Authors: Eileen Dreyer

Head Games (30 page)

BOOK: Head Games

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“I won't. I'll give them your name.”

Sasha simply gathered her supplies for work. “You have no sense of adventure. After all, it could be worse. According to the accumulated press, you're probably the psycho dream date, whereas the St. Louis police are a cabal of ineffectual coconspirators doing their best to ignore the plight of lower-class kids and their grieving parents.”

“You're right,” Molly agreed. “Given the choice, I'll take psycho dream date any day.”

“You're just saying that because none of your psychos can get through that crowd of reporters around your house.”

“Who are all psychos in their own right.”

“Some of whom pull in quite a good paycheck,” Sasha mused. “Might be worth considering.”

“Frank makes a good paycheck. If I wouldn't consider him, I'm not considering bottom-of-the-food-chain tabloid reporters. Ya know, I hate to say this, but this computer stuff is pretty amazing.”

Sasha plopped, openmouthed, into a chair.

“Oh, shut up,” Molly chastised, then waved at the screen. “No, I mean it. It's frightening, of course, because with the right employee ID anybody could access every byte of usable information about me, which terrifies me to my toes. But with my own ID, I've been able to access almost everybody else's medical and employment secrets, and that might save me some â¦ time.” She'd almost said pain and suffering. But there was no way she'd tell Sasha what it would cost her to wade through twenty-five years of records.

“Like who?” Sasha asked, leaning closer.

“My morgue buddy, Lewis. He has not only a pretty impressive rap sheet, he has more than a nodding acquaintance with shrinks. Although, truth to tell, I haven't found antisocial behavior listed among his evaluations. Just arrested psychological development and a bit of obsessive ideation. On the other hand, my local grocer boy has lots of antisocial behavior, and I think he's been trolling the neighborhood for open windows. I wonder if he has a rap sheet, too.”

“Who else?”

“Well, I have a list from St. Roch's and, of course, the people here. John Martin, by the way, that housekeeping tech, doesn't have any psych history. Just a bit of sneaky-peeking when he works nights. He works better by himselfâwhich would make him much better at housekeeping than patient careâand has been suspected of substance abuse.”

“Pretty normal stuff around here,” Sasha admitted. “I'm disappointed.”

“I know. You really wanted him to be our man.”

“It would have gotten him out of patient care, anyway. I thought I smelled alcohol on his breath the other day.

Molly looked up. “You, too? I reported him the other night. He damn near dropped Frank's dinner out the window.”

Sasha wasn't quite as amused as Molly expected her to be. “What do you do now?”

“I pop up to visit Frank, start my ten hours saving lives, and then come back to this when I'm finished.”

Sasha got to her feet and grabbed her lab coat. “You do live an exciting life. Are you really in as good a mood as you seem?”

Molly shut off the computer and climbed to her feet. “Don't be absurd.”

“You're getting too famous for me,” Frank greeted her. He was scratching at the stitches they'd taken in his side when they'd pulled the tube, and fidgeting with his remote control. Definitely time to dispatch him to his family.

“It's been my dream all along, Frank,” Molly informed him. “To be too famous for you.”

“You okay, St. Molly?”

“I suck, Frank.”

“How?”

“Alphabetically or chronologically?”

If it hadn't been Frank, she probably wouldn't have told him. But Frank understood about Patrick, and knew all about Molly's aversion to past-life regression therapy. So he got an earful. Then he got another when he made several objectionable suggestions about how he could make Molly feel better.

“Once you leave here, you can't even come near me,” Molly reminded him acerbically. “It isn't safe.”

“If I liked being safe, St. Molly,” he retorted with that sinful smile of his, “I wouldn't play with you in the first place.”

But for once, even Frank didn't improve her mood.

Fortunately for her peace of mind, at least, the weather went sour about four o'clock, which meant that the place was too busy for her to worry, and the roads too awful for the press to make an attempt to storm the proverbial hospital gates. By the time Molly finished work, the only way to get home was by emergency vehicle. So she curled up in one of the empty call rooms and called it a night.

