A Man to Die for (19 page)

Everything else on her list was probably useless, nothing more than fuel for her own suspicions. But the notebook might be something. Casey looked down at her notes one more time, trying to pull a game plan from them.

She was walking a more perilous tightrope now, with humiliation on one side and unemployment on the other. Each step she took had to be more careful than the last.

Downstairs the doorbell chimed. Casey looked up and sighed. The next step was going to have to wait. She had Janice to deal with first. Shuffling her scattered papers back into order, she slid them away and turned off her lamp.

Janice stood on her porch like a noblewoman on her way to the guillotine. Casey couldn’t help but smile as she pulled open the door.

“Finally.” She greeted her coworker with a smile she knew must look like one of Ed’s. “We have the house to ourselves for the afternoon. Let’s eat.”

Janice’s lips fluttered toward a smile of thanks. “Your mom?” she asked, eyes tracking the high, echoing rooms.

Casey shrugged and pushed the heavy wood-and-glass door shut. “Off saving souls in purgatory.”

Janice actually sighed. “I hope she’s saving mine.”

“Food first.” Her tennis shoes muttering on the hardwood floors, Casey led Janice past the entombed silence of the living room back into the cracked and comfortable kitchen.

Casey hadn’t wasted her years living with Ed. She knew enough to ease Janice into her problem. Dessert was soon enough.

“I don’t know what to do,” Janice admitted, picking her chocolate cake into crumbs with the tines of her fork.

Casey spent a moment watching dust motes drift in the sun over by the sink.

“Wanna tell me about it?”

Janice’s eyes were wet and huge, her forehead creased like an old letter. Her hands trembled, just a little. She’d been keeping a lot in.

“Your ex-husband ran around on you.”

Casey just nodded.

Janice renewed the attack on her cake. “Aaron has done the same thing…” Courage seemed to require extra oxygen. Janice filled her lungs and continued. “And it wasn’t with women.”

Casey’s own breath whooshed out. “Oh.”

“Men,” Janice spat. “A man, anyway. He knows him from the hospital.”

Aaron was a nurse who worked at one of the mid-county hospitals, a postcard-perfect hunk with devastating blue eyes and enough hair on his chest to warrant a virgin fiber tag.

“Do you know who it is?”

Janice shook her head. “He swears it was just a fling, just…an experiment. Casey, I don’t know what to do.”

“Wow,” Casey muttered. “I never handled that one before. For all Ed’s quirks, he did like to be the only one in the bed with a penis.”

Janice’s look of surprise made Casey smile.

“He’s a transvestite, not a bisexual. There’s a difference.”

“How did you make your decision?”

Casey sighed. “It was a final straw, not the whole reason. His running around was just a symptom of the problems.”

Janice nodded, setting her fork down. It clanked listlessly against her plate as she studied the checkered table-cloth. “We’ve been having problems,” she admitted. “We’ve been married nine years, and it seems like we’re having the same arguments without resolving them. I’m frustrated, he’s frustrated.”

“Does he want to stay married?”

Her laughter was as brittle as her eyes. “Of course he does. He hates change.”

“Do you?”

“Want to stay married?” She looked up, her eyes swimming again. “I don’t know. I’m afraid I’d stay in it just because I’m as afraid of change as he is. We’re comfortable together. We’re a habit. Divorce is such a final thing, such an effort.”

Casey waited, instinctively knowing there was more. There was.

“There’s something else,” Janice admitted, her hands on her table, her fingernails lined up like red bullets. “There’s someone else.”

“For you?”

Janice hesitated, hedged, finally shoved her chair back to give her more room. “I think I’m in love with him. I…I feel sometimes like all I want to do is escape with him, and it would take care of everything.”

Casey dropped her own fork. “No,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

Janice looked up at her, startled.

Casey faced her, surprised at her own vehemence. Wouldn’t it just figure that she’d get into this conversation right after visiting with Ed the Led?

“Believe me when I tell you that running into a new relationship like that isn’t going to solve your problems left over from your old one. It’s just going to create new ones.”

“You did that after Ed?”

“I did that
with
Ed. He was my escape. My savior who understood me and would make me feel better. All I did was step from the swamp into the morass. Trust me, Jan, it isn’t the solution.”

“Then what?” she demanded, jumping to her feet. “Life with Aaron is impossible right now. He doesn’t understand, and I can’t make him. We’d been making love less and less even before I found out about…the other thing. I think I want to leave, but I’m not sure I have the courage on my own.”

“Thinking you want to leave is a lot different than knowing it,” Casey advised. “Until you know, tell the other guy to keep his pants zipped.”

