A Man to Die For

by Eileen Dreyer

  "I was kinda hopin' I'd catch up with her here. I heard she left Buddy."

  Elbows on the bar, the bartender leaned much too close. It was his way of expressing sincerity. "We haven't heard from her, either. You know Buddy?"

  Casey shrugged a little, wishing she could escape the man's breath. "Met him. He seemed nice enough."

  She got a nod for an answer. "He is. He's real broke up over this."

  "Cop told me that he thought Buddy hit her. What do you think?"

  Clyde considered that pretty funny. "Sure he hit her. But after growing up a Millard, she knew how to take a punch."

  Casey just nodded. Not much to say about that.

  "I don't know," she mused, sipping at her beer and shaking her head. "It just doesn't figure for me, somehow. That's kinda why I came looking to talk to Wanda."

  "What don't figure?"

  Casey leaned a little herself. "Do you really think Wanda'd just take off like that?"

  Clyde straightened a little, looked at Casey as if she were a couple bricks shy. "Sure."

  Bad tack to take. Casey waved him off and redirected her question. "No, that's not what I meant. Do you think she'd do it and not at least let Buddy know why?"

  "Well, she is impulsive. High-strung, ya know. And she was sayin' something about leaving the trailer. You know how much she wanted a real big house and a garage for her car."

  Another arguable point. But Casey had the trump card that nobody seemed to have thought to play. She played it. "Yeah, but would she leave her Firebird behind?"

  That brought Clyde straight upright. He looked up to the ceiling, obviously stretching for some thought processes. Maybe it was the gender, Casey thought, stifling her excitement as she remembered Scanlon watching the station ceiling much the same way. They had to look for their ideas. Or maybe they just had to lift their brains a little ways to get them to work.

  Without a word, Clyde turned and drew himself a beer. Then he finished it in one long gulp and turned back to Casey, astonished.

  "Not," he assured her, "if Elvis himself offered her a ride in his limousine."

  "Clyde," Casey said, forcing herself to lean close again. "I've heard Buddy's been hassling the police to find her. I hear he thinks something's happened to her. What if he's right?"

  "If he's right," he echoed, his expression suddenly dark, "the Millard boys'll be happy to take care of the slime who might o' done it."

  Even Casey had too weak a stomach to consider that.

  "The police won't look for her," she nudged with a tinge of outrage. "Maybe her friends should."

  "It'd sure show them pussies, now wouldn't it?"

  Casey couldn't think of any more appropriate answer than a nod. Now was the time she needed to take the newspaper out of her purse, but she held back, afraid. Wanting too much for Clyde to answer all her questions right here and now by recognizing the picture. Knowing he wouldn't and putting off the inevitable.

  But she had no other reason to stay except another beer, and Casey wasn't encouraged by the looks she was intercepting in the mirror from a couple of the pool players. It was put up or shut up in more ways than one. Besides, she couldn't think of any way to bring the alleged lounge lizard into the conversation without sounding like a pussy cop herself.

  "Well hey, Clyde. Thanks for the beer. If you do go looking for Wanda, you'll let me know, won't you?" Pulling her purse around, Casey unzipped it and began digging for cash. Her wallet, checkbook, and hairbrush ended up on the counter before she managed to flip the clipping out almost into Clyde's hands.

  "Oh, shit, what's that doing in there?" she demanded, swinging on Poppi. "Did you put that in my purse?"

  "Not me," Poppi answered evenly.

  Clyde picked it up to hand back to her, curiosity nudging his attention toward the picture of the mayor and Hunsacker.

  "See that asshole?" Casey demanded, pointing to Hunsacker's smiling face. "Remember that face. He's one of the biggest stiffs in the business."

  "Looks like a pussy," he commented.

  "Asshole stiffed me on a date," she complained, pointing again. "He's a doctor who worked with Wanda. Took us out for drinks a couple a times and then had his beeper go off before the check came. He ever done that here?"

  "In that outfit?" Clyde demanded with a barking laugh.

  Casey scowled. "Hardly."

  "Never seen him here. Only men Wanda hangs around with here are regulars."

