A Man to Die for (42 page)

“Come on, Casey,” he coaxed, tugging the robe more tightly around her bare shoulders where now he saw faint scars from other confrontations. “Why don’t we go on downstairs. It’s getting cold up here.”

She started at his touch, looked over. Jack bit back a curse at the brutal slash on her cheek. He hoped that son of a bitch died bad.

“Why don’t you slip on the robe?” he said with a half smile, his hand back on her shoulder, suddenly needing to touch her, just to reassure himself that she was all right. That she was alive.

She looked up at him, tears still sliding unheeded down her cheeks. “Your arm…” she protested, lifting a hand toward him.

Jack backed away just a little. “Oh, it’s okay. Now, come on.”

She actually managed a wry quirk of the lips. “I thought when you were shot, you weren’t going to let a policeman take care of you.”

He smiled back, relieved and awed. She stood in no more than underwear and a tattered seersucker robe that was already flowering with blood. Her hair was tangled, blood streaked and caked her face and throat, and her eyes were still huge and dark with the residue of violence. And yet she was so poised that Hunsacker had been the one humiliated rather than his intended victim.

“All right,” he conceded. “We’ll both be seen.”

She smiled, more wistfully, more uncertainly, and turned to slip her arm through the robe. Between the two of them they had two decent hands, and managed the task with a maximum of fuss. And touching. Casey seemed to need it as much as Jack.

“How did you get here?” she asked, her voice still raw as Jack finished a one-handed knot on her belt.

Jack smoothed the hair back from her forehead with a hand that shook. “Your mother. She called 911 and told them to tell me that Mick was here.”

“Mom?” she countered, incredulous.

Jack nodded. He didn’t add the part that Helen had been waiting by the front door with a complete silver tea service in order to serve him coffee when he slipped in the door.

He lifted his hand again, and dropped it, frustrated and suddenly stupid when there was so much that he needed to say. Like how he’d never been so terrified as when she’d turned those eyes on him and expected him to save her. Like he would have suffered anything rather than have let her end up in Hunsacker’s hands. How he’d died just getting that call, and that he’d never let her face something like that again.

Then Jack lifted her hand to tie his handkerchief around it, and saw the damage Hunsacker had inflicted there. His heart stopped all over again.

“You did a good job, Casey,” was all he could manage. Stiff and formal and uncomfortable as he clumsily wrapped the sodden white linen and tucked in the edges.

She set those eyes on him again, suddenly a lost little girl where she’d never allowed vulnerability before. “It was so hard for a minute to separate them all,” she admitted. “I couldn’t tell Hunsacker from Frank from…”

Tears swelled and spilled, and she bent her head. Jack lifted it with a finger. “Did I tell you I was a priest once?” he asked. “I’m very good at absolving guilt.”

Casey gave her head a little shake. “He should have paid, shouldn’t he?”

“I’m not talking about him,” he corrected. “I’m talking about you.”

Casey stiffened. “I’m not guilty of anything,” she countered with the first spark of life.

Jack smiled down at her. “Not bad for starters. We’ll work on getting you to believe it.”

Casey’s answering smile was at once wanton and unsure. “I’d sure like to try,” she agreed. It was enough to break a man’s heart.

Jack ignored the other cops who still milled around and pulled her close. “We’ll begin sessions as soon as we have a full complement of working limbs,” he promised. Then he nuzzled against her hair. “Maybe sooner.”

He kept his arm around her as they headed down the stairs. “We got the license matchup,” he told her, walking her slowly down toward where the paramedics were waiting in the living room. “Hunsacker owns two black Porsches. He waited a full six weeks to get the damage fixed on the one he hit Billie with. I got in an hour ago with my witness.”

“Cookies?” Helen chirped to the crowd, standing at the bottom of the stairs with a tray in her hands and a white gauze apron over her brown dress. “I have tea or coffee, whichever you’d like.”

One of the SWAT guys strolled by munching on a ladyfinger. The paramedics were balancing demitasses of coffee on their knees. Bert was flexing his fingers over by the piano as he talked to Ernie, a short, balding Jewish guy who kept shaking his head and grinning at the fix his partner had gotten himself in to.

“I’ll tell you,” another SWAT member said to his partner as he watched out the door, slapping the water from his cap. “I damn near got hit by lightning when I was standing on that friggin’ porch roof. Scared the shit outta me.”

