"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 H
unsacker 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.
The lights were on in the house, Helen's lights and the chapel lights and the lights in the living room. Helen must think that cops needed extra electricity. Either that or she was warding off the storm for Benny. He'd always hated the thunder, even as an adult, cowering from it, hiding from all the windows that let it in. Maybe it was Helen's way to coax Benny back in out of the storm.
Casey pulled in behind Bert's car and shut off the engine. There was a car parked around the corner, but Casey didn't pay any attention to it. That corner was the Mecca of necking spots. She didn't hear the Greasons' dog bark when she got out of the car, so he must have been in already. Good thing Pussy wasn't in heat again.
She would have hated to consign Bert to that kind of shift.
Casey walked into the kitchen and dropped her bag on the floor. She needed something to drink. Then she needed to check on Helen and hand off her information to Bert.
That made her look around. She wondered where Bert had holed up. The house was so quiet, only the refrigerator and the mantel clock keeping her company against the approaching thunder. Casey immediately looked to the sun room, and then realized that it had been Jack who had favored the discomfort of the couch. She found herself smiling at her disappointment at not seeing his familiar form sprawled across the furniture.
Maybe Bert had actually taken her up on the offer of a guest room. Maybe he'd gotten hooked into sitting with Helen while she prayed. Casey almost groaned aloud.
Taking a good slug of iced tea, she pushed the door open to the front hall and headed for the stairs, instinctively flicking off lights and checking windows as she progressed. Lightning flickered in through the big front bays. The wind was beginning to groan at the corners of the house.
Bert had left a cache of paperwork on the hall table, just like Jack. His hat rested atop it, and his jacket was draped over the wingback by the front window. Casey smiled and sipped, reassured by Bert's steadfast presence. Maybe she'd get some sleep tonight after all.
Helen was awake and alone, sitting on her lounger and saying her bedtime rosary. Mick's picture had been moved to the table next to her, where she could see it. Casey wasn't sure what to do about that. Would Helen recover now, or sink deeper into the morass of guilt and self-recrimination?
"Oh, Catherine dear," Helen greeted her with a wan smile, her thumb positioned over the last bead she'd recited. "You're just getting home? I thought I heard you come in already."
"No, Mom. Have you seen Sgt. DeClue?"
Helen made a show of looking around, as if he might be hiding behind the armoire or nightstand. "No, dear, I haven't. He seemed pretty busy, so I came upstairs. Are you going up?"
Casey nodded, backing out just enough to see that the guest-room door was closed. Maybe he'd turned in already. She'd double-check after closing her windows and getting out of her uniform. "I'm pretty tired. See you in the morning?"
Helen thought about it. "I might just... visit."
The chapel. Then it wasn't going to get any better. Casey restrained a sigh and smiled a good night before closing the door and climbing the second flight of stairs.
Topping the stairs, she instinctively wrinkled her nose in protest against the incense. The harsh lights washed out the color from Mary's face where she beamed down on her chubby infant and robbed the candles of their mystery. In the dim dusk, the chapel looked quaint, worn like a church tucked in the hills of England where centuries of faithful had rubbed it away with fingers and knees. In the bright light, it looked shabby. A cheap imitation.
Casey walked through it as quickly as she could, now even more uncomfortable with its message, and opened her door. She took another gulp of tea and flipped on the light.
"Oh, good. We've been waiting to see you."
Casey came to a shuddering halt. The glass slipped from her fingers as her mouth opened. She couldn't cry out. She couldn't even breathe. Bert sat stiff and taut on her rocker, a gag stuffed in his mouth, his hands tied behind his back, and his feet tied to the rocker legs. Alongside him, lounging with one of her beers in his hand, a razor-sharp knife bobbing lazily in the other, sat Hunsacker.
He smiled as if Casey had just invited him to dance. "I was really disappointed to see that your good friend Sgt. Scanlon couldn't be here for this," he said. "I especially wanted to see his face when I sliced your ears off."
Chapter 21
When a psychopath finally shows himself in the movies, he looks wild. Manic and jerky, as if the poison that fills his brain has spilled out over his nerve pathways. His eyes light and flicker back and forth, and he laughs like Hyde with a beaker in his hand. That isn't the way it happens.
Hunsacker leaned on his side, one elbow on her bright comforter, his eyes settling on her like crows fluttering to a fresh kill. His smile was controlled and pleased, his movements as restrained as a woman at her first formal dinner. He was wearing scrubs, crisp and creased, and looked composed for having been waiting in the shuddering dark of her bedroom with a bound-and-gagged police sergeant.
Casey remembered something she'd read in the material Marva had given her. It said that serial killers were hunters. They just hunted humans. Casey understood that now. She could imagine Hunsacker crouched in a field before dawn, shotgun shouldered and eyes skyward, looking just like this. Waiting, coiling, setting up. A cat curling in on its haunches as it spotted its prey.
The next time she saw one of those movies, when the killer finally sprang loose, she'd nudge Poppi next to her and say, No, this is wrong. What they really do is far more frightening. It's enough to scare you to death before they ever move.
"Nothing to say?" he asked, smiling that self-satisfied smile of his, his eyes feral. