A Man to Die For

by Eileen Dreyer

  "Well, I'm not sure. I never made a date with her."

  "Did she keep a rigid schedule?" Casey persisted.

  There was that silence again. It was all the answer she needed.

  Did she allow herself to hope now? "I think you'll find Hunsacker's name in her schedule book. Evidently she carried one with her everywhere. He would have seen her the same time every time he visited. Maybe she used some kind of code."

  "No," he answered. "She didn't. She wrote everything out. Quite literate for a South Side Hooker. Her book disappeared when she was killed."

  Now Casey was silent. She knew Scanlon would be able to hear the throb of bass from her stereo, Joe Cocker singing about help from friends.

  She was getting tired of the turnarounds, the chances, the spark of hope only to run headlong into reality. She kept coming close and getting no closer.

  "I'd hoped this might be something."

  "It does tell me that maybe your doctor did know my dead hooker. Where'd you find out about the book?"

  "My ex-husband. He and Hunsacker trade 'women in my life' stories over golf."

  This time the tapping stopped. Casey could almost imagine him rubbing at his forehead, elbows on Dawson's desk, his face with that pinched pre-antacid look to it.

  "Ms. McDonough—"

  Her mother was right. He was still a Jesuit. He issued a complete warning against recklessness with no more said than her name.

  "Sergeant," she countered in the same tone. "I have to know. I have to reach the point where somebody else will listen to me."

  "Hearsay evidence isn't admissible in court."

  She smiled now. "It's enough to get a search warrant. At least it was on Miami Vice. I just want enough so that all you guys will start looking in the right direction."

  "You are perseverant, aren't you?"

  "My other commendations were for perseverance."

  "Can I ask you a question?"

  "Sure."

  "Why are you so sure? I mean, nobody on earth would tie these three deaths to one person. There's not one damn thing that's the same. Not the weapon, not the site, not the circumstances. There's no pattern here, and what you're trying to tell me is that Hunsacker is a pattern killer."

  "I'm telling you he killed three people. I don't know from patterns. I don't care."

  "Why?"

  Casey shook her head, frustration welling tight in her chest. Certainty, dread, fear, and all overwhelming her sense of logical communication. "It has to do with pelvics, Sergeant."

  "Bones?"

  "Exams. And unless you're a woman and have ever been through one, I can't tell you why I think Hunsacker's a psychopath just by his fondness for pelvics."

  This time the pen seemed to skitter. He must have thrown it.

  "Give me a try."

  Casey snorted. "What, you're going to give me the church line about not having to be married to counsel couples? Strip, put your feet in stirrups, and make light conversation while somebody's sitting between your legs, and then we'll have something to talk about."

  Much to Casey's amazement, Sgt. Scanlon laughed. She should have been furious. She found herself laughing along.

  "I've been given a lot of suggestions," Scanlon admitted. "I think that was a first."

  "Ask your Detective Dawson about it," Casey countered. "I bet she'd understand."

  "Do me a favor," he asked, the levity in his voice dying. "Lay off for a while. I've spent the day interrogating the pimp's girlfriend trying to break his alibi. We also found that possible witness, the one who took off. She's coming in tomorrow morning. We should have something by noon."

  "And you still think it's going to be the pimp."

  "I still think it's going to be the pimp. If it is, the worst your doctor did was see a hooker with a tight schedule."

  Casey didn't know quite what to hope for. It was like all those times Ed had come home late and she hadn't known whether she wanted proof he was seeing other women or not. What did you wish for, innocence or calumny? The anticlimax of relief or the hot flood of self-righteous indignation?

  "You'll tell me," she asked. "Won't you?"

  He seemed to be thinking about it, tapping something new. Fingers maybe. The sergeant either had great rhythm or was in dire need of magnesium.

  "I'll tell you," he finally allowed. "I only hope it satisfies you."

  She wanted to say it would. She couldn't. It would be a promise she didn't know she could keep. "Thank you, Sergeant," she did say. "You've been very patient about this."

  "Like I said," he answered with the stiff formality of a shy man. "I never pass up a reasonable lead."

