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Evidently nobody can imagine anybody on God's good earth passing up the chance to rub the mayor's nose in a big win."
    Molly was glad she'd already dispatched the first hamburger, because the sense of déjà vu damn near took her appetite. "Gambling," she muttered to herself, the name Peterson fitting in there somewhere. "Gambling. God, I wonder if that's it. She mentioned something about sleeping with snakes."
    Sasha's eyes widened. "Scandal. How droll. You still have it?"
    Licking the juice off the fingers of her left hand, Molly used the right to reach into her scrub pocket. Then she dipped her wet fingers into the other pocket. All she came up with was lint and one lone rubber band.
    She looked at Sasha and then at Pearl, her appetite suddenly gone.
    "Oh, shit."
    "Am I going to have to take your reward back?" Sasha asked.
    Molly forgot the bag of hamburgers. Suddenly she couldn't remember what she'd done with that note when she'd gotten called out of the room. Dropping the wrapper in the trash, she headed toward her next best bet. Pearl herself.
    "I bet I left it on her," Molly said. "Since I got called away and didn't want to just leave it out."
    Suddenly, she couldn't remember, and that was the last thing she needed.
    "Go find Lorenzo for me," she begged.
    Sasha didn't move. Molly checked the robe, checked the gown beneath. Checked the cart and came up just as empty.
    "Might as well finish your hamburgers," Sasha offered with a dry grin. "Looks like you're going laundry-diving."
    Molly just stood there, trying her damnedest to remember just what she'd done right after Lorenzo had poked his head in the door.
    As if in answer to her thoughts, he did it again. "Molly, the chief of police wants to talk to you. You have a note?"
    "Lorenzo," she begged. "You saw the note. Didn't you? Did you see what I did with it?"
    Lorenzo's handsome face wrinkled. "I saw you holding something. Didn't you stick it back in her robe?"
    "Get out her scuba tank," Sasha suggested.
    "Hear the one about the lawyer and the rabbi?" somebody asked just outside the doorway.
    Molly bated suicides.

 
     
     
    Chapter 3

     
    Molly never did get her sleep. She spent the night fielding phone calls and irate questions at the Grace ER, where she used her free time to wade through laundry bins and trash bags, and she spent her morning watching autopsies. By the time she made it back to her house at the north edge of the Central West End, she was feeling dirty, exhausted, and impatient. Which was not the way to run into her next-door neighbor.
    Molly's neighborhood was a quietly genteel one of old houses lovingly restored. Her street had once emptied onto Euclid, the main thoroughfare for the West End. In these times of higher crime and upscale paranoia, though, iron gates kept the circling cars away. Molly's neighbors were successful gays, adventurous young families, and older urban pioneers. Molly's house, which her grandparents had owned and passed along, was a graceful three-story Federalist-style brick box with black shutters and a lawn cultivated with more care than most children in the city.
    Molly had grown up in the house. She did not love it. But then, she'd never felt much more for her parents, who had communed more comfortably with their careers and acquirements than with their offspring. They had in the end had the foresight to leave what they had accumulated in an unbreakable trust that allowed Molly the use of the house with all contents during her lifetime. Afterward, it would pass to her brother and his children. Even that long ago, Molly's father had just assumed that Molly would never have anyone of her own to pass it all down to. He'd been right. It didn't make her any more grateful to him for the security.
    Molly lived there anyway, among the antiques and art her parents had collected over the many years of traveling the world courtesy of Uncle Sam. She ignored the statuary and the pedigreed paintings in favor of the hostas and iris and