A Man to Die for (39 page)

“I’d rather I didn’t have to walk back into this house,” she countered, the nausea surging briefly. Everything she looked at she saw Hunsacker’s fingers on. She smelled his cologne when she knew she couldn’t, heard his silky laughter in her kitchen where she used to feel safe.

“Bert will be over in a few minutes,” Jack reassured her.

Casey could actually grin at that. “It’ll almost be worth seeing the expression on some of my neighbors’ faces in the morning.”

“You don’t go anywhere without him,” Jack demanded. “You hear me? I don’t want you or your mother alone for a minute.”

Casey offered an uncomfortable little shrug, her gaze sliding away from his. “I hate this,” she managed, surprised by the tears that were still so close, so unpredictable.

She wasn’t as surprised as she would have been a week ago that Jack walked right up and took her back in his arms. She folded into him, glad for his strength, his undemanding silence. He didn’t wear cologne, his smell clean soap and shaving cream. She thought it smelled like baptism.

“I’ll be back tomorrow night,” he promised. “If we can establish a pattern from Boston, we can reinforce the circumstantial evidence we have already.”

She nodded, eyes closed, heart stumbling past the pictures that once released wouldn’t dim. Chest taut with the battle between compassion and hatred. She needed the hatred, but the compassion wouldn’t be squeezed out. “I don’t want to feel sorry for him,” she admitted in a strident whisper. “I want him to be a monster.”

“He is a monster,” Jack told her, his workman’s hands gentle against her back. “But monsters are usually products of worse monsters.”

She shook her head blindly, overwhelmed by what she’d realized. “We have so much in common.” Except that Casey hadn’t been the one flinching away from that powerful, inescapable hand. She hadn’t had to hide the bruises and crawl into corners. She’d just had to watch. “The sons grow up to be serial killers,” she observed wryly. “The daughters grow up to be nurses.”

Except that Benny hadn’t turned to murder to vent his shame and pain. He’d turned to oblivion. He’d disappeared into the mist like a sad, silent wraith, a child-ghost trapped between earth and eternity, just alive enough to be felt, a tug on the conscience, but not seen. Not ever seen again. Maybe it was only the rage that kept the men really alive.

Casey took a few more selfish minutes fortifying herself with Jack’s strength. Then, she straightened, shaking herself like a dog trying to rid itself of water. “Okay,” she announced, lifting her face to smile up at him. “It’s showtime. Be careful in Boston.”

Jack was surprised into laughing. “I’m the one with the gun, remember?”

Casey tilted her head in challenge. She wasn’t fooling him. She knew it and he knew it. Even so, she needed to get her facade good and set for work. “I’m a nurse,” she said. “I don’t need a gun to be threatening. Now, head on off. I’ll wait for Bert before I leave.”

He took her by the shoulders, and for once his eyes were forthright and honest. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid,” he demanded, not smiling now. Not teasing at all.

Casey nodded, just as sincere. “Hurry back.”

Neither of them said what they were thinking. Casey didn’t even know how to phrase it yet. She just knew that she was doing something she’d vowed on everything that had still been holy to her that she would never allow herself to do again. She was anticipating. And she anticipated seeing Jack again even before he left. God, she hoped she wasn’t making another mistake.

She got another kiss. This one neither promise nor punctuation. This one hot and slow and savory, the kind that made you forget your troubles and think of only your hormones, Casey’s hormones, so badly neglected all these years, sprang right to attention. By the time Jack pulled away, a little breathless and smiling himself, Casey was forgetting every promise she’d ever made to herself. Except the ones about Hunsacker, because until there was some kind of resolution about him, there could be no future for her.

When she left for work, Casey saw that the sky was still unsettled. The temperature had risen; humidity weighted the air. Clouds boiled over in the southwest horizon, angry and threatening. Casey loved storms. She sat up in her room and watched them rip at the city, shaking the ground with their great feet and tearing apart the trees with their cool, swift breath. She didn’t feel excited now. She felt edgy, nervous, charged like the air around her. Waiting and uncertain.

“What do you remember about the night Billie came in?” Casey asked Marva as they sat down to dinner.

Marva looked up from her tuna salad. “Not much,” she admitted. “Why?”

Casey waved the chart copies at her. “Because somewhere in there is Hunsacker’s mistake. I can feel it in my bones, and I can’t figure out how to find it.”

