A Man to Die for (28 page)

“Wrong number,” she said, knowing just what would happen if she told him. Knowing that he’d interfere before she had the chance to win her victory.

Jack didn’t answer right away. He stood across from her, tense and suspicious, his right hand resting on his hip, just by his gun. Casey wasn’t sure he believed her. He didn’t press it. In the end, they returned to the files to try to piece together more information, without any luck. When they finally gave up, he gathered up his jacket and tie and carried his uneaten apple out with him.

Casey closed the door behind him uncertain what she should do. She walked upstairs to her room and undressed, still uncertain. Knowing that if she told Jack he would intervene, and knowing that she didn’t want him to. It was too important to let it happen. To prove that she could handle it.

Because Hunsacker had begun to threaten her in a much more personal way. He’d invaded her home.

She really thought that was all. Just that he was upset about whatever had been on the news and thought to step up his reign of terror over her. She went to sleep with the thought that nothing Hunsacker could do would dissuade her. That she was strong now. She could beat him before he hurt her.

The call came at seven in the morning. It startled Casey from her sleep, the buzz a monitor alarm in her somnolent state. A threat in her abrupt jump to sharpness.

There was a phone on her desk, for the conversations she didn’t want Helen to monitor. She jumped for it, anxious to intercede before Helen heard that silence. That presence.

“Casey?” It was Millie, and her voice shook with distress.

“Millie, what’s wrong?” Casey’s stomach sank with awful anticipation. The quaver in the young nurse’s voice portended disaster.

It took Millie a minute to pull herself together enough to talk. When she did, it was with outrage, with condemnation. Whatever she was going to say, it was somehow Casey’s fault.

“I just thought you should know,” she said in a rush. “We just got the call from the police.” She sobbed, and Casey wanted to shake her. “Janice is dead. She killed herself.”

SHE’D EATEN A
.38. No question, according to the Brentwood police, who’d been called when her separated husband had stopped by on his way to work to pick up some things and found her in the bedroom. No question, said the county medical examiner, who inspected the scene, the remains, and every kind of bodily fluid they could siphon. Janice Feldman had imbibed enough alcohol to stupefy a moose and then shoved the gun she’d purchased the week before into her mouth and blown out the back of her head.

Yes, her coworkers said. She had been distracted lately. She’d been having problems at home. She’d even joked once about committing suicide the “right way” to prevent common mistakes. Her husband had finally moved out, and Janice had left behind a note apologizing for what she was doing to him.

Janice didn’t seem like the kind of person who would commit suicide, they admitted. But then, how many times had they heard that same song from grieving relatives over the years? No, the investigating detectives said, women did not as a rule eat guns. But the precedent had been set during the conversation. That and the note and the physical evidence pointed to the fact that Janice had been set on proving something to her husband, her friends, and herself.

“What about the guy she was seeing?” Casey asked at work three days later, still stunned, still guilty, still expecting to see Janice stroll down the hall holding a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in her manicured hand to clean some microscopic spot from her uniform. Casey hadn’t slept for the last two nights. The phone had been ringing again. And when it hadn’t, she’d closed her eyes to see Janice, accusing, distraught, isolated.

“What guy?” Barb demanded with some distaste.

The look in her eyes warned Casey not to make up fairy tales to absolve her own culpability. For some reason, everybody who had sided against Casey in the Hunsacker dispute demanded connection. Their implication was that somehow Casey had caused Janice’s desperate act. Casey was too tired to even care.

She looked up from the medication she was mixing. “Janice had begun seeing somebody else. Somebody she said she was in love with.” There was another needle cap at the side of her mouth, already misshapen and scarred from chewing.

Barb glared at her from where she stood over the lab FAX waiting for results. “Aaron only moved out last week,” she accused.

Casey hadn’t even known that. She wondered what kind of decision Janice had made, whether she’d meant to leave for the other man and couldn’t in the end, or whether that had fallen through, too. She wanted more than anything to understand why Janice was dead. Why she was dead in such an awful way.

“She told me this a couple of weeks ago,” Casey insisted, setting the bottle down and facing Barb.

“The only other man she might have seen was a shrink,” Barb retorted hotly, turning back to her chore. “Dale tried to talk her into seeing somebody.”

It was so stupid. Such a little thing that should have blown away all the confusion of the past three days. And it hit Casey like a baseball bat, right between her eyes.

Her knees almost gave out on her. Her chest caught fire. She battled the first tears she’d shed since hearing the news. Not tears of grief. Tears of guilt. Of rage.

Dale.

She should have known. She should have anticipated it the minute Hunsacker had comforted Janice in the lounge. She should have spotted the symptoms in that funny little dance Janice had always done near him. The easiest route to a person’s bed is a soft shoulder, and that’s just what Hunsacker had provided.

