A Man to Die for (38 page)

Jack halted. His instincts pulled him to her, to take her back in his arms and cushion the fall. His hands, restless with the inability to act, slid into his pockets. His chest hurt almost as much as his gut. “I’m here if you need me,” he offered lamely, furious with himself for not having more. Suddenly impatient with a distance he was beginning to resent.

She shook her head, still tightly folded. Still rigid as pain. “I can’t,” she whispered, her eyes liquid with turmoil. “It’s too easy to do with you.”

Jack couldn’t quite breathe. He’d spent too many sleepless hours down on that cramped little couch to be listening to this. He was too tired and too frustrated and too attracted. And, she was much too vulnerable.

“I was an Eagle Scout, too,” he offered with a wry grin. “Always faithful, always trustworthy.”

Casey tried to grin back and looked as if she were going to cry instead. “Well, I wasn’t,” she retorted thinly, tears finally filling her eyes.

Jack did the only thing he could. He stalked right up to her and took the phone away. “Come on,” he commanded, hanging up the receiver and pulling her gently to her feet. “You need some sleep.”

She started at his touch, skittish and shy. Even so, she followed. Jack steered her for the mountain of color on her bed and pulled it back. When she climbed up into the bed, he covered her up and smoothed the comforter, much as she had two mornings ago when she’d thought he’d been asleep.

“I’m here,” he repeated, brushing back her hair. “I’ll be here until this is over.”

Casey grinned wearily. “I don’t suppose that’s negotiable.”

Jack smiled back. “After we catch Hunsacker, we can negotiate anything you want.”

Giving in to impulse, he bent over and sealed his offer with another kiss. Not like the one in the bathroom, more a promise than punctuation. A kiss that betrayed the fact that he was beginning to need as much as she. And then, not giving either of them a chance to react, he turned and left.

Casey didn’t get any sleep that night, either. Jangling like a telephone wire in a high wind, she tossed and turned until she heard Helen shuffling around beneath her, and finally got up for the day. Another day with Jack at the breakfast table. Another day hunting Hunsacker. Another day with Helen and the crew at work and the phone, sitting on her desk like a somnolent adder, striking without warning, relentless and deadly.

Jack had already made breakfast by the time Casey got downstairs.

“The call last night came from Creve Coeur,” he offered, handing over a mug of coffee. “We’re checking to see if our friend was out and about. Is it always like it was last night?”

Casey accepted the cup with a silent nod of thanks. “Every time. He seems to know that silence is worse for me than words.”

Jack nodded, sipping thoughtfully at his own cup. He hadn’t shaved yet, and was still barefoot, just as he’d been the night before when he’d walked into Casey’s room. She’d wanted him to hold her so badly last night, to banish the ghosts. She wanted it again, so she turned away.

“Do you know what Ed tried to tell me last night?” she asked, still incredulous, especially after sitting through that phone call. “That Hunsacker told him this gruesome abuse story. A real Daddy Dearest fairy tale that fueled all his problems.”

She looked to Jack for disdain, to reassure her and reinforce her. She needed her outrage so badly right now. She needed his support.

Instead, he contemplated his coffee. “Actually,” he said quietly. “It’s true.”

Casey stopped halfway to the table where her English muffin waited, the butter dripping and the jam red and sweet. Something slipped inside her, something that threatened her balance.

“Come on,” she objected again. “Hunsacker’ll say anything he can to look sympathetic.”

Jack looked up at her, and she didn’t like what she saw. “The family hushed it up because of the money,” he said quietly. “The place in society. Evidently the famous surgeon went into uncontrollable rages when he drank. He beat his son and molested his daughter, and his wife refused to do anything about it. I read the report yesterday.”

Casey couldn’t defend herself against something like this. She needed her anger too badly. She needed her sense of distance.

“Bullshit,” she accused baldly.

Jack shook his head. “I contacted a detective in Boston. There was always some question about that fire, and he filled me in on the stuff that never hit the news. It’s a classic pattern for serial killers, abuse so bad at home that the kid becomes expert at dissociating. All that rage and guilt boiling beneath the perfect facade.”

A tiny child, cowering in the dark, weeping with the terror of a sudden bellow, the sound of footsteps. Screams. Helpless and alone and afraid.

No. Hunsacker was a monster. He hurt people just to see it happen. He’d never been a child. He’d never been trapped with no way out.

“Well, good morning, Father. Look what Mr. Rawlings brought us.”

Casey actually flinched at the sound of Helen’s too-bright voice. She couldn’t quite breathe right, couldn’t keep the mug still in her hand. She knew Jack was watching her, but she couldn’t face him. Her gaze fell instead on Helen, who was too puffy and tremulous for enthusiasm. Casey had hoped she’d be better after yesterday. Instead she looked worse, more strident, like a tightly wound top ready to overbalance. From anxious to desperate, and Casey couldn’t say why. But she felt it, too.

“Good morning, Mrs. McDonough,” Jack greeted her. “Mr. Rawlings.”

Casey turned then to find that Mr. Rawlings had followed Helen in, a bunch of iris and dahlias and gladiolas in his arm. He was smiling at Jack.

“I promised you a ride in the Mustang, didn’t I?” Jack asked as Helen gathered the flowers from Mr. Rawlings and went for a vase. Mr. Rawlings smiled the way a person would who had just made a successful transaction. Any other time Casey would have smiled, too. Today she’ stood silently and stared at her breakfast, her appetite suddenly lost.

“I would like that,” Mr. Rawlings enthused with an efficient nod, and then smiled like a boy in a locker room. “Although I have to admit, what I’d really like to do is have a crack at that Porsche.”

Casey didn’t hear it. She was too distracted, stretched too thin. Jack heard it.

“Porsche?” he asked, his voice deceptively quiet.

Mr. Rawlings nodded. “The one Casey’s other friend drives. The one who comes in the afternoons sometimes to keep Helen company.”

Casey heard it then. She heard Jack’s sudden, harsh silence and turned to see his expression harden to stone. She turned to Mr. Rawlings.

Suddenly her heart was pounding. She flushed with fear. Casey stood very still. Yet she knew everyone could hear the scream of outrage that was building behind her throat. She knew they could see the revulsion that swelled in her chest.

“What other friend?” she asked, her voice strained, desperate to keep it even. She wanted to close her eyes, as if it would make, him change his answer. Her hands were clenched around the hot mug, and her chest was frozen. Waiting. Dreading. Knowing.

And still Mr. Rawlings didn’t sense the disaster he was announcing. “Why that blond gentleman,” he said, and turned to Helen for confirmation. “Didn’t I hear you call him Mick?”

Here. Hunsacker had been here, and her mother had invited him in. Casey never heard the mug shatter against the floor or felt the coffee burn her bare leg.

“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?”
Casey shrilled, whirling on her mother. “Just what the
bell
were you thinking letting that man in here?”

Jack stepped in front of her. “Casey—”

“No,” she snapped, waving away his intervention, glaring at him with accusation. “He was
here
. In my house. In my,
house!
And she let him!”

Helen held the flowers in front of her like a shield, the long stems trembling in her grasp, her face paper white at Casey’s venom. “I don’t recall any visitors,” she objected lamely, her eyes skittering away. Turning, she walked toward the door. “Now, I must give these to our lady…”

“No,” Casey demanded, grabbing her mother’s arm and yanking her back around. “Not this time. You’re going to talk to me.” She wanted to shake her until she rattled, until every ridiculous aphorism clattered right out of her head onto the floor. The urge was so strong, so overpowering that she let go. Helen swayed like a sail in a gust of wind.

“My visitors are my—”

“How long has he been coming here?” Casey demanded, walking right up to her, her hands clenched to keep from striking her own mother. Incensed, terrified, revolted.

