A Man to Die for (40 page)

The lights were on in the house, Helen’s lights and the chapel lights and the lights in the living room. Helen must think that cops needed extra electricity. Either that or she was warding off the storm for Benny. He’d always hated the thunder, even as an adult, cowering from it, hiding from all the windows that let it in. Maybe it was Helen’s way to coax Benny back in out of the storm.

Casey pulled in behind Bert’s car and shut off the engine. There was a car parked around the corner, but Casey didn’t pay any attention to it. That corner was the Mecca of necking spots. She didn’t hear the Greasons’ dog bark when she got out of the car, so he must have been in already. Good thing Pussy wasn’t in heat again. She would have hated to consign Bert to that kind of shift.

Casey walked into the kitchen and dropped her bag on the floor. She needed something to drink. Then she needed to check on Helen and hand off her information to Bert.

That made her look around. She wondered where Bert had holed up. The house was so quiet, only the refrigerator and the mantel clock keeping her company against the approaching thunder. Casey immediately looked to the sun room, and then realized that it had been Jack who had favored the discomfort of the couch. She found herself smiling at her disappointment at not seeing his familiar form sprawled across the furniture.

Maybe Bert had actually taken her up on the offer of a guest room. Maybe he’d gotten hooked into sitting with Helen while she prayed. Casey almost groaned aloud.

Taking a good slug of iced tea, she pushed the door open to the front hall and headed for the stairs, instinctively flicking off lights and checking windows as she progressed. Lightning flickered in through the big front bays. The wind was beginning to groan at the corners of the house.

Bert had left a cache of paperwork on the hall table, just like Jack. His hat rested atop it, and his jacket was draped over the wingback by the front window. Casey smiled and sipped, reassured by Bert’s steadfast presence. Maybe she’d get some sleep tonight after all.

Helen was awake and alone, sitting on her lounger and saying her bedtime rosary. Mick’s picture had been moved to the table next to her, where she could see it. Casey wasn’t sure what to do about that. Would Helen recover now, or sink deeper into the morass of guilt and self-recrimination?

“Oh, Catherine dear,” Helen greeted her with a wan smile, her thumb positioned over the last bead she’d recited. “You’re just getting home? I thought I heard you come in already.”

“No, Mom. Have you seen Sgt. DeClue?”

Helen made a show of looking around, as if he might be hiding behind the armoire or nightstand. “No, dear, I haven’t. He seemed pretty busy, so I came upstairs. Are you going up?”

Casey nodded, backing out just enough to see that the guest-room door was closed. Maybe he’d turned in already. She’d double-check after closing her windows and getting out of her uniform. “I’m pretty tired. See you in the morning?”

Helen thought about it. “I might just…visit.”

The chapel. Then it wasn’t going to get any better. Casey restrained a sigh and smiled a good night before closing the door and climbing the second flight of stairs.

Topping the stairs, she instinctively wrinkled her nose in protest against the incense. The harsh lights washed out the color from Mary’s face where she beamed down on her chubby infant and robbed the candles of their mystery. In the dim dusk, the chapel looked quaint, worn like a church tucked in the hills of England where centuries of faithful had rubbed it away with fingers and knees. In the bright light, it looked shabby. A cheap imitation.

Casey walked through it as quickly as she could, now even more uncomfortable with its message, and opened her door. She took another gulp of tea and flipped on the light.

“Oh, good. We’ve been waiting to see you.”

Casey came to a shuddering halt. The glass slipped from her fingers as her mouth opened. She couldn’t cry out. She couldn’t even breathe. Bert sat stiff and taut on her rocker, a gag stuffed in his mouth, his hands tied behind his back, and his feet tied to the rocker legs. Alongside him, lounging with one of her beers in his hand, a razor-sharp knife bobbing lazily in the other, sat Hunsacker.

He smiled as if Casey had just invited him to dance. “I was really disappointed to see that your good friend Sgt. Scanlon couldn’t be here for this,” he said. “I especially wanted to see his face when I sliced your ears off.”

WHEN A PSYCHOPATH
finally shows himself in the movies, he looks wild. Manic and jerky, as if the poison that fills his brain has spilled out over his nerve pathways. His eyes light and flicker back and forth, and he laughs like Hyde with a beaker in his hand. That isn’t the way it happens.

