Chapter 10

 

"What do you mean you have number five?" Molly yelled, leaping out of her chair and running out into the hallway.

Vic's footsteps were already echoing down the stairwell.

"Ms. Burke?" Jones asked, reaching ineffectually for the paper that fluttered in Molly's fingers as she tore by.

"Guy playing smashing pumpkins from the Wainright Building!" came Molly's answer, drifting up from below.

Molly leaned over the railing at the stairs, not even noticing that two of the four investigators had made a move to follow her into the hall. "Not Metropolitan Square?" she demanded.

Vic leaned his head back so she could see his smile. "Sorry. Wrong lawyer again."

And then he walked on out the front door.

Smashing pumpkins. A jumper. A jumper from high up. Well, as high as the Wainright went. The first skyscraper built west of the Mississippi, the Wainright had been an amazing feat of engineering when it was built in 1892. Now it was dwarfed in its nine stories by thirty-and forty-story neighbors. It was still, however, tall enough to ensure a good sidewalk splatter factor.

Another lawyer.

Molly felt a twinge of something other than annoyance.

"Ms. Burke, aren't you interested that somebody might be trying to kill you?" FBI agent Lopez demanded.

Molly turned, almost surprised to see them all still arrayed in the office like game show contestants. She was even more surprised to see that the Steak wrapper was still in her hand. She did notice, though, that whoever wrote the note had spelled her name wrong. Everybody did. Left off the E at the end of Burke. As if it were important. As if that would matter to a killer looking for a victim. Remember now, Mustaffa. Make sure you have the right Molly Burk. The one without the E, all right?

"Ms. Burke?"

Martin was beginning to sound long-suffering. Molly headed back into the big investigator's room, wondering what exactly she was supposed to tell them. Wondering what it meant that they had another lawyer, and what it would do to their per capita suicide stats.

"We had another lawyer commit suicide just now," Molly said, settling back into her seat. "That's five."

She looked around for reactions. Problem was, she'd said the wrong word.

"You know why they use lawyers instead of laboratory rats now?" Jones asked Martin.

"No," Martin responded, just like the good straight man he was.

"Well," Jones said as Molly stared on. "There are more lawyers than rats—"

The other three suits nodded.

"People get attached to rats—"

Another chorus of nods. Molly couldn't believe it.

Jones grinned. "And there are just some things a rat won't do."

Laughter. Out of that bunch. Well, Molly figured, it was her fault. She could have said that five clowns had died in a freak human cannonball accident and she wouldn't have gotten quite the same reaction.

"Just thought you'd like to know," she said, although she wasn't sure why.

Belatedly, their attention returned.

"What do you think?" Jones asked.

"Don't quit your day job."

If he'd had a sense of humor, he might have smiled. As it was, he just scowled and inclined his head toward the wrapper. "About the fact that you were set up."

Molly took another look at the wrapper in her hand. She fought off another urge to eat. Steakburgers for lunch. Maybe chili mac, with extra sauce, so the grease just dripped off her chin. Steak fries, thin and chewy, with extra salt. She could sit there, all alone with a book and forget everything that waited for her outside.

"Ms. Burke."

Molly looked up. Blushed. Well, it was better than thinking about lawyers. About homeless vets.

"I thought hit men ate at places called Carmine's," was all she could come up with.

"Mustaffa'd do anything for anybody," Jones let her know. "As long as he got a rush out of it. He got a rush out of hurting women."

Suddenly Molly remembered Mustaffa's eyes. Clearly. She damn near blanched. "Thanks."

No one figured apologies were necessary.

"This isn't public information yet," one of the Feds said, "but we've been in Pearl Johnson's bank accounts. She received three substantial payments in the last six months amounting to almost a quarter million dollars."

It took Molly a minute to get over that kind of amount. "Who gets it?" she asked instinctively.

Jones shifted a bit uncomfortably. "Nobody. She spent it all."

"A quarter of a million dollars?"

"Her church needed a new roof, and there are some playgrounds in the area..."