“I notice it took you three tries to get the branch through the window, hotshot,” the other guy said, munching and grinning. “You’re not pitching for the team this summer.”

“Bullshit! You try and lob a branch straight up a story in a thirty-mile-an-hour wind and see how easy it is.”

Casey was shaking again beneath the flimsy material. Jack held on tighter. She was definitely due for a round of shock. He saw the paramedics looking for someplace to set the coffee as they got to their feet. He wasn’t exactly sure yet how he felt about handing Casey off to them.

“Well, Father, there you are,” Helen sang, sailing in. ”Coffee? Casey, really. You shouldn’t greet the guests in your swimwear.”

Jack noticed, though, that there were tears in the little woman’s eyes as she turned back for the kitchen.

“Uh, excuse me…”

One of the paramedics was pointing to the hardwood floor. Jack looked down to see he was dripping blood on it. Damn. No wonder he was starting to feel so washed out. He was going to have to hand Casey off after all.

She was turning to him, her hand coming up, her mouth open to chastise, when a shout went up outside. They all turned. More cries of alarm.

“Stop or I’ll fire!”

“Shit!” Jack was already at the door when the shots rang out. Dozens of them, a chain reaction of adrenaline and fear and firepower. Jack reached the porch just in time to see Hunsacker seize under the impact of all those bullets and fall to the lawn.

“What the hell happened?” he demanded, running for him.

Casey was right on his heels.

Hunsacker lay half on the sidewalk, blood pooling beneath him, the handcuffs dangling from one hand, his feet splayed and his eyes open. Really dead this time. He twitched and sighed. A dark stain spread down his pants leg to match the bouquet on his chest. A ragged cloud lifted from the circle of guns that had brought him down, and the air stank with cordite.

“He got out of the cuff,” a SWAT sergeant admitted, stunned. That kind of thing just didn’t happen. “He actually ran for us. Straight for us.”

Jack stood over him, trying to decide how he felt. Furious, because they would never know now. They would never be able to prove that he’d killed all the women they suspected him of. Relieved that he didn’t have to worry about his ever getting away.

“He said he didn’t want to hang around,” Casey said next to him. Jack took her back in his arm. “But dammit, why should he have the easy way out? Now, we’ll never know. Well never find that last girl.”

They all stood there, dark-suited police ringing the dead killer like a circle of priests at a ritual. Silent, staring, wondering. Trying to cull the essence of violence from minerals and water. And into their midst stepped little Mrs. McDonough in her brown dress and bandanna and apron. She knelt right in that pool of blood and lifted Hunsacker’s head into her lap.

“It’s all right, now, Benny,” she crooned, stroking his hair back with trembling hands. “It was the only way. You see, I knew you weren’t Mick all along.” Her tears spilled onto his face. They were the only tears spent for Dale Hunsacker.

Separating herself from Jack, Casey walked up and bent to her mother. With gentle patience, she helped her back to her feet and walked her back in the house. And Dale Hunsacker was alone again.

“When does the cast come off?” Marva asked.

Casey didn’t look up from where she was using an endotracheal guide to scratch beneath the plaster. “Another three weeks,” she said. “Then I’m in splints. This tendon shit’s a pain in the ass.”

Marva grinned. “Well, at least you have your sense of humor.”

Casey scowled. “What I have is three more weeks of call backs and telemetry monitoring. I’m ready to tear my hair out.”

“Tom thinks he’s being magnanimous keeping you on the job. This wasn’t a work-related injury, ya know.”

Casey knew. She’d been the one sitting in on insurance claims, personnel conferences, and legal meetings. Everybody had just wanted to make sure that Casey didn’t file anything official that blamed them for her injuries.

Her injuries she could live with. She still couldn’t imagine how they could sleep knowing they were responsible for Janice’s death. Because if they hadn’t harassed Casey, they might have uncovered Hunsacker’s little truths sooner.

As it was, he left on his own terms. The notebook had never been discovered. Just select pages, left right in the middle of his dining-room table to taunt the searchers with the knowledge that there had been more, but they’d lost it. They had his precise schedule for murdering Billie and murdering Wanda. The rest would always be conjecture, circumstance, and chance.

They had found trophies. Dozens of them, earrings, rings, snapshots, keys. Three teeth and a dog collar. They were going to have to pass the artifacts around to all the unsolved homicides in Boston and New York and see if they came up with a match. Buddy got Wanda’s earrings. Aaron retrieved a locket of Janice’s. Marilyn had Elizabeth Peebles’s wedding ring, and Casey had asked for Billie’s nursing pin.