Hunsacker leaned on his side, one elbow on her bright comforter, his eyes settling on her like crows fluttering to a fresh kill. His smile was controlled and pleased, his movements as restrained as a woman at her first formal dinner. He was wearing scrubs, crisp and creased, and looked composed for having been waiting in the shuddering dark of her bedroom with a bound-and-gagged police sergeant.

Casey remembered something she’d read in the material Marva had given her. It said that serial killers were hunters. They just hunted humans. Casey understood that now. She could imagine Hunsacker crouched in a field before dawn: shotgun shouldered and eyes skyward, looking just like this. Waiting, coiling, setting up. A cat curling in on its haunches as it spotted its prey.

The next time she saw one of those movies, when the killer finally sprang loose, she’d nudge Poppi next to her and say, No, this is wrong. What they really do is far more frightening. It’s enough to scare you to death before they ever move.

“Nothing to say?” he asked, smiling that self-satisfied smile of his, his eyes feral. Casey knew Bert was watching them, trembling with fury. She couldn’t afford to look at him. She couldn’t afford to look away from Hunsacker at all. He might strike without warning.

Lightning seared the sky outside her window and jolted Casey from her paralysis. The night, it seemed, was going to shatter instead of the killer.

“I don’t…” Her voice stumbled over the sudden, sweeping terror. Thunder slammed into the house, rattling windows and snaking along nerve ends.

Casey had never expected to find him here. Not even after he’d taunted her with her mother, not even after the phone calls. She’d balanced her safety on the assumption that he wouldn’t sacrifice his audience. The house groaned with the wind, and Casey shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

Hunsacker shifted himself up to a sitting position and wrapped his arm around the bedpost, the knife still pointed toward Bert. Casey wanted to scream. She wanted desperately to run, to slam the door and grab Helen and flee over to Mr. Rawlings. Her heart thundered with it. Her limbs strained with the temptation. Her palms had begun to sweat.

But Hunsacker knew her too well already. He only had to let that knife rise and fall bare inches from Bert’s eyes, his exposed throat, to hold her still.

She couldn’t risk Bert. She might get away. She might even get Helen to react quickly enough to save her, too, dragging her across the lawn to pound on a closed door for help in a raging storm. If she did, it would be to come back to find Bert sliced into bloody ribbons.

The lightning glittered along the edge of the blade as if to remind her. It sliced along the edge of Bert’s throat, yellow-white against his mahogany skin, dipping into the hollows of his throat that exposed vein and artery and nerve, outlining the path of the blade. There was only so much guilt a person could live with, even to save her own life.

The problem was, Casey didn’t know how she could possibly save either of them by staying, either.

“Come on in, Casey,” Hunsacker invited, motioning toward the chair where it had been pulled out from her desk. “Get comfortable.”

Casey could hardly find breath to speak. “Does the offer come with rope and gag?”

Hunsacker actually laughed. “That’s what I like about you,” he admitted with a little nod. “I have you hemmed in so tightly at work you shouldn’t be able to breathe, and you still insult your supervisor. You got
cojones
.”

Casey stiffened. “Don’t say that.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Why? You don’t like the compliment?”

“Why are you here now?” she demanded, not moving, not able to act without jerking to a start and stumbling. Dogs did this sometimes; horses, she heard, in a fire. She was frozen in place, only her mouth mobile. Only her mouth that always seemed to get her into trouble anyway. “Sit down,” he invited genially, “and I’ll tell you.”

Casey gave her head a choppy shake. “I’d rather not.” Hunsacker’s slow smile was truly terrifying. “I’d be happy to convince you,” he offered, and before she had a chance to react, he reached over and sliced Bert’s cheek.

Casey cried out. Bert flinched, tightened. Blood welled up from the cut and slid down over the white surgical tape that bisected his face. The knife had swept within millimeters of his right eye.

“Now, sit,” Hunsacker demanded, his eyes back on Casey.

