Molly had called the police. Winnie had called her back. Now Molly sat with Winnie and Kevin McNally, the city's senior death investigator, in the conference room at the ME's office, where she was supposed to come up with some idea of what was behind her little gifts.
Tough to think straight enough to do when she was still shaking. She had spent another bad few minutes on the floor of her foyer. She had spent even longer in her bathroom. Patrick had pounded on the door for five minutes to get her to answer Winnie's call.
Above her shoulder now the winter sun poured through the dusty window like watered milk. The conference room was uninspiring. Off-white walls, dim gold carpeting somebody must have stolen from an old convent, and one dingy window that looked out over the equally uninspiring granite police station next door. It was the room that had once held the coroner's inquests. The perfect place for a little light grilling.
“Do you have my list?” Winnie demanded.
Another answer Winnie wouldn't like. Molly had sat at her kitchen table with that damn pad of paper in front of her all morning long. She'd pulled out a pencil. Broken the point. Pulled out two ballpoints and another cup of teaâthis one unadulteratedâand tried her damnedest to put one name on that page.
She simply hadn't known where to start.
Eyes. He'd sent her eyes.
“I tried,” she said without enormous enthusiasm, her attention on the fine tremor in her hands where she'd splayed them over the scarred tabletop. “I just can't imagine anybody who'd be ⦠uh, creative enough to do this.”
“Doctors,” Kevin McNally offered from across the table.
Kevin was Molly's immediate boss. Kevin had hired Molly one week into her malpractice trial, and had quietly supported her through some fairly tough times. Kevin was the exception to the rule that redheads had fiery tempers. He might look like the poster child for St. Patrick's Day, but even caught in an archaic political system like St. Louis and working with someone as mercurial as Winnie, he'd never been caught raising his voice. But then, Kevin, who was skinny and slow-moving in the office, was also a triathlete. Probably took out all his frustrations on his feet.
Molly shook her head at him. “Doctors don't need to go to this much trouble. They can just cost me my job.” She grinned wryly. “It's sure been done before.”
“Someone involved in that lawsuit of yours,” Winnie suggested.
Molly had considered the lawsuit. It had certainly made
her
mad enough to send nasty notes.
It hadn't been that complicated a disaster. A chronic patient had come into Molly's last ED complaining of abdominal pain and died of a stroke. Everyone had been sued for misdiagnosis and neglect. Molly had been sued because she hadn't tried hard enough to pry the ED doctor out of the bathroom where he'd hidden so he didn't have to see another patient. Just another stellar chapter in the life of Molly Burke.
Again Molly shook her head. “The only person frustrated enough to send hate mail from that is me. The family got a fortune, the hospital passed enough blame around to not get stiffed for the whole amount, and the patient's lawyer could finance his way to Congress on what he made.”
“The lawyer you're now dating.”
Molly bristled. “I am not dating him.” When Winnie glared, Molly retreated to a shrug. “He just keeps coming over.”
Even Kevin didn't know quite how to react.
“He wouldn't go to the trouble,” Molly assured them both. “Trust me.”
He would, of course, send roses just to make Molly mad. But she'd
already made the phone call to clear up that little prank. Molly was convinced that Frank had just been ⦠Frank. He wasn't mad. He wasn't crazy. He was just ⦠Frank.
“What about the doctor? Didn't you testify against him?”
Molly shrugged. “His insurance covered it. He now has a lucrative practice in Alton.”
“Somebody else, then,” Winnie snapped, tapping the desk with manicured fingers. “Another patient. A lover. A neighbor.”
A lover, Molly thought with a wry grin. Definitely a lover. She'd had so many of those she'd lost track. No, come to think of it, it wasn't the lovers she'd lost track of, it was the sex. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had sex. In fact, if she maintained her current condition, in just a few more months, she could consider herself rehymenated. Maybe she should have taken Frank up on his offer after all.
“Nobody's said anything,” she said.
“And nobody saw or heard anything either time,” Kevin said.
Molly shook her head. “I asked everybody I could think of. My neighbors said the only time they heard anything before we found the box was when my dog barked around eight o'clock last night, but Magnum has been known to bark at boom cars and trash cans. Sam looked out the window, but he didn't see anything.”
Bupkeus
was actually how he'd put it. Then he'd patted Molly's hand and passed the bottle of Stoly.
“And your nephew? What about him?”
Molly shook her head. “Nothing. You can ask him yourself. He's downstairs.”
Winnie was not mollified. Straightening, she managed to give the effect of looking straight down at Molly without standing or dipping her head. “It had just better not be the family of one of the patients who went through here.”
“Sending eyes on decorated cotton?” Molly retorted. “I just don't think so, Winnie.”
“Eye,” Winnie retorted. “I only have
one
eye in my possession.”
Winnie knew perfectly well what had happened to the other eye. In fact, she'd suggested retrieving it without benefit of anesthesia.
“You have to admit,” Kevin said with a quiet smile, “it does beat all hell out of âmy dog ate my homework.'”
Winnie glared. “We're sure that neither of these ⦠artifacts could have come from our morgue.”
Kevin nodded. “Checked and double-checked. Where would you like to go from here?”
“Home to put my head under the covers,” Molly suggested.
Winnie huffed. “Hard to pretend it's a mistake anymore.”
Especially with the newest note sitting alongside the bagged flower box, like an exclamation point at the end of a statement.
YOU DESERVE WORSE
Delightful. Even Patrick had been impressed.
