A Man to Die For
A Romantic Suspense/Thriller
by
Eileen Dreyer
New York Times bestselling Author
A MAN TO DIE FOR
Awards & Accolades
RITA Award Winner
Romance Writers of America
Nominated, Anthony Award in mystery
REVIEWS
"A wicked prescription guaranteed to give you sleepless nights."
~Nora Roberts
"Eileen Dreyer creates the sort of skin-crawling suspense that will leave readers looking with a wild and wary eye upon anyone at the other end of a stethoscope."
~Elizabeth George
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ISBN: 978-1-61417-327-4
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Please Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 1991, 2012, 2014 by Eileen Dreyer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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Thank You.
Acknowledgments
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.
It was difficult for the Angel of Death to kill everybody in the whole world,
so he appointed doctors to assist him.
~Nachman of Bratzlav
Jewish mystic, 1771-1811
Prologue
1991
Control your impulses, her mother had always said. Stifle your urges, the church agreed. She should have listened. The next time she had an urge like this one, she was going to lock herself in a closet until it went away.
"Honey, why are we here?"
"I have to make a stop before I take you home, Mom."
A stop. She had to report a crime. Several crimes. That wasn't exactly a run to the local Safeway for deodorant.
Gripping her purse in one hand and her mother in the other, Casey McDonough approached the St. Louis City Police Headquarters like a penitent approaching the gates of purgatory. It seemed amazing, really. Casey had been born no more than fifteen miles away, but she'd never visited this place before. She'd never even known precisely where it was.
A stark block of granite that took up the corner of Clark and Tucker, the headquarters did nothing to inspire comfort. Brass grillwork protected massive front doors and encased the traditional globe lamps that flanked it. Unmarked police cars and crime scene vans hugged the curb. Police in uniform or windbreakers and walkie-talkies hovered near the front door, chatting among themselves. Civilians edged by, sensing their own intrusion, much the way they would enter her hospital.
Casey didn't want to be here. If she could have, she would have approached her friends on the county police force instead. She would have pulled one of them aside when they'd come into her emergency room and proposed her theory in a way that could be considered an inside joke instead of an accusation.
"Say, Bert, what would you think if I said there's something just a little more sinister than fee-splitting going on around here? What if I told you that some of the bad luck around this place is actually connected? And not just because I know all the people involved, either."
Bert would laugh and deflect her fears with common sense, and the issue would have gone no further.
Only none of the crimes Casey suspected had actually happened in the county. Bert wouldn't know anything about them. He couldn't do her any good. If she wanted any relief from the suspicions that had been building over the last few weeks like a bad case of indigestion, she was going to have to find it with the city cops. Cops she didn't know. Cops who didn't know her.
Casey pulled on the heavy glass-and-brass door and winced at its screech of protest. It sounded as if it resented her intrusion. The way everybody else ignored the noise, the door must have been objecting for years.
Inside, the foyer was a high square of marble, cool and hushed. Casey held the heavy door open for her mother to follow inside. Sketching a quick sign of the cross, the little woman instinctively reached for a holy water font.
"It's not a church," Casey reminded her.
It was hell. She was in hell for what she suspected. But Casey just couldn't keep it to herself any longer. It was time to let somebody else help shoulder the weight of this rock she was carrying around her neck.
"What do you mean it's not a church?" her mother asked, swinging around on the gray marble floor, her voice echoing in the cavernous lobby. "Who's going to take care of St. Joseph?"
Heads turned. The female officer at the control desk at the far side of the room came to a kind of careful alert, like a guard dog catching an unfamiliar scent. Two middle-aged black men slouching against the wall of the diarrhea brown and green waiting area interrupted their conversation to assess the new entertainment.
"It's a police station," Casey whispered, a hand on her mother's arm so she couldn't get far. "It'll only take a minute."
She shouldn't be thinking of her civic duty. She should be thinking of her personal duty. She had a mother to take care of. A mother nobody else really wanted to be saddled with. What was going to happen to Helen when Casey was without a job, without a career, without any kind of future? Because if she took another step, that was exactly what was going to happen. This simply wasn't the kind of action the medical hierarchy overlooked.
"Can I help you?"
This was stupid. She had no business being here.
She had no choice. Evelyn had been her friend. Casey stepped up to the desk.
"Couldn't I just go to confession?" Helen asked in a little whimper. "I only pruned her roses."
The officer frowned. A petite, precise black woman with very little humor in her expression, she considered Casey's mother like a bad joke. Casey couldn't blame her. But then, Casey didn't know that the sergeant was going to like Casey's story any better.
