A Man to Die For

by Eileen Dreyer

  Jack's pen hovered over the still-blank paper. "She ate a gun?" he demanded.

  "Women don't do that," she retorted with the kind of brightness Jack knew wouldn't reach her eyes. "They think Janice was their exception to the rule."

  "And you don't think so."

  "I knew her. I also finally figured out who the mysterious boyfriend was."

  He was tapping the pen against a blank sheet of paper and didn't even hear it. He didn't want to ask. He'd just spent two nights butting his head against a brick wall and been summoned into the captain's office again. He didn't want to know that the stakes had been raised again, because he didn't have the chips to call, and it was going to be Casey in the end who was going to lose.

  "Hunsacker," he said anyway.

  "In a word." Her voice carried an odd exhilaration. Maybe she wasn't as blithe about suicide as she thought. Maybe she'd already vented her grief. Maybe there was something else going on that followed the news. Jack fought an urge to rub away the fire.

  "Where was she found?" he asked.

  "Brentwood police handled it, and Pat Martin over at the ME's office. I already talked to him."

  Scanlon knew he hadn't wanted to hear more. "You talked to him about this?"

  "I couldn't get hold of you," she defended herself. "And I didn't want Janice to fall through the cracks. I don't want people to keep thinking she killed herself when Hunsacker did it."

  "How do you know for sure?"

  "He told me."

  Jack had a feeling he'd been waiting to hear this. He closed his eyes and kept his silence, breathless with fury.

  "That night you were over," she continued more quietly. "The wrong number. It was Hunsacker, I'm sure of it. He didn't say anything, but I think he was taunting me. The time of death was an hour before that call."

  "Did he call again?"

  "Every night."

  Now Jack made his first notes. "We'll tap the phone. What else?"

  "No, you won't."

  Jack rubbed at his eyes. It had already been a long day. He didn't need Casey to pick this moment for a fight. "I said we'll tap the phone," he informed her with more steel. "He's getting too close now, and you're not safe anymore."

  Casey's voice was as sharp as his. "Unless I'm under arrest, don't tell me what I will or won't do at my own house."

  Jack heard it then, the button he must have pushed. It was just amazing how a woman with so much common sense could shut down straight into blind stupidity just because a man told her what to do. Those old hurts must have run real deep.

  If she'd brought him any other news, he might have taken more time coaxing her out of it.

  "It's you and I, Casey," he reminded her abruptly. "Two people in the whole damn city who think this guy's poison. I can't afford to let you play power games at the expense of the investigation. This has gone too far already."

  He could hear her breathing, slow and deep, reeling in control. He did the same and managed to shove down an impulse to send a cruiser out for her, just to make sure she didn't do something stupid.

  "Janice Feldman," he repeated back to nudge her into gear. "Brentwood, 1:00 AM, June 12. I'll do some talking. Now, what else?"

  It took her a moment, but when she finally answered, her voice had almost regained its control.

  "Elizabeth Peebles," she said. "And Wanda."

  Jack's pen slowed all over again. "What about them?"

  Casey took a good breath. "Did you know that Wanda knew Mrs. Peebles? She met her when her daughter-in-law Marilyn came in to have a baby. Turns out Marilyn went to Dr. Hunsacker and referred the older Mrs. Peebles to him for menopause problems. Momma only went twice, and then stopped altogether until a friend suggested Dr. Fernandez."

  "And you know why."

  "From what Marilyn said, her mother-in-law was very troubled about how Hunsacker conducted his office visits."

  "How so?"

  "It has to do with those pelvics," she said with deliberate patience, reminding him that as yet he hadn't set his feet in stirrups. "He was either too rough or too familiar. Or both."

  "And the daughter kept going to him?"

  "Funny thing about pregnant women. They get just about to term, and they get really passive with their doctors. They're really afraid of rocking the boat, and more afraid of establishing a new relationship that close to game time."

  "Was she having problems with him?"

  "Well, that's evidently how this all started. She mentioned something to Wanda while Wanda was prepping her for her C-section. She was trying to understand why she felt so uncomfortable around Hunsacker when everybody else seemed to dote on him. Evidently Hunsacker had been tough and tender to her, too."

