A Man to Die for (21 page)

“That’s all, then,” he announced to his patient, his gaze still fixed on Casey. “Casey’ll help you dress.”

Casey dismissed his patient without ever saying another word to him. Hunsacker didn’t waste much more time on her. Still leaning against the desk when she walked back into the hall from cleaning the patient’s room, he made it a point to stretch and straighten.

“Well, thanks again. I’ll be off.” His smile broadened and brightened for her as he slowed to a temporary halt. “It’s been another long night, and I have an early day tomorrow.”

He was already gone before Casey finally understood.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped, scrambling to her feet. “The news. I haven’t checked the news today.”

Her palms already sweating and her heart rate doubling, she ran for the lounge and the little color portable the doctors had donated for Christmas. Ahmed was there ahead of her watching
Leave It to Beaver
reruns. Casey didn’t even apologize. She flipped the channel just in time to see the news return from a commercial.

“And now,” the announcer intoned, “to local news.”

“What do you mean?” Ahmed demanded, reaching for the knob. “What are you doing?”

Casey slapped his hand away. This was just the news she needed. “Touch that knob and dié,” she threatened. She never noticed the astonishment on Ahmed’s face.

A new contract for teachers, possible fraud charges against a local charity, a fire on the north side.

“And this just in,” the announcer said to the accompaniment of dark video that throbbed with flashing lights and the shadows of bystanders. “A Ladue woman was killed tonight in a fiery one-car accident along a deserted stretch of Highway KK in O’Fallon.”

Casey stood up. “Give the Beave my best, Ahmed.” She felt sick.

She was on her way back toward the work lane when she heard her name being called. She wanted to ignore it. She wanted to walk on out the door and all the way home and hide back in her room where nobody could find her. Then the call came again and she recognized the voice. Casey whipped around on her heel to see Sgt. Scanlon striding her way.

He was still dressed for work, dark shirt, skinny tie, a gray sports jacket that flapped a little as he walked. His face was more animated than she’d ever seen it.

Casey found herself at a dead halt. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, wondering if she’d called him and forgotten already.

Scanlon reached her in two steps and took her by the arm. “Can we go someplace to talk?”

She looked instinctively over her shoulder to where Ahmed still sat and turned instead for room three. It was empty and had a cart in it in case she found herself in need of a place to pass out.

“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you,” Scanlon said as soon as the door had sighed shut behind them. “We’re bringing in Hunsacker tomorrow.”

Casey couldn’t manage anything more than a stupid stare.

Scanlon squinted at her. “You wanted to know. The hooker we were bringing in recognized Hunsacker from the photo. She doesn’t remember if she saw him that night, but she knows he was one of Crystal’s customers, and that’s enough to question him on. It’s not a conviction, but at least it’s a start. We have a solid link to him.”

Still, Casey couldn’t formulate an intelligent response. She’d been sucker-punched too many times today already. She just didn’t think she could take any more. Scanlon took hold of her, his hands tight around her arms as if contact would help her comprehend. His hair was rumpled and his jacket looked as if he’d crumpled it up and sat on it. Casey found herself wanting to straighten it out. She found herself wanting to fold right into his arms like a tired child.

“Casey,” he insisted, giving her a little shake. “You’re the only one who saw this coming. At least enjoy it a little.”

She looked up beyond his coat now. Saw the hint of elation in his eyes and wished she had something better to tell him. It was too late, though. Hunsacker had gone to so much trouble to deliver his message.

So she passed it along to Scanlon. “He killed another woman tonight.”

SCANLON HAD HER
by the arms again. “What are you talking about?”

Casey couldn’t seem to get past head shaking. “Some lady from Ladue. She went toast off Highway KK out in O’Fallon tonight.”

“How do you know?”

She laughed at the insanity of it, even though her stomach tipped again. “He told me. The son of a bitch came in here and demanded I help him with his patient just because he wanted me to know that he’d killed somebody else.”

Scanlon took his hands back and shoved them into his pants pockets. Distance, Casey thought distractedly. He’s afraid of getting contaminated by my delusions. She could hardly blame him. She was sounding like Helen with her messages from God.