Spent it on her city, just like always. Poor Pearl. Hoping the ends justified the means. Finding out differently.

"Were you able to trace where the funds came from?"

"We're looking now. We're also doing some investigating on some of the other aldermen who voted for the gaming bill."

"And you found that there were no unusual deposits in any of my accounts," Molly offered for him.

Again, she got no apologies. "Nothing except the money from your trust."

"From the house's trust," she corrected him. "I'm just the caretaker."

From their expressions, they already knew that. It was also pretty obvious that they'd yet to figure it out, but Molly didn't think she needed to enlighten them.

"Somebody seems to have wanted you dead," Jones said, neatly bringing the conversation back to the subject at hand.

Molly tried to believe that. It was one thing to think of Mustaffa just randomly spraying bullets into the ER wall. After all, it had happened before. It was quite another to think that the smile he'd delivered when he'd been about to empty a full clip into her chest had been personal.

"Any ideas?" she asked, her voice suddenly very small.

"You're sure about that note?"

Molly instinctively reached to open her drawer for her Excedrin. Then she remembered that she'd just had some. She slugged down some Maalox instead. "I can't tell you any more ways."

"You're quite sure it was Pearl Johnson's handwriting on the suicide note."

For the first time since she'd seen that note, suddenly Molly wasn't so sure. "I don't... I'm not sure I've seen Pearl's handwriting before."

Evidently, the Feds were as prepared as Boy Scouts. Either Lopez or Hickman opened the briefcase next to his chair and pulled something out. Slid it across the desk as if it were the last card in a game of draw poker. "Familiar?"

Molly picked up the plastic-encased sheet of paper and did her best to remember the note she'd only seen once for five minutes.

What she held in her hand was a list of things to do. Laundry and shopping and stopping off for the new choir robes for the church. Molly wondered if they'd been purchased with bribe money. She wondered what the poor minister would do with his gifts once he knew.

"I can't swear to a thing," she said. "But I think the handwriting's the same."

"You think."

It was her turn to scowl. "You want to dump on me for losing that note, you're going to have to stand in line. Now, you want my opinion or what?"

It was Jones who answered. "We're just trying to get a best-case scenario here. Trying to make sure the victim wasn't... compromised."

"She was in her house for twenty hours by herself," Molly retorted. "Who could compromise her, aliens?"

"The mother admits to having been out for an hour or two earlier that day."

Molly sighed. "And Jack Ruby would have had plenty of time to sneak up from his hiding place in Havana to stuff drugs down Pearl's throat."

"William Peterson has had four murder charges dropped because of lack of witnesses," Jones said. "And until she died, Pearl was a witness. Now, you are."

He got Molly's attention. "Lack of witnesses, or lack of surviving witnesses?" she asked.

She just got that all-purpose cop shrug.

So Molly took another look at the hamburger wrapper. Another at the list in Pearl's handwriting. She thought about what had happened that night, played it every way she could, and still couldn't come up with anything different.

"Do you guys think Pearl was murdered?" Molly asked.

"We think it's still a real possibility."

"But all the drugs she took were prescription meds. All prescribed for her."

"You're sure."

Molly thought about it. The tox screen hadn't come back yet. She was going to have to check on that. After the Feds left. Molly's parents had taught her to be cooperative, but she'd long since learned that you took care of your hometown team first. That meant she let out her information when Winnie and Rhett said it was okay.

"As sure as I can be," she said.

"But there might have been something else in her bloodstream you hadn't counted on," Jones persisted.

Molly laughed. "She wouldn't have needed anything else. She had enough on that nightstand to drop Godzilla in full charge."

"Still..."

Still, she didn't have the tox screen. She would have heard if the tox lab hadn't found any of the expected drugs in Pearl's blood, but they wouldn't have known to look for any surprises.

"And you think that this Peterson guy wants me dead, too," she said, amazed that she sounded so matter-of-fact. "Why?"

Molly got another silence that stretched into discomfort.