Marva squinted at her. “I sure wish you wouldn’t broadcast that quite so much,” she advised. “Barb didn’t look too happy at your four-letter professions of love.”

“He was in my house,” Casey reminded her with a hiss. It was all she could do to eat thinking about it.

Marva nodded, conceding the point. “I already talked to you about that one,” she challenged. “You look like warmed-up day-old shit, and work’s not gonna help any right now. You should be home in fetal position gettin’ your sanity back, not here. Especially here. You shouldn’t be within fifteen miles of that man right now. ’Specially if he knows you found out.”

“He’s been waiting for me to find out,” Casey retorted. “It’s part of the game. I had to call in a priest to hear my mother’s confession this morning, and I can’t sit on any chair in my house without wanting to throw up. It probably tickles him to death.”

Marva shook her head. “I hope he lights up like a Christmas tree when they fry him.”

“Which is why I’m trying to remember that night,” Casey reminded her with another small lift of the papers. “I find I cope better with something positive to do. Now, help me. Remember how busy it was? I did my charting at the end of the shift, and I have a horrible suspicion that I missed something on the VanCleve chart. That’s the one that upholds his alibi.”

“What he say he was doin’?”

“He was supposed to be in at Barnes twenty minutes before walking in the door here. He got here right before Billie did. I remember. He had bourbon on his breath and was doing his best Dr. Kildare impression. So if he was at Barnes only twenty minutes earlier, he couldn’t have gotten ten minutes south of here, found Billie, run her over, and then made it in here before her.”

Marva reached for the chart copy. Casey held on to the Barnes notes, looking at the times. The nurse mentioned him arriving at 7:05. She didn’t note when he left. His last note timed him at 8:00. And Casey clocked him in at 8:20. But there was something else about the case she should remember, something nagging at the back of her mind.

“Too bad you can’t prosecute for doin’ unnecessary pelvics,” Marva observed, munching on her sandwich. “This lady sure didn’t need one.”

“I think they’re punitive pelvics,” Casey answered, swallowing her own bite of ham and Swiss.

Punitive. Punitive. It struck something.

“Give me that chart a minute,” she asked.

Leaning across the table, Marva passed it across. Casey took another look. Mrs. VanCleve. UTI. Red fingernails. Diamonds. Bitch.

Casey remembered considering punitive actions against the woman long before Hunsacker had.

“That’s it!” Casey crowed, flipping back to her notes again, then rechecking the face sheet. Something rare fluttered in her chest. Hope. Anticipation of the unholiest kind.

“She was a raving, screeching bitch. I remember now. I should have spotted it when I saw the time clocked in and the time Hunsacker came in. We called him for a solid forty-five minutes before we found him and she bitched every second of every minute…damn, it’s not here anywhere. I know I meant to chart it, especially after the tantrum she threw. I remember asking somebody to get the times on those calls for me.”

“But if it ain’t on paper—”

Casey’s head came up, the hope now agony. “How long do they keep the phone logs from the desk?” she demanded.

Marva shrugged. “Forever, I’m sure. It’s paperwork, ain’t it?”

Without bothering with the rest of her sandwich, Casey jumped to her feet and ran for the door. Please, God, she thought in sudden, crystal desperation. Let them be there. Let the secretary that night have made clean notes, since she hadn’t. Let her be contradicted.

“What are you doing?” one of the secretaries demanded as Casey yanked one file drawer after another open in search of the right paper. Her name was Venice, and she didn’t like nurses screwing with her files.

“Phone logs,” Casey said. “From March. Where are they?”

“The incinerator,” she answered as if Casey were slow.

Casey came to a sick halt. “Please don’t say that.”

“They keep ‘em for a month.”

“No,” a younger girl answered. “Tom’s got ’em. I saw ’em in his office, ya know? It’s fer like this study they’re doin’ so they can get more help or somethin’.”

Casey reached for the phone and dialed security.

“You’re not going to go into Tom’s office, are you?” Venice demanded.

Casey smiled, suddenly wishing she could throw up again. “You bet,” she said.

Bert called while she was waiting for security to show up.

“Be careful, little girl,” he warned. “We don’t have him yet. The plates definitely belong to a black Porsche, but they’re registered to a Walter Reed.”

Casey let out a wry bark. “Do you know who Walter Reed is, Bert?”

