Head Games (12 page)

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Authors: Eileen Dreyer

BOOK: Head Games
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“What's the matter?” Molly asked. “Who's this about?”
Please, she thought in sudden terror. Don't let it be Patrick. Don't let it be Frank or Sam or Sasha.
Winnie didn't sit, and she didn't relax. She just stood in the middle of the room watching Molly as if waiting. Molly was beginning to sweat.
“You get any farther on that list I wanted?” her boss asked in deceptively lazy tones.
Molly blinked. She stared. She sat down so abruptly the couch let out a little puff of dust. Then she laughed.
“Oh, God, I thought you had bad news.”
“I didn't come out in this weather for trivialities.”
Molly waved off her objection. “I mean personal bad news. I'm a trauma nurse, Winnie. I always think in worst-case scenario.”
Amazingly, that made Winnie smile. But not the kind of smile that was benign. “If you insist on a worst-case scenario, I might just be able to comply.”
Molly blinked again. She'd just begun to feel better, and Winnie was ruining it.
“Who might be mad at you?” Winnie asked again.
Considering the day she'd had, Molly laughed again. “You want to know who's mad at me, point a fire hose down the hall. Whoever gets wet is probably calling me names. Why?”
“Mad at you how long?”
Molly was feeling unnerved all over again. “I don't know, Winnie. I haven't had time to think about it. It's been a shitty shift. What do you want to tell me?”
Winnie's shrug was minimal, but even that frightened Molly. Winnie did not shrug.
“We have the report back on your bone,” she said.
“Molly? Molly, what did you tell them?”
They both turned to see Nancy skidding to a halt in the doorway, tears on her cheeks. Molly wanted to scream at her. “What is it, Nancy?”
“They're gone!” she accused, all but pointing an angry finger at Molly's chest. “Somehow you tipped them off, and now that baby's going back to that …”
“David's gone?”
“They just never came back from X Ray! What do I do?”
Molly fought the old clutch of futility and faced her nurse with as much composure as she could. “Advise DFS. Find out what's on the films. Follow it up.”
The young nurse's eyes were hot. “We should have done something
here
.”
“Yes,” Molly said. “We should have. This is the next best we can do.” Nancy fled and Molly was left with nothing more than Winnie's news. It took her a second to get back to it.
“You got the report back,” she said, wondering why the hell she was forcing this.
Winnie faced her head on. “Neither the bone nor the eyes were from any medical supply house. Not a medical school, not the Internet. Not anything traceable.”
Molly just stared, her brain suddenly frozen. “What do you mean?”
“The bone was from a human. It was a new bone from a young woman. The eye was also from a woman. Probably a young woman.”
“But not from a medical supply house.”
“No.”
“Not from a medical school.”
Winnie just lifted an eyebrow. For a second, all Molly could do was stare at her boss. And wait for the inevitable.
“You're not just getting threats from somebody who's mad at you, Molly,” Winnie admitted. “You have a monster on your hands.”
Molly's instinctive reaction probably wasn't wise. “You're lying.”
Winnie froze.
Molly should have apologized. Hell, she should have thrown herself on the floor and groveled. It seemed, though, that all she could manage was a frozen stare and a sudden, overwhelming bout of nausea.
“How do you know?” Molly asked.
Winnie just looked to the open door, which made Molly feel even worse. Sucking in a steadying breath, she climbed to her feet and closed off the rest of the lane. Then she faced Winnie again.
“How do you know for sure?”
Winnie sat down. “The anthropologist was bored. Your bone was the most interesting artifact she's had to deal with in a while. Probably the decoupaging, don't you think?”
Molly kept her temper by a thread. “The point, Winnie.”
“You want chapter and verse? It's pretty dry.”
“Humor me. This is a big logic leap, and I've already had a bad day.”
Then Molly sat down, too, if only to drive home her point.
Winnie nodded and slipped into testimony mode. “After photographing and measuring the specimen, Dr. DeVries cleaned off an area of paint to determine age. The femur is fresh. It hasn't been discolored enough to be aged at all. It certainly hadn't been in the ground for any length of time, which would have left it stained and showing root patterns. It's also too heavy to be old. Bone mass lessens over time. The femur is straight, which
means it is Caucasian. The diaphysis is curved, which you find in females. You want me to go on?”
No. Molly wanted Winnie to smile and say it was all a joke, like Frank. “Yeah.”
