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the door open, but right next to her, Sasha was poking her head in.
    "She's been gone since noon, Sasha. Where've you been?"
    Sasha's expression was guarded as she stepped into the room, her hands behind her back, her street clothes back on. Precision-pressed cotton slacks and shirt in perfect pastels, white-blond hair brushed into a smooth cap around her head. She also had yellow fingertips and a lingering aroma of cigarette smoke about her. Sasha, the ice queen, was also one of the driveway fraternity who stood shivering all winter in the snow so they could have their smokes.
    "Not her," she said, then motioned in the general direction of the other door. "Her."
    Finally getting the chance to get out her equipment to finish the task at hand, Molly nodded. "Yeah. She went to sit with Pearl's family."
    Sasha nodded once, a sharp movement that failed to reach her hair. "Good. Then she can't bitch about dinner."
    "What dinner?" Molly was busy unlatching the metal case so she could get to the thermometer and Polaroid camera inside. Everything else she needed, she had at hand.
    "This dinner," Sasha said, and proceeded to bring her hands forward with the panache of a magician to produce a sack of White Castles.
    Molly should have smelled them. She'd been too preoccupied. She wasn't now. Her saliva glands went into immediate overtime.
    In her life, Molly had picked up a bad habit or two. The worst, without question, was her addiction to junk food. When she'd lived in LA, she'd dined on hot dogs at Pink's; in Austin, tacos at Willy's Mex. In Chicago, Italian beef anywhere on Diversey; and in Little Rock, hamburgers at Doe's. But in all the world, there simply was not a treat like White Castles, little flattened balls of meatlike material smothered in onions on buns the size of credit cards. Alternately called Belly Bombers and Sliders, eaten not by unit, but by sackful. There was simply nothing to compare with the taste or the clientele met at the drive-up around three in the morning or the taste of the food with a nice dry Ripple.
    It wasn't the professional thing to do, but Molly figured that Pearl would forgive her. She let the case fall closed again and pulled off her gloves. There was a dead certainty she wasn't going to get food any other way, and it was bad etiquette to eat hamburgers in formal attire.
    "You know that this is the real test that sets sentient beings apart from lower life-forms," Molly was saying as she dug into the bag and came up with her first treat.
    "Of course."
    "Only a higher form of life would create something that tasted like this and then choose to eat it. Someday we'll elevate it to the religious form it deserves, and you will be its first saint for crossing the desert to deliver me."
    "Damn right I will. I had to sneak these past half a dozen crows out there. Thompson just showed up."
    Crows being Sasha's term for mucky-mucks. As in, "if he makes you nervous, picture him with a crow sitting on his head." And Thompson was a big crow. Chief operating officer of the medical center, the man who held all their professional lives in his hand.
    His arrival was no surprise. His taking even this long, was. Nobody respected the politics of St. Louis more fervently than Dr. Stanley Thompson, nor profited from them better. Born with the rare talent to finesse both politicians and civilians, he always managed to get extra funding for his hospital and exemptions from his taxes. Molly toasted him with her first hamburger.
    "So, you got a note, I hear?" Sasha said, leaning a sleek hip against the counter by the door.
    Her full attention on the taste of old onions and mystery meat, Molly scowled. "Word travels."
    Sasha checked her watch. "It's like a game of telephone out there. The first rumor I heard mentioned rejection by a boyfriend. As of two minutes ago, it's rejection by the mob. We probably wouldn't have three people out there if Pearl hadn't missed the press conference today announcing that gambling thing.