Chapter 8

 

"Jesus Christ, Burke. Hold it still!"

"I can't! The goddamn ground's shaking!"

Just to prove it, another rocket hit, taking with it the lights. She was on her knees in the mud, in the red mud that looked more like blood than anything pumping out of these bodies, and it just didn't stop.

"Can you clamp that artery for me?"

She couldn't even see the artery. The generator was on, but the feeble light didn't help. Blood pumped so hard it hit the lights. The table was damn near on the ground, and they were on their knees so they could protect themselves from the shelling that shattered the windows and pulled the ground out from under them. Operating in flak jackets and helmets, on their goddamn knees in the goddamn dark, and she was supposed to see a blood vessel.

"Molly! Clamp it!"

"I'm clamping, damn it, but the blood won't stop!"

"Aren't you guys finished yet?" the medic screamed from the door. "We've got a full house out here, and more coming in!"

Another rocket hit, and even the generator went out.

"Flashlights!"

"Can you see it?"

"What's he doing? How's his pressure?"

"Molly!"

"I can't get it clamped! I can still feel the blood!"

"Molly!"

"Somebody get me a goddamn light so I can see this fucking artery!"

"Molly, hey!"

At first, Molly couldn't figure out why Kevin McCaully was in Pleiku. Then she couldn't figure out why he was in her bedroom. The kinks in her back should have tipped her off. No place was more uncomfortable to stretch out on than the couch in the death investigator's parlor. And Molly, who usually pulled nights in the office, had done her share of time on its cracked black Naugahyde cushions.

It was probably just that when he looked down at her, Kevin was surrounded by a nimbus of sunlight. Molly didn't equate the couch with sunlight. But then, she didn't equate Pleiku with the sun either. Only the mud. The damn mud she could still smell twenty years later.

"They've called your number down at the counter," he said with a quiet grin.

Molly yawned and did her best to hide the shakes that always followed her away from a dream. Kevin would never think to mention if she made any noise. Kevin, a survivor of more then one round of bad burnout himself, respected nightmares, no matter when they happened.

"What time is it?"

"About forty minutes before Winnie has to leave. You'd better bust butt if you still want her to do the post on your suicide."

Molly remembered now. Instead of doing Mary Margaret Ryan after Bill Myers, Winnie had insisted that her other cases took precedence. Not just Mustaffa, but a twenty-something-year-old white kid who'd been found dead—in the bathroom—of no apparent causes. Molly wouldn't have minded so much if she hadn't needed sleep so much. If she hadn't been looking so forward to finishing her work here and taking the next two days just to herself.

Molly rolled off the couch and tested her legs. Her right one was asleep from having to be curled up to fit. She shook it a bit until she thought she could take the stairs on it without ending up on her nose. "Maybe my suicide shouldn't have been first," she griped. "But it sure as hell could have been second."

"Didn't you want the shooting board to close the case on those two nice policemen who saved your life last night?"

God bless Kevin, he even had a cup of coffee in his hand. Molly took a good slug of it and rubbed at her eyes. Allergy season in St. Louis lasted from January 1 to December 31. Summers, though, redefined the term miserable. They were also handy if a person wanted to hide something less acceptable, like surprise tears, behind the excuse of a pollen count.

"Those were not nice policemen," she said. "Just good shots."

"I warned you," Kevin reminded her.

Molly shot him a grin and got her butt in gear. "Thanks, Dad."

Being the newest kid on the block, Molly had the desk closest to the door and farthest away from the windows. She stopped there long enough to get her paperwork and a pocketful of licorice to see her through the postmortem, which, if she was lucky, would include nothing more than the area of injury and stomach contents to verify the assumption of suicide. Then she trotted on down the stairs before Winnie could accuse her of being late.

She could hear the saw as she rounded the corner for the back. Hercules was holding the top of the head while Winnie, ever the perfectionist, made the circular cut.