“What exactly did he say?”

Casey looked up to see that deceptive laziness back in his eyes. He was the picture of passive acceptance, his stance relaxed, his jacket flaring out behind his forearms.

It didn’t help make her admission any more logical. Casey decided she needed the cart after all. She leaned against it, wrapping her hands around the cool metal frame for balance.

“You remember I told you about the day I figured out he’d killed Crystal. How he carried on this perfectly innocuous conversation about what was in the paper and what a rough night he’d had the night before.”

Scanlon nodded quietly. Casey nodded back, badly needing more conviction.

“And how I was convinced he was playing a game with me. Giving me a message nobody else would get.”

Another nod, another pause for clarity.

“When he came in tonight, he asked for me to assist him. Said he’d complain to the brass if I didn’t. He was…hyped, excited. He’d been drinking, too. It’s really hard to explain, because he didn’t really say anything. It was all in his eyes, in the way he danced around and taunted me. But then, just before he left, so I’d get the message, he said the same thing he said that day. About how he’d really had a rough night.” Casey looked Scanlon in the eye and challenged him. “He was telling me he’d done it again. I saw the story on the news.”

Scanlon didn’t move, didn’t offer support or disdain. “Was she a nurse? Somebody you knew?”

Casey shook her head. “They haven’t released her name yet. But it’s what he was trying to tell me. He was responsible. I knew the minute I saw it.”

Scanlon did move then.

Letting his head drop a little, as if he had to consult some inner voice, he turned away from Casey and walked over toward the work-lane door.

Beyond the window Casey could see Steve burrowing in a cart for IV fluids and Janice in conference with Dr. Miller. The light over room six blinked and the phone beeped. Casey wiped her wet palms across the paper sheet and tried to be patient.

“You believed me all along, didn’t you?” she asked. He didn’t look back at her. “I told you. I never overlook—”

Casey waved off his excuse. “Yeah, yeah. But you don’t think I’m a space ranger.”

Still folded into his considerations, Scanlon afforded Casey a ghost of a smile over his shoulder. “You said it. A pain in the ass, but no cookie crumbler.”

How could she possibly feel better and worse at the same time? She thought about that Celtic knot she’d studied on Poppi’s wall, the endless maze that trapped you before you knew it. She was trapped, drawn in by her instincts and doomed by her persistence. Hunsacker had pissed her off with his manipulations. He’d taunted her with her impotence to stop him, not ever knowing that it was the one taunt she couldn’t abide.

Come to think of it, until she’d found herself making lists in her room, she hadn’t realized it, either.

She was trapped in a game with a snake. But she’d suffered too much turmoil, all those weeks she’d thought herself the only witness. She’d wondered too often whether she was the mad one, whether Hunsacker did no more than remind her of those terrible years in that black-and-white prison. She’d spent too long with only women as her confidants, when women were the last to be heard. And now, finally, she had an ally.

She wanted to thank him, to let him know just how much it meant to her. She wanted again to lean against him, physically just as much as emotionally. It had been so long since she’d been afforded even that much. But that wasn’t something Casey allowed anymore.

“So we can go after him for all the murders?” she asked.

Scanlon turned on her, his hands still hidden, his face still creased with thought. “I’m going to have enough to just get him in for Crystal.”

Casey shoved off from the cart, outraged all over again. “But you
know
he did it.”

Scanlon refused to flinch from her. “I might when I see him. I might be sure that he’s responsible for everything from AIDS to the assassination of JFK. That doesn’t matter. I have to take it one step at a time. With luck, and with patience, maybe I can get enough to call in the Major Case Squad, and let them go after him.”

“But we don’t have that kind of time,” she argued, wanting so much for Scanlon to take the whole burden from her, to say, it’s okay now. I’ll handle it from here. “He’s not going to stop.”

“He’s also on the mayor’s Christmas card list.”

Casey straightened abruptly, hands on her own hips. “That shouldn’t make any difference!”