  "How tender?"

  "Enough that if she raised the question, Hunsacker could be investigated, censured, and indicted. She won't raise the question. I asked. But she won't go to him anymore, either."

  "And how did you manage to find all this out?"

  "Wanda had Marilyn Peebles's name and address in her lab-coat pocket."

  Now Jack had to wait a minute for patience. He'd just punched a hole through the paper with his ballpoint. Damn her! She'd just gone off half-cocked again without letting him know. How the hell was he supposed to keep balancing the hunt for Hunsacker with the need to protect Casey? And he hadn't even been into the captain's office yet. He didn't even know whether he was still on the case. Hell, he didn't even know if he was still on the force.

  "I asked you to pick up grapevine material," he grated, clenching his pen instead of his jaw. "Not interview relatives."

  Her exuberance seemed to have returned. "Nobody else was doing it."

  "Don't be an idiot," he snapped. "You make one wrong move, you screw up any hope of hauling Hunsacker in."

  "Have I done anything wrong yet?"

  "No, but that doesn't make any difference."

  "And nobody else in three counties knew that Hunsacker knew Mrs. Peebles. I rest my case."

  Jack took a steadying breath. "I'm gonna rest my hand on your backside if you don't contain yourself. Don't you get it yet? Hunsacker's not going to let you traipse around collecting damaging evidence against him. He finds out you met Mrs. Peebles' daughter-in-law and he might meet you in some dark parking lot. And who's going to take care of your mother when you end up in a garbage bag?"

  It took her a minute to answer. When she did, her voice was subdued and angry. "Not bad," she whispered. "Must be that clerical training that helps you zero in on the guilt reflex so fast."

  "Whatever gets the job done."

  Jack hung up the phone a few minutes later and leaned back in his chair. Five women, now. Five and counting. Jack saw that he'd written their names in order on his scratch pad. Wanda Trigel, Evelyn Peters, Crystal Jean Johnson, Elizabeth Peebles, Janice Feldman. Each one different, each one as dead as the first. And there were signs that Hunsacker was increasing the tempo of his kills. His down time was shortening, like a woman in labor, so that the next woman was already in danger.

  A woman in labor. What an analogy. Jack wondered whether Hunsacker was objective enough about his own murderous pattern to comprehend the irony of the comparison.

  Jack looked at his list. Bare facts, statistics, anonymous features that somehow look alike beneath the medical examiner's camera. Eyes half open, as if bored with the whole thing, mouths slack in surprise, skin waxen and thick. It was his secret, the fire behind the Maalox, that he couldn't leave the names on their standardized forms. He took them home with him, to bed and to breakfast, weighing him down like one heavy rock piled on another until there were times when he thought he couldn't get his shoulders up far enough to breathe.

  It was Jack's secret that he'd carried his dead from war and from the missions, all clustered around his table in the dark to accuse him, to remind him of his failures. And the victims from his job joined them, sad-faced ghosts with no one to redeem them but Jack.

  Even more than that, he carried the names of the
next victim and the one after that. He saw the list in his hand and knew it would be longer before it stopped, and those names bore down on him most of all.

  This time, though, it was different. This time he'd made the mistake of letting it get personal. It wasn't just going to be innocent victims he had to atone for, it was going to be Casey. Because he knew as well as he knew the list already in his hand, that hers would be added. And he wasn't sure that there was a damn thing he could do about it.

  Chapter 16

  "Then why did Janice go out and buy herself a gun?" Marva demanded when Casey told her. "She didn't hunt no rabbits, girl."

  They had the lounge to themselves, Marva milking one of her rare cigarettes and Casey finishing a pile of charts.

  "We might never know," Casey admitted,' leaning in close. "Maybe she was scared of Hunsacker. Maybe Hunsacker convinced her that Aaron was going to hurt her. Maybe she had a mouse in the closet."

  "And maybe she was hurting enough that she just didn't wanna play anymore," Marva argued relentlessly, the smoke that curled from her nose giving her the appearance of a recumbent dragon.