  Casey gave the picture another tap. "He likes country western places. Don't be surprised if you see him. And don't say I didn't warn you."

  "I won't," Clyde promised, finally accepting the payment for the beers. He never noticed that the picture went right back into Casey's purse with all her other equipment.

  "Hey there, sweet thing, how 'bout a game?"

  Casey stiffened. She was being addressed by a skinny man with a cue in his hand. She could only hope from the amount of grease he sported that he was on a lunch break from a local garage.

  "I don't play pool." She smiled a little hesitantly as she slid off the stool. Behind her, Poppi did likewise. They were no more than ten feet from the door.

  He grinned with teeth the color of moss. "I ain't talkin' 'bout pool."

  Casey smiled in return and began backing out the door. "Thanks anyway," she demurred, hearing the door squeak in Poppi's hand and praying for sunlight. "Maybe next time."

  "A wonderful example of my new game," Poppi said evenly as she punched her car door lock into place a few minutes later.

  Casey's eyes were alternately on the parking lot exit and the Rose's door, which thankfully remained closed in their wake. "What?"

  "Nirvana," Poppi answered, snapping home her seat belt. "Can't you just see it? You land on the CEO square. You decide to close a plant and put a thousand people out of work so you can increase your profit margins and buy more prestige. Oh, no, wrong answer. You die and come back as a lower life form. The guy with the pool cue and the axle grease between his teeth would do nicely, don't you think?"

  Casey's laughter was explosive. She had a lot of pent-up tension to relieve after tap-dancing her way through that bar. "All right," she conceded. "It is a great idea. You have my money."

  Casey felt like laughing all the way back to Webster. Poppi settled for a smug grin.

  "A cherry stem?" she asked with some incredulity a moment later.

  Casey laughed at that, too. "Catch me at the next party. It's a real nice icebreaker."

  "I was hoping you'd show that guy from the pool table."

  "So was he."

  Casey found Highway 55 and turned north for the Meramec River and St. Louis County. She was still tingling with the excitement, the feeling not unlike having a surprise trauma code at work, dancing along the edge of disaster, running solely on practice and instinct and knowing that it would take less than a funny blink to lose the whole game.

  She hadn't won. Winning would have been getting Clyde to gasp in recognition when he saw Hunsacker's picture. But at least she'd made it out of there without blowing it. She'd gotten Clyde to think a little more about Wanda's disappearance. She'd gotten reassurance that her instincts about Wanda weren't so far off.

  Evens wasn't so bad.

  "Did you think up that trick with the newspaper ahead of time?" Poppi asked, rolling her window down a little and letting the wind in.

  "No," Casey said, her voice still laced with adrenaline.

  Poppi grinned, shaking her head. "Good. It stunk."

  Casey laughed again. "Yeah," she admitted. "It did, didn't it? Good thing I'm a nurse and not a cop."

  When Poppi looked over to answer, her eyes weren't quite as bright or exhilarated. "Try and keep that in mind, okay?"

  * * *

  Casey thought of that the next afternoon when she walked onto the work lane. She was still a little pumped up, still surprised that she'd gotten away with her impulsive gamble. After getting back the day before, she'd tried her best to make a list of things about
Hunsacker that unnerved her, and what she could do to connect him to three unconnected murders.

  If anybody saw that little list, they'd think she'd lost one of her oars. Casey knew she was dealing in intangibles. She knew she was fighting an uphill battle. But she felt righteous. At least she was trying to figure out why people she knew had died. At least she wasn't sitting on her jurisdiction and doing nothing.

  Which was why she had to run right into Hunsacker the minute she got to work.

  She was on her way to the time clock, her arms full with purse and bag and lunch. Since the morning had been taken up with chapel cleaning, Casey had delayed her planning session until the drive into work. She was on the problem of how to get information out of the labor and delivery crew at Izzy's when she pulled open the door to the back hall and almost bumped right into Hunsacker.

  Casey stopped dead in her tracks. She'd been so smug the day before, felt as if she were invincible, irrefutable. She was a crusader, and Hunsacker was the infidel.