"I told you. Because you saw the note," Jones finally said, as if she should know better. "Because you have Peterson's name."

"And?"

"And what?"

Molly was losing patience. "And now you have it."

"You say you saw the name on the note connecting Pearl with Peterson. That's hearsay evidence. Not admissible unless you're present to testify, shaky even with a deposition. So, even if Pearl did commit suicide and that was her final will and testament you saw, it still points the finger right where Peterson doesn't want it. Remember, there's something like forty million dollars involved here. His chance to be a player again."

"Did it occur to you that Mustaffa might just have been pissed off because one of his posse died in my ER?" Molly demanded.

"It did. We discounted it."

"Also, if Pearl was murdered to protect Peterson, what the hell was the note all about?"

"Peterson's people might not have known the note was there," one of the Feds responded evenly. "Just because a note says somebody's sorry doesn't mean it's a suicide announcement."

"But if it was, and she did commit suicide, that means Peterson managed to get somebody down to my ER pretty damn quick to get rid of it," Molly retorted. "That's just a little too much conspiracy theory, even for me."

All the same, they were making her think. Well, not think, really. React. Worry. Too much had happened today for her to have anything in her head but white noise. They were sure planting some sharp-nosed little moles in her stomach, though.

Molly couldn't think of anything to say. No disclaimer, no protest, no suggestions.

"So, assuming you're right," she said. "Now what?"

This was' definitely not an inspired group.

"Now, we wait," one of the Feds said.

Molly wished she'd been paying closer attention when they'd been introduced. She'd never gotten which was Lopez and which was Hickman. She figured it probably wasn't politically correct, but she was going to decide that the guy with darker hair was Lopez, and the blond was Hickman. At least she had statistical advantage on her side.

"We wait for what?"

"For the investigation into the rest of the Board of Aldermen," Lopez said. "For some kind of concrete link between Peterson and this new gambling casino."

"For them to actually kill me so I can write out a name in blood before I die."

Molly was expecting at least a small protest. What she got was stony silence. That was exactly what they were waiting for.

"Peterson's an awfully long name to spell when your blood pressure's bottoming out," Molly protested faintly.

"We're keeping an eye on you," one of them said.

"Are you tapping my phones?"

"That would be illegal."

Molly was the one who laughed this time. "Silly me. I know you haven't been in my file, either."

Her FBI file she'd amassed in school when Richard Nixon was more afraid of students who didn't believe in his war than he was of the communists. Molly hadn't believed in his war, but she'd gone anyway. She bet the FBI guys were still shaking their heads over that one.

"We're not allowed to hold someone's youthful indiscretions against them anymore," Hickman said, and damned if Molly didn't think there was a hint of a grin somewhere behind those eyes.

"Anyway," Jones said, standing, "if there's anything you can think of to change the equation, let us know."

"I will," she said like a good girl. "I promise."

Then she waited for them to make it outside before dialing up the tox lab.

"No surprises here," the tox lab said. "We found a real smorgasbord of lethal pharmacopoeia in her blood. Everything from Valium to Lithium to birth control pills. There's a match with every prescription bottle you brought us. There were some mystery extras in the baggie you brought that we have calls out on, but I doubt they'd make much difference."

"You don't have that info, yet?"

"We've been a little busy over here, ya know?"

"Busy?" Molly retorted, figuring that the death of a city official possibly on the take would hold some precedence. "With what?"

"Haven't you read the papers?" the supervisor asked. "This is going to be a record year for homicides. Not only that, but the narcs pulled in a huge haul of dust and crack yesterday. In the great scheme of things, suicide gets bottom billing."

Until that morning when she'd spent her off-hours with a homeless vet and people telling her that somebody was trying to kill her because of a suicide, Molly would have understood completely.

"It's getting really important," she hedged. "If you could scoot on it, I wouldn't have to tell Winnie you still weren't finished."

Molly knew the tech well enough to not be offended when the answer she got was, "Bitch."