Never Molly's favorite part of an autopsy. The big cut into the chest and abdomen never really bothered her. After all, livers were just livers, spleens little bags of blood. No one ascribed poetry to intestines or debated whether the soul lived in the pancreas.

The brain was another matter entirely. It was still as cryptic as the far universe, deep thoughts as likely to reside in those gullies and folds as deep insanity. And yet, it was just gray. Just tissue, like the packets lifted from beneath the ribs and hips. Just cells and connective tissue, like every other part of the body. No magic, no mystery.

Maybe after all these years, Molly was still waiting for somebody to find a soul there after all, and all they lifted away was a sluggish, semi-set Jell-O.

"Where's Rhett?" she asked.

Winnie never looked up. "I told him to go home after the Myers kid."

Her pen poised to catch any pertinent info, Molly looked up in astonishment. Compassion now. This was not like Winnie at all.

"I also told him you'd call him with these results."

"Sure. What did you find on that last kid?"

Winnie never looked away from her work as she examined the ruined remains of a once-firing system. "Bad luck. He had a big Berry's aneurysm. At least Kevin didn't have to tell his mama he'd been stuffing shit up his nose."

Berry's aneurysm. Genetic, unpredictable, deadly as a snake sleeping in the dark. A weakness in the blood vessels of the brain usually discovered when the holder of same keeled over in his bathroom.

Winnie was right. If there was good news in a dead young man, it was that he hadn't earned it.

"Ya know," Molly mused. "If you think about it, we're not just getting a run on lawyers, we're getting a run on head cases."

Winnie did look up for a millisecond, as long as it usually took her to consider anything. "Good point, last week it was allergic reactions to front bumpers. Next week it'll be something else."

Molly just nodded. "What's Mary Margaret's final?"

"Three-fifty-seven aneurysm."

"Gets the job done."

"Waste of my time. Go ahead and release her. There's nothing here to see but bullet prints."

Molly checked her notes, found the funeral home the parents had chosen. Waited until Winnie snapped her gloves off and Hercules approached to clean up before calling and arranging for the morticians to pick the body up at their convenience. Case closed, shift ended. Molly made it home by one and finished Sam's paperwork by four and considered herself lucky.

The next morning, clad in one of her few dresses, Molly stood uphill a little from the rows of blue-uniformed officers at Resurrection cemetery. A moaning wind snaked through the trees and the sky was lowering and close. Theresa Myers stood across the casket, her dark head bare, her eyes wet and tired, each hand filled with the smaller hand of a child, all of them at perfect attention.

Molly didn't know Theresa. She did know the cops who lined up on either side of her. She saw the flag-draped casket and wondered if it had been smart to come after all. Her head was filled with old sounds, old hurts, old friends who had come home the same way. She could smell the mud again, the sharp stench of astringent and cordite, the musk of trauma. She looked at the cops lined up and thought of the kids she'd cared for two decades ago, their eyes just as distant, just as ruined.

It never changed. It had just become a different war.

At a barked command, seven rifles were lifted. Fired. Lifted. Fired. Lifted. Fired. Molly watched Theresa Myers flinch at the sound. She saw the cops stand rigid, every one of them, even Rhett in his full-dress uniform with the black electrical tape across his shield as a sign of mourning, his gloves crisp white and his eyes red. She said good-bye to Bill Myers, who had tried his best.

She heard the whine of the bagpiper, who stood alone on the hill above them as he began "Amazing Grace," and she let herself cry.

Winnie had been right. They'd had no right to try and take care of Mary Margaret Ryan first. Mary Margaret Ryan, being laid to rest somewhere on the other side of the cemetery in an hour or so, had thrown her rights away.

* * *

It would have been the last Molly thought of Mary Margaret. It would have been the last attention she'd given any of the suicides. Molly didn't like to think about suicides. She didn't want to ask the questions or demand the reasons or wonder about prevention. Nobody did, really. They only went through the motions, because suicide made them angry.

It was so hard, most days, because the fight to save lives was stacked against them. Death was capricious and nasty and clever, and always, always hungry. If law enforcement and trauma teams and everyone down the line in the system worked full-out a hundred percent of the time, they still lost. They lost children who begged and mothers who wanted just a little more time and policemen just trying to do their job. And no matter how tired or sad or empty, the good guys still fought like hell to keep just one more victim alive.

And then they were expected to fight just as hard for somebody who didn't give a crap.

Suicide made them afraid. Afraid to look in the eyes of somebody who had decided to quit, afraid to ask why, afraid that whatever the person had who had just swallowed all those pills, was contagious. Especially to someone who was so empty from burnout that they could no longer remember exactly what was worth fighting for in the first place.

So, when suicides came in, people like Molly took care of business, because that was what they were trained to do. They yelled sometimes at the ones who didn't quite get it right, and they flipped coins to see who'd have to care for them, because nobody liked doing suicides.

And as soon as they got them out of sight, they forgot them. They tried, anyway.

Molly, with more practice than most, succeeded. Which was why, when she got the call to come down to the office the next day to answer the accusations of a crazy man named Joseph Michael Ryan, she couldn't figure out why.

* * *

Molly wasn't in the mood to mollify anybody. It was supposed to be her day off, and she'd been all set to spend it up to her elbows in the dirt. She'd even been planning on sharing shoveling tips with the guys who'd shown up again at the corner to watch. One look at the man waiting for her in the foyer of the medical examiner's building assured her that at least she wouldn't be far from the dirt. It would just be on the other guy.

"Mr. Ryan?" she asked tentatively, since the receptionist wouldn't say a word. The only clues Molly got from that direction were a frantic nodding of the head toward the far end of the lobby and a very emphatic wrinkling of the nose.

Molly could hardly blame her. The man who turned was damn near unrecognizable as a human. Long, tangled hair and beard, filthy features, layers of ripped, oily clothes that had seen at least one Salvation Army bin in their lifetime, and boots that had newspaper sticking out the sides of the soles. Molly thought he was white, but she wouldn't have sworn to it.

"You're Molly Burke?" her visitor said in a raspy voice. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet as if he couldn't hold still. He didn't approach, though.

For some reason, the guy triggered a sense of unease in Molly. "Can I help you?"

Although the more she thought about it, the more she wanted to just pretend she'd never seen him.

Then he lilted his head to face her and the unease gestated sharp wings. It wasn't just the dirt or the desperation. It was something more. Something dark Molly responded to in that old, tired face and frantic smile. Something she didn't particularly want to deal with when she was this tired and stressed out.

It was his eyes. Ghostly pale, the color of ice, stark against all that grime and hair. Familiar. She thought she recognized them from somewhere. She sure as hell knew the look. The thousand-yard stare. Ancient, lost, drained out like a glass knocked over on the floor. She'd seen that look in the eyes in her nightmares. She'd seen them twenty years ago, while she'd slogged through the red dirt of Pleiku. This guy wasn't just homeless, he was Vietnam homeless. And that made it all different.

"Can I help you?" she asked again, her voice lower. Hesitant. Less a city official than a woman facing old ghosts.

She knew other guys from the Nam. Other homeless guys, balancing on the edge of reality with little cat feet. But other guys didn't make her feel crawly with dread like this guy.

"Yeah. Yeah, you can. You can help me."

This time, he moved, that same, oddly graceful gait some of the homeless guys got, as if dancing, or maybe avoiding hot spots or cold spots or filth on the sidewalks where they slept.

He smelled as if he slept in the sewer. Molly barely noticed. She was watching those eyes, those eyes that were suddenly squinting at her, as if he were the one trying to fit her face to a memory.

"Lieutenant?" he said, stopping in front of her.

Her smile was more hesitant than his voice. "Captain, actually."

His nod was jerky and stiff. He sighed. "Thought so. He said so, but now I know."

"He said so?" she asked. "Who said so?"

Her visitor crammed his hands in the pockets of his pea jacket and stared over at the receptionist. "Where, ma'am?"