“No.”

“The doctor who cured yellow fever. It’s also an army hospital.”

“That’s cute,” he retorted. “Not proof. We’re waiting for pictures and signatures now. Maybe we can get a match. Until then, you keep your head down.”

“I’m gonna break his alibi, Bert,” she crowed. “I can feel it in my bones. It’s all in those phone logs. Once we have him for Billie, we can break him on everybody else.”

She hadn’t even heard the lounge door open, she was so excited. Marva’s none-too-gentle nudge brought her to attention. Barb was standing in the door, bristling with hostility.

“We’re under a tornado alert,” she announced briskly into the artificial brightness of the windowless room. Turning her gaze directly to Casey, she finished her message with deliberate warning. “Big storm coming our way. A bad one.”

Casey dismissed both her messages without much thought, tired of Barb’s tantrums. She was finally getting somewhere, really getting somewhere. She could go back to Buddy’s trailer and tell him it would be okay. She could go home to her mother and tell her that Mick had absolved her.

“Trauma code, emergency room seven. Trauma code, emergency room seven.”

Casey barely remembered to say good-bye before hanging up the phone on her way out the door.

By the time she and security were in the same place at the same time, Casey thought she was going to lose her mind. All hell had broken loose for a three-hour stretch, and there’d been blood and drunks flying everywhere. They’d just gotten the last upstairs or outside as night shift started to show up.

Casey greeted the oncoming nurses from where security was letting her into Tom’s office on the excuse that she’d left her work bag in there. Luckily, the security guard on wasn’t diligent enough to wait for her. Casey found the logs within ten minutes.

It took her another half hour to find it. March third, three-to-eleven shift, phone log, recording every doctor called, who placed the call, where the call was placed, whether to office, home, hospital, or through exchange, and when the call was returned. The list of numbers and notes by Hunsacker’s name for that afternoon was as damning as it got.

They had placed a call for Hunsacker about another patient at 7:10 through his exchange. He’d answered from Barnes. When Mrs. VanCleve arrived demanding his immediate attendance fifteen minutes later, the call had been replaced. The note next to the time was that Hunsacker had not been contacted because he’d just left Barnes. A full forty minutes before he’d signed off his chart. Repeated calls to the exchange, Barnes, St. Isidore’s, and several other locations hadn’t located him.

Casey thought she’d feel triumph. She thought she’d feel rockets exploding in her head, singing exultation. She felt oddly empty. It was over. The dance had ended, and she’d just bowed to Hunsacker. It was time to walk away.

Marva was waiting in the lounge along with Barb and a couple of the night crew. Casey lifted the copy she’d made of the log.

“He lied,” she announced to her friend. “I have it in black and white. His alibi is pure bullshit.”

That frown of worry creased Marva’s face, but Casey didn’t care. She’d walked on tiptoe too long around here. It was time for them to listen to her and understand. It was her turn to gloat.

Except it was too late for gloating. She just wanted to go home and hand this all off to Bert and crawl into bed until Jack got home the next day. Except that she knew she wouldn’t sleep, either. Not knowing that Hunsacker had been in her house, not plagued by that gnawing feeling that if she turned around he’d still be there. Always uncertain, always waiting, even when he was safe inside a five-by-five cell.

Picking her nursing bag off the floor, Casey slid the copy in with the other papers she’d been studying. And then she turned to go.

The new storm was battering the horizon. Casey saw it the minute she stepped out of the sharp, fluorescent lighting and air-conditioning. Thunder mumbled and cracked. Lightning shuddered in the clouds like distant artillery fire in a World War II movie. The air ahead of it danced in anticipation, trees curtsying welcome, grass shuddering before its onslaught. Gusts of cool air dipped and soared through the familiar humidity like invisible kites.

They were in for it, now. Casey stood for a minute watching it, the capricious wind plucking at her lab coat and winnowing through her hair, and wondered when she was ever going to feel safe enough in her room again to sit on her window seat and welcome that kind of fury.

She should have felt better. Maybe the storm was affecting her, spinning her molecules just like it did the atmosphere’s. She walked to her car knowing that she had the end of Hunsacker’s career in her hands, and felt furious because she still felt sorry for him. She drove home without calling Bert simply because she wished it had been Jack she could have handed over the final proof to. And she thought of Benny.