Helen shrugged away from her, lifting the vase between them. “A few weeks. He…he stopped, and then…then he came back yesterday. I missed him.” Her attempt at rebellion faltered and died, and she clutched at her chipped green vase as if seeking foundation. “He said you’d leave me if you found out.”

“Then why do it?” Casey demanded, taut and disbelieving. Still unable to quite grasp the idea that Hunsacker had touched her things, sat at her table, chatted with her mother while Casey had been working to put him away. “You saw his picture on the television. You knew who he was. Why in God’s name did you let him in the door?”

“You don’t understand,” Helen objected, her eyes, filling. “You never did.”

“Understand what?” Casey retorted with a wave of her hand. “You invite a murderer into my house, and I’m supposed to understand?”

Casey felt Jack’s hand on her arm and tried to pull away. He wouldn’t let her.

“We need to discuss this rationally,” he advised evenly.

Casey spun on him. “He sat on my furniture,” she spat, her eyes burning and her chest so tight she couldn’t breathe. “He got them to lift my suspension so he could come back into my house! Don’t you understand? He’s raped me without even unzipping his pants!”

She’d forgotten Mr. Rawlings. He rustled at her harsh words, too delicate to object, too distressed to stay.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I thought you knew. I thought he was a friend.”

“Thank you for telling us, Mr. Rawlings,” Jack acknowledged him, hand still restraining Casey. “Could I talk to you in a few minutes?”

“Oh, yes.” He scuttled from the tension in the room like a fox from a forest fire.

“We need to sit down, Casey,” Jack said.

Casey couldn’t take her eyes from her mother. She couldn’t understand. Truly couldn’t. How could her mother have lived through all this, and then blithely invited a serial murderer to tea?

“Explain it to me,” she said, still ignoring Jack. “Tell me why you had to invite him in.”

“He understood,” Helen whimpered, head down, tears tracing a familiar course down hollow cheeks. “He was sent to absolve me.”

“Absolve you from what?”

But Helen shook her head, the tears building. “You don’t understand. You never did. You have no charity.”

“
Tell
me!” Casey demanded, grabbing Helen’s arm, endangering flowers and vase. “Make me understand why you want a murderer to make you feel better.”

“Because he knew,” Helen retorted, her eyes suddenly hot and afraid. She pulled away, standing alone, her flowers brave and bright before her. “He talked to me in Mick’s voice. He told me what you can’t even tell me. You want me to talk, but it’s you who won’t talk. You won’t even listen. He offered to take my guilt with his.”

“Guilt?” Casey demanded. “What guilt? Which guilt? That man doesn’t have
anything
to do with us.”

But Helen was beginning to fade, to fold into herself with the weight of her words. She began shaking her head, her shoulders shuddering and the vase drooping in uncertain hands. “You don’t remember,” she said. “You refuse to remember.”

“Remember? Remember what?”

“That I killed him!” she shrieked suddenly, all the years of docility exploding along with the vase as it hit the floor. Helen’s hands flew to her mouth as if she could shove back in the words. Flowers tumbled at her feet and water splashed over the hem of her dress.

Casey wanted to scream. How many times had they had this conversation? Every Lent, every anniversary, every time she looked at Mick’s picture on her mother’s dresser. “Aw, God, Mom,” she moaned in disgust. “I can’t tell you again that leaving the convent doesn’t kill a man.”

“No!” Helen insisted, still hiding behind her hands, the flowers at her feet like an offering to the Madonna. She was sobbing, now, a new sound of grief. Of horror. “No, no, no. You don’t know. You refuse. You turn away and run, because you don’t want to know. You want nothing to do with it, with me because of what I did. What I made you help me do. Don’t you understand yet? You were with me. You knelt right next to me in the living room every night and helped, you took my message to church with you. You and Benny and I, day after day. Praying to stop his uncharitable acts.”