She actually got a smile out of Janice on that one. A brief flash of revelation that betrayed just what kind of bedmate this new guy was. No wonder she was confused. Sex confused everything.

“You’re a woman,” Casey challenged her. “You’re too intelligent to let your gonads lead you around.”

Janice laughed and settled back into her chair. “But they’re such lonely gonads.”

It was Casey’s turn to laugh. “Honey, when they’ve been singing solo for three years, you come talk to me. Till then, I got no sympathy.” Scraping back her own chair, she got up to refill the tea glasses. “Get thee to a counselor, woman. Make Aaron go, too, so he can work out this experimentation shit. Move out if you need to, to see if you’ll feel better. Live all on your own for a few months, because chances are that’s what you’ll be doing anyway if you leave. Then, and only then, will I permit you to run off with Studley Do-Right if you so choose.”

Janice looked up with a fair amount of frustrated humor in her eyes. At least it was better than all that angst. “Gee, Mom, it’s all so easy, isn’t it?”

Casey topped off Janice’s glass and turned to her own. “Of course not. But it is logical.”

“Which is why we all respect your advice so much.”

Casey snorted and sat back down. “If everybody respected my advice, we’d have three more nurses on the work lanes and Ahmed would be put on waivers.”

They’d comfortably moved on to dishing dirt when the phone rang. Casey got to her feet, figuring Helen was calling for a ride home from her Sodality blow-out. She was surprised to hear the fatigued growl of Sgt. Scanlon on the other end.

“Can I call you back in about half an hour?” she asked immediately, turning toward the wall. Even Janice could innocently betray her now.

“You can,” he retorted shortly. “But I thought you might want to know this now. Wanda Trigel’s been found.”

CASEY COMPLETELY FORGOT
about Janice. “Where?” she asked, already hearing her answer in the caution in his voice.

“Couple of hunters found her down a ditch about half a mile from the Ramblin’ Rose.”

She didn’t realize she’d lifted a hand to the ache in her chest. “And?”

He didn’t answer right away. Casey guessed cops were as hesitant to be forthright to civilians as nurses were. “She’d been there a while. There wasn’t a whole lot to go on. They think it was blunt trauma to the head.”

Casey instinctively nodded. “How did you hear about her?”

Scanlon grunted. “APB’s out on some guy she was buying drinks for that night. He’s wanted here, too.”

So, she wanted to say. I was right. Wanda didn’t run off, she didn’t leave her car behind. She was dead all the time and nobody looked for her until some poor schmucks in their camouflage and feed hats tripped over her rotting carcass back in the woods.

“He didn’t do it,” was all she said.

“Jefferson County seems to think so.”

It was Casey’s turn for a grunt. “They also thought she’d run off with a trucker.”

It was news Casey had expected all along. It served to indict Hunsacker yet again in her mind. But she knew just the same it wouldn’t help. Nobody would go looking for him just because he’d been called a shit-filled douche bag by the victim. In the end, the news of Wanda’s death would only serve to increase Casey’s sense of impotence.

“What did you want to tell me?” Scanlon asked. “I was in interrogation when you called.”

Casey pulled fingers through her hair and shot a side-long look to where Janice was listening with more than a little interest. “Let me call you back on that. I have company right now.”

“Suit yourself.”

She wanted him to understand, but she couldn’t say anything. “Thank you,” she said instead. “I appreciate your calling me with the news.”

“I thought you’d want to know.”

Hanging up, Casey focused on the shaft of sun again, where it flowed in from the back bay window. Thick and golden and trembling with dust, it reminded her of the sun of cathedrals, ringing with enlightenment and inspiration, swollen with faith. Carrying prayers and incense up through the windows to God.

Carrying back warmth to earth to feed decay, warming a corpse so the bacteria could balloon, so the maggots could feed and grow and hasten dust back to dust. Melting identity and individuality back into fertilizer, the hopes and prayers decaying along with all the other body parts.

“Bad news, Casey?”

Casey offered Janice an apologetic smile. “A friend from back at St. Isidore’s. Everybody thought she’d run away from her husband. They found her dead this morning.”

Janice’s mouth closed into an
O
of surprise. “God, how horrible. Do they know who killed her?”

“They think so. Somebody she was out drinking with.”

Poor slob. Casey hoped he had an airtight alibi, or else he’d get snared in Hunsacker’s web, too.

She was just about to return to the table when the phone rang again. She picked it up.

“Is Benny there?”

Well, it definitely caught Casey’s attention. “Mom?”

“Catherine, dear, is Benny there?”

“No, of course not.” Even so, she caught herself looking around, as if he could have snuck in behind her back. “Why in heaven’s name did you ask?”

