A Man to Die for (37 page)

“Near as they can guess, just about eight.”

Casey checked the chart and then her notes again. She remembered dealing with the lovely Mrs. VanCleve. She also remembered that her chart had gone on a huge pile to be finished at the end of shift. Casey hadn’t charted on it until three hours after the woman had left, and now she realized that something was missing. She wasn’t sure what. But something wasn’t right.

“He did come in just before Billie did,” she murmured, peering at the pages that flapped in the wind. She gave her hair another swipe, already knowing it was useless. “But…”

He looked over then. “But what?”

Casey could only shake her head. “I don’t know. Something.” She looked over at Jack. “Give me some time on this, okay?”

Nodding, Jack returned his attention to traffic. They turned into the emergency drive and pulled to a halt outside the ambulance entrance as Casey stuffed the envelope into her work bag.

“I’ll be here at eleven,” Jack assured her.

Casey tried another scowl. “What if I don’t get off then?”

“I’ll read a good book.”

“Go home and get some sleep instead.”

Jack just shook his head. “I won’t get any sleep until this is over. Now, go on and get in to work.”

Still, she didn’t move. She clutched her bag in taut hands and faced the back end of the ambulance in front of them, trying her best to summon courage, or words, or both. She’d been planning on having time alone to screw her proverbial courage to the sticking post.

Jack was ahead of her. “Casey.”

She turned to him, knowing damn well he could see the precarious state of her self-confidence.

Jack’s smile was at once dark and empathetic. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

Casey was surprised by a sharp laugh. The good Sgt. Scanlon was better acquainted with uncertainty than he let on. It said something about the situation she’d landed herself in that it was a man she’d only met going to report a crime who was the one person she could rely on right now.

She flashed him a sharp grin and nodded. “I’m okay, you’re okay, but they’re morons, right?”

“It’s one way to look at it.”

At least when she opened the car door she was still grinning.

Casey would never have believed she would be hesitant about walking back on the halls. When the doors swished open before her and the triage staff looked up, she wanted to turn back around. She expected hostility and curiosity, and there was no question she at least saw uncertainty and curiosity on their faces.

It seemed that the shift wasn’t going to be normal in any way. When Casey opened the door to the lounge, she braced herself for just about anything. She didn’t think that included finding her ex-husband the only person there to greet her.

She instinctively looked over her shoulder, just to make sure she’d walked into the right hospital. Then she turned back to Ed, who was getting to his feet and straightening his double-breasted suit.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you, Casey,” he said.

Casey almost ran out to catch Jack before he got away. “What’s wrong with the phone, Ed?”

“I hear it’s tapped.”

Casey abruptly sat. “Where did you get that information?”

Ed walked up to her and held out a hand. “Your supervisor said it was okay if you got on the hall a little late. Let’s take a walk.”

Casey looked around, fully expecting to see Hunsacker step in the door. “Where?”

Ed sighed. “Casey, you’ve become paranoid over this whole thing. I’m alone, acting on my own behalf. I just want to talk. And it was your mother who told me about the phone. I think she wanted to scare me off.”

Casey didn’t know quite what to do, but one thing she’d long since learned about Ed was that he was harmless. Giving in to curiosity, Casey got up and walked out the door with him and headed for the exercise paths that circled the campus.

“The police talked to me, you know,” he said, hands in pants pockets, his jacket bunching up around his forearms, head down a little.

“I know,” Casey answered, her attention on the little knots of people wandering over the grounds. She still expected Hunsacker to show up out of nowhere.

“You really must have impressed the police with your fear of Dale. They took your story quite seriously.”

“And why shouldn’t they?” Casey asked.

Ed took a minute to think about that. “Dale has some problems,” he admitted, watching the path ahead of him instead of Casey. “Things we’ve been working through together, about his sexuality and self-image. I won’t deny that, and I doubt he would, either. But you’ve made rash judgments based on only a slice of information, and. I think you should know the rest.”

“Does he know you’re telling me this?”

“No. He’d never let me if he knew.”

“Then I don’t want to know.”