For the first time, Scanlon lost his temper. “Get ahold of
my
personnel file!” he retorted with enough pique that Janice looked up on the other side of the window.

Casey didn’t notice. She didn’t take her eyes from Scanlon’s, still fighting reality, hoping for a reprieve. Knowing it didn’t work that way. Scanlon was just as constrained by the real world as she was. Finally she sighed and shoved her own hands into her lab coat, her posture wilting. So she was going to end up standing alone again. So what else was new?

“Great,” she mourned with a sad smile. “Just a couple of pains in a perfect world, huh?”

Scanlon had the good grace to smile back, and Casey couldn’t help but like him anyway. Even if he had been a Jesuit.

“New patient to room three. Nurse to room three star.”

Casey started, stared up at the speaker in frustration. “Oh, hell. Wait a minute.”

She was turning to head off the invasion when Scanlon spoke up behind her. “Casey, I think you should come back with me tonight.”

“I can’t—”

Casey had just about reached the door when it slammed in on her. Mike clattered in, pushing a wheelchair with a very pasty, very sick middle-aged man slumped in it.

Casey was on the move the minute she saw him. One whiff and she was running. He had a big GI bleed, the bucket in his hands already sloshing with the blood he’d vomited. It was flecked across his white lips and spattered down his shirt, thick and dark and deadly.

“Mike, get me some saline,” Casey snapped, whipping around to get the patient onto the cart before he crumped right on the spot. His eyes were already rolling. “Lots of fluids. Call blood bank and get lab up here. And get me the biggest NG tube you can find.

“Had better days, huh?” she asked the patient with a wry smile. He did his best to stay focused on her as she flipped up the side rails.

“I mean it,” Scanlon insisted, sounding kind of funny. “I’m not sure you’re safe.”

Casey ran for the nurse server and began yanking out equipment. “And see if you can get Ahmed in here!” she yelled to Mike’s fleeing back as she swung into a gown.

“Casey.”

“No,” she answered, pulling on gloves. On the cart, the patient was making funny noises. Casey hopped over and yanked the bed up a little so that he wouldn’t aspirate when he puked again. “We’re shorthanded.”

“You’re also my only link to Hunsacker.”

Sliding her stethoscope into place one-handed, Casey looked up from where she bent over to get a blood pressure. “Just a little louder please, so they can all hear it. It will make my life so much easier.”

Scanlon was looking white again. Greenish white. Casey couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t the sight, it was the smell. The worst smells list was a standard around the ER, and hands-down champ was the smell of a gastrointestinal bleed, the kind of pungent, syrupy odor that followed you for days, that wouldn’t quite rinse off. The room was awash in it.

“I have to get back and check on that story,” Scanlon insisted. “I want you to come with me.”

Well, there was a blood pressure anyway. Casey pumped the cuff up again and went for a vein. A big vein. Mike must have impressed somebody out there, because Marva pushed through from the work lane with a couple of bags of Lactated Ringers in her hands and a blood pump.

“You with the patient?” she asked Scanlon on the way by.

“He’s with me,” Casey answered, slapping at the arm she held to get venous pressure.

Marva stopped a millisecond to smile. “Ain’t she a great date?” she demanded. Then she caught the Cathlon Casey flipped to her and got down to business.

“All right now, Jesus, be good to your Marva, help me get this line…”

“See?” Scanlon demanded from his corner, his voice sounding even more strained. “There’s somebody else here now.”

Casey still couldn’t find the vein on her side, either. “Are you going to stay in here?” she demanded crossly.

He glared back. “Yes.”

Reaching over with one hand, she plucked a pair of gloves from the box and tossed them to him. “Then get dressed. You get to help.”

She should have felt guiltier. Scanlon stuck it out as long as he could. But when the level on the bucket rose again, he opted for retreat. And Casey, in one of her less noble moments, grinned. She finally felt better about having to walk onto Scanlon’s turf. He’d walked onto hers and lasted about as long.