  "And blow the shit out of herself?" Casey argued, intense, needing Marva to believe. "Janice wasn't the kind to do it that way. Not when she didn't have to go any farther than the medprep. Hell, Marva, you know damn well that if any of us really wanted to get scrogged, we'd head straight for insulin or potassium or digitalis. All neat and quick and efficient, accessible and anonymous. You wouldn't need a permit or a hundred bucks or the guts to feel the metal against your teeth. You'd drop a vial in your lab coat with a syringe or two, slip into your favorite nightie, put on your favorite music, and get out the tourniquet."

  Marva never moved more than an eyebrow. "Sounds like you did a lot of thinkin' on this."

  Casey deflated a little. She hadn't felt her fist clench around her pen or her shoulders tighten up somewhere around her ears. "It crossed my mind," she admitted uneasily, wishing Marva would move or flinch or look away. It seemed those soft brown eyes stripped her naked. "A long time ago."

  Marva took a minute to at least assure herself of that. With one last drag from her cigarette, she crushed it into the Styrofoam cup she balanced in her lap and blew smoke at the whirring filter in the ceiling. "You got that sergeant working on this?" she asked.

  Casey nodded.

  Marva nodded back and aimed a finger at Casey's chest. "Then drop it around here. You ain't real popular right now, and that kind of accusation's not gonna help at all."

  Marva was about to get to her feet when Casey laid a restraining hand on her arm. "Do you believe me?"

  Marva stopped where she was, and those brown eyes settled back on Casey with more worry than Marva would ever admit. "I think that boy has got you fried in hot oil. He's slick and sweet and popular, and you're gettin' sucked into whatever he's doin'. You're losin' your sense of humor, girl, and that's not good."

  "People are dying, Marva. What do you want me to do?"

  Marva waved that off, too. "Shoot, girl. What I tell you? It's like the good Lord said about the poor. People always gonna be dyin'. Sometimes they's somethin' we can do about it, sometimes they ain't. All you can do is what you can do."

  Casey allowed her friend a grudging smile. "You've been a trauma nurse too long."

  Marva rolled her eyes and finally got to her feet. "Way too long," she said and walked out into the work lane.

  It took Casey another ten minutes to complete just one more set of notes. She couldn't concentrate. She was having trouble sitting still. Finally she just gave up and left them for later and went back out to the lane to do some real work.

  Maybe it was instinct. Maybe she was developing a sense of smell like Hunsacker. Whatever it was, it drew her back out onto the work lane just as Hunsacker walked in the door.

  Casey froze. She'd just laid her hand on a bottle of potassium for the IV she was going to start. She stood there, dead center in the hall, exposed and vulnerable, her suspicions literally in her hand when he spotted her.

  "Are you going to be helping me with my lady?" he asked with a broad, bright smile.

  Casey kept thinking of apples and worms, meat and maggots. Open the bright shiny exterior and see the rot. She couldn't quite match his smile today. Hers would have looked too hostile.

  "I think Millie is," Casey said, turning back to her work. Her hands trembled with the sudden flush of adrenaline. She could smell that woodsy cologne he wore, subtle and fragrant. Enticing to the unwary.

  He walked very close, smiling, bending his head toward her. "I'd still rather have you help me," he purred, then dropped his voice so that no one else could hear. "You're so thorough about things, ya know?"

  Startled, Casey looked up. It was there, that alien that looked out from his eyes, that flat dark entity that consumed emotion. Casey wanted to flinch away from it. She wanted to drop into a ball and cover her head with her hands to protect herself. Rage exploded in her, frustration that he could threaten her in darkness and court her in daylight. But the rage didn't come alone. The minute she let that loose, other, older emotions bubbled toward the surface. Other memories, as deeply imbedded as instinct. He was loosening them like old teeth, and she couldn't allow them free.

  So, again, she fought for challenge, for advantage.

  I know you, she chanted in the safety of her own silence. I know you and I'll prove it. You can't scare me again.

  "I wouldn't want to disappoint Millie," she said with a slow smile of her own, knowing that she couldn't keep the venom from her face as easily as he.