"And I speak so well of you," she answered with a grin and was relieved to hear a chuckle in return.

* * *

Molly had been waiting to get back home all morning. For some reason, she didn't go right there. She drove, instead, across to Locust Street, where the Wainright building sat in rehabbed splendor, a neat square redbrick building with elegant terra-cotta friezes around the roof, all tucked neatly away amid all the glass and steel like a well-mannered aunt among the rowdier children.

Along the sidewalk at the base, police tape still held back the curious. A couple of units shared the street with the medical examiner's van and the transport vehicle, a dark blue van with no identification. It had once been labeled METS, for Medical Examiner's Transport Service. Unfortunately, the baseball fans in town had mistaken it for a vehicle belonging to the New York Mets, and regularly egged and spray painted it with colorful opinions of the team and its players. Since that didn't look appropriate on the ten o'clock news, the acronym had been painted over into anonymity.

Vic was standing there with a couple of uniforms, his clipboard and measuring tape in hand, his thick black hair stuck to his forehead from the heat and humidity. At his feet lay an untidy bundle hidden by a dark tarp. The tarp couldn't cover all the blood, though. It had been a mess.

"What are you doing here?" he asked as Molly walked up.

Hands in pants pockets, she shrugged. "I had to come by this way. Thought I'd check and see how you were doing."

Vic went back to his work. "Sorry, no politicians, sports figures, or actors. Just a lawyer in the middle of a divorce and a bad year at the stocks."

Molly couldn't seem to take her eyes off the lumpy tarp. "No questions?"

"Only the ones about why a successful lawyer would have such bad taste in clothes. But hell, that could have depressed him, too."

Molly looked up, saw the open window nine floors up. Saw the shadows of curious observers just inside. Probably wondering what it would take to open a window and step out into air. Wondering maybe if they saw a little of themselves in this man who worked in their offices every day.

"Molly?"

Startled, she looked up to see Vic frowning at her. She gave him a quick grin. "I was just thinking that I'm going to rip up that law school application I've been working on."

Vic snorted unkindly and went back to writing. "Oh, don't do that. If this keeps up, just think of all the open positions to be filled."

Vic never noticed that she left.

A cold front was hovering just west of the city, pushing thunderheads inexorably before it. Molly climbed back into her car with an eye to the thick, dark clouds that were boiling up to the southwest. The wind was kicking up, spinning paper and leaves in little eddies along the streets and pushing up the skirts of women scuttling to lunch. The humidity climbed, as if it had been squeezed between the clouds and the river, so that the air, even though it was moving, seemed stifling. There was a change in the wind, as the weatherman said.

Molly turned her car back down toward the morgue and the highway entrance that rose alongside it. She had her windows open and her sunroof up so the wind could batter at her. She was gearing down so she could get a decent acceleration on the entrance ramp. She checked left so no one would cut her off.

And there she saw him.

Bent, shuffling, anonymous. An upright pile of rags holding a plastic bag full of aluminum cans. Standing there alongside the morgue parking lot as if waiting for something. Wondering about something. All but invisible to the rest of the city, to her on any other day she might have flown by him in a fast sports car. Today, though, she saw him. Like a sign. A warning. A memory and a promise.

Molly turned deliberately away, her hand clamped to the gearshift as if it were the magic wand that would carry her safely away from his eyes. His voice. She shifted down until her car screamed. Then she swept onto the entrance ramp and left him behind, where he belonged.

* * *

It didn't work. By the time Molly reached home, it was that lost, lonely man who stayed with her, even after the wind had pulled everything else away. It was the formless lump on the sidewalk she saw instead of the trees that bent and writhed along the street.

The rain was coming, which meant Molly couldn't sit outside. She wouldn't watch her fish or listen to the birds argue in the trees, or wonder what the people were talking about in the patios of the restaurants down the block.

Molly parked her car in front of her house and headed up the walk. She slid her key in the lock and opened the front door. She stood there in the high, echoing entranceway, watching the shadows climb the walls of the living room and run over the furniture like dark water.