Her legs shook and her stomach crowded her lungs, but she managed to get over to the chair. She was turned at a ninety-degree angle to the door, equally able to see the bleeding heart of Jesus on one side and the bleeding cheek of her friend on the other. And behind him, the storm, still gathering, still building, higher and higher against the tremulous old walls of the house. Waiting to pounce, fingers plucking into weak spots, teeth ripping at exposed viscera. A battle that one day it knew it would win.

And yet, because it had always withstood, the house refused to falter.

Hunsacker lifted himself from her bed and strolled closer. “Actually, I don’t want to kill him,” he admitted. “Not yet. I’ve never had a real audience see my work, and since Scanlon can’t be it, he’s my substitute.”

Casey clenched her sweaty hands in her lap. She kept her eyes fixed on Hunsacker’s torso as he approached, the knife bobbing, the erratic light from the window sluicing along it like bright water, like yellow blood. She didn’t wear earrings, she thought absurdly. Would they ever be able to identify her? Would they find her, or would she be lost like that last victim?

“Why now?” Casey repeated, her voice raspy with strain. “Why not yesterday or last week?”

He crouched down on his haunches before her. Casey struggled not to flinch away. She could smell his cologne, that smoky, woodsy scent that was suddenly so much like the incense in the other room, sickening and heavy and secretive. She could see all the way back into his eyes, and there was nothing there. No rage or remorse. The lightning sparked in them only to reveal the crescive anticipation of the hunt. Only the careful, greedy alien that kept seeking her out.

“Because it’s over,” he admitted in an amused voice, as if he were talking about a play instead of his own murder spree. “You found it tonight, didn’t you? I was waiting for you to. It was such a small thing, an oversight when I’m usually so careful. Like these,” he said, motioning to the scrubs that were so much a part of him. “Nobody thinks twice about an OB strolling around in them. And the hospital laundry sees so many bloody sets of scrubs, they don’t notice one more set. So simple it’s brilliant, don’t you think?” Casey couldn’t answer, mesmerized by his casual dissertation. “All my work is that precise. And yet, all these weeks while we’ve been courting, I’ve known I made that one mistake. I’ve been waiting for you to finally remember.” He was delighted, smiling, the knife tip pointed right at Casey’s left eye. “I had a secret, and I was waiting for you to find it.”

Casey’s brain spun. Her chest clamored for air. She fought the urge to press a hand against her sternum to hold her heart inside. She knew he could hear it, was feeding on its terrified staccato. “But there still isn’t any hard evidence against you,” she protested, trying for anything. “It’s all circumstantial.”

His smile broadened a little. He lifted his hand, resting the knife tip against Casey’s cheek. She shied a little and felt the sharp sting of penetration, just below her cheekbone. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, his gaze briefly flickering to where Casey felt her own blood welling from the puncture wound. “They’re beginning to take you seriously. They never figured me out in Boston, or in New York. Nobody caught on because I was so careful they didn’t have any reason to tie the murders together.” His gaze slid north again, impaling Casey as surely as his knife. “Until you. I figured if they couldn’t catch me in New York, I could live forever in this two-bit wasteland. I could work and hunt to my heart’s content. And then the first time you met me, you spotted me. Which is why you’ll be my last. My best.”

Casey couldn’t control the shudder, and it made him smile again. He nodded, satisfied. “Not as brave as you thought, huh? I just have to know, Casey my sweet. How did you know? How did you guess when nobody else did?”

The alien, she wanted to say. That dead, decaying presence that inhabits the backs of your eyes and lubricates your hypnotic voice. “I don’t know,” she whispered instead. “A…gut feeling. The…the way you do pelvics.”

That provoked the biggest, heartiest laugh she’d ever heard from Hunsacker. “Is that what you told the police?” he demanded. “God, I would have loved to see that.”

The knife edged close again, tickling the skin below her eye, so close she instinctively blinked. Sweat began to trickle down between her breasts. Casey couldn’t possibly hold still anymore, and yet she did, terrified of that cold, bloody point that caressed her cheek.

Thunder exploded and the house shuddered in protest. Rain slammed against her window. Beyond, trees writhed and screamed. A loose shutter banged against the wall and the wind squealed in delight. But Casey, suspended in breathless agony on the point of a knife, held perfectly still.

“Oh, Casey, there you are.”