Molly never had a problem sleeping in the hospital. There was just something about the syncopated dings from elevators, the murmur of the paging system, the slap and swish of running shoes on the halls that lulled her to sleep more completely than the silence at home. And she was so tired tonight, it worked even better. No more than three minutes after her head hit the pillow she was sucked so deep into an exhausted sleep that even the nightmares failed to follow her down. Which was why when something woke her in the early morning hours, she surfaced like a drowning swimmer.

Molly startled awake so fast she felt sick. She didn't move, couldn't think past the idea that something was wrong. That she was afraid. She wasn't quite sure what it was, but something had happened that had yanked her straight out of oblivion.

She was in the hospital; she knew that. She remembered tossing to get comfortable on the ill-used mattress and trying to ignore the smell of old aftershave on the covers.

She could still smell it. She could hear the hospital noises, and they were no different. There wasn't even a Code Blue page, which might have dug through to deeper instincts than exhaustion.

Maybe it was the fact that the call room door was cracked open. Molly never slept with the door open. Hospital lights were too stark to induce sleep, and Molly didn't like the idea of people peeking in.

Maybe it was just the fact that her bare foot had somehow escaped the
blanket. Considering how cold her feet usually were, it wasn't a place she encouraged them to be.

Or maybe it was just the lingering feeling that she'd missed something, like catching movement out of the corner of her eye. The side of her ankle was tingling, as if it had just brushed against something, and her stomach was doing flip-flops.

For a second she just looked at her foot, as if it were an alien life form grafted onto her body and sending strange signals. The tingling was spreading, a shiver of dread, of distaste. Of inexplicable familiarity.

Molly sat up in bed and looked around, but there wasn't anything there. Not a whisper of movement in the room or out in the hallway. Not even the feeling that somebody stood in the dark or around the corner, waiting and watching.

Still, she just couldn't shake the feeling that somebody had been there.

Somebody who had touched her naked foot and then left.

“You look like shit,” Marianne the secretary greeted Molly when she stumbled back out onto the work lane later that morning.

Molly rubbed at her face, wishing like hell she could rid herself of that creepy feeling she'd been watched the night before. She knew damn well it had probably been somebody who'd been fascinated by the notoriety, but even so â¦

“For a change I'm going to make your day and agree with you, Marianne,” Molly agreed. “I feel like shit. I have any messages?”

“This isn't a fuckin' hotel,” the girl sneered.

Which meant that there were messages, but Molly was going to have to work for them. “I'll make you a deal. You give me my messages, and I promise not to work your shift today. How's that?”

With any luck, Molly'd be able to look outside and find she couldn't get to St. Roch's. Of course, if the roads were bad, Marianne would be the last person at work, but there was hope.

Marianne just kept shooting those “fuck-you” glares, so Molly cinched up the drawstrings on her borrowed scrubs and walked on by. Green scrubs, she thought inconsequentially. Just like the ones on that bloody mannequin in the bookstore window the other night.

Molly fought a new set of shivers and hoped that what she was feeling was just the creeps, not prescience.

“Detective Butler is here somewhere looking for you,” Marianne finally conceded just before Molly made it out of earshot. Molly battled the chronic urge to strangle the secretary and waited for the punch line. “Said he knew you wouldn't want to worry about how to get up to St. Roch's, so he came to pick you up.”

Well, there went the rest of Molly's marginal mood.

“Hey there, Molly,” the annoyance in question greeted her from the other end of the hall.

“And you got another delivery,” Marianne said.

No,
there
went the rest of Molly's marginal mood. She was sorely tempted just to keep on walking, but so far that hadn't solved a damn thing. So she gave Marianne the satisfaction of turning around. Marianne rewarded her by making a big show of pulling out the mystery delivery and setting it on the top of her desk.

What a surprise. A big, brand-new, shiny flower box. Square, this time. With a red ribbon.

“You want to check it for bombs again?” Marianne asked.

