, and/or distributing of this eBook via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  Copyright © 1992, 2012 by Eileen Dreyer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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  Thank You.

  Acknowledgements

  For help above and beyond the call. On the technical side: Dr. Mary Case and Mary Fran Ernst of the St. Louis County Medical Examiner's Office, who taught me how to be a good investigator. Lt. John Podolak and his always lovely wife Michelle, who never let me get away with faulty procedure. Dr. John Ponzillo, RPh, Pharm D., with special mention for coming up with the names for my drug. Always, of course, to the nurses out there who still share their stories (with special mention to Susan from McGurk's for crack cocaine) and fight the good fight.

  Any errors in the work are mine. As to the caves beneath St. Louis: there are caves, just not where I put them.

  On a professional side: A special thank-you to all the booksellers and distributors who have been out there hand-selling me when nobody knew who the heck I was, or just what it was I was doing. I couldn't have better friends in the industry. Unfortunately, I'm too big a coward to give individual names, for fear that I'm going to forget somebody. But you know who you are.

  On the personal side: it's redundant, but thank you Karyn for seeing the way when I couldn't. Thank you Carolyn and Karen for the unflagging support and enthusiasm, even when we switch ball games in the sixth inning. And always, to Rick, for not only letting me fly, but dogfight. What more could a girl ask for?

  He is not an honest man who has burned his tongue on the soup and does not tell the company that the soup is hot.

  ~Yugoslavian proverb

  Tell the truth and run.

  ~Ibid.

  Prologue

  1995

  Nobody noticed that there was something wrong with the mayor's press conference. It was a small thing, and the press was preoccupied with the breaking airline strike story at the airport, not to mention the ongoing investigation into morals charges against the Speaker of the House, on which most of them had sizeable bets. So they all slumped in the stifling room in the city hall waiting for Mayor Martell Williamson to announce who was finally going to be given the contract to open the casino on the St. Louis riverfront, and not one of them noticed who was missing.

  The citizens of the St. Louis metropolitan area didn't notice, even though they were being dished up the news live with lunch. Most St. Louisans found politics tiresome—especially city politics. It wasn't even as if it was that important an announcement. During the two years the Board of Aldermen had carried on their public and often bitter debate over the contract, some thirty riverboats had already set up business on the nearby Missouri and Meramec rivers, which were much preferable places to park and wander than north St. Louis anyway.

  Besides, it was hot out, and the people of St. Louis were far more interested in their weather than their politics. If they were even home to watch the news, instead of lurking half-submerged in one of the neighborhood pools to escape the humidity or at the stadium watching the Cardinals warm up against the Phillies, they were busy refilling their iced tea during the press conference so they wouldn't miss Wally the Weatherman telling them just when they could expect a break from the two solid weeks of hundred degree weather.

  Harry McGivers and Peg Ryan would have noticed.

  Unfortunately they were already seated at the Missouri Athletic Club Grille about a mile away, celebrating the news with their favorite scotch and pharmaceutical chaser as they waited for the star of the story to return from the press conference and fill them in.

  That was the problem. The star of the story wasn't there. Up on Hodiamont Street where she lived with her mother, Pearl Johnson had the television turned to the news conference as she drifted off to sleep. Pearl was dressed in her best nightgown and robe, buttoned neatly to her chin, her hair brushed out, and her lipstick on. Her door was locked, and her Bible was at her side. Her pill bottles were lined up along her nightstand, and they were empty, each and every one of them.

  Pearl knew what was wrong with the press conference. She was listening to her betrayal. But she wasn't really paying attention. She was too busy dying.

  Chapter 1

  The manner of death was not that unusual for St. Louis, but the tattoo certainly was.

  "Incredible," the ER physician said as he considered the man laid out on his cart.

  "Impressive," the respiratory therapist agreed.

  A roomful of people nodded in awe.

  Considering how busy the shift was running at the Grace Hospital emergency department on this hot summer night, there was quite a crowd in the trauma room, even for the extent of the injury evident along the left side of the victim's forehead. Possible gunshot wound had been the call. Definite gunshot wound was the diagnosis, as evidenced by the police report, the absence of a good portion of skin and bone from the young man's left temple, and the scattering of suspicious opaque objects visible throughout the man's skull films that were even now displayed on the viewer at the other end of the room.

  But the attention at the moment was not on the method of injury or its obvious effects on the patient's cardiovascular system, which had shut down operations shortly after the introduction of a concentrated load of buckshot to his face. It was instead focused on the sight uncovered when one of the trauma nurses threw back the ambulance sheet in a vain effort to insert a Foley catheter into the patient's bladder . The nurse, a new graduate without much experience in the real world, let out a squeal. From that moment on, the focus of the trauma team wandered from the ABCs of resuscitation to the XYs of the chromosome.