“From the size and length of the specimen, we're probably talking about a female in the range of five-foot-seven to five-foot-nine-inches tall, and well nourished. From the histomorphometric analysis and epiphyseal closure, Dr. DeVries believes the owner to have been about seventeen years of age. And something else …” Winnie damn near winced on this one. “Something I missed.”
If she hadn't still been trying to ingest the impact of the rest of Winnie's statement, Molly would have been more impressed by the virtually unheard of admission of guilt. As it was, she was still caught in the seventeen-year-old white female portion of things.
“Well, we did establish that neither specimen could have come from a path lab or medical school. No formalin present. But Dr. DeVries did catch a faint aroma we seemed to have overlooked. She did some tests. The bone showed fresh traces of hydrochloric acid,” Winnie said, then paused for impact. “And Soilex.”
Soilex. Soilex. Why did that ring a bell? Molly sat there in dead silence as the hallway beyond the lounge door echoed and shrilled with a full load of injured and ill and Winnie waited with the patience of a cat for her part-time death investigator to make the connection.
It came with an almost audible click.
“Oh, God,” Molly breathed, eyes widening, stomach clutching up like a faulty bellows. “Tell me you're joking.”
One raised eyebrow was enough answer.
Molly wanted to stand up. She wanted to walk off the implication of Winnie's final bit of news. She couldn't seem to make it to her feet.
Molly had first heard about it at a Masters Class in Death Investigation she had attended at St. Louis University. Each course offered updates, experts in the field, topical information on current issues. Molly vividly remembered the day they'd discussed the pros and cons of Soilex, because of the “tastes just like chicken” jokes.
She all but glared at Winnie. “You mean the same hydrochloric acid
and Soilex that Jeffrey Dahmer used to soak his victims in to clean the meat off the bones?
That
hydrochloric acid and Soilex?”
“Similar enough to do the job.”
That finally got Molly to her feet. “Oh,
God
.”
Winnie didn't move. “Medical supply houses don't find a need to use Soilex. At least, not on human bones. They also clean their specimens better before shipping. Besides that, most of their specimens are from third world countries, which pretty much excludes fresh five-foot-seven-inch, well-nourished white females.”
Molly found herself pacing fast, cornering the little ten-by-eight-foot room like a go-cart on a short track. “Oh … God …”
“As I said,” Winnie mused almost to herself. “We have a monster on our hands.”
Molly walked faster, cornered harder, until she almost wiped out by the sink on water that had dripped from the coffeemaker.
“Triage nurse to the front,” the PA announced overhead.
Molly tried very hard to switch gears back to the hallway. She couldn't. She kept tripping over the rest of Winnie's implied message.
They had a monster on their hands.
And he was sending his trophies to Molly.
 
 
Molly didn't sleep that night, either. She kept waiting for Magnum to bark. For him to show up at the back door with a red-and-gold mouth. She kept expecting to suddenly realize who might be angry enough with her to do something this grisly.
Outside the sleet stopped and the temperatures rose. The wind gusted and whined and then, toward morning, dropped, as if losing interest in harassing the city. Inside Molly's house, nothing stirred. Patrick had come home from work and gone straight to bed, and nobody else came to visit. So Molly sat at her kitchen table with her dog curled up at her feet and her pad of paper on the table, and she still couldn't come up with one viable name to put on her list.
She didn't know that many people. Not many she chose to remain in contact with, anyway. Molly was a compartmentalizer, carefully tucking the
different bits and pieces of her life into separate boxes with the intent of only keeping one or two open at a time, because it was the only way she could deal with them.
It didn't always work, of course. PTSD lurked beneath the faultiest lid, so that she sometimes had trouble shoving it fully closed. But as she'd moved from city to city and back again and again to St. Louis, she'd ended up packing her life away and leaving it behind each time. And, for one reason or another, she'd never gone back to pick it up.
The box that was currently open contained the people at Grace ED, her coworkers at the Medical Examiner's office. Sam. Frank, when he behaved, and his three children, who had come to see her as a kind of eccentric aunt. Joey, Frank's homeless friend who lived in a cave down by the river.
But no one with huge emotional bonds, no violent upheavals, no melodramas. Her own upheavals were far behind her, her emotional bonds not even strong enough to have withstood her latest move. There was no one and nothing she could easily blame this on.
She'd helped send some people to prison last summer. She supposed she could do another check on them. Make sure once and for all none of them were so bitter they'd do something like this.
She couldn't imagine how, though. They'd been small minds. Big greed, short sight. Their crimes hadn't extended to pure evil. And whatever was going on, Winnie was right. This was the stuff of monsters.
Bones.
A human bone.