Casey should have understood. After all, she’d been there when Janice had made her promise to Steve about suicide. But so had Hunsacker. And he would have remembered.

“Oh, God,” Casey whispered, suddenly blind to the activity around her, hands slippery against the gleaming metal of the medprep, her fingers clawing at nothing more substantial than rage.

He hadn’t called to threaten her. He’d called to taunt her. To let her know what he’d done. He would keep calling until she understood and answered him.

“Casey, Mr. Crawley’s bed is ready upstairs,” Millie announced. “Casey?”

She couldn’t even answer. Too many voices already dissented in her ears. Logic told her she was jumping to conclusions. Janice had too much taste to fall for Hunsacker’s patter. She would have seen through him in a minute.

But Casey had told herself she was jumping to conclusions before. This time she listened to her instincts, and her instincts told her that Janice had been confused, been in pain. Been desperate. And that was just the kind of chum Hunsacker was attracted to.

Hunsacker had been the other man. He’d slept with her, promised her more than he’d ever intended to give, and then, for some reason, killed her.

And there probably wasn’t any way in hell they’d prove this one, either.

“Casey?”

Casey started at the feel of Millie’s hand on her arm. “I’ll, uh, be right back,” was all she said. Then, leaving the syringe full of anticonvulsant medication on the counter, she wheeled around for the lounge.

But Jack wasn’t in his office. Casey couldn’t leave a message; no one else would understand. She told Detective Capelli to have Sgt. Scanlon call her as soon as he got in, and hung up.

She had to do something. Evelyn was dead, and Wanda, and now Janice. And Hunsacker still hunted with impunity. Her friends. Her coworkers. And as she’d always said, if they didn’t take care of each other, nobody else sure as hell would.

Casey sat for five long minutes in the empty lounge, the clatter of the work lane muffled beyond the door, the smoke filter whirring steadily overhead, the distant whine of ambulances prophesying trouble. She still couldn’t quite breathe, and her chest hurt, as if something were trying to claw its way out. She had to do something.

There were new notices on the BOHICA board. A flower fund for Janice and a reminder that outpatient psychiatric treatment was only partially covered in the health insurance plan. The official reminder that staff couldn’t talk to police on official business in the work lane without the permission of the on-site supervisor.

Casey fought tears again. She pulled at the hard plastic of the needle cap with her fingers, rolling it around between her hands until it left little red grooves on her skin.

Hunsacker was sidling closer. He was raising the stakes, and Casey had to stop him. She had to find some way to silence that boastful laughter. She desperately wanted to talk to Jack about this. To make him understand and get his input. But she didn’t really expect him to help. His hands were tied.

Hers weren’t.

Concentrate on Wanda and Crystal, he’d said. Well, all right, she would. There were some questions she wanted very much to ask Buddy, some things she wanted to see. After that, she’d get back in touch with her friends over at Izzy’s. And maybe she’d just go a little step further and ask her acquaintances in the medical examiner’s office for some news about Janice. She’d get enough information for Jack that his request for the Major Case Squad couldn’t be turned down.

And tonight, when Hunsacker called, she’d fight back.

Casey didn’t call Buddy. Buddy didn’t have a phone. She headed back down to the Rose right after work to check in on him.

Nothing much had changed. There was a different song on the jukebox, something about lovers and liars, and fewer people scattered over the vinyl and Formica. Casey walked in alone and hopped up on a bar stool.

Clyde the bartender was pleased as he could be to see her. “I told Buddy what you said,” he informed her as he poured her a beer. “We were all set to get up a search party of our own when those old boys found her instead of the rabbits they was huntin’.” Setting the foaming glass on the counter, he paused to shake his head, the ashes at the end of his cigarette glowing red right over Casey’s beer. “Beer’s on the house.”

It was his way of saying thank you.

“Thanks,” Casey allowed with a smile and took a drink just to get it out of range. Her hands were still shaking. “How’s Buddy doing?”

Clyde inclined his head over to one of the tables by the wall. “See for yourself.”

Casey couldn’t believe her luck. Buddy sat with his back against one of the Budweiser mirrors, a beer in hand and quite a few more on board. Casey remembered him as being a pretty good-looking guy. He looked a lot thinner now, prematurely stooped, his features gray and flat.

She’d never thought much one way or another about Buddy before. Suddenly she hurt for him.

So this was what they looked like later. She’d wondered sometimes when she’d ushered families back out the door from a visit with sudden death, still too numb to know their own grief. She’d been cried on, screamed at, assaulted with that first wave of denial and pain. She’d never seen what they had carried through the next days and weeks. She saw it now, the reality of death weighing Buddy down like an inescapable sentence.