Sudden tears choked Casey. Bile seared the back of her tongue. Her hands sought her ears. She didn’t even realize she put them there, shutting out her mother’s words. She didn’t hear the harsh rasp of her own breathing or the thunder of her heart, a child’s heart.

But it was too late. Helen had finally let reality catch up with delusion.

“Every night,” she sobbed, her hands clutched to her breast, a mea culpa that bruised. “Every morning when he woke up. Every day for ten years. ‘Please, sweet Jesus,’ I prayed. ‘Help your poor sinner. Give refuge to your children. Grant this one prayer. Save us.’ And then he’d come home, and I’d sit across the table from him, waiting, waiting for that last bourbon, and knowing what would come. And I’d pray, ‘Please, my lady, my mother and sweet solace, who comforts the ill and oppressed, I don’t know what else to do to stop it…please.’ Every night, our hands like steeples as we prayed together. ‘Please. Jesus, Mary, Joseph. Just…let…Mick…die.’ ”

“No,” Casey rasped, her ears hurting, her cheeks wet, her arms too numb to feel Jack next to her.

The dreams. The echoes of that child’s voice. The stark, stale terror of the darkness.

Helen crumpled. Jack rushed forward to gather her in. She kept sobbing. “I couldn’t take any more. I couldn’t take any more, couldn’t watch Benny suffer…I went to Father, and he said pray for guidance. I went to the police, and they said I’d made my bed, he was my husband. But I was weak. I was evil. And because I was weak, I murdered him. He understood. He prayed, too. He remembered.”

Jack led Helen back to the table and gently sat her down. Casey couldn’t move from where she stood, numb and frightened and confused. She tasted salt against the palm of her hand, where it shut in the sounds of anguish that clamored in her chest. She heard Helen’s sobbing and Jack’s soothing murmurs, and still couldn’t escape the echoes that suddenly wouldn’t end.

Benny. Sweet, serious Benny, who had slept just below her. Who had always crawled into the big room where Helen did her sewing and hid amid the boxes so his father couldn’t find him. Who had prayed the hardest, tow head bent over the tips of his trembling fingers, tears splashing the beads of his rosary.

Helen, tiptoeing in her own house to escape her husband’s blind wrath, who had never made it any farther than the big room outside Casey’s door before Mick had caught her and beaten her, her terrified shrieking and sobbing echoing in the big house.

Casey, trapped in the blackness of her room beyond the terrible sounds, sinking beneath the guilt and shame and terror, wondering why Benny and her mother were so much worse that they had to be hurt and she didn’t. Begging to be included just to take away her own shame.

Helen had taken down the sewing machine the day after Mick died. She’d dismantled her sewing room and begun constructing her chapel of guilt, and all these years Casey hadn’t realized that she’d prayed at her mother’s altar all along.

Casey’s door had never been strong enough to blot out the noise. The clatter of furniture, the roaring threats, the pitiful protests, the wrenching cries of pain and terror. She’d lain in her bed and put her hands over her ears and watched the sky. The black, endless, empty sky where nobody lived, where she could be all alone and not hear everything.

Where she wouldn’t have to get up in the morning and kiss her daddy hello and feel shame because she loved him so much. Because even as she prayed right alongside her mother and brother, she begged him not to go.

She felt Jack’s hand on her shoulder and turned to his embrace. “Damn him,” she cursed with blind sobs, her face against the limp cotton of Jack’s shirt, fists clenched against his chest. “Damn him, damn him…damn…”

Jack bent his head over hers. Casey could feel the warmth of his cheek against her, his hand tentatively stroking her hair. He didn’t say anything. Just held her so tightly she couldn’t escape, couldn’t crumble.

Her stomach heaved with revulsion. Her chest closed off. She kept shaking her head, trying to push away the pictures she hadn’t allowed in so long, swimming in their recriminations.

She’d been the only one to run to Mick when he’d collapsed. Benny and Helen had sat frozen, their forks halfway to their mouths, their eyes stark as dead fishes, their dread so mixed up with hope they couldn’t tell them apart. But Casey could. She’d tugged at her father and screamed, hating herself for it, hating her mother for making her feel this way.