  For there, tattooed along the shaft of the victim's penis, ran brilliant flames of orange, blue, and red.

  "Redefines the term hot rod," one of the paramedics offered.

  "Smokin' good time."

  The med nurse snorted. "Probably closer to flaming dick, you ask me."

  "It's better than the question mark," the emergency department physician admitted.

  All nodded, having seen the question mark no more than a week earlier under similar circumstances. A simple blue tattoo etched along the shaft of another once-working penis, it had raised, if nothing else, a host of questions.

  "Is it a statement?" they'd all asked upon seeing it. Maybe a gang identifier. A gay identifier. A message to the owner's date, or a prediction of his talents. That young man with the tattoo had ended up being shipped to the medical examiner's office without answering any of the questions.

  This time, the crew didn't think there was any question at all about what the statement was.

  "Time of death?" somebody called.

  "I think," the physician answered, "the proper term would be flameout."

  The nurse nodded agreeably. "Time of flameout?"

  "11:02 P.M."

  "Do we know what MIG managed to shoot this young flier down?"

  "Enemy pilot is in custody," one of the cops obliged as he recorded the time in his notebook.

  Positioned by the door so that she could watch the entire room, Molly Burke made a similar notation on the code flow sheet that recorded this action for medical and legal posterity. "Would that be his wife or her husband?" she asked.

  Molly was a petite woman with short mahogany hair, restless hands, and a wealth of crow's-feet crowding the edges of sharp brown eyes. Older than almost everyone else in the room by at least a decade, she considered herself an optimist because sights like the one on the cart still surprised her.

  "His wife," the cop said. "Must have suspected something, because the girlfriend says she never heard the shotgun being racked. The wife must have locked and loaded before she broke open the door."

  Molly nodded absently, a forearm u
p to wipe damp hair off her forehead. "I like a woman who thinks ahead. Are you going to have somebody break the news to her that he didn't make it?"

  The cop laughed, a dry, knowing sound. "You kiddin'? She told us. And I quote, Now that whore-fuckin', scum-sucking son of a bitch ain't gonna hit me no more.'"

  Molly looked at the remains on the cart, imagined the scene. Nodded. "Okay."

  "I don't guess he's a lawyer," somebody said hopefully. They had had two lawyers come in dead in the last week. Since everything tended to run in threes, the staff was particularly interested in making this hat trick. Even though the other two had been suicides, no one really minded rounding out the count with murder. Lawyers were almost as popular in emergency departments as the man who invented managed-care insurance.

  Molly considered the victim's long hair, bad teeth, and cracked, stained fingernails. "Not unless he went to the Wal-Mart School of Law."

  "It's possible," the physician retorted. "I'm pretty sure that's where my divorce lawyer trained."

  "You know how to tell a lawyer from a vulture?" Molly asked, going back to her notes. "Removable wing tips."

  "Molly's ex-husband was a lawyer," the physician told the chuckling crowd.

  "No," Molly demurred with feeling. "My ex-lawyer was a lawyer."

  There was nothing left to do for the body on the cart except report his demise to the death investigator on duty for the city. Still, not any of the twenty or so people crowded into the littered, humid trauma room could seem to move. The intercom announced the arrival of two new patients, and outside the work lane door a security guard pounded down the hall. It wasn't enough to incite the team to action. Sasha Petrovich, on the other hand, was. Leaning her considerable blond self in the door, the evening charge nurse dispatched a withering glare on the assembled crew.

  "I give up," she said. "We're posing for a commemorative stamp?"

  "Look," the respiratory therapist said in explanation.

  Sasha looked. Then she lifted an expressive eyebrow in comment. "If he were Russian," she said simply, "he'd have had room to include the logs and fireplace in that picture. Now, everybody come out and play."

  It wasn't the order so much as the tone of voice. People began pouring out of the room like water over a dam break. The rookie nurse pulled the sheet back over the patient and the physician handed Molly the braided blue ball cap that designated him Code Captain, thereby officially ending his responsibilities. Molly set the hat on its official place on the crash cart, gathered her paperwork, and followed him out the door. She was the only one to catch Sasha grinning.

  Whenever Molly thought of the ER, she thought of noise. Not sights or smells or actions. Just constant, ululating cacophony, like a rock concert. Tonight was the same. Babies wailing, kids on crack shouting, phones ringing, radios crackling, sirens worrying at the darkness outside. Half a dozen arguments raging along the hallways so the whole of it sounded like a Mozart octet on acid, everybody singing a different song at the same time, and you were supposed to figure out what was going on.