“Because I’ve been thinking of him,” her mother answered as if Casey were slow. “I’m sure it’s a message from Our Lady. She wants me to prepare.”

“Good, Mom. Fine. Are you ready to come home?”

“Of course,” came the answer. “I have to start dusting.”

To dust to dust. Maybe it was a message. Maybe Benny was as dead as Wanda. They hadn’t heard in two years. And maybe Casey needed an afternoon at the movies to clear her head.

“On my way,” she said and hung up.

She didn’t get back to Scanlon till later that afternoon.

“Sgt. Scanlon,” he answered as if finishing a sentence.

“I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you,” Casey apologized. She was sitting back up in her room, her notes condensed to a small list of things Scanlon might like to know. They lay next to her
Taber’s Medical Dictionary
and three historical romances on her old walnut desk.

The rest of the room was much the way she’d kept it when she’d left for school. A canopied bed, window seat, rocker in the corner. The bulletin board with pictures of Paul Newman and Robert Redford had been traded for a series of Erte posters, and the stuffed animals had given way to books and stethoscopes, but it would always be Casey’s haven. The top of the house, closest to the sky, the first room the moon found at night and the sun found in the morning. A bubble of quiet in a house that echoed.

“Is it all clear now?” Scanlon asked, just a hint of weary humor in his voice.

Casey couldn’t say she was amused. “I’ve become a little more cautious in the last few days. I seem to have attracted Dr. Hunsacker’s attention.”

She expected Scanlon to blow her off, so it was a surprise to hear a funny little silence on his end.

“What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly not quite so tired.

“He’s playing little games with me. Letting me know that he knows some of my secrets. I’m not sure I want him to have all of them just yet. The company I had over when you called before thinks he walks on water.”

“He really has you spooked, doesn’t he?”

Casey heard the distant tap-tap of a pen across the line and fought a smile. The sergeant was at work. “I’m looking forward to hearing your opinion of him after you meet.”

Another silence punctuated by tapping. “What did you want to tell me earlier?”

“Oh, yeah.” She pulled her notes up, glad he’d changed the subject. She knew she’d been cryptic about Hunsacker, but not everyone in St. Louis needed to know about Ed quite yet. “I wanted to ask if Crystal was obsessed with punctuality.”

“What?”

“Did she yell at her, uh, customers if they were late for appointments?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I never made a date with her.”

“Did she keep a rigid schedule?” Casey persisted.

There was that silence again. It was all the answer she needed.

Did she allow herself to hope now? “I think you’ll find Hunsacker’s name in her schedule book. Evidently she carried one with her everywhere. He would have seen her the same time every time he visited. Maybe she used some kind of code.”

“No,” he answered. “She didn’t. She wrote everything out. Quite literate for a South Side Hooker. Her book disappeared when she was killed.”

Now Casey was silent. She knew Scanlon would be able to hear the throb of bass from her stereo, Joe Cocker singing about help from friends.

She was getting tired of the turnarounds, the chances, the spark of hope only to run headlong into reality. She kept coming close and getting no closer.

“I’d hoped this might be something.”

“It does tell me that maybe your doctor did know my dead hooker. Where’d you find out about the book?”

“My ex-husband. He and Hunsacker trade ‘women in my life’ stories over golf.”

This time the tapping stopped. Casey could almost imagine him rubbing at his forehead, elbows on Dawson’s desk, his face with that pinched pre-antacid look to it.

“Ms. McDonough—”

Her mother was right. He was still a Jesuit. He issued a complete warning against recklessness with no more said than her name.

“Sergeant,” she countered in the same tone. “I have to know. I have to reach the point where somebody else will listen to me.”

“Hearsay evidence isn’t admissible in court.”

She smiled now. “It’s enough to get a search warrant. At least it was on
Miami Vice
. I just want enough so that all you guys will start looking in the right direction.”

“You are perseverant, aren’t you?”

“My other commendations were for perseverance.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why are you so sure? I mean, nobody on earth would tie these three deaths to one person. There’s not one damn thing that’s the same. Not the weapon, not the site, not the circumstances. There’s no pattern here, and what you’re trying to tell me is that Hunsacker is a pattern killer.”

“I’m telling you he killed three people. I don’t know from patterns. I don’t care.”

“Why?”

Casey shook her head, frustration welling tight in her chest. Certainty, dread, fear, and all overwhelming her sense of logical communication. “It has to do with pelvics, Sergeant.”

“Bones?”

“Exams. And unless you’re a woman and have ever been through one, I can’t tell you why I think Hunsacker’s a psychopath just by his fondness for pelvics.”

This time the pen seemed to skitter. He must have thrown it.

“Give me a try.”