"Seventy-first Evac at Pleiku," Molly said, understanding perfectly. "'70-71. You?"

"First Cav, '68. I'd tell you where, but some days I can't remember."

First Cav. First Cav. The niggle of memory got sharper, but it couldn't work its way free just yet. Molly was still trying so hard to get over the feeling that this man could hurt her, when she could see that he was only interested in hurting himself.

"Molly," the receptionist said suddenly. "You got a message a little while ago that the police need to see you about that Johnson situation. You want me to call them?"

Interpretation: You want me to save you from this?

Molly turned to the twenty-five-year-old receptionist, who had no idea what was going on between Molly and a homeless guy, and she smiled. "No, thanks. I'll call them back. I need to talk to Mr...."

Then it clicked. The picture on the wall. The I-can-do-anything glare beneath that military buzz cut. The shiny, perfectly aligned teeth that screamed orthodontics. The more mature pictures that weren't there.

Molly spun around on her guest and almost sent him running for the door. As skittish as any of the homeless guys, as desperately uncertain. A wild, frightened thing caught on the streets.

"Would you like some coffee, Mr. Ryan?" she asked gently, now even more unsettled by those shifting, startling eyes. "We could talk in the conference room upstairs if you'd like."

His nod was quick and feral. "Yes. I need... uh, I'd like to talk, if I could."

"We're going upstairs," Molly told the receptionist, whose eyes widened noticeably.

"Okay."

Molly knew better than to grab hold of Joseph Ryan's arm, so she just showed him the way and let him follow. He did, the secretary's outrage following the both of them up the stairs. Imagining lice dropping at every step, Molly was sure. It wouldn't be a surprise.

She got him into the small conference room at the back and produced the coffee, black for him, although he quickly pocketed a couple of packets of sugar. He smiled, too, which just showed that at one time those grimy, broken teeth had been straightened like Chiclets. Molly fought the urge to just leave. She wanted more than ever to run back and hide in her garden.

"You're Mary Margaret's brother," she said, settling into her chair across from him. "Aren't you?"

Joseph Ryan nodded. His eyes welled with silent tears as he held that coffee cup in his palms as if it were the only warmth he could get, even on a day as hot as this. He looked away, restless and afraid and grieving, and Molly was at once amazed and unnerved.

"You know?" she asked.

Another nod. "Peg," he managed, his voice sounding like a rusty hinge. "Her name is Peg."

"I'm sorry," Molly said, suddenly full of questions she didn't want answers to.

"I need help, Cap."

Molly hadn't been called that in more than twenty years. The young kids coming in from the boonies, torn up, scared, wanting to make sure their friends were okay, still delighted enough at the sight of a woman to joke. "Hey, Cap, I never kissed nobody with bars before. What'dya say?" "Hey, Cap, I'm so short I'm damn near invisible. Kiss me for luck?"

It was summer. Molly was having trouble enough with the old memories, the new traumas. She didn't need Joseph Ryan pulling her back through it all again.

"I'm not sure what I can do for you, Mr. Ryan."

He smiled again, almost a nervous tic. The window dressing of an addict. Good enough reason as any to be on the streets all these years. Molly knew better than most that even the addictions were window dressing over the real problems.

"Name's Joe, ma'am. I never made it to Mister."

It was Molly's turn to nod. "Joe. I'm Molly, okay?"

Not Cap. Don't call me Cap and put that responsibility back on my shoulders again.

"Okay, Molly. Nobody'd talk to me, but I figured you'd understand, ya know? That kid doesn't know, he doesn't..."

Molly waited through a pause as Joe's attention strayed out the window toward the highway. Seeing something that wasn't there. Remembering so strongly that it took over.

"He doesn't what, Joe?"

Abruptly he was back. Grinning, embarrassed. "Homicide. That guy. I talked to him, but he just knows I live in a cave, ya know?"

Molly's smile was as dark as Joe's. "Yeah. I know."