  Hunsacker seemed to grow a little. "I'll make it up to her," he promised. "Believe me."

  Casey wondered how they could be just casually standing next to each other in a hospital hallway. She felt as if she were battling to stay upright, fighting a wind that threatened to pluck her away. Too bad Jack couldn't tap into this, she thought dizzily. Too bad enmity wasn't admissible in court.

  Her courage was costing her.

  "I couldn't allow you to do any favors for her like that," Casey retorted, her smile stiffening with meaning, her chest tight. "I'm not sure she'd recover from it."

  For a moment he stopped. His smile remained behind like an afterimage, frozen and unreal as the alien retreated to consider Casey's challenge. Casey held her breath, mesmerized, stricken, thrilled. She wanted to tell him about Wanda, about Mrs. Peebles. She wanted him to know she wasn't impotent before his taunting. She wanted to see the surprise on his face when he fell.

  "Oh, Dale, there you are," Millie called from the other lane, and the alien slipped away.

  Hunsacker lifted his head like a predator sniffing prey. He smiled, his eyes glittering twice as brightly. "Just talking to Casey. Do you have my lady?"

  "She's in room six," Millie almost sang out. "Set up and ready to go."

  "Would you mind if Casey helped me this time?" he asked in the same way a man would cut in on a dance.

  "I get the next two," Millie demanded with a soft pout. Casey wondered if the girl realized she went right up on point every time she talked to Hunsacker. He ever asked her out, she'd do the whole damn dying swan.

  "The next three," he promised, and turned back to Casey.

  Casey was all set to tell him to go to hell. Then she spotted Tom hovering in the door of one of the rooms, ostensibly checking a chart. His ears might as well have been glued to the back of his head. Casey was getting her chance not to screw up. She wished Marva were close, so she could at least fortify herself with her friend's support. She needed someone to calm the flush of frustration.

  "Do you need any Thayer Martin cultures?" she asked instead, focusing on the CPR chart that was peeling from the side of the medprep. As if anybody in a trauma center would need to run to the medprep in the middle of a cardiac arrest to make sure the ABCs of life support hadn't changed since their last code. But lifesaving charts looked good in ERs. It made the staff look sincere about their calling, as if the things were pledges that needed
solemn reavowing from time to time. Casey knew the game.

  She knew the game, and much as she resented it, she played it now.

  Phoebe Griffin was a well-fed, well-pampered woman with a penchant for diamonds and Lucille Ball #4 hair color. Casey didn't like her the minute she walked into the room.

  "There you are," she whined at Hunsacker, clutching the green paper sheet around her ample waist with both hands as if any minute somebody would come rip it off. "I told my Allen that I couldn't stand this any longer. I said I simply couldn't wait until office hours tomorrow, especially since you missed my last two appointments. Besides, who wants to wait hours in an office when this is so much closer and insurance pays for it?"

  "You've been having cramping again?" Hunsacker asked, checking the chart in his hand as he pulled out his notebook.

  "Doubled over," she whispered, her eyes large.

  Casey squeezed some lubricant onto the opened pelvic pack, the obnoxious sputtering sound saying enough for her. She leaned around a little, trying to see what Hunsacker was jotting down in his book.

  She could see the time, and Mrs. Griffin's name. There were a lot of times on the page, a lot of notations, but Casey couldn't make them out.

  Hunsacker asked a couple more questions, scribbling, smiling and hand patting, and then slipped out of his jacket for the pelvic. Casey moved around to position Phoebe into the stirrups.

  "Well, you know, Phoebe," he was saying as he snapped his gloves into place over the monogrammed cuff of his shirt. "You haven't been behaving. You have to expect to pay some consequences when you haven't behaved. Now, don't you?"

  Casey couldn't imagine a supine woman in stirrups looking even more passive, but Phoebe managed it. She simpered and apologized, saying that she just had too many things to do to stay off her feet, especially when she was only a little pregnant.

  Hunsacker settled onto the stool and flipped the sheet back to expose a lot of unexercised thigh and a black tangle of hair at target area. Phoebe was already squirming.