Molly sighed. She knew darn well that Frank had ordered it after getting a taste of the mood she was in the night before. Even so, Molly just didn't have the patience for it.

“It's all yours, Marianne,” she decided. “Just do me a favor and write Frank a truly tasteless note thanking him, because this time it's probably water balloons.”

Marianne's laugh betrayed how stupid she thought Molly was for turning down yet another box of flowers. Molly turned on her heel and faced her next problem.

“Hey, Officer Butler,” Molly greeted him, on the move again. “What do you know that will brighten my day?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, ambling her way, “we do have news. Turns out that more than half a dozen of the parents who showed up last night about missing teens happen to have femur X rays of their daughters. Although why all those girls would need femur X rays doesn't make sense to me â¦”

“Sports,” Molly conceded, scratching at the side of her head, where
she'd had one of the docs pull her staples the night before. “Which means we should go now and offer up a mass for those parents who push their children to excessive athletic achievementsâ”

She got no further. Behind her, Marianne began to scream. Molly shut her eyes, praying for rodents. For flashing house doctors. For the second coming of Christ in her work lane. When Marianne kept screaming, Molly knew she wasn't going to be so lucky.

CHAPTER 16

“You gave me that box on purpose!” Marianne shrieked for the thirtieth time in two hours.

Molly ignored herâagain. She was much too preoccupied with the fact that she'd once again underestimated her correspondent. After all, it had been the only reason she hadn't run screaming into the street the minute that first news van had parked out in front of her house. She'd figured that no self-respecting serial killer would chance showing up on the ten o'clock news trying to drop off a trophy.

What Molly had stupidly overlooked was the possibility that he might be more motivated than intimidated. Which meant he'd found a way to leave a box at the triage desk without anybody remembering how, or by whom. And Marianne had opened it to find another skull. Another note. Another paint job.

Eyes watching in terrible silence.

Marianne hadn't stopped screaming for twenty minutes. By that time, there wasn't a person in all eight stories of the hospital who didn't know precisely what was going on.

Which also meant that the cops and Winnie had to wade through a fresh sea of newspeople to see what it was Molly had received.

“I hate Christmas,” Molly was muttering to herself as she stared at that very gift.

THIS IS FOR MOLLY BURKE

In red this time, right across the forehead. The forehead that had been
painted so that it looked like gray marble. Tucked in glittery cotton and surrounded by dime-store gold stars, the kind teachers put on good reports.

Sitting beside her on the lounge couch, Sasha tsked. “You wouldn't have minded so much if he'd just succumbed to crass commercialism and gotten you a bottle of perfume.”

“True,” Molly sighed, shaking with the effort to quell hysterics that would have silenced even Marianne. “I guess one person's art is just another person's â¦”

“Cranium?”

Molly giggled. She was having way too much trouble controlling herself. Probably because of the letter she held in her hands. Her gloved hands. It was, after all, one of the benefits of receiving viable evidence in a hospital.

“Pretty personal, huh?” Sasha asked as if knowing.

Molly couldn't look at her. She couldn't look at the note. She didn't want to admit yet that Kathy had been terrifyingly right. That Molly was going to have to go down into the basement of St. Roch's whether she liked it or not, and that she was going to have to pick through a couple of the worst years of her life so she could try and remember a kid she hadn't managed to help.

Dear Miss Burke,

Miss Burke. Molly flashed again on Lewis with his lopsided grin and untidy uniform. Did she remember him from another, smaller life when she'd tried to save him? Did she really believe he could have searched for her for twenty years with the sole purpose of having her remind him he was real?

After this new letter, she had no choice.

It's his fault, whoever he is. He doesn't understand and he's interfering. I didn't do that. I wouldn't do that. I would never bomb people. It's stupid. Besides, this is between you and me. I wouldn't hurt your friend. Or your boy. He's real handsome now, isn't he? Real smart. I remember wanting to be him when I saw you before. I wanted to be your baby, Miss Burke. But I wasn't. I was theres, and they made me nobody. Here is another one of my friends for you, her name is Flower. So you know. So you remember. So you'll know me, too, when you see me

“What do you think?” Kathy asked quietly, looking over Molly's shoulder at the hastily printed words that seemed to have been spilled, impatient as children, across the page.

