Free Bad Medicine by Eileen Dreyer Page A

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