  Casey hung up the phone wishing she could have told the sergeant her intangibles. The little things she'd collected about her friends and Hunsacker that began to form a pattern, at least to her. She wanted to see his face when she told him about the way Hunsacker used his information about Ed, how slick and sly he was. She wanted the sergeant to understand about Hunsacker's eyes, because she often felt she was the only one who could see what they really looked like, like the guy in the old Twilight Zone who could recognize aliens because he was the only one wearing the right glasses.

  Sitting alone in her room at the top of the world with her list, she sometimes felt very foolish, as if she were getting as delusional as Helen. Helen saw saints, and Casey saw sinners. An extension of their lives, a logical end to their beliefs. Casey was afraid she was losing her sense of humor, and if that happened, she'd be as much a ghost as her mother.

  It was that dream. The memory of those years when she hadn't known how to break free, when she hadn't had the courage or insight or maturity. She'd come to that apartment a twenty-year old who accepted what she got as inevitable. She'd run four years later and vowed to never look back. Until Hunsacker, she hadn't.

  For a long while Casey sat there alone with her suspicions, watching the sun gild the trees and slide toward the horizon. She listened to the croak and chatter of birds and the mutter of traffic over on Elm. For that long she held off the next step, because she didn't want to take it. She didn't want to step out her door into Helen's miasma of fervor, or the real world it held away.

  The chapel was the only other room on this floor, a cracked, badly painted, old practice altar Benny had brought home from Kenrick Seminary littered with a forest of holy cards, attended by red and blue vigil lights, guarded by a myriad of Madonnas and one lonely Sacred Heart. Helen's real family. More real than the faces downstairs she'd made up lives for, more real than her own children who had tiptoed through the house, dreading the sound of their mother's call.

  Helen's temple of submission. Her altar of deliverance, built confession by confession over the years until Helen could never escape the finality of her decision, until her children could never run far enough away to quiet the remonstrances.

  It was Casey's punishment for taking control that she was caught in her room with the puzzle of Hunsacker to solve. Her penance for not bowing to the power of a greater force. Everyone else submitted, to God or spouses or peer pressure. But not Casey. She had to stand alone. And because she had to stand alone, she was the only one with a clear view of Hunsacker's eyes. She stood on a box of self-pretentious pride that lifted her just high enough to see over that wall of manners he'd erected.

  Maybe Helen was right after all. Maybe she should get out there and throw herself at the mercy of the holy cards and be absolved of this insight.

  Casey knew better. She was stuck with her pride and her insight and memory of what real impotence felt like to fuel her fight. She wouldn't burn any incense in this house.

  * * *

  Down at city homicide Scanlon bent to retrieve his pen. Crystal's file lay spread out over his desk, where he'd been going over it again when Casey McDonough had called. While he'd been on the phone, somebody had dropped off a note from the captain. It sat on top of the crime-scene photos like a crow looking for leftovers.

  The captain was complaining aga
in about Jack's request for overtime. It was the captain's way of telling Jack that he didn't like him. Jack didn't need a note to figure that out. He got the message every time he was called into the office.

  Jack wasn't a statistics man. He didn't close files just to clean up the city's numbers. He worried at a case until he was satisfied with it, and that wasn't the way to play the game. City elections were coming up soon, and the captain was the mayor's man. And Jack refused to help the mayor improve his crime stats.

  The captain's note made a decent airplane, but it sank fast. Jack turned back to the task at hand.

  The ME's photos taunted him. Spread like playing cards, both color and black and white of the crime scene, Crystal's blood dark in both shots, her skin as gray as her floor. Taunting his well-ordered logic.

  She'd been a striking woman, tall and commanding, with an athlete's strong features. In the pictures they were misshapen and asymmetrical, like a deflating basketball. Blood matted her blond hair and spattered the linoleum floor.

  It hadn't been a quick death. Whoever had killed her had been in a rare fury. He'd used hands and feet and fingers, battering her until she wasn't recognizable as one of the prettier hookers on the stroll.And then, after he'd beaten her to death, he'd cleaned everything, including the skin beneath her fingernails.