“I think,” Molly said, closing her eyes against the fire this new note lit in her chest, “that he's just told us where we'll find him.”

Kathy straightened like a hound on scent. “What do you mean?”

“He'll be in the St. Roch's records somewhere in 1979 or early 1980.” She could hear Kathy go very still, and beyond her Sasha, Rhett, and Winnie. They were so still in fact, that all Molly could finally hear was her own heart.

“Why is that, Molly?” Winnie asked, her own voice oddly gentle.

Molly shook her head, not wanting to concede to the old grief that clogged her throat. It was the box she'd kept closed the tightest. The one she hadn't looked in since shoving that lid down the day she'd buried her first husband, John Michael Murphy. It was the box in which lay the last of the ashes of their struggle to recover what they'd been.

“Because I was pregnant in 1979.”

“You were pregnant four times,” Sasha said, as hesitant as the rest, as out of character. “You've told me that before.”

Finally Molly opened her eyes and faced her friends. “I miscarried three times,” she said. “But 1979 I â¦ 1979 was the only time he could have seen that I was going to have a baby and wanted to be it. It's why he thinks Patrick is my child, because Patrick looks about the same age as Johnny.”

The rest of them left it to Sasha to ask. “Johnny?”

Molly tried so hard to smile as if it was a joke. “I actually managed to enjoy the special delights of labor.”

But Johnny could never have been mistaken for Patrick. He never would have grown to be as beautiful, with soft hazel eyes and a poet's face. Johnny had been born acephalic. Molly's baby had lived but a few days, gasping and fragile and misshapen, doomed from the moment Molly and John, both exposed to Agent Orange, had conceived him. He was buried in Calvary Cemetery, next to the father who would follow him no more than six months later.

Handing the letter she'd received over into Kathy's gloved hand, Molly
managed a stiff smile at the appalled discomfort on her friends' faces. Then, she got up and walked out.

No, she didn't just walk out. She ran. Just as she always did. As she always had, from home to the military, from city to city, from friend to friend without settling, as if that way, neither could her memories settle on her.

The problem was, she realized as she hurried down the hall to the elevators, she couldn't run this time. She had to turn around and face what hurt the most, or somebody else would die. A lot of somebodies would die, fragile, wide-eyed children on the brink of adulthood who had committed no greater crime than being confused and unpredictable.

Another skull. Another little girl who had smiled at the wrong man. Molly barely made it to the heliport on the roof of the fifth floor where the wind snapped the windsock and snow swirled and glittered in a winter sun. And then, wrapping her arms around herself, Molly just folded down into the corner of the roof where she knew she'd be safe, and she stayed there, wishing like hell she couldn't yet, after all these years, feel that soft, misshapen body in her hands. All those soft, sad bodies she'd lost and couldn't get back.

She shouldn't really have been surprised that they refused to leave her alone.

“Go away, Frank.”

He crouched right beside her, coat flapping around him, hair tumbled and dusted with snow. “Sasha would have my liver if I went back inside.”

Molly steeled herself against the pity and looked up.

Thank God they'd thought to send Frank. “It's perfectly all right to make people feel bad because they can't do anything to help,” he said easily. “But you probably don't want to scare them.”

Molly managed a grin, teeth chattering and arms blue. “They all too chicken to face me?”

“Nope. Kathy thought you'd be more comfortable if you made your surrender to the inevitable by easy stages. I'm stage one, the prudent approach.”

Molly frowned. “Inevitable?”

His grin was brash, his eyes just a bit less. “That you have friends who might take the trouble to worry about you.”

Molly dropped her head back into her crossed arms as if she could ignore him. “No wonder she's a profiler. I guess this means you won't go away until I bare my soul.”

