Bad Medicine Page 2

  "Shit," three people snapped in unison.

  More trauma. Gunshots, undoubtedly. Summer in the city.

  Molly needed something for the headache she was brewing. Sasha strolled for the sputtering equipment as if answering a social call, and Suze trotted on back to X ray before anybody could ask her to help out.

  From the other end of the hall, Lance Frost tossed a paper airplane that skimmed the top of Molly's hair and stuck into the corner of the PDR at her elbow.

  "I'm telling you, Molly," he prodded, just as he had all evening. Just as he had for the four years Molly had known him. "It's easy money."

  Dr. Lance Frost, a veteran of more ERs than Molly, had never quite made his certification in Emergency Medicine. He didn't see the need, since his fortune would surely come from any one of the great and fantastic money-making ideas Lance was always conjuring up while lying in the call room. Considering the disproportionate relationship of his girth to his wallet, it was well-known that Lance was better at the position than the inspiration.

  Lance also had the questionable distinction of being known as Chicken Soup behind his back for his distinctive brand of body odor, which was cleared up about as often as his credit rating.

  "Dr. Frost's Fishy Food," he said, rubbing at his impressive belly like a free-market Buddha. "Just think of it."

  "No thanks," Molly answered without looking up. "I'm doing Chinese tonight."

  That was if she ever ate. If things didn't slow down out there, she'd be driving the medical examiner's van through the drive-up window at McDonald's on the way to answer a homicide call. She was hungry, she ached to her hips from running the halls, and she didn't imagine she was going to get any time off until at least dawn.

  "Come on, Molly," Lance Frost wheedled, as if she'd ever given in before. "I already have the perfect formula, and fish are going to be the pets of the future. We can make a fortune. All we need is salesmanship."

  "I don't want a fortune, Lance."

  Lance laughed as if Molly were the funniest thing he'd ever heard. "I'm serious. Come on, you're single. You have that expendable cash and no one to spend it on but me. I mean, you're not gonna do something dumb at your age like have kids or anything, are you?"

  Filling in the particulars on the ME's questionnaire, Molly ignored him. Lance wasn't cruel, just thoughtless. A fine trait in a trauma physician. No, Molly wasn't going to have kids or anything. But that wasn't a subject she broached with anyone, especially Lance Frost.

  "I thought you were investing in that new experimental drug the hospital's testing," she said without looking up, "You know, the one that will make Prozac obsolete."

  Of course, every new antidepressant that hit the market was touted as the one that was going to make Prozac obsolete, but that was beside the point with Lance.

  "I'm gonna be in gravy in a year," he said. "I would have preferred to be their front man. You know, the team researcher who gives the official party line to the medical masses about how wonderful the product is in exchange for only a small fortune and free travel. But I didn't get into psych fast enough. Besides, fish food is fast return on your money. And I don't have to share it with corporate bigs."

  "Maybe next time, Lance."

  "What's wrong with a little success, Molly?" he demanded, seriously offended by her disapproval. "Tell me that. Why shouldn't we get ours?"

  "Molly doesn't have any money," Karla insisted from behind her protective barrier. "She's got all that legal stuff to pay off, Lance. You know that."

  Karla, on the other hand, was cruel. She didn't like Molly. She didn't like nurses or doctors or anybody who gave her work or made more money than she. As always, Molly ignored her too. The lawsuit was another matter entirely.

  A little more than a year ago, an emergency physician at a prestigious county hospital had decided that hiding in the bathroom would keep him from having to hear about the new patient Molly wanted him to see. It had. In the end, it hadn't mattered one bit to the jury that Molly had done everything but break down the bathroom door to get to him. The patient's family's lawyer had convinced them that it had been just as much Molly's fault as everybody else's that the patient had eventually had a stroke and died, even though she'd come in complaining of abdominal pain.

  "Oh, God," Lance whispered. "That's right. The lawsuit." Said like other people said cancer. "Where does it stand?"

  "Stand?" Molly retorted easily. "It doesn't have to stand. For that kind of money, it can sit wherever it wants."

  "Vic Fellows, line four," Karla called out.

  From one treat to another. Molly picked up the phone. "Hello, Vic. It's Molly."

  "You couldn't have just shelved this until you came on?" was his answer. "For God's sake, it's not even an hour."

  Molly ignored that too, and told him the particulars of the case. As investigator, he would take all the information, make sure the body got to the city morgue, and then coordinate the case with the medical examiner, the lab, and the police. Vic spent the time while Molly spoke making disparaging grunts and sighs. That is, until she gave him the capper.

  "He has a tattoo, Vic."

  Silence. Molly knew just where to get Vic. He was the tattoo collector on the team. A necessary position, a vital clue in identification of some of their less-obvious victims. Vic just enjoyed his task a little too much.

  "Better than the question mark?"

  Vic had taken to the question mark like Champollion to the Rosetta Stone, certain it meant something they couldn't fathom. He'd been driving everybody nuts with it.

  "Easier to figure out."

  "What is it?" he demanded.

  Molly thought of the double take the trauma surgeon had done at the unveiling and smiled. "You'll see."

  "All right, then," he said, suddenly enthusiastic.

  Well, Molly figured. Everybody had to have a hobby. She would have preferred porcelain frogs, herself.

  "Method of death?"

  Not a question Vic should be asking at this point. Not one Molly should technically answer. The method of death, by what vehicle the victim died, was pretty obvious, although it should never go in a death investigator's report that way. When she was a nurse, Molly had a lot more leeway to say "Possible gunshot wound to the forehead." As a death investigator, she could only go so far as, "four centimeter defect to left temporal region of skull with tissue and bone loss, exposed brain matter." The city figured that since it paid those big bucks to have a forensic pathologist on staff, it should give the doctor the honor of classifying that defect as being the result of a bullet. Or pellets, as the case might be.

  "Big load of buckshot to the left temporal artery," she said anyway, hoping Vic would have the sense not to make that an official statement.

  The next question, the only other one of interest to the Medical Examiner's Office, was manner of death. The manner of death was defined as why that tissue and bone was missing. What—or who—put that gun to that forehead. The four basic classifications were natural, accidental, homicide, suicide. And not one should be determined before all results were in.

  "Manner of death?" Vic asked, just as Molly knew he would. Another question that was not theirs to answer.

  "Woman scorned in the first degree."

  Woman Scorned, of course, being the subheading B to manner type three.

  Vic took it like a professional. "I hate when that happens."

  "Molly!"

  Molly whipped around at the sharp sound of Sasha's voice.

  "We need your room. Peds is bustin' out, and we gotta eight-year-old coming in. Drive-by to the neck."

  "Send transport for our man," Molly told Vic, who was already sputtering in protest, not yet having heard what the victim had for lunch, or what his mother had worn to her wedding. "Gotta go."

  "Stick him in holding," she informed Sasha, already on her feet, adrenaline honing the edge of the anxiety that always lived in her chest.

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

&nb
sp; "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 sig
ns 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.