“Daddy, no! Don’t go, Daddy, please!”

Outside the window, the sky muttered. The weather service had finally promised rain today, a storm to sweep out all the stagnant air in the city. The sky was tumescent, a dirty green-gray that swirled above the motionless trees.

A storm was coming.

Jack should have known. He should have spotted it the minute Casey talked about the other man, the one who had made her crawl. It was such a familiar pattern, one he’d learned through years of counseling, years of domestic disturbances. Still he couldn’t quite quell the rage that ate new holes in his stomach. Rage against a dead man. Rage against a system that had protected him and reserved room in hell for his family.

Helen was up in bed, whimpering and lost. Casey had walked her up, hollow-eyed and spent, her own hands shaking as badly as her mother’s. Left behind, Jack had stood in the living room staring at a wasted piano and the harmless family that populated Helen’s walls. Family that had given support and succor and love when her real family, her real faith, hadn’t.

No wonder Casey had no patience with God. Jack hardly blamed her. He had a few things to say to Him himself.

“The license is K2F-309,” he said, phone propped on his shoulder as he read off the notes he’d taken from the interview with a surprisingly observant Mr. Rawlings. He wanted to say something about how thorough the patrolman who’d interviewed him had been, but didn’t. It had been his responsibility to follow up on it, and he hadn’t.

“I’ll get it right over to DMV,” Bert promised. “Sounds like it’s going to tie right in to Billie Evans. The evidence crew’s on its way over to dust for prints. How’s Casey?”

“Pretty tapped out. I think Hunsacker’s finally getting to her.”

“I can’t wait till we have this son of a bitch in our hands.” Bert retorted. “I’m looking forward to paying him back for this one. Casey’s one of the good guys.”

It took Jack a minute to answer that. He couldn’t quite get past the hard knot in his throat. Casey’s scent still lingered on his hands. His shirt was still a little damp from her tears. He’d come a lot closer than he wanted to admit to walking right out of the house and blowing that asshole’s brains all over those dean white walls of his.

“We’ll get him,” Jack promised in a voice every policeman in the city recognized and respected. “And when we do, I get first crack at him.”

Bert actually chuckled. “I’ll hold your coat. What else can we do right now?”

“The Evans alibi is our best bet until I can get that hooker back from Chicago,” Jack said, glad to be back on familiar territory. “I gave Casey copies of the paperwork, and she’s trying to come up with something. You’ll be over here when?”

“Two hours. When do you leave for Boston?”

Jack checked his watch. “Plane leaves at four. I’m meeting with the Boston detectives tonight, the family and shrink in the morning. Now, you won’t leave her for a minute?”

“I’ll even have a guy sitting in her waiting room at work.”

“Don’t let her know. She’ll ream you a new asshole and then pitch him right out the back door.”

Bert allowed another chuckle. “I borrowed one of the undercover narcs. He’ll fit right in.”

Jack nodded instinctively as he flipped his notebook closed. “Thanks, man.”

“My pleasure. Let’s catch this asshole.”

“Call in sick.”

Casey looked up at the mirror to see that Jack stood behind her. He was dressed for work, with a new dark shirt and skinny tie, his hands on his hips and his jacket splayed back over his arms. Casey could just see the curve of his gun handle behind his right wrist. “Just when I get back to work?” she asked, knowing how lifeless her voice sounded. “They’d demote me to rehab right on the spot.”

She could tell he was frustrated. Those creases between his eyebrows were deep, the line of his jaw taut. He looked even more tired than she felt, and she had a feeling he was wishing he had his Maalox bottle. She was surprised at the sharp ache she felt at the thought that he was hurting for her.

Sighing with resignation, she turned to face him. “I’ll be okay,” she promised. “Marva’s on tonight. She’ll shore me up.”

Jack just shook his head. “I’d rather you didn’t leave this house.”