  The difference was, Mozart kept it on key. And Mozart would never have written a tune for The Diver.

  Molly stopped dead in her tracks at the distinctive sound. "Oh, great," she said with a scowl. "The backup band's here."

  The Diver was one of their regulars, an old black man who lived in condemned housing down the road and rolled in regularly about two weeks after the welfare checks came in and his supply of Thunderbird ran out. The Diver made a constant, God-awful whooping noise, like the claxons on submarines, that never slowed, never stopped until they managed to turf him upstairs to the floor where they could snow him until they could safely get him back out the door again.

  "And he's asking for you to do harmony," Sasha informed her. "We also got the call from City 235. There's a lot of popping and banging over by Terrell Street. We should be getting business anytime soon."

  Molly grimaced. "Just in time for me to get the paperwork when I change into my investigator's tights. What a happy thought."

  Molly, a twenty-year veteran of the emergency wars, was also the newest part-time death investigator in the city, which meant that after a code team walked out of a room like the one in which Mr. O'Halloran still lay, they called her to figure out what to do next. Her shift tonight began thirty minutes after she escaped this circus at eleven-thirty. If she was lucky.

  Sasha was not impressed. "Serves you right for trying to run with the big dogs. The big dogs have more paperwork and worse hours."

  "And lousier pay," Molly agreed, spreading the paperwork she'd just collected across the nearest desk so she could finish this mess before diving into another.

  "Then why do you do it?" Lorenzo demanded as he unloaded a nest of EKG strips onto the desk from the code. Lorenzo, Molly's favorite tech, was about a hundred pounds stretched over almost seven feet, ebony dark, and on his way to med school, courtesy of a fiery grandmother and a sensible set of Jesuits who had pressed him with a full scholarship. "Isn't working here hassle enough? You got to go out looking for trouble?"

  Molly grinned. "I just like riding around in that big van that says medical examiner's office on it. Guys whistle at me at all the stoplights."

  Rearranging name tags on the flow board over Molly's head, Sasha lowered herself to a snort. "You just like hanging around strapping young men with guns."

  Molly dealt paperwork across her desk like cards. "No. If that were the case, I'd hang around with the highway patrol. Now, they're strapping." Especially since Molly barely topped five-one in her tennis shoes, and Missouri Highway Patrol officers seemed to have a height requirement of at least six-foot-four. Molly spent a lot of time at accident scenes looking up noses.

  An X-ray tech scuttled by, arms filled with large manila brown folders. "Molly, your lady in four's back from X ray. She needs to be cleaned up again."

  Molly didn't bother to look up. "I'll pay you a dollar to do it for me, Suze."

  "Not if she were rich and you were famous. You goin' with us tomorrow?"

  A good percentage of the evening shift had booked a ride on one of the riverboats to go gambling the next night. Molly was not one of them.

  "Thanks, no, hon. I owe enough money as it is. I'll wait until they untangle all the politics downtown and build that new complex by the riverfront."

  "You mean when hell freezes over," Sasha offered.

  Molly tossed a chart to the surgeon and collected lab reports on two of her other patients.

  "It's untangled," Suze retorted.

  Molly looked up, surprised. "What do you mean? I didn't hear anything."

  "This very afternoon. The mayor gave in and awarded the contract to that hotel group from Chicago. They're going to break ground for the casino in October."

  Molly hadn't heard a thing. But then, Molly had been here since noon, and hiding in her backyard before that. "Call me when it's built," she told the X-ray tech.

  "Spoilsport."

  "I prefer the term realist. Who's death investigator on?" Molly yelled across to the secretary's station.

  "You work there," Karla snapped back. "Don't you have the schedule?"

  "I have my schedule, and I'm not on it till midnight."

  "It's only another hour. We won't tell anybody you forgot to call."

  "Karla!"

  Karla made it a point to answer in a near-whisper. "Vic Fellows."

  Molly groaned. Great. Mr. We Never Have Enough Paperwork himself. An ex-homicide cop with an old ax to grind, Vic spent his time making sure that he came up with one more question to ask than anyone had the answer for. Just what Molly needed right now.

  "Call him!" she yelled anyway, deciding that she wasn't about to let him off the hook just because he annoyed her. The way this night was shaping up, she'd have enough forms of her own to fill out before the end of her own eight-hour shift down at the medical examiner's office.

  To the right of the secretary's station, the radio sputtered to life. "Grace, this is City 235. Grace, 235 calling Code Three."