“What
was
that?” he asked a while later when she found him sitting in the lounge. He had some of his color back, but his hair was a little wet, so Casey imagined he’d been performing a little fresh-air rejuvenation. Anybody else unaccustomed to that scene would have driven the porcelain bus a block or two. Casey had the feeling that Scanlon hadn’t allowed himself to vomit since he was ten.

“That,” she informed him with some satisfaction, going back after the cold piece of pizza she’d left behind so long ago, “is what happens to people who do not take care of their ulcers.” Munching on congealed dough and cheese, she shot him a meaningful look. “Which of course you have done.”

Scanlon’s eyes were riveted on her actions. “I thought
my
stomach was strong.”

Casey smiled in commiseration. “Like the man says, there’s worse things than dyin’. At least for the cleanup crew.”

Completely composed once more, Scanlon got to his feet and grabbed his jacket from where it was draped over one of the chairs. “Are you ready to go now?”

Casey considered him. “You mean it. After all this time,
suddenly
I’m in danger? Why wasn’t I in danger yesterday?”

Scanlon’s smile was grudging and knowing as he shrugged into the jacket. “Because I didn’t have any way to prove you weren’t a space cadet yesterday. Besides, I didn’t know about Elizabeth Peebles yesterday.”

Casey couldn’t quite get the pizza back up to her mouth. “The lady in the car?”

Scanlon nodded. “Single car, ran into a tree and exploded. Nobody knows why. There aren’t any skid marks or signs of another car. She was supposed to be on her way out to her country home. It’s going to be a long night, Casey. I need you to tell me everything you can about Hunsacker before I get him in my interrogation room tomorrow.”

Casey’s answering smile was grim. “If we can stop by my house, I have notes.”

Behind her, Marva breezed in with the bag containing her once-clean uniform in hand and scrubs in its place. “Why, hello,” she greeted Scanlon with a suspiciously pleasant air. “You stuck it out after all. I was wondering.”

Scanlon didn’t see fit to react past an enigmatic smile. He busied himself with pulling out car keys.

“Marva,” Casey obliged. “This is Sergeant Scanlon. Sergeant Scanlon, Marva Washington.”

Marva’s eyebrow slid north. “Sergeant?” she demanded, swiveling on Casey.

“Did I tell you I talked to the police?” Casey asked.

“You did not tell me you talked to the police.”

Casey’s smile was placid. “Well, now the police want to talk to me.”

Marva turned to Scanlon. “Make it hurt,” she suggested equably; and then walked back out.

Frontenac was a far cry from where Jack Scanlon grew up. The oldest son of an Irish cop, Jack had been raised in Dogtown where Irish cops lived. In the city. He’d been raised on corkball and the fights and fish fries over at church during Lent. The house where his mother still lived was a two-story white frame that looked pretty much like every other house on the block, with a chain-link fence, yard and a porch, and the school playground two blocks away for recreation. He’d bought his first car with the money he’d saved from working at the Steak ‘n’ Shake, and his father had taken a second job to get Jack through St. Louis University High School.

He hadn’t had yard services and pools and preschools. He hadn’t been given a car for his sixteenth birthday and another when he wrecked that one. He hadn’t had skiing vacations and an allowance that would have supported his sister’s family for a month. Jack had had a front porch and two rigid ethnic codes, Italian and Irish. He’d inherited his father’s black Irish looks and his mother’s Italian determination. He’d also inherited his city neighborhood’s disdain for the upscale neighborhoods in the county.

“I want to get a look at that book,” he told Dawson as he turned off Conway Road back into one of the newer subdivisions built by all the medical money in the area.

Rubbernecking at the half-million-dollar houses they passed, Dawson just shook her head. “You’re gonna be lucky he doesn’t file a harassment suit.”

“He’s a doctor, not a lawyer.”

“I’ll bet money he calls Murray Abrams before we take our fingers off the front doorbell.”

Murray Abrams was the “lawyer who counted” in the upper social circles of St. Louis. Jack refused to take the bet. Checking the address one more time, he turned into a driveway.

Dawson whistled in appreciation. “Screw law and order,” she decided. “I want to deliver babies.”