She couldn't stay here. Not when she was trying to sort out everything she'd learned today. Not when she had to think about death and suicide and hopelessness. When she stood in this house, she heard her parents' voices. She heard disapproval and dismissal and disinterest. She heard the years of polite denial pile up around her like trash on the pristine gray carpet.

"I suppose I'm not surprised you want to be a nurse, Melinda Ann," her mother had said, composed on the Chippendale settee like a ruler weary of her less disciplined subjects. "A career of subservience. You can spend the rest of your life without having to excel or take responsibility. Disappointing, but then I've come to expect that from you."

Her brother Martin Francis had not disappointed. A foreign consul by the time he was twenty-six, he was now undersecretary of something or other. A real Burke. An achiever, a brilliant star in the right universe who had made his parents proud in the years before their mostly untimely demise in a foreign post. Married, father of the two heirs apparent to the Burke name and legacy, the real owner of the house with its treasures and heritage.

Molly, the also-ran, the child who was born to disappoint, had none of these things. Just as her mother predicted, she'd failed at it all until she faced her forties alone, childless, and caught between a career she'd once found challenging and a lawsuit that threatened to bleed her dry.

She needed to talk to somebody. Run what she'd heard past understanding ears and get feedback. Reassurance. Logic.

The problem was, Molly had no one to talk to. No one who'd lasted through the years with her, no one she'd ever let close enough to burden with that kind of turmoil.

Burkes never discussed their problems. That was because they never admitted them. Problems were messy and distasteful and unpleasant. Above all, Burkes believed in the myth that all of life should be quiet and well-mannered and private. Which was why perfect Martin Francis had a great job, a host of stress-related health problems, a wife who drank herself into oblivion, and two sons who were doing their best to earn their places in the Young Psychopaths Hall of Fame. Which was why Molly stood in this empty house hearing echoes of misery instead of seeking out friends.

We're the ones who dabble in suicide, Molly. You and me.

Not anymore, Joseph Ryan, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut against the fear. That was a long time ago. A long, long time ago.

Even so, she wanted a drink. She wanted it so badly she could actually taste the smoke of good Irish whiskey at the back of her throat. It would slide down so easily. So effortlessly.

And it would be safe, because Joseph Ryan was wrong.

Even so, Molly spun around and slammed back out of the house.

She walked it off. Around her the trees shook and danced. The sky split with early lightning, turning the clouds the sickly green that made St. Louisans look up and worry. The rain came down, first a splattering, then a torrent. Big, fat drops that drenched in seconds and swirled along the street so cars could splash them back up again. Molly turned out onto Euclid and dodged people trying their best to get in out of a thunderstorm that crackled and boomed overhead. Molly barely noticed.

It just wasn't the time for all of this. It was summer, and Gene was right. Molly should have been a teacher so she could outrun her demons during the summer. She should have been a consul in a distant country where the most important thing on her schedule was arranging tables at a state function.

Instead, she was here. Up to her elbows in trauma, up to her armpits in suicides, and the summer wasn't over yet.

Suicides. It couldn't have been something simple. An epidemic. A serial killer or two. Anything but the sight of lifeless eyes and deliberate self-destruction. Anything but the suspicion that it was, after all, much easier just to give in.

And now, not only did the FBI want her to reexamine how someone would have committed suicide, Joseph Ryan wanted her to go back in and reexamine why.

Why should she listen to a guy who ate lunch behind McDonald's instead of in it? Why would his word count for more than that of a mother who sat on a Sears couch in the county?

He'd been so sure. So clear, for that solitary moment, as if it were the only thing he truly understood anymore. As if his years on the street could be distilled into that one truth. Joseph Ryan was an expert, and the area of his expertise was despair.

Before Joseph had spoken to her, Molly had managed to slip all those damn suicides neatly into an envelope marked Closed and shove them away.

Now, she was afraid she was going to have to go back and reexamine at least one.