How did she say it? How did she pull all the suspicions whirling around into some kind of recognizable order? How did she accuse a respected man of crimes without suffering recrimination?
Crimes. A euphemism. A generality that didn't carr
y the impact of the truth. She'd been avoiding the issue by calling it a crime, instead of what it was. She'd been dancing with inevitability, because the minute she gave voice to the suspicions that had been hovering like unwelcome ghosts, there wouldn't be any retreat. There wouldn't be any chance of calling her fears a mistake.
"Ma'am?" the officer nudged without appreciable patience.
"Murder," Casey blurted out ungracefully.
The officer scowled, hands on hips. "Take your roses seriously, huh?"
"Have you ever thought of the convent?" Helen asked, reaching across the dark wood desk.
The officer flinched.
Casey pulled Helen back just in time. "Say a rosary, Mom." When Helen nodded agreeably and began to dig into her purse, Casey returned to the officer. "It's about the murder the other night, Crystal Johnson. I may have some information about it."
That elicited a long, considering look. "You wanna tell me?"
Casey didn't know whether she wanted to laugh or cry. Didn't this woman understand how tough this was?
"It's a long story," she hedged miserably. And somebody's going to see me here, somebody from the hospital like me who never comes into the city except to shop and eat, but who maybe got their car stolen or impounded for a ticket, and they'll go right back to work and report just what I was doing at the city police headquarters.
The officer took one more look at Helen, then Casey. "You're not confessing, are you?" She sounded almost hopeful.
"Not without a priest," Helen piped up.
Casey ignored her. "I suspect somebody else," was all she could manage.
A nod, a quick look around the lobby, at nothing at all. "Well, in that case, I'll do you one better. I'll get you a Bishop."
Casey considered herself rightfully frustrated and depressed. She should have known better. She wasn't really frustrated or depressed until fifteen minutes later when she stepped into the Bishop's office for the first time. One look at him made the rest of the situation pale in comparison.
Even so, she straightened as much as she could, shoved her mother into a seat, and challenged the officer. "There's somebody you and I need to talk about."
Chapter 1
His arrival was foretold like the second coming of Christ. Administration, that great hospital prophet of profit and loss, whispered his name with reverence and hope. Men in three-piece suits said novenas. Drunk with his potential, aquiver with his proposed patient load, silver-haired corporate giants wept with joy. A great wind of change was sweeping over Mother Mary Hospital, and its name would be Hunsacker.
The labor and delivery staff took up the song the minute he first crossed Mother Mary terrazzo, the nurses entertaining the cafeteria crowd with psalms to his looks and charisma, teasing the unanointed with his proximity, congratulating themselves on their incredible luck to be so privileged with his presence.
The floors followed, and then surgery, until the reputation of Dr. Dale Hunsacker threatened mythological proportions.
He was handsome. He was electric. He remembered names and told jokes and brought in pizzas. The administration loved him because he had managed to siphon the wealthier pregnancies their way when he decided to name Mother Mary his primary hospital, and the labor and delivery nurses loved him because he inspired administration to cough up some badly needed money for their unit. So what if he wasn't the best OB/GYN to hit the halls. Neither were any of the other OBs on staff, and not one of them was nearly as pleasant.
Dr. Dale Hunsacker, doctor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, late of the finer neighborhoods of Boston and New York, had decided to escape the pressures of the East Coast for the settled, homey atmosphere of St. Louis. In no more than a matter of weeks in his new home, he had proven a rare talent, attracting some of the area's more wealthy women into his practice on weight of word of mouth and an unforgettable smile. Dr. Dale Hunsacker was an up-and-coming commodity in one of the most cutthroat business venues in St. Louis—medicine. And much to the chagrin of the more traditional moneyed hospitals in the area, Mother Mary had him.
Dale was a great guy. Dale was a dream. Dale was a hell of a team player. By the time Casey met him, she knew she was either going to end up hating him or having his children.
* * *
Given a choice, she would have picked almost any other night to finally meet the newest staff legend. Friday night was bad enough in the emergency room, but a full moon was worse. And to top it off, the weather was warming up. All those bananamen out there who had been waiting out the cold weather to go back into action were revving into high gear.
Five hours into her shift, Casey was tired, hungry, and crabby. The idea that all this was just a preview of the months to come depressed her immensely.
"It's like a zoo in here tonight," she complained to Janice Feldman when they met at the medprep where the medications were kept.
Tall, elegant, and irritatingly spotless at eight o'clock at night, Janice grinned and waved a manicured finger at Casey's freckled nose. "Watch it, hon. One of the surgery nurses got fired for bandying about that particular euphemism. Administration thinks it's derogatory."