Joe leaned forward, his hands suddenly still, his eyes suddenly focused, right on Molly. "Help me find out how she died," he said.

Molly hadn't wanted to have this discussion with his mother. She certainly didn't want to have it with Joe.

"I'm sorry, Joe," she began in her best bad-news-breaking voice. He never let her finish.

"No," he said, pointing a finger. "She didn't kill herself. She did not."

Molly was already shaking her head. "I was there. I saw the autopsy. Didn't your other sister or your mother talk to you about it?"

That damn near brought him to his feet. "You can't tell them," he pleaded, eyes hurt and so young, suddenly, even in that tired, wasted face. "Please promise me. They don't know."

That one took Molly a second. "They don't know what? That you're alive? Where you live?"

"They think... only Peg knew where I was. She went looking for me. Mom couldn't..."

He looked away, the cup trembling in his hands, ashamed and alone.

"I won't say anything to them," Molly promised. "I promise." As if she could ever think of any reason to flagellate herself by revisiting that house.

He settled a little back into his chair. Patted his coat and came up with a crumpled, almost empty pack of Marlboros. "Thanks. Can I..."

Molly dragged over the ashtray and fought the urge to ask for one for herself. Ten years, two months, three days and counting since she'd quit that one. Vietnam had given them all some very bad habits.

"If you didn't hear from your family," Molly said, "how did you know?"

Joe paused in lighting his cigarette with an old Zippo lighter that looked as if he'd brought it home from his tour with him. "You mean how does a guy who lives in a cave and eats out of a Dumpster keep up on current affairs?"

Molly damn near blushed. Then she saw the glint of humor way at the back of those ravaged eyes. "Something like that, yeah."

"Frank told me."

He went on lighting up. Molly gaped like a landed fish.

"Frank who?"

Although she already knew. It wouldn't have all been nearly weird enough if she hadn't been right.

Joe sucked in a first lungful of smoke and slipped the lighter away in an inside pocket. "Patterson."

She couldn't help it. "You know Frank Patterson?"

That humor again, only older and a little sadder. "We went to school together."

Which, translated into St. Louis priorities, meant they went to high school together. Any other school didn't count in the small world of St. Louis friendships and accomplishments. Frank Patterson, good Catholic overachiever, had gone to St. Louis University High, the school for Catholic boys. That meant that Joseph Ryan had, too. From SLUH to the sewers. Via Hue, of course.

"Of course you did."

"Frank said you don't like him, but that you'd help me."

"Well, he has the first part right."

The smoke seemed to be settling Joe down a little. His smiles were a little more sustained, his sentences almost complete. Molly wasn't sure whether that was better or worse.

"Cap... Molly. Believe me. I knew Peg better than anybody. Anybody. She would never have... she wouldn't kill herself. No matter what anybody says they saw. Or know... she just... wouldn't."

"Did you know she was on Prozac?"

He snorted. "So's everybody. So what? She wasn't suicidal."

"She had some other things with her," Molly tried again. "Things that might have made her less... careful."

He was shaking his head. "You didn't try anything stupid when you were her age?"

Molly almost laughed. "Sure. I enlisted."

That quickly, they shared a smile. A memory. A private hell most of the rest of the people in this building couldn't even conjure up. And once shared, put away again.

"You talked to her the last couple of weeks?" Molly asked as gently as she could. "Frank thinks you're wrong, you know."

For a second, Molly was afraid he was going to get violent. "Frank and I disagree," was all he said.

Molly didn't know what to do. She didn't know how to make him understand. Nobody wanted to think their loved ones would put a gun in their mouths. Nobody wanted the responsibility or the legacy. Especially, Molly thought, a soul so fragile he haunted the edges of society wrapped in rags and alcoholic hazes.

"How can you be so sure?" she asked, really facing him.

He faced her right back, and suddenly Molly saw that this fragile man with his tics and addictions recognized far more about her than her old captain's bars.

"Because we're the ones who dabble with suicide, Cap," he told her. "You and me. And Peg wasn't like us at all."