“But you have to. You of all people…”

She stopped and swung on him. “I don’t—”

“Dale’s father abused him.” Ed stopped right across from her, his voice implacable and soft. “He beat him mercilessly and locked him in closets for days and humiliated him in public. He molested Dale’s sister repeatedly, and Dale couldn’t stop it. He’s never gotten over it.”

Casey instinctively shook her head. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she demanded, rigid and unyielding. “He’s lying to you just to get your sympathy, Ed. He’s lying to you like he’s lying to everyone. He told everybody at M and M and Izzy’s that he and I were having an affair, did you know that?”

Much to her astonishment, Ed nodded. “Casey, he’s so afraid he’s gay, he does and says outrageous things to protect his self-image.”

“Like slicing a woman’s ears off?”

The firs whispered with a soft wind. Down the path two people turned at the sound of Casey’s strident words, and then walked on, more uncomfortably.

“Somebody is taking advantage of this,” Ed insisted. “I can’t explain why. I just know that as a psychiatrist, I’ve evaluated Dale and know he’s confused, frightened, full of shame, but that he’d never do what you’re accusing him of. He’s incapable of violence.”

Casey couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t seem to still her hands, rubbing them together as if she could erase some stain. “Did he ask you to intervene, Ed? So I’d lay off?”

Ed shook his head and tried to lay a commiserating hand on Casey’s arm. She flinched from him. “I came on my own when I found out the police were dragging him back in all over again. They’re trying to tie him into yet another killing.” He shook his head, frustrated, more defensive than he’d ever been with her. “Don’t you understand, Casey? He came to St. Louis to try and escape his past, and now you’re dragging it all back out again.”

“He’s lying,” she insisted, not knowing what else to say. Desperate and convinced, furious at the compassion Ed demanded. “You’re dazzled by him, just like everybody else. You can’t see what he’s really like.”

Whirling away, she tried to walk back to the building. Ed caught her by the arm and forced her to a halt.

“Casey, listen to you,” he said, truly concerned. “You’re not being logical at all. It’s not going to help you to project your unresolved problems onto Dale just to punish other people in your life.”

Casey looked over to see that Ed’s forehead was pursed, his eyes truly bemused behind the horn-rims. She pulled away from his hold. “The only reason he reminds me of other people in my life is that he acts just like him, only smoother.”

But Ed shook his head. “I’m not talking about Frank,” he said. “I’m talking about your father.”

That brought Casey to a dead halt. “What?”

“Haven’t you noticed the resemblance?” he asked, truly surprised. “He looks just like him.”

She felt so frightened suddenly. So small and lost. “My father had an
honest
job,” she snapped. “He was an officer at the brewery.”

“Your father—”

“Is dead,” she hissed. “Has been dead most of my life. Thanks for the little talk, Ed, but I have to get back now. I’m sure I hear an ambulance calling.”

Ed didn’t stop her this time. He stood in the center of the path, his hands limp by his side, his expression forlorn. “Casey—”

But Casey wouldn’t turn around. She just walked faster, her eyes focused on the red emergency sign over the doors she sought. Which was why she didn’t see Dr. Hunsacker walk out of the trees to her left and stroll away.

The phone calls started again that night.

Jack had been waiting for Casey just as he’d promised when she finally got out of work at midnight, slouched in his front seat reading a book on Immanuel Kant and the Categorical Imperatives and listening to some strange kind of fusion jazz on the radio. He asked how Casey’s evening had been, and she snapped at him. The rest of the ride had been silent.

When she arrived home, Casey thanked Jack for his consideration and told him to go home and get some sleep. She still didn’t tell him about what Ed had said, or the fact that of all the people she worked with at M and M, only Marva and Abe had spoken to her all evening long. She was exhausted and sore and sick, and she didn’t want to deal with having Jack under the roof again that night.

So she said good night and walked around to let herself in the back door. She brewed a pot of coffee and was in the process of pulling her shoes off when she realized that Jack was still sitting out in her driveway, the headlights off and the map light on. Reading Kant.

“Son of a bitch,” she muttered and threw open the front door. “Get in here!”

He rolled down the window. “I’m fine,” he assured her.

