A Man to Die for (11 page)

She was beginning to see him where he wasn’t and shuddering at the sound of his approach. And she knew, if he wanted to unnerve her, he was doing a hell of a job.

“You’re obsessive-compulsive, you know it?”

Casey didn’t even bother to look up from the newspaper she was reading as she waited for the nurse on Four West to pick up the phone. Marva wasn’t talking about the paper, though. She didn’t know why Casey had developed such a fondness for crime statistics lately. She didn’t know that Casey was looking for Wanda to show up under the homicide column. Casey couldn’t explain her growing obsession. Not to Marva or anybody else. Not even, really, to herself. She simply gnawed at the coincidence that two women last seen arguing with a prominent doctor were both in tough spots.

She’d also been plagued by the nightmare over the last two weeks, the one where she was locked in the apartment, impotent to free herself. It was the only recurrent dream she’d ever had—except for the one where Mel Gibson showed up at her door in nothing but a fireman’s turn-out gear, but that was another matter altogether. That dream didn’t make her feel frustrated and ashamed and frightened at once.

“Don’t you read your literature, Marva?” she retorted. “Obsessive-compulsives make the best nurses.”

“Once they stop washing their hands and turning off the oven, sure.”

There had been two female homicides the night before. One courtesy of a boyfriend with a knife, and the other an alleged prostitute from the city’s South Side. Assailant unknown, found beaten to death in her apartment.

Still no Wanda. Another nurse had died the week before, shot in a burglary. But no bleached blond OB techs had been found in any of the myriad ditches around town.

“You want some interesting reading,” Marva offered, flipping through the paper without Casey’s permission. “Read this.”

The Everyday section, soft news and society tidbits. And there, right at the top of Millicent Adams’ column in tux and patented smile, was Hunsacker, his arm over the shoulder of the mayor of St. Louis.

“Our boy’s getting pretty popular,” Marva commented dryly.

“It’s enough to make you wanna puke.” Adams, St. Louis’ final word on the fashionable and powerful, had affixed the label “Superstork” on Hunsacker. How cute.

“This is Barkin. What?” The nurse on Four West finally picked up.

Casey came to attention. “Hi,” she answered, quickly closing Hunsacker away behind the homicides once more. “This is the ER calling back to let you know Mr. Washington is on his way up to 423.”

“They got eyes,” Marva groused, reaching across Casey to wipe off Mr. Washington’s name from the flow board. That only left fifteen patients waiting for disposition.

“They’re also two nurses short,” Casey retorted, hanging up the phone after receiving a curt reply to her announcement. “And the nurse I just gave report to was Millie Barkin.”

Marva shot Casey a pained look. “Butcher Barkin? Oh, Lordie, poor Mr. Washington.”

Casey dropped the chart remnants in an outgoing pile and pocketed her pen. “I rest my case.”

She was about to fold away her paper and head in to start the migraine headache in eight when Tom blindsided her.

“Casey, listen, I’ve finally gotten the schedule finished,” he announced, dropping it right on top of the chart she’d just pulled out. “You put in a request, but those aren’t allowed on summer schedules.”

“Since when?”

“Since you asked,” Marva muttered from where she copied off lab results.

There was only one reason Tom would have forced her into looking at the schedule in a busy work lane. It was the “you won’t make a fuss in an expensive restaurant” theory of management.

“July Fourth?” Casey shrieked, jumping to her feet.

“The patients,” Tom objected, looking around as if she’d just dropped her uniform to the floor. “What have I told you about team playing?”

“The team’s gonna have to play without me on the Fourth,” she retorted, clenching the schedule in her hands like a weapon. “I played New Year’s Eve and Easter. It’s my holiday off.”

“Nothing I can do. We go through this every schedule, Casey. You know I can’t rearrange a road trip just for you.”

Casey gained her feet, glaring. “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell that to Barb. She had New Year’s off.”

“She was sick, Casey.”

“Bullshit, Tom. She was at the hockey game.”

His face reddened. “I’m warning you, Casey…”

“I’ll pick it up,” Marva offered in a deadpan voice. “Bein’ off the Fourth is against my religion.”

Casey’s first reaction was to tell her she was nuts. The Fourth was the worst holiday of the year, St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s with detonators. But Tom was way ahead of her.