“I’m just glad it’s over,” Casey said.

It wasn’t, of course. She still had nightmares. She found herself seeing Hunsacker in crowds, just like before, watching her. Smiling. And, of course, she was still dealing with Mick. But Jack had proven good to his word, and the emotional scars were fading apace with the physical ones.

“How’s Jack doing?” Marva asked.

That made Casey smile. She’d been smiling a lot lately, as a matter of fact, from the first walk she’d taken down to sit in his room when he came out of surgery to the ride they’d taken the night before with Mr. Rawlings in the Mustang. Not quite the same ride as jack, but impressive for a quiet gardener.

“He’s as crabby as I am,” she admitted, sliding the purloined stylus back in her bag and picking up her iced tea. “They have him on light duty for another three weeks.”

“I thought, his arm was okay.”

Casey grinned. “Not for his arm. For his ulcer. That’s what’s really ticking him off. They finally caught up with him.”

Marva just grinned. “You two were meant for each other.”

It was a quiet evening. Baseball was on television and the humidity kept even the kids off the streets. Casey and Marva sat back by room twelve sharing a bag of pretzels and some isolation from Barb, who had never quite recovered.

“So, what now?” Marva asked.

“What do you mean, what now?” Casey retorted. “Now I do my best to keep my job until I get tenured. Which is at least seven more years.”

Marva just nodded.

Just about then, a blond head popped around the corner.

“Hey, space cadet,” Marva greeted her. “How you be?”

Poppi stepped into the work lane, beaming and clutching a large, fat manila envelope. “Ladies, I have some good news. How would you like to be rich?”

Casey snorted. “Oh, God, not another game. What’s this one, Change Partners, the game of Eastern Europe?”

But Poppi wasn’t going to be dissuaded. She settled herself onto the edge of Casey’s desk and lifted the envelope into view. “No,” she countered. “Same game. Nirvana. In which both of you invested a hundred dollars, thereby becoming one-third partners in its future.”

Marva stiffened a little in her chair. “You got somebody to look at it?”

Poppi beamed. “I got somebody to buy it. Milton Bradley is sending their lawyers out next week. We have been asked if we’d like to split two million dollars and a percentage of the sales, with future deals included.”

Casey’s jaw dropped. “Get outta here,” she retorted instinctively.

Poppi grinned at her. “You’re rich, girl. Get a real pool.”

Casey still couldn’t comprehend it. Yesterday she’d been on the hospital hit list—the negative kind, pressured because she couldn’t assume her full duties, pressured because she was worth a good salary and they didn’t want to spend the money on her. Pressured because she’d slammed into Tom’s office to offer proof that Ahmed was an imminent threat to the hospital’s medical malpractice coverage. Pressured most of all because she’d been right all along, and no one but Marva was going to forgive her for it.

And suddenly Poppi was telling her that none of that mattered. She was independently wealthy. She could sit at home and paint daisies on dinner plates if she wanted. She could buy one of those big old houses down off Skinker and spend the rest of her life trying to find furniture for it. She could stay where she was and turn the dismantled chapel back into a real sewing room for Helen and let her make all the altar cloths and vestments her heart desired. Because somehow she had the instinctive feeling that Nirvana was going to be everything Poppi predicted. Donald Trump was going to call her Ma’am.

“You can quit now,” Poppi crowed.

But Casey smiled over at Marva, finally free to enjoy what she loved most.

“No,” she disagreed. “Now I can stay.”

Suddenly the quiet of the work lane shattered with a familiar bellow.

“Ho, maid, hold! Save me with thy death!”

This time, Casey laughed. In fact she laughed for the rest of the shift and all the way home.

My special thanks to all the people who helped make this book possible. To Lt. John Podolak of the St. Louis police force, for his patience, insight, and experience. To the most fashionable homicide detectives in the Midwest for their hospitality, and Steve Ballinger for the ballistic information. If mistakes were made, they were mine. To all my friends at Tony’s and John’s who made it worth walking onto the work lanes all those years. There’s nobody like you guys. To Katie Wilson Lucas, who is directly responsible. To Karyn Witmer-Gow, friend, mentor, and the best midwife a book could have. To Steve Axelrod who believed in me and Karen Solem and Carolyn Marino for taking a chance.

And most of all, always to Rick. This one’s really for you.