“I've talked to Detective Butler,” Winnie said.
Molly literally blanched. “Rhett?” she retorted. “Why? He's in homicide.”
Winnie glared. “Because I don't trust that incompetent clock-puncher from the Fifth who didn't even think this merited her attendance. At least I know Rhett will follow something up.”
Even tense as a time bomb, Molly damn near laughed. Rhett would faint when he heard Winnie's left-handed compliment. RhettâJohn Jason Butler, who had, naturally, become Rhett to the forceâlived in terror of the Medical Examiner. But then, Rhett had a strong sense of self-preservation.
“What did he say?” Kevin asked.
Winnie made gathering-up motions to alert her staff that the meeting was over. “He'll do some checking. He wants to talk to Molly, of course. And we'll be getting the report back from the anthropologist soon on the femur.”
Kevin stood on cue as Winnie glided to her feet. She took both their measures, her amber eyes as cold as yellow could get. “It has to stop.”
Again, Molly fought the urge to laugh. “Sure, Winnie. Anything you say.”
Winnie swept from the room, and Kevin walked across to lay a hand on Molly's shoulder.
“Whoever it is, they're an idiot,” he said.
“Not the description I would have used,” Molly said.
Kevin, bless him, laughed. “You're in a better position than just about anybody in the city to figure out who's behind this. You're the first person I'd put on the team anyway, Mol.”
Molly smiled then, grateful at least for Kevin's support. Giving his hand a quick pat, she lurched to her own feet. “Then let's get a game plan together, boss.”
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Downstairs, the first floor of the Medical Examiner's office echoed with age and memories. Built in the early part of the century of granite, high white walls, and dark wood, it said
institution
in big letters. It even smelled of institution. Radiators, old building, and bathroom air freshener. And, closer to the back where the terrazzo floor metamorphosed to tile, musk, more disinfectant, and the heavy tang of formaldehyde.
Stepping down from the stairs that swept quite regally up to the office floor, Molly couldn't help but think that no matter what else happened from this mess, she hoped like hell it wouldn't get her tossed out.
She really did like it here. She liked the people who worked here. She liked solving the puzzles brought here. She even liked being able to gentle the impact of the business done here on the families who clustered in untidy clumps in the viewing room.
On her better days, Molly thought she was good at her job. That if she could bring nothing else to these echoing, solemn rooms, she could make sure no one died unnoticed.
But that was on her good days. Today she just knew she felt oddly at home here. And that she needed the added income, especially with a new and ravenous mouth to feed. A ravenous mouth that was supposed to be waiting for her here in the front foyer.
That, in point of fact, wasn't.
“Damn him,” she muttered, stalking straight through toward the business end of the building.
“What are you doing back here?”
Patrick startled like a straying husband caught on videocam. Molly was not amused. She'd only allowed him to come down with her because he'd promised to remain on good behavior. And, of course, she found him leaning against the tiled wall of the morgue laughing with Lewis, the intake
tech. Not five feet away, autopsy tables gleamed beneath tucked-up surgical lights, and bagged bodies lay along the wall on morgue carts.
Three bodies lined up for autopsy. Three souls who definitely did not need a morbidly curious teenager peeking down their zippers.
Patrick shrugged and smiled, as if he'd been caught cadging a smoke behind the garage. “I was just saying hi to Lewis.”
Molly glared. “Well, say good-bye. You know you're not supposed to be here.”
Patrick took one more look around the room. “I just wanted to see.”
Standing alongside the grinning, badly shaven Lewis, Patrick looked completely out of place in his Dockers and polo shirt and Hilfiger jacket. Too clean, too neat, too eager. Molly sighed and wondered if all teenage boys were this gruesome.
“Well, you've seen. Now, come on.”
She got a quick glare of fury, and then cold complaisance. Hands shoved in pants pockets, head down, half smile reserved for his new friend Lewis, who shuffled back to his cubbyhole, where the bodies were signed in. Molly rubbed at the fresh acid gnawing at her chest and led the way back to the civilian side of the building.
“Now that you've seen your dead bodies,” she said, “you can stay home next time I come down.”
Patrick swung on her, a hundred-eighty pounds of high dudgeon. “You're acting like I'm six years old!”
“No,” she said as evenly as she could. “
You're
acting like you're six years old. I told you my rules were strict, Patrick. That's because I'm not a florist or a cake decorator. Those were people back there. People who deserve a little more respect than a kid trying to cadge a sneaky peek to see what they look like dead.”
She saw too many emotions skitter too quickly over those beautiful hazel eyes before they shuttered hard and tight. She wished she hadn't lost her temper. He probably needed to talk.
Molly had seen more dead guys than most people should in their entire lives. She forgot sometimes that other people, trying to come to grips with life and death, thought they could see something in the left-behind husks.
Molly could have told Patrick that there wasn't anything to see. She'd
found that out by her eighteenth birthday. But Patrick, sheltered, privileged, protected, hadn't had the chance.
“We'll talk about it when we get home,” she said as if he'd actually asked the question.
He watched her for a moment, his eyes almost half closed to show his disinterest. Then he turned to the door. “What did your boss say about your new present?”
Molly sighed, but she followed. “She is not pleased. Are you sure you never noticed anything in the backyard before you left for work?”
Patrick stopped so fast Molly all but ran into him. “You
still
don't believe me. I swear I don't know anything. I didn't see anything. I didn't hear anything. I didn't
do
anything!”