“You can’t pick up other people’s holidays,” he said.

“Since when?” Marva asked.

“Since you asked,” Casey retorted blackly.

“I don’t know, Tom. Seems to me these women get more uppity all the time.”

Stunned, Casey whipped around to see that Hunsacker had managed to appear on the scene just when he was least wanted.

“Uppity?” Marva echoed with just enough lift to her left eyebrow to make a sane man dive for cover. Hunsacker smiled right through it.

Tom came right to attention. “Hi, Dale, nice to see you. You have a patient down here?”

Hunsacker pulled a hand from one pocket and waved at Tom like a rock fan. “Just on my way through to medical records.”

“I saw you in Millicent Adams’ column this morning,” Tom offered, his smile unctuous.

Casey picked up the chart on her new patient, anxious to get away, her stomach already roiling.

“It’s a filthy job,” Hunsacker demurred with a conspiratorial grin. “But somebody’s got to do it. Is that what you’re reading, Casey?” he asked, motioning to the still-opened paper, his tone silkily offensive. “About me? I’m flattered.”

Casey couldn’t help but look up. She couldn’t quite answer, caught by the new light in his eyes. The sudden challenge.

“Nah,” Marva retorted for her, her own attention on the silent duel. “I have.
She’s
been reading about murders.”

Hunsacker was smiling. His eyebrow lifted, that same eyebrow that seemed directed right at Casey. “Really? I heard that you know you’re getting old when you read obituaries. What does it make you when you read homicides?”

Marva again. “Morbid.”

He was telling her something. Something vital. Casey could sense it, like the throb of static electricity. That smile wasn’t without purpose. The expression in those eyes was too bright, too knowing. Too smug by half. She couldn’t believe nobody else saw it. She couldn’t believe he was delivering it in front of an audience.

“Is there anything in there worth reading?” he asked.

For just a minute, Casey wanted to turn to Tom for support, where he stood stiff and uncomfortable at her side. She wanted to demand that he recognize the sly malevolence in Hunsacker’s expression. But she couldn’t pull her own gaze from Hunsacker’s long enough to do it. Like a deadly snake, he mesmerized her into compliance.

“Oh, just your usual mayhem,” she said with a little shrug, her shoulders screaming with strain. “Crip shoots South Side Posse, burglar shoots cabbie, boyfriend stabs girlfriend. John beats hooker.”

His smile broadened so minimally in response to that last bit of news that Casey knew no one else noticed. “It almost makes obstetrics sound boring in comparison.”

Casey’s heart stumbled. Her chest felt suddenly hollow. What was he telling her? Why had the challenge in his eyes suddenly grown?

Casey couldn’t seem to breathe with the weight of his stare. She couldn’t move. She didn’t see anymore whether Marva or Tom were even still there. All she could see was that smile, and it made her think of Satan with a soul in his pocket. Dracula wiping his fangs.

“Well, I’ll get going,” Hunsacker said, still to Casey, only to Casey. “I had a hard night last night. And I’m on call tonight. Let me know if you need me for anything.” Again his expression brightened by millimeters, his eyes dancing. “Anything at all.”

He was already through the far door before anybody moved.

“What was
that
all about?” Marva demanded, looking after him.

Tom was more direct. “Casey, were you being antagonistic? What have I told you about that, especially to him. And why do I have the feeling you still haven’t thanked him yet, after all the times I’ve reminded you?”

“For what?” Marva demanded.

“Marva, when I want you to have the signals, I’ll give them to you.”

Casey almost laughed. Tom had no idea what had just transpired. Her chest still hurt with the aftermath of that odd little conversation. She was overcome by the urge to grab that paper and reread the information about that hooker. And her supervisor was still trying to get her to read the playbook.

“Casey, are you listening to me?”

Slowly, Casey looked over from where she was watching the door swing shut behind Hunsacker. “Of course I’m listening to you, Tom. And, no, I wasn’t antagonizing Dr. Hunsacker. If I were, I think you would have known it.”

“What about thanking him?”

“Oh,” she lied with a blithe smile. “I’m sure I did.”

He nodded. “I hope so. You know, your evaluation’s coming up soon, and I’d hate to see that kind of thing on it.”