  Suddenly she was the target. She gasped, clutched her paraphernalia to her chest like a life preserver. Yesterday Hunsacker couldn't touch her. Today he knew everything she'd ever suspected. He'd instinctively guessed all her secrets, and was going to punish her for them.

  It took Casey a full few seconds to realize that he hadn't even recognized her. He was in scrubs, but not the scrubs he usually wore. Not neat and pressed and somehow pretentious, like old school colors. Today they were crumpled and bloody and sweaty. A mask hung by one tie from his neck, and his cap swung from his hand. His eyes, which had always seemed so cunning and sly, were hollow. Dead.

  He stumbled to a stop, a hand out as if he were having trouble seeing, faltering a little before he even looked down to find Casey trembling before him.

  "Oh," he muttered, "I'm sorry. I..."

  Tears? Casey couldn't believe it. His eyes glittered with them.

  "Dr. Hunsacker," she said, well-honed instincts forcing a hand out to steady him, "are you okay?"

  He refocused his attention on her, and Casey felt more troubled. He looked the picture of a soul in torment, and that was a sight Casey never thought she'd see. Her chest, still tight with the terror of exposure, hurt worse with the shock of sympathy.

  Hunsacker still hadn't moved. He couldn't seem to drag his gaze away from Casey, nor could he seem to call up any comprehension.

  "I'm... uh, sorry," he apologized, his hand out to her arm. Casey was stunned by the feel of perspiration on his palm. "Bad day in surgery. I'm just... tired."

  He wandered away before she could question him.

  Head down, shuffling, the paper booties making scuffing noises on the floor. It wasn't until he'd turned the corner toward the doctor's lounge that Casey finally roused herself and finished her business.

  The lounge was crowded by the time she made it in. Cigarette smoke hung like a pall over the small room. The secondhand chairs were filled, and the BOHICA boards being perused. The microwave dinged and one of the day nurses pulled out her late lunch.

  "...just heard from the OR crew. She was only fifteen. He was devastated."

  Casey's sonar picked right up on the conversation. She didn't want to hear this, but somehow she already knew who they were talking about. Dropping her bag in the corner, she edged over to the knot of people by the refrigerator.

  "Who's devastated?" she asked.

  Janice, Barb, and Millie looked up.

  "Dale," Barb allowed, her use of his first name almost possessive. "Day shift had a young girl with a ruptured tubal pregnancy. Mother denied the girl was pregnant at all until too late. Dale lost her on the table just a little while ago. He picked up the case when Bellamy wouldn't touch it because the girl didn't have insurance."

  "Bellamy should die of impacted hemorrhoids," Millie vowed.

  Everyone nodded. Casey wanted to say something about seeing Hunsacker in the hall. With anyone else she might have, testifying to the shattering effect of the girl's death on him, commiserating about what hell it was when a good doc lost a tough patient.

  With Hunsacker she couldn't. She couldn't get the words of sympathy out. Her chest still stung with it. She could still vividly see the torment in his eyes, the broken shamble of his gait. It was a picture she'd seen before, on good docs, the ones who cared, the ones who took the losses personally and broke their friends' hearts with their pain.

  But she couldn't allow it on Hunsacker. She didn't want to feel sorry for him. She didn't want to think of him as human, as fragile, as feeling. She didn't want to have anything to do with the guilt that was already building right behind that ache of empathy in her.

  Damn it, just when she was so sure. He had to come along and make her question.

  * * *

  She didn't feel much different by the time she got home that night. The shift hadn't been a busy one, which just meant she had more time to listen to the details of Tammy Whittaker's death. It was a bad death, avoidable but for a mother and an insensitive doctor, leaving Tammy's uncomfortable young ghost hovering over the building. Like Navajos chanting against ghost sickness, the staff told and retold her story, purging outrage, guilt, and shame for the loss of such a young life. They laid blame and offered praise, and except for the frantic nursing crews who had physically held back her death with their hands, the only praise to be allotted this time belonged to Hunsacker.

