Bad Medicine (10 page)

She had to do anything but tell this sad little lady that her bright and ambitious young daughter had been so selfish that she had ignored what would happen to her mother when she stuffed a gun in her mouth.

"Can you think of any reason Mary Margaret would have tried to take her own life, Mrs. Ryan?" Molly asked anyway, her own voice not much more certain than that of the woman she interviewed.

"Peg," she said, her head lifting, her eyes coming to brief life. "Her name is Peg."

"Peg. Yes, ma'am."

The room was filled with pictures. Mr. and Mrs. Ryan, a shy-looking couple caught smiling at the camera as if it were a trick. Children. Five maybe, with their growth and development charted in color across the living room wall.

One photo caught Molly's attention, the
kind of
shot taken to celebrate the end of boot camp. Short hair and an I-can-do-anything glare. A handsome kid in a First Cav patch. A familiar pose. Molly had a shot just like it of her in her Army Nurse Corps dress greens.

There were no pictures of this son in newer clothes or with older eyes. It seemed that Mrs. Ryan had gotten bad news before.

"Not my Peg," Mrs. Ryan begged, as if Molly could take the news away. Change her mind. "Please, not my Peg."

"Do you want to wait for someone else to get here before we go on?" Molly asked again.

Mrs. Ryan straightened, lifted a square, plump hand to push back the salt-and-pepper hair that sagged across her forehead. "No." Her voice was too quiet now, and Molly wanted to be gone. "She's had her problems. Haven't we all? But she wouldn't do this. She wouldn't do this to me."

Molly wanted to scream. She wanted to throw something heavy, just to hear it break. It had seemed such a good idea when she'd taken this job. She was good at it. She liked the people. She needed the hours and the money.

Sitting on this well-worn couch with this well-worn woman, Molly gave serious thought to standing in line behind that maintenance guy from the motel for a job at Burger King.

* * *

In the end, Peg Ryan's sister showed up. In the end, she admitted that yes, Peg had been on Prozac, that she was under a lot of stress with the new law firm. She'd been trying a huge case. She still lived with her parents here in Shrewsbury. Didn't have much of a social life to speak of because she wanted a career in law so badly. She'd suffered bouts of depression in high school and then in college, but it was something she'd gotten over.

Not Peg, her sister Maureen said, just as her mother had. Holding her mother's shaking hands. Round, freckled face drawn and disbelieving. Not Peg.

But Molly heard in their voices the same pause. As if the words
Not Peg
had been a prayer instead of a protest. In the end, she'd asked for the name of Peg's law firm, since Peg had spent the majority of her time there. And then, she got out of that stifling little house, because what she really wanted more than anything, as she stared at those two women holding each other against the truth, was a drink.

* * *

Molly didn't get her drink. She didn't get a nap, or time off for good behavior. Instead, figuring the day couldn't get much worse, she decided to breach the law offices of Marsdale, Beacon, Fletcher, and Richards. There were still a couple of questions on Mary Margaret Ryan's psychosocial history that had been left blank. Or at least incomplete. Since Molly was going to have to spend the evening at the ER again, and the next morning watching autopsies, she needed to get her paperwork cleared up.

At least, that was what she told herself.

She also believed in getting unpleasant things out of the way, like the dentist or divorce. The dentist she saw every year, the divorce court, twice, both preventative measures that prevented decay and disease.

Marsdale, et al, held sway on the twenty-first floor of One Metropolitan Plaza downtown. A handy little building for an impressive law firm. New, trendy, with its postmodern copper roof and marble facade for the paying customers, and the bankruptcy court taking up the seventh floor for the nonpaying ones. It boasted a two-story lobby with Thomas Hart Benton-like murals of the city of St. Louis, one of the premier restaurants in town, Kemoll's, in the lobby for the occasional business dinner, and enough red marble to jump-start a cathedral.

Molly wasn't impressed. She was surly. But that was about how she faced a visit to any law firm. Especially since she figured that the ones she'd had dealings with had been able to import their own share of marble to impress the clientele on the money she'd invested in them.

Then she got to the information board and realized it was computer generated. Punch the right buttons, get the right answer. Molly hated those almost as much as lawyers.

No. She hated buttons. She felt humiliated by lawyers. Every time she thought about facing one, she remembered sitting in that witness chair fighting for the words that would fairly represent that night Mrs. Wiedeman had died. She remembered that no matter what words she found, the lawyer for the plaintiff had turned them around so that she sounded as stupid as his original lawsuit had claimed her to be.

Molly was standing before the black board trying to punch up the right law firm when her beeper went off. Better and better. Next the eyewitness news crew would show up.

Since it was the office calling her, Molly decided to check in with them before breaching the lion's den. Maybe they'd tell her to come back. To forget the interview. To relax, because somebody had found a note after all and the file could be closed and put away.

No such luck.

"There are a couple of detectives who need to talk to you," the senior death investigator said.

"Rhett and who else?" Molly asked, watching a gaggle of precision-suited executives with their power ties and soft leather briefcases skim over that information board like they were playing a Wurlitzer.

"Not homicide," he said. An ex-DEA bomb and arson expert, Kevin McCaully was a savvy guy who had proved to have an incredible talent for getting the job done while staying out of Winnie's way. "Intelligence. Something about Pearl Johnson."