That kind of thing was always on it. Casey had a dangerously low AKQ, and unfortunately it wasn’t going to get better. In terms of priorities, her ass-kissing quotient was somewhere below buying a leopard-skin coat and joining the Vanna White fan club. With Hunsacker sniffing around so much more lately, she was sure she was going to lose even more points.

“What,” Marva repeated the minute Tom followed Hunsacker out the door, “was that all about?”

Casey considered the nurse, the keen intelligence masked by that deceptively lazy attitude. She thought of the frustration that was bubbling really close to her own surface and just how successfully she might relieve it by confiding in another person.

Marva was suddenly way ahead of her, as if she, too, had read that nonverbal communication a minute ago, and the meaning had just sunk in.

“Murder,” she breathed, eyes growing so large with the revelation that the whites ringed them like the corona of an eclipse. Looking like a con being told the breakout was set, she grabbed Casey’s arm and pulled her close. “You can’t be serious, girl.”

“I don’t know,” Casey hedged. “What if I am?”

Both of Marva’s hands shot up as if fending off gunfire. “Stay away from me, you hear? I don’t wanna hear
none
o’ that stuff.”

“But what if—”

Marva emphatically shook her head, waving Casey’s words back where they came from. “I told you already. I got problems enough. So do you. You go makin’ crazy accusations like that, you’ll end up with a fine job in a McDonald’s someplace dishin’ hamburgers. For the
rest
of your life.”

Casey was the one who ended up doing the relieving. She reassured Marva that she wouldn’t do anything stupid and left it at that. Of course Marva knew she was lying, but they had both long since learned the value of silence. Marva’s only answer was “Mmmm.”

There was something unnatural about going to a gynecologist. Something invasive and demeaning. Sitting in her own GYN’s office, Casey realized that the feeling was the same as waiting for confession.

Father Donnelly had been the pastor of St. Christopher’s when she’d been a girl. A tall, raw-boned man with austere manner and saturnine features, he had heard all school confessions. Casey remembered standing in the cold, dim church, a second-grader at the end of each pew, inhaling the detritus of incense and beeswax, diminished by the echoes of creaking kneelers and nuns’ whispers. Mesmerized by that little red eye that glowed over the confessional, shuffling a pew closer each time the eye blinked, palms clammy, heart thundering, brain empty of everything but the certainty that the next time she saw Father Donnelly he would somehow convey what an unworthy person she was for what he heard in that stuffy, claustrophobic little room.

Casey could still resurrect that terror, the shame, the dread that marked every long, slow procession along the side aisle of that church. She likened that feeling to the flutter of disquiet the minute she heard elevator music, saw
American Mother
magazine, and smelled disinfectant.

It wasn’t just anatomy and physiology. It was mystery and secrecy. Morals and mores. A man never had to submit himself in a completely vulnerable manner the way women were supposed to. A man was never taught that his sexual organs were a precious gift to be secreted away until offered to one special person—only to be expected to expose them for regular and casual inspection by a stranger.

There was no one a woman instinctively feared or necessarily trusted more than her gynecologist, simply because there was no one else in the same position to take advantage of her. It was why good gynecologists were so very empathetic. It was also why it was so easy for bad gynecologists to cause so much damage and not even be reported. It would be like publicly denouncing one’s confessor, only to compound the humiliation of private betrayal with the shame of public exposure.

Casey tried to imagine what it would be like to place that kind of trust in Hunsacker. To wait, exposed and unsettled, for the first touch of his fingers, the cold invasion of the speculum. Even sitting in a chair fully dressed, Casey found herself squirming.

Casey’s gut told her that Evelyn had been right. Hunsacker was hurting people. Maybe he wasn’t killing them, but he was humiliating them, manipulating them. Women surrendered themselves to him, just like Helen did to God, putting all their trust in his hands, and he abused it. She just couldn’t ignore that as easily as Marva could. Those funny little yelps of pain she kept hearing from his patients haunted her—almost as much as the disappearance of her friends.

“Casey? Your mom will be out in a minute.”

Startled from her reverie, Casey grabbed her purse and got to her feet. All around her women in various stages of ripening leafed through old magazines or hunched over needlework. And all Casey waited for was her mother. She allowed the old yearning to resurface for only a moment before turning to greet Dr. Burton’s nurse.