It had to be what Evelyn’s husband had felt, what Aaron Feldman felt. It must have been what Helen had faced when her Mick had died so long ago. Casey decided she didn’t want any part of it. She was glad she worked the ER, where she could shield herself against the flash of first pain and then shuttle it back out the door before it had the chance to sear her.

“Buddy?” She greeted him, her beer in hand, her voice tentative and more afraid than she realized. She didn’t want him turning those lost, lonely eyes on her. She didn’t want to be infected with his sorrow.

His eyes were a soft blue. She remembered them laughing. Tonight they looked distant and opaque. Occupant not home, call again later.

“My name’s Casey McDonough,” she introduced herself, slipping into the other seat without waiting for his invitation. “I worked with Wanda at St. Isidore’s.”

A dim light flickered. Not interest so much as recognition. “I wanna thank you,” he slurred, grabbing on to his beer glass as if it were the only handhold left on a steep slope. A cigarette had burned almost away in the little tin ashtray in front of him, the smoke wreathing him like early fog. “They wouldn’t believe me. None of ’em listened. But you did.”

Casey shook her head. “I knew Wanda. She loved you, Buddy. She wouldn’t have taken off like that without a word.” Maybe it was trite. Maybe it wasn’t even true. It was all Casey could offer.

Buddy’s eyes filled with unshed tears, and Casey battled against her own. God, she hated this. She wanted to get back into her rut, where she was safe and anesthetized against this kind of pain.

“I’ need a favor, Buddy,” she hurried on, trying her best to control her voice. “I don’t think the police know what to look for in investigating her murder.”

He tried his best to focus on her words. His eyes rolled a little and straightened, settling on a spot on her left cheek. “Pussies,” he snarled. He’d obviously been spending a lot of time with Clyde lately.

“Buddy,” she said, leaning closer, peering through the haze. “I’m working with another policeman on another murder. A murder I think is related to Wanda’s. And, well, if I could find something more solid than they have now…”

“But they looked already,” he said, his attention inward again. “Rummaged through our place for a coupla hours.”

“The cops didn’t know Wanda. They don’t know hospitals. I do. I might spot something important they wouldn’t recognize. Could I look? At her stuff, her hospital stuff.” She didn’t mention that the police wouldn’t have known they were looking for blackmail material. Casey wasn’t sure how he’d react to a concept like that. She wasn’t even sure he could comprehend it right now. The simple route seemed the best.

It worked. It took him a minute for her words to worm their way past all the alcohol. When they finally did, Buddy came right to his feet with a nod. Then he turned for the door without waiting to see if she’d follow.

“I’m gonna drive Buddy home, Clyde,” Casey announced, her beer left forgotten with Buddy’s. Clyde just nodded, too.

The Trigel trailer had never been that much to speak of. It was less now. Buddy hadn’t spent a lot of time cleaning since Wanda’s disappearance. Empty TV dinners spilled out over trash can and sink. Beer cans and cigarette butts littered every available surface. Clothes huddled in rumpled piles over the furniture, and the place reeked of smoke.

Buddy had obviously been sleeping on the couch. The bedroom was dusty and neat, closed off and silent. Casey figured he hadn’t gone in since Wanda had disappeared. It made her search easier, but spookier. After pointing out the correct door, Buddy grabbed himself a refill from the fridge and sprawled into a chair in the living room without moving any of the previous occupants, and then just waited.

The contents of Wanda’s locker were still stuffed into the cardboard box that sat on the dresser. Just what Casey had heard, five or six pictures of Elvis from puberty to pantsuits, a stash of unfiltered Marlboros, and a cache of cheap, brassy earrings. No diaries, no messages, no surprises. Casey turned away to check the rest of the room.

She found stuffed animals, a shadowbox with tiny turtles, and a lot of jeans. More Elvis and enough makeup to stage a Broadway show. And, tossed in the corner, right behind a chair, a lab coat and white shoes.

Casey hesitated a moment, superstitious and uncertain. Wanda had probably dropped the clothes here after her last night of work, careless with the certainty that they’d still be there the next day to pick up. That she’d be there the next day to do it.

But she hadn’t. Casey had the feeling she was the first person to touch them since Wanda had tossed them over the chair and missed, that the police hadn’t even seen the little puddle of white back in the corner.

She gingerly reached past a couple of cobwebs and caught the lab coat by the collar. It smelled like cigarettes, too. A name tag was still over the pocket, W. Trigel CNA, Labor and Delivery. Casey went right for the bulging pockets.

Wanda had been a typical hospital pack rat, stuffing her lab coat with things like tape and alcohol swabs just in case she’d need them. Casey stacked those on the dresser along with three pens, scissors, an opened pack of cigarettes, a stash of rubber bands, paper clips, and a tape measure. And one other thing.