Hunsacker jerked back. Casey stiffened, the knife missing her cornea by a hairbreadth. She spun toward the door to find Helen standing there, her rosary clutched in her restless hands, her smile tentative and shy.

“A passion play?” she asked, looking around the room. “Really, Casey, Lent’s over.”

“Mom—”

Hunsacker had gone on point, quivering with restrained energy, ready to pounce either way. Casey’s badly frayed composure unraveled dangerously. She didn’t even hear the next shattering clap of thunder or notice that Helen shied from it like a nervous horse.

“Come in, Mrs. McDonough,” Hunsacker invited, not moving, the knife just inside the shadow of his head.

“Heavens no.” She giggled, waving away the invitation, her attention straying to the windows where the storm pounded for entrance. “I never interfere when Casey’s entertaining, Benny. You should know that. I will go down and make you children some coffee, though.” She’d actually turned away, pulling the door behind her. Casey’s heart stumbled to a stop, started.

Run
, she begged in silence. Get the hell away before he decides he can’t count on your delusions.

Helen turned back to them. “Unless you’d like chocolate.”

“Coffee,” Casey rasped, tears choking her. She’d had a brief surge of hope when her mother had appeared. Helen would run for help. She’d stumble away and Casey would trip Hunsacker as he leapt up to follow. But Helen was lost in the mists tonight. She was wandering somewhere between the Gospel of St. Mark and Tennessee Williams. She nodded brightly and turned away, pulling the door just shy of closing so her daughter could have privacy but not be compromised, without a clue that her daughter would be dead inside a half hour.

“You know what I love about your mother?” Hunsacker asked with a broad smile. “She’ll do just that. She’ll walk downstairs and make coffee for when the passion play’s over.” He nodded, enjoying his observation, his attention never even flickering to the battering, thunderous assault of the storm against the high roof. “I think I’ll probably take mine with cream and sugar.”

“If you stay to coffee,” Casey said. “How do you plan to get away?”

Hunsacker returned his attention to her. She felt it sweep over her like a cold, deadly wave. “Oh, I won’t,” he assured her. “That’s why this has to be my best job. Because after this, they’ll make me stop.” The knife lifted, sought her skin as if it had a hunger of its own. “I practiced on that last one,” he admitted. “It had been a while since I’d let myself enjoy a knife. It’s part of the discipline, you know. Using it in surgery on women and not ever hurting them. Clean and sweet and swift, without pain or scarring. Controlling myself when I lay that scalpel against their skin.” He pressed the knife close, the edge testing the elasticity of skin like a scalpel the second before penetration when a surgeon sets up his site, gathers his initiative, hesitates before the moment of mutilation. “I lay them open like fish, and then I sew them back up.”

The knife sliced along her cheek. Casey knew it was cutting before she felt it. Her body protested even before it allowed the pain. She opened her mouth, the terror too great for words, her eyes tearing and wide, the night sobbing for her.

“But the others, I don’t sew back up,” he admitted, watching the trail of his handiwork. His eyes glittered in the deathly light now, flickering life where there was none. “I watch the filth spew out of them. I lean close so I can smell it, the sweet stink of death.”

He brought his face right up against hers and Casey flinched away. She heard a thud of the beer can hitting the floor, and then his hand wrapped around the other side of her head, holding her against him.

“Yes,” he said with a small; satisfied nod. “It smells right on you, too.”

Casey fought against the whimpering that bubbled in her throat. She pushed the paralysis away. “Who was she?” she asked, trying to keep contact with those brutal, deadly eyes. “The last one.”

He dipped a finger in her blood and tasted it. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, sucking on the end of his finger like Casey did when she was licking a bowl of icing. “She served her purpose.”

“What did you do with her?”

He smiled with satisfaction. “You’ll never find her. Nothing but what I’ve already given you.”

Casey’s cheek burned. Blood dripped off her jaw and onto the clean white of her uniform. She was trembling now, his touch cold and purposeful.

“What do you think?” Hunsacker asked, turning her head so Bert could see her cheek. Casey could hardly see him through the tears. He seemed no more than a shadow against the storm. “Is that a great cut? And that cunt from Izzy’s said I couldn’t use a knife. Want to see another?”