  He'd fought harder, cursed louder, and prayed more desperately than anybody. Stricken OR nurses, over in the ER to share coffee and grief, shook their heads and recounted the final, desperate moments when Hunsacker had sponged and clamped and sweated and screamed, "Damn you, you're not dying on me!"

  He hadn't even allowed them to finish their code in surgical ICU as protocol demanded. Operating-room mortality rates were kept down by stapling a dying person shut and pumping on their chest just as far as the ICU to lay the blame within other doors. Hunsacker had told the anesthesiologist to get fucked when he suggested that it was time to do just that. He hadn't given up until he'd held her heart in his hands and known that even that wouldn't convince it to start again.

  Children were lost in hospitals. They were never given up easily. By the time the Mother Mary staff finally laid Tammy to rest, they also etched another chapter into the Hunsacker legend.

  Casey had listened to all the talk, thought of the weight on Hunsacker's shoulders when she'd seen him, the blood of that child still staining him, and began to wonder.

  How could he be the monster she'd thought? If he was really callous enough to murder women who argued with him, would he be capable of losing so much with the death of a patient? If he played control games, abusing patients without their even knowing it, would he be able to turn around and fight such a selfless fight?

  Could she be wrong? Could she be investing him with traits only she saw? She hadn't liked him from the moment she'd met him. Would she have manufactured conspiracy where there was only coincidence?

  By the time she pulled into her driveway Casey throbbed with contradictions. She hadn't eaten, but she felt sick, unsure suddenly of her own sense, afraid that after all this time she was projecting old memories onto an innocent man. Could a person have post traumatic stress syndrome when the only disaster had been domestic? she wondered. Were her convictions about Hunsacker nothing more than flashbacks?

  She'd come to a complete stop, waiting to turn off the car until the Moody Blues answered the question of balance. She felt tired and listless and unwilling to face the lights that were on inside her house.

  That was when she realized another car was in her driveway. Her headlights highlighted it, dark enough to be black, gleaming and sharp. A vintage '67 Mustang convertible, polished and cared for like a bright child, the white top ghostly in the night.

  Casey's attention swung back to the house lights. Helen was entertaining somebody in the living room. Casey could see the lights, couldn't see the shadows. She couldn't imagine who was in there. She hadn't known anybody with a Mustang since sh
e'd been out of high school.

  Only one way to find out. Switching off the Moodies midsentence, she gathered together her paraphernalia and climbed out of her car. The night was muggy, creeping into the polyester of her uniform like a stale aftertaste. Casey's head ached and her stomach churned. The last thing she felt like was visitors. The last thing she could imagine was who would be so inclined to put up with Helen at eleven o'clock at night.

  There was no way she could have anticipated what she found.

  Deciding that the front door was the quickest route to an answer, Casey climbed the front porch, her crepe soles swallowing her footsteps. She saw Helen standing before the picture wall in the living room. She couldn't see who she was addressing as she lifted a hand to one of the exhibits. She heard the rumble of an answer, though, and knew it was male.

  Both of them came to a surprised halt when she opened the front door. Catching sight of Helen's guest, Casey followed suit. She didn't exactly drop her bags to the floor, but she forgot she had them in her hands. Her eyes were riveted to the man who stood next to the piano on the old oriental rug, a glass of iced tea in his hand, his greeting made hesitant by his exposure to her mother.

  Casey's greeting wasn't in the least hesitant. "What are you doing here?" she demanded, and finally remembered to walk in.

  Chapter 8

  His stomach was killing him. The last few days had been unrelenting frustration, from the moment these two women had left his office to the last interview he'd conducted at nine-thirty down on the stroll. He'd stood in on the Washington autopsies, even though one look at the scene photos had pretty much told the stories. He'd come up empty on witnesses who might tell him what everybody knew, that Cleona's husband had slashed her and her little boy in a fit of crack-induced rage. He'd lost the trail on the gun in the Gray shooting, and fought without success to get a court order for a search on one of the suspects. When he'd come up empty on Crystal tonight, he decided that the only way to complete a perfect evening was a visit with the McDonough ladies.