  Scanlon was just turning back to Reeva's interview when the phone rang. His eyes on his work, he palmed the receiver.

  "Sgt. Scanlon."

  "Jarvis Franklin from Arnold," his caller informed him with a drawl. "Returning your call. What can I do for you now, Sarge?"

  Jack started tapping. "Yeah, Franklin, thanks for calling back. I hear you found Wanda this morning."

  Franklin snorted. "Coupla boys found what was left. After you and I talked about her car, can't say as I was real surprised. Funny how sometimes you don't pay attention to the nose on your face, ain't it?"

  "Well, from the sounds of her, your guess was as good as mine." Scanlon tapped a little faster, not even hearing it anymore. "Tell me something, would you? Did you find anything on the car?"

  "Well, I'll tell you, it's funny. Buddy refused to get in that thing after he got it back. Said it'd be bad luck. So we got it in a pretty pristine state. And there was nothin'."

  "No latents?"

  "No nothing'. It was clean as a soul on Sunday morning. I have a feeling that it was a blind alley. Ole Wanda had that thing over to the car wash every damn week. She musta had it there that day and vacuumed the shit out of it and then just left it at the Rose. And it rained that night. Big storm. Nothin' left of interest on the outside."

  The tapping slowed. Scanlon didn't see Barb Dawson look up from her desk and watch. "What about Wanda?" he asked. "Anything?"

  That got a real snort, the kind that implied he should have known better. Scanlon could just imagine. Just because he was in the city didn't mean he didn't see his share of decomposed bodies. Jarvis Franklin might have foxes and coyotes, but Scanlon had rats. Rats and heat can do a hell of a job in no time at all.

  "Anything that struck you," he amended.

  "Why?" Franklin asked. "Got somethin' for me?"

  "Nope." Franklin would just love the story of the homicidal obstetrician. Scanlon laid down the pen and took up rubbing. "Just trying to appease that friend of mine that gave me the car idea."

  "Only funny thing is her earrings."

  "Her earrings."

  "Yeah. She wore more earrings than Mr. T. Four on each side. Only one side was missing. All four of 'em. Other than that, she got hit with a big rock and died. We're still lookin' for Bobby Lee Martin, if you see him."

  "I got the notice. We'll keep an eye out. Thanks."

  He'd barely hung up before Dawson swung his way. "You don't have any friends, Bishop," she prodded, curious.

  His fingers closing around his pen again, Scanlon looked over to where the paper airplane stuck ass end out of his trash can. Then he turned to consider the wry light in Dawson's sharp eyes. "Dawson," he said, leaning back and lacing his fingers behind his head, "tell me about pelvics."

  * * *

  There were some benefits to going in to work. It was really difficult to find the energy to weigh the merit of existential existence when you were hip deep in gomers. Control and submission didn't mean squat to a kid with a bean up his nose. When the shift was short three nurses and cursed with Ahmed as one of the docs, the most involved one could realistically get with personal problems was how long your deodorant would last.

  Casey didn't get to dinner until almost nine. By then her only coherent thought was how she could get Ahmed deported.

  And there, right on top of her bag, was a gift. There was no name attached, but Casey recognized Marva's handwriting. Casey picked up the packet of papers and pulled up a chair.

  Serial, Mass, and Sensational Murders, a Profile. Casey laughed out loud. Leave it to Marva. Like the detective fairies, leaving little clues around to help the amateur investigator solve his case. She should probably run right home and check her closet to make sure somebody hadn't left handcuffs in her shoes.

  Marva couldn't afford to be involved, and Casey understood. But Marva believed her, and that was all that counted right now. Especially since there were times when she didn't believe herself.

  Absently picking mushrooms off her pizza and popping them in her mouth, Casey opened the report and began to scan.

  "Serial murders are the murders of separate victims with time breaks as minimal as two days between victims."

  Casey felt a chill of prescience snake down her back. She had an uncomfortable feeling about this. First line of the report, and she was already labeling Hunsacker.