Casey lifted a dry eyebrow. "It is," she assured her friend. "That's why I said it." Drawing up fifty of Vistaril, Casey capped the needle and turned to consider the long hall. "Sounds like it's feeding time, too."
Babies wailed, drunks howled, one particularly colorful psychotic screamed a series of numbers out loud to keep them all from disappearing, and the radio babbled nonstop. Phones rang, monitors beeped, and sirens moaned on their way in.
"Hold ye there, virgin!"
Casey stiffened and spun around. "Oh, shit, Ralph. I told you to watch him!"
A close relative of Gentle Ben was bearing down on her, hair and beard flying, eyes glittering, arms outstretched to her. The leather restraints he'd been wearing flapped in his wake. He was buck naked and ugly as sin.
"Save me, virgin!" he howled, scattering security guards like bowling pins. "Die for me!"
Casey planted herself foursquare in his path. "I have affidavits," she yelled at him, hands on hips, fighting a grin. St. Paul came in every other month when he forgot to take his Prolixin and tried to sacrifice a redheaded virgin to ensure the safety of his virility. Unfortunately, Casey was the only redhead around. "Witnesses. Participants. I—am—not—a virgin!"
"I'll swear to it!" Dr. Belstein yelled from room three where he was sewing up a toddler's chin.
"Me, too," Michael Wilson added, hand in the air from where he was adjusting a pair of crutches at the other end of the hall. "She was great!"
"Nae!"
"Did St. Paul live in medieval Scotland?" Janice asked as security gave it another try. Two of them grabbed restraints. Two more tried flying tackles.
"What I want to know," Casey answered, watching the foray passively, "is whether he's only been this ugly since he fell off that donkey."
St. Paul finally came down when Casey just stuck a foot out and tripped him. The ensuing crash of people tumbled two chairs and sent a stock cart rolling into the telemetry desk. Janice delicately lifted a spotless white shoe just in time to have St. Paul slide neatly beneath. Spittle dotted the floor, but not her uniform.
"You'll need to fill out an incident report," Ralph informed them from where he lay amid the tangle of arms and legs.
Casey waved him off. "I'll just copy off the last four."
She was turning back to close up the cabinet when a wild howl split the air. Both she and Janice turned in the direction of room eight, which had been empty only moments earlier.
"What's that?" Janice demanded as the voice rose again, somebody's impersonation of a screech monkey.
"Your gomer du jour," Barb announced as she stepped out the door. "Mr. Wilson Macomber. Ninety-two and holding."
Janice groaned. "Again? I just sent him home."
Barb's smile was smug as she handed over the paperwork from the nursing home that had transferred Mr. Macomber in. "He misses you. I ne
ed rooms, kids. Clear something out."
"So I can get Mrs. Macomber?" Casey demanded. "No, thanks."
Barb just looked down at the floor where security was still trying to convince St. Paul he wanted to go back to his room—or Thessalonia, as it had been dubbed for the night. "Don't forget to fill out the incident report."
Casey and Janice turned back to their task, handily ignoring the scuffle that still continued behind them and the newest member of the Friday Night Choir.
"We really want to do this, right?" Casey asked.
Janice knew Casey well enough to laugh. "More than sex."
At that, Casey sighed and cleaned up her equipment before racing off. "I wouldn't know," she admitted. "I haven't had sex in so long, it would be hard to compare."
"Trust me, then," Janice suggested.
Casey turned, hearing the sudden tension in the other nurse's voice, but Janice was way ahead of her. "Heard from Dr. Wonderful yet?"
"Hunsacker?" Casey shook her head. "He's still missing in action. Which just proves that he's not stupid. God knows, I wouldn't want to face that bitch when she's in full cry."
Janice huffed self-righteously. "The price of courting the rich."
"Casey!" one of the other nurses yelled from the far end of the hall. "Mrs. VanCleve wants you!"
Casey's mood took an immediate nosedive. "He'd better get his butt in here fast," she threatened blackly.
"He will," Janice promised with a commiserating pat to the shoulder. "And from what I've heard, it'll be well worth the wait."
Casey stopped just long enough to shoot her friend a particularly derisive look. "Honey, he's gonna have to fart flowers to impress me after this." And then she headed off to face the glacial Mrs. VanCleve.
Casey's feet ached. Her calves ached. Come to think of it, her hips ached. She'd walked on to a full house and hadn't stopped moving since, sending three patients to surgery, two to intensive care, and waiting to get one to Fantasy Island before somebody really did make him disappear. She'd held babies, comforted confused old people, pacified drunks, and dodged St. Paul. And to top it off, she'd gotten stuck with Mrs. VanCleve.
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