That was if Joseph Ryan was right.

Molly walked faster. She didn't want him to be right. She didn't want him to make her look at the pictures of that room again, talk to his sister and his mother. She didn't want to wonder enough to rake back through Pearl's desperation or the futility of the life of the lawyer who had decided that the Wainright building was the door out of his life.

Molly needed to talk to somebody about this. Somebody who understood.

Nobody understood.

No, that wasn't true. The crowd at work understood. They might not have stumbled out from the disaster of Vietnam, but they slogged through the desperation that was late twentieth century urban America.

But no one in the ER would talk about this. They would talk about rage and anger, yes. Frustration, indecision, fury. They would talk about exhaustion and they would talk about rebellion. They would not talk about despair. They wouldn't admit it because they were more afraid of it than anything.

It was why none of them would deal with suicides. It was why they would never sit down and listen to Molly tell them why Joseph Ryan frightened her so much. It was why she would never think to tell them.

And that left her only outsiders. People who would need the problem explained, the loyalties defended. And Molly simply wasn't up to it. She wasn't even strong enough to have to define it all for Gene, who understood better than most. She just needed someone who would instinctively know. Someone who spoke in code, so she could shorthand past what she was too afraid to say.

Besides, even though he'd empathize, Gene would do it for a hundred-twenty an hour, and Molly simply couldn't afford it.

Alongside her, a Caprice slowed to a crawl in the downpour. Molly saw the passenger's face turn her way, a faint, pale globe of suspicion beyond the rain-fogged window. She was being watched. Being followed. More FBI agents, she thought.

She hoped.

She walked faster, ignoring them. Ignoring the new disquiet that settled on her shoulders when she considered that they could be there for some reason other than to protect her.

For whatever reason, they didn't follow. They just watched, which was just fine with Molly. She had enough on her plate.

She had to talk to someone who knew Joseph. Who knew Mary Margaret. Who shared the common bond of Vietnam so she wouldn't have to explain or excuse.

Unfortunately, there was one person who fit that bill all too neatly. Even the Vietnam part.

Molly remembered when she'd found out. It had been while Molly had been giving her deposition. When she'd outlined her nursing experience as the introduction to the questioning about how she might have let an old woman die.

"Why don't you mention the year you spent in Vietnam?" he'd asked.

Uncomfortable in her brand-new red suit and high heels, Molly had shrugged. "I never think to," she said, because she didn't. Too much effort, too many questions and assumptions. Too much to deal with on too little stamina.

"But Vietnam has cachet now," he'd said, standing so he could lean over the table toward her. So he could impress her with his crocodile smile and Armani suit. "Everybody wants it on their resume. Even people who haven't served."

"You have it on yours?" she'd retorted.

His smile had grown. "First line. 'I served in Vietnam. Oh, I also graduated top of my class in law-school.'"

"Served where?"

That smile again, taunting, knowing. "The real war. Adjutant general's office. Saigon. I did everything I could think of to stay away, especially since I'd earned my law degree on ROTC. I mean, I figured that a top lawyer like me would take Washington by storm."

"Only you took Saigon by storm instead."

"And Bangkok on weekends."

Still, he'd been there. He'd served in a war unlike any other war, where there hadn't been rear lines, where there hadn't been a real demarcation between friend and foe. Where your friends were alive one minute and dust particles the next. He'd known Joseph Ryan before the war had ruined him, and known Mary Margaret Ryan before her case had shattered her.

He was an asshole. A user. A despoiler of hardworking people everywhere. He lived in a fancy office now, used Vietnam as punctuation in a resume.

He was still the only one who would be able to tell Molly whether or not she should listen to Joseph Ryan.

Molly kept walking. She walked for an hour, ever mindful of the silent, watchful men who followed her; and then, when she gave up, when the storm gave up, she trudged alone back to the silent, watchful house and took a shower. She might as well. After she cleaned herself up, she was going to have to wallow back in the grime. She was going to have to call and ask a favor of Frank Patterson.