Molly leaned against the smooth wall and rubbed at her forehead. It was so cool inside this building, hushed, as if money were something to be revered on a par with the twelve apostles. That kind of hush didn't seem to help the headache she was brewing, though.

Great. First a lawyer and then a witch-hunt. Or, if she was feeling particularly foolhardy, she could try it the other way around. It came down to the fact that she liked the decor here better than downtown.

"I'll be finished here in a little while," she said. "But I have a shift at Grace tonight. I can talk to them there, or they can meet me at the morgue in the morning. I have two openings to sit in for. Do you know exactly what they're after?"

"Nope. My gut feeling is that your mention of this Peterson guy rolled some rocks, and they're collecting what's crawling out. You doing that lawyer right now?"

"Even as we speak. I'm finding out if she was more depressed than her mother admitted."

"Lucky you. There was a question from the lab about that blue pill you found."

Molly dragged up the memory of that cluttered bureau top and the bag she'd dropped the meds in to be analyzed. "Yeah," she said. "It was in the little aspirin tin with the Benadryl and Darvon. Neon blue cap. I've seen it around, but I didn't recognize it."

"Neither did they. They were just wondering if there wasn't a container or something."

"I would have sent them a container. Just like the Prozac and birth control pills. Wouldn't I?"

Kevin chuckled. "That's what I told them. I'm sorry you got the complicated ones, Mol. I got the first two. Slam-dunks, both of them."

Molly couldn't help but grin. "Yeah. You get the flame tattoos and I get the question marks. Now, let me get this finished so I can do the really fun stuff, like Myers's investigation. They catch the kid yet?"

"They caught the kid."

"They beat the shit out of the kid?"

"He fell down a couple flights of stairs. Twice."

"Good. See ya later."

"Uh, Molly." There was a small pause, and Molly could imagine Kevin staring at the posters of the Hawaiian Islands he'd hung across the room. A skinny redhead with more beard than bicep, Kevin McCaully was nonetheless one of the top four Ironman contenders in the contiguous U.S. "Listen, be careful on that city hall business."

Molly really wasn't in the mood to hear that. "Okay, Kevin. I will."

Be careful how? she wondered. Don't say too much? Don't say anything at all? Don't even talk to the cops without a lawyer present? Well, maybe she'd find someone upstairs to bring along.

Upstairs. Right. Turning away from the bank of phones, Molly headed back to her original quest, her mood even worse.

By the time she stepped off the elevators onto the hush of gray carpets and recessed lighting on the twenty-first floor, she was almost looking forward in a perverse kind of way to putting a wrinkle in the world of Marsdale, Beacon, Fletcher, and Richards.

She was almost wondering if the news she brought them would, in fact, wrinkle anything.

"Can I help you?" the receptionist asked from behind her black Lucite desk. She was blonder, bustier, and better groomed than Molly. She also had teeth like a Derby contender.

"Yes," Molly answered in her most professional tone, feeling like the carpet cleaner in her slacks and jacket when surrounded by the kind of decor that comfortably cushioned big retainers. "I understand Mary Margaret Ryan is employed here?"

"Ms. Ryan is not in today," the blond answered, still completely neutral. "Could someone else help you?"

"One of the partners, please. It's about Ms. Ryan."

A frown, a gathering of poise, as if distancing herself. "Could I ask in what regard?"

Molly hated flashing her identification until she needed to. If a cop flashed a badge, it could be about anything. Death investigators only had one thing on their minds.

"Does she work with any one particular partner?" Molly asked. "I only need a few minutes."

The blond studied her as if trying to guess her genus. Molly sighed and reached into her purse. Five minutes later, a truly shaken receptionist was ushering Molly back along a hallway decorated in hunting prints and Brooks Brothers suits to a corner office that overlooked the river. She wasn't nearly as shaken as Molly when the occupant of that office looked up from the phone to see who was there.

"Oh, shit," Molly muttered.

His smile was a real two-hundred-watter. He flashed it on Molly like the searchlight from the police copter. "Well, well, well," he greeted her, pushing himself up from his gleaming oak desk. "If it isn't Saint Molly of the Battlefield."

Six feet two inches of black Irish good looks and the sartorial taste that comes with a big, big paycheck. Barracuda hungry and ethically challenged. The man Molly would have paid to have found in that motel room instead of Mary Margaret Ryan. The man she'd still pay to see dead in the worst possible way she could think of–and she'd thought of them all.

The man who had spent two weeks smiting just like that across a witness box from her, thirteen months, two weeks, and five days ago. The man who had taken the last of her idealism and sold it on the open market.

"Frank Patterson," Molly said, ignoring the smile, the outstretched hand, and the snakeskin charm. "Who'd you have to kill and eat to get here?"

Chapter 5

He laughed. Molly wasn't in the least surprised. One thing she had to say about Frank Patterson, he had never apologized. Not for tracking down the family of Mrs. Wiedeman, not for filing a lawsuit that included Molly for something she didn't do, not for making sure that Molly paid more than her fair share along with everybody else.

Which just went to show you that the jokes were right. Metro Health Center, suddenly uncomfortable having a liability on its staff who had openly testified against the hospital in court, had methodically worked its bureaucratic magic until Molly had been forced off the payroll, ending her first real chance at tenure and security. Patterson, on the other hand, seemed to have leapt up the food chain like a salmon in spawning season. Frank's last address had been in a crackerbox place out in Ferguson sandwiched between a Chinese take-out and a video store
.