The human bone of a young girl.
And, oh, God, her eyes.
Her
eyes. Could the eyes have gone with that femur? Could she be getting a corpse one piece at a time?
Or was somebody storing up gifts in his basement just to make her frantic?
Eyes.
Bones a person could almost discount. Not eyes. Not when they looked at you in your sleep, as if expecting an answer.
Eyes were an organ, just like a liver or a spleen. But an organ that carried the weight of a soul.
And Molly had been gifted a pair, like marbles, to play with.
Sitting alone in a silent kitchen that still lay in early morning shadow, Molly thought of little Latesha Wilson, who had died an unexpected death, her killer probably as surprised as she. She thought of Sharon Peters, left like trash beneath the trees of Forest Park for the joggers to find. Stunned to unconsciousness, raped and battered. A sudden crime, overwhelming, startling.
Molly wondered what it would take to have the exquisite patience to produce a bone so clean of tissue that it could hold paint.
A bone from a woman who had once been alive.
A young woman.
A girl.
Molly looked at that empty tablet of paper in front of her and knew she wouldn't find any answer that would satisfy her. Because the mind that would be able to kill like that was so malevolent Molly would surely have recognized it right away. She would have seen that kind of evil at a glance.
Wouldn't she?
God, she thought, staring at those empty lines. Who could do something like this? And what does it have to do with me?
She knew the answer to the first question, of course. She'd taken the classes, seen the slides. Hell, she'd heard the tapes the FBI had gathered of suspect interviews.
It was tradition in the ED, though, where superstition reigned right above science in imperatives, that you simply didn't name something that scared you this badly. It was like calling down the devil. You didn't say what a quiet shift you had or all hell would break loose; you didn't say out loud just how bad a patient was or he'd die before the words were out. So Molly didn't call this person by name. But she sure as hell knew what he was.
What she had to do was figure out who and why. Because whoever the hell this was, he sure had a personal message to give to her.
Molly wanted to laugh, because she didn't know what else to do. It was too goddamn quiet in this house. Too empty and tidy and still. Molly needed movement. Leaving the empty paper behind, she headed for her answers.
Watery sunlight had begun to creep through the southern windows. The crows in her trees had begun to cackle. The family room still lay in shadow, though, the woman in Picasso's painting resting from her rage.
Molly didn't notice. Instead she focused on the penances she'd tucked
into the bookshelves in the corner. The answers to questions she still really wasn't ready to ask.
For in those mahogany shelves rested the sum of her professional knowledge. Not just the
Taber's Medical Dictionary, Trauma Medicine, DSM-IV, Merck Manual of Medicine
, but her
Practical Homicide Investigation
. Her
Death Investigator's Manual
and
St. Louis City Criminal Investigation Procedurals
. Even more important, her collection of works from Ressler, Douglas, and Burgess, the masters of their subject.
The Crime Classification Manual, Sexual Homicide
, the syllabuses from every lecture she'd ever taken from those authorities.
Her answers lay on these shelves. Tucked within the statistics droll instructors had dispensed like stock options because it was the only way they could impart them with any composure. Laid out in graphic photos and even more graphic interviews that still didn't convey the horror of the subject.
Molly knew she was going to have to open those books and confirm what she already knew. She would.
In a minute.
Molly wasn't sure how long she stood there trying to work up the courage to move. She just knew that the light strengthened around her until she could actually read the titles she knew so well. Until she could see that books she cared for with the reverence of someone who respected her work, were suddenly untidy.
Jumbled a bit, as if quickly shoved back into place.
Oh, damn.
Shoving her hands into her rumpled scrub pockets, she sighed. Like she really needed even more complications right now. She was still standing there wondering what to do about it when she heard footsteps skid to a sudden halt behind her.
“Jesus, Aunt Molly! You scared the hell out of me. I didn't think you'd be up yet.”
Molly didn't bother to turn to where Patrick was standing behind her in the hallway. “You either, Patrick,” she said softly.
“You're still in your work clothes,” he noticed. “Do you have to go back already?”
Molly rolled her shoulders to loosen them and scratched at unwashed hair. “I couldn't get to sleep last night.”
She heard his bare feet pad across the hardwood floor. “Is something wrong? You get another note or something?”
Or something.
“No. Just a bad shift.”
She and Winnie had decided to keep it under wraps until Winnie could assemble help. The two of them, heads together in the nurses' lounge like two friends planning a wedding shower.
“You really look beat,” Patrick said, stepping alongside Molly. “Why don't you go on up to bed?”

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