  A serial killer. Nah. Bundy was a serial killer, Gacy, Son of Sam. The kind of people who hustled strays and then chopped them for firewood. Hunsacker wasn't like that.

  The report divided serial murders into two categories, organized and disorganized. Disorganized killers included the folks who heard voices, saw visions, and thought their cats were possessed. Psychotics.

  After twelve years on the halls, Casey was well acquainted with that particular species. She'd had people who thought they were everything from Mary Mother of God to Larry the Cockroach. And, of course, St. Paul. The only thing keeping St. Paul from ending up on some DA's list was the fact that he thought Mother Mary's ER was the Temple of Salvation. If the Temple had had a Kmart sign over the door, some redheaded checkout clerk would have been short one head.

  Disorganized killers struck when the voices spoke, which, as any visionary knows, is not a predictable thing. Their urge to kill disappeared with locked doors and regular doses of antipsychotics.

  Organized killers, on the other hand, usually fell beyond the range of treatment. Organized killers were usually calm, logical, bright, and charming. They enticed their victims to their deaths just for the sport of doing it.

  The human shark, the psychopath. Void of soul, bereft of conscience, hopeless of rehabilitation. Ted Bundy. Handsome, charismatic, manipulative, deadly.

  Casey read on, her pizza getting cold on the table, her stomach churning, her trepidation mounting. She didn't even hear the door open.

  "What you readin', child?"

  Casey jumped and almost knocked over her soda. "Marva, don't do that to me."

  Marva's smile was broad and unapologetic. "Good readin', huh? All you ever wanted to know about people who go bump in the night."

  Casey shook her head. "They keep talking about Bundy's eyes."

  Marva leaned over and grabbed a piece of pizza, then settled herself onto the edge of the table. "Do they?"

  Sections of the piece were underlined. Marva knew all about Bundy's eyes. "It's one of the things that first bothered me about Hunsacker," Casey admitted. "His eyes never seemed... right."

  Marva chewed on her pizza. "Dead," was all she said.

  Casey nodded. "I wonder what his feet look like."

  Marva almost choked. "You mean about that toe thing?"


  "It's a statistic," Casey insisted, needing the levity all of a sudden. "A disproportionate number of serial killers have longer second toes than great toes. Now, the question is, how do we find out?"

  Marva grinned. "Tackle him and pull off his shoes."

  "Dump a urinal on his Dock-Sides. He doesn't wear socks."

  Marva shook her head. "Too obvious."

  "And tackling him isn't?"

  "All right, we'll have Barb tackle him. She wouldn't mind, and he wouldn't be surprised. Get her to distract him, and we can sneak up while he's not watching."

  "I'm not joining a ménage a trois just to play with his toes. That's not my kink."

  "Honey, don't tell me what you kink ain't. You' horns gettin' so high, you could just as well start sashayin' up to Abe."

  Casey gave a gentle grimace. "Thanks all the same. Some natural wonders are meant to be enjoyed from afar."

  Casey didn't think to hide her reading when the door opened again.

  "Casey, are you busy?" Steve asked, leaning in. He looked a little bemused, which was an alien expression for him.

  "I still have about ten minutes to eat," she said. "Why?"

  On the other hand, maybe she should have put the report up. The minute Steve spotted the picture of Ted Bundy on the open page of her report, Casey remembered that he was in the middle of an Abnormal Psych rotation.

  "What's that?" he asked, walking on in. "Bundy? Boy, would I have loved to have interviewed him. You don't get a chance to put a serial killer under the microscope every day."

  Casey choked back the urge to enlighten him. Why was it the psych majors didn't see the psychopath under their noses?

  "Somebody left this in here," she said, letting him pick it up. "Spooky reading. By the way, how long is your second toe?"

  Steve chuckled. "Long enough to pick my nose with. Wanna see my collection of hunting knives?"

  Casey actually shivered. "Not funny."

  Steve's attention was still on the article he was flipping through. "I'll give you funny. Know what I found out last week? One out of ten serial killers is in the medical profession." Setting down the article, he gave Casey his best psychotic-on-the-loose look. "Now you want to see my hunting knives?"