“Don't be stupid. It's freezing out here. I'm just the silent support stage. You know better than to think I'm going to compare scars with you.”

That got her head back up to surprise the brief, tiny flash of pain in Frank's eyes. His own ashes. Frank's lovely young wife had chosen Abigail over treatment for leukemia and died soon after giving birth. Frank, from all reports, had handled it with exceeding bad grace. And Frank, if he was out on this windswept roof, now knew all of Molly's story.

Odd, that that alone should make her feel a little less lost. She guessed they were right. This stuff was tricky.

“Let's go back in before you get dismissed just in time to catch pneumonia,” she suggested, climbing to her feet.

He scowled up at her a moment. “You're not going to wait till I'm inside and toss yourself off into traffic?”

Which was why Kathy had thought to send Frank. He made Molly laugh. “It would be far too mundane,” she promised him, holding out a hand. When he took hold and stood, she flashed him a grin. “I'll wait until I can land on your car.”

She was heading through the door when she heard the real grief in his voice. “I don't have a car â¦” And she smiled, despite herself.

“We have an ID on one of the victims!”

Molly looked up from the stacks of logbooks and ED charts that surrounded her to see Rhett waving a paper at her. She'd been stuck in the station for three days now, trying to pull protoplasm from old ink, and it was giving her the headache of the century. Not to mention the fact that she'd simply stopped sleeping. She dreamed when she slept, and she dreamed about her friend Sally, except now Sally spoke to her from the dirt, and Molly didn't think she wanted to hear any more accusations.

So she took some of the folders home, and then she came down to the station to read the rest, hoping against hope that she'd suddenly be struck
by insight without actually having to wade through the tales of mayhem that had been visited on children two decades earlier. Wishing like hell her list of names was shorter, or that she could put a face and voice to just one of them.

And when the children weighed on her too heavily, she stepped back out to Jay's International Foods store and practiced her Vietnamese, without any better results.

“Winnie get a hit on our latest skull?” Molly asked, taking the time to rub at the ache behind her eyes.

“She just released the damn thing two hours ago,” Rhett reminded her. “No, as a matter of fact, the anthropologistâ”

“Puffin.” Probably the only amusing point in her day.

“Yeah.” His grin was no more respectful. “Anyway, she and a radiologist managed to match up one of your femurs to some X rays. Delighted the hell out of her. Is that creepy or what?”

Molly forbore reminding Rhett that most of the things that delighted him in the course of his work were at least as creepy and reached for the paper. “So, who is it?”

“Crystal Marie Taggatt, 3217 Hope Street, Arnold, Missouri. Seventeen years old, five-foot-seven-inches tall. Blond and blue, if that makes a difference.”

Molly looked up. “Arnold? Then â¦”

“She didn't live in or near the target zone.” His sudden grin was surprisingly feral. “The last place she was seen, on the other hand, was at the Mean Bean Coffeehouse on South Grand Boulevard.”

Should she feel better or worse? Considering the condition of her stomach and head, tough to feel worse. On the other hand, given a chance, Molly was sure she'd manage it.

“Somebody going to talk to the family?”

“Baitshop and me.”

Molly looked up, amazed. “The big boys are letting you loose?”

Rhett's grin was understandably proud. “I'm now on the starting line-up.”

“Then let me go with you,” she begged like a beagle. “Please?”

“But you need toâ”

Molly scrambled to her feet. “I
have
been. I have been for three fucking
days, and I'm about to lose my mind. Let me out for a little fresh air, for God's sake.”

Rhett actually grinned. “You sound like we keep you in a cave.”

Molly made it a point to look around at the interrogation room they'd offered her with its scarred, soundproofed walls, its tang of old cigarette smoke and sweat. Its table that was buried beneath a layer of fast-food wrappings and congealed grease.

Rhett lifted an eyebrow. “Hey, you were the one who chose this room.”

“That's so nobody could hear me screaming. Come on, Rhett. I can help. I do these interviews all the time.”

“But nobody else can interpret those charts.”

BOOK: Head Games

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