Casey snorted. “What, you’re going to give me the church line about not having to be married to counsel couples? Strip, put your feet in stirrups, and make light conversation while somebody’s sitting between your legs, and then we’ll have something to talk about.”

Much to Casey’s amazement, Sgt. Scanlon laughed. She should have been furious. She found herself laughing along.

“I’ve been given a lot of suggestions,” Scanlon admitted. “I think that was a first.”

“Ask your Detective Dawson about it,” Casey countered. “I bet she’d understand.”

“Do me a favor,” he asked, the levity in his voice dying. “Lay off for a while. I’ve spent the day interrogating the pimp’s girlfriend trying to break his alibi. We also found that possible witness, the one who took off. She’s coming in tomorrow morning. We should have something by noon.”

“And you still think it’s going to be the pimp.”

“I still think it’s going to be the pimp. If it is, the worst your doctor did was see a hooker with a tight schedule.”

Casey didn’t know quite what to hope for. It was like all those times Ed had come home late and she hadn’t known whether she wanted proof he was seeing other women or not. What did you wish for, innocence or calumny? The anticlimax of relief or the hot flood of self-righteous indignation?

“You’ll tell me,” she asked. “Won’t you?”

He seemed to be thinking about it, tapping something new. Fingers maybe. The sergeant either had great rhythm or was in dire need of magnesium.

“I’ll tell you,” he finally allowed. “I only hope it satisfies you.”

She wanted to say it would. She couldn’t. It would be a promise she didn’t know she could keep. “Thank you, Sergeant,” she did say. “You’ve been very patient about this.”

“Like I said,” he answered with the stiff formality of a shy man. “I never pass up a reasonable lead.”

Casey hung up the phone wishing she could have told the sergeant her intangibles. The little things she’d collected about her friends and Hunsacker that began to form a pattern, at least to her. She wanted to see his face when she told him about the way Hunsacker used his information about Ed, how slick and sly he was. She wanted the sergeant to understand about Hunsacker’s eyes, because she often felt she was the only one who could see what they really looked like, like the guy in the old
Twilight Zone
who could recognize aliens because he was the only one wearing the right glasses.

Sitting alone in her room at the top of the world with her list, she sometimes felt very foolish, as if she were getting as delusional as Helen. Helen saw saints, and Casey saw sinners. An extension of their lives, a logical end to their beliefs. Casey was afraid she was losing her sense of humor, and if that happened, she’d be as much a ghost as her mother.

It was that dream. The memory of those years when she hadn’t known how to break free, when she hadn’t had the courage or insight or maturity. She’d come to that apartment a twenty-year old who accepted what she got as inevitable. She’d run four years later and vowed to never look back. Until Hunsacker, she hadn’t.

For a long while Casey sat there alone with her suspicions, watching the sun gild the trees and slide toward the horizon. She listened to the croak and chatter of birds and the mutter of traffic over on Elm. For that long she held off the next step, because she didn’t want to take it. She didn’t want to step out her door into Helen’s miasma of fervor, or the real world it held away.

The chapel was the only other room on this floor, a cracked, badly painted, old practice altar Benny had brought home from Kenrick Seminary littered with a forest of holy cards, attended by red and blue vigil lights, guarded by a myriad of Madonnas and one lonely Sacred Heart. Helen’s real family. More real than the faces downstairs she’d made up lives for, more real than her own children who had tiptoed through the house, dreading the sound of their mother’s call.

Helen’s temple of submission. Her altar of deliverance, built confession by confession over the years until Helen could never escape the finality of her decision, until her children could never run far enough away to quiet the remonstrances.

It was Casey’s punishment for taking control that she was caught in her room with the puzzle of Hunsacker to solve. Her penance for not bowing to the power of a greater force. Everyone else submitted, to God or spouses or peer pressure. But not Casey. She had to stand alone. And because she had to stand alone, she was the only one with a clear view of Hunsacker’s eyes. She stood on a box of self-pretentious pride that lifted her just high enough to see over that wall of manners he’d erected.

Maybe Helen was right after all. Maybe she should get out there and throw herself at the mercy of the holy cards and be absolved of this insight.

Casey knew better. She was stuck with her pride and her insight and memory of what real impotence felt like to fuel her fight. She wouldn’t burn any incense in this house.

Down at city homicide Scanlon bent to retrieve his pen. Crystal’s file lay spread out over his desk, where he’d been going over it again when Casey McDonough had called. While he’d been on the phone, somebody had dropped off a note from the captain. It sat on top of the crime-scene photos like a crow looking for left-overs.

The captain was complaining again about Jack’s request for overtime. It was the captain’s way of telling Jack that he didn’t like him. Jack didn’t need a note to figure that out. He got the message every time he was called into the office.