“You’re a pain in the ass!” she retorted loudly enough that if it hadn’t been that late, all the neighbors could have taken notes. “And this time you’ll sleep in the goddamn guest room!”

She could have sworn she heard a chuckle.

He didn’t sleep in the guest room, of course. He dropped his shoes on the sun-room floor and his tie over the couch. He’d evidently decided, however, that it was time to bring a shaving kit with him. That ended up in the downstairs bathroom.

Casey didn’t talk to him. She couldn’t. She left him the coffee and headed upstairs.

The phone woke her from the middle of a dream. Not the afghan dream, another one. She was sweating and shaking, the echo of a small voice dying in her. “Daddy, no! Don’t go!” The words clotted in her chest like old blood.

It rang again, insistent and shrill. Casey jumped from the bed and ran for the phone.

“Hello?”

She heard Jack pick up just because she knew he would. But Hunsacker kept his peace, as always. Casey curled up into her chair, her bare feet flat on the cool wood of the seat, her face buried in a trembling hand, her hair damp and sticky.

He was a menace tonight, a force, like the wind plucking at the edges of her windows, always trying to get in. Persistent, sneaky, wearing. Close to slithering past her defenses and hearing her dreams. Tonight, she didn’t think she could hold out. She desperately tried to shore up her anger, her hatred. She recited her litanies as fervently as Helen chanted the rosary, praying for salvation. For…what was it Jack said, redemption? For redemption.

But tonight, Hunsacker was too real, too powerful. Casey bit the heel of her hand to keep from screaming at him.

Then, the, click. Quiet, controlled, satisfied. Casey couldn’t move, couldn’t even reach over to replace the phone. She heard the flat hum of a dial tone, and didn’t notice that there hadn’t been a corresponding click from downstairs. She knew she should go down and talk to Jack about it, should at least tell him she was all right. She couldn’t. Curled up in her hard-back chair, like a child against a wall, she held on to the phone, her eyes squeezed shut, her hand against her mouth, frightened for reasons that had nothing to do with murder.

Jack waited for her to hang up. The phone hummed in his ear. The night creaked and moaned around him. Still no corresponding click from Casey’s room. Instinctively he looked up, as if he could see through two floors. The call had unnerved him, and he’d heard some of the most awful things one person could say to another. That silence had been turgid, sinister. Jack had felt it crawling up and down his spine like the instinct that the enemy crept beyond the buffalo grass back in the jungle. A huge emptiness with a feral smell to it.

She was too quiet. Too still. Jack finally hung up the phone and climbed the unfamiliar stairs.

The second story was as quaint as the first, family antiques and worn carpeting and more Sacred Heart pictures. Four doors opened off the corridor. Jack didn’t try any of them. He headed up again.

The big room brought him right to a stop. Small blue and red votive candles flickered. The smell of incense permeated the wood, and hundreds of curling holy cards crowded the chipped portable altar like a Taoist family shrine. Jack expected joss sticks and paper petitions instead of a kneeler and dispossessed life-size statue of Mary.

He saw the light seeping around the edge of the door and hesitated. She was still so quiet. And she’d been trying to deal with these calls on her own. He wanted to throttle her.

The door was unlocked. He tapped and opened it at the same time, not giving her the chance to beg off. Again, he was brought to a halt. It was like the kitchen downstairs, a flash of color in this pastel house, blues and purples and greens on wall and blanket and curtain, clothes tossed around and books and magazines stacked haphazardly wherever there was room. This was a place with life.

But then Jack saw Casey. All he could think about was finding her on the bathroom floor. She was curled into herself, her hair tumbled over her arms, her bare toes peeking out from under a modest flowered cotton nightgown, her fingers clenched and trembling around the phone.

“Casey?” He heard it. The ache of frustration in his own voice, the grate of fury. He was shaking, and it hadn’t been his call.

Giving a little shudder, Casey lifted her head. Her eyes were dry and wide, her face taut. She looked like a mine-site survivor, steeling herself against the pain. Looking into hell and needing the strength to walk away.

“Don’t come in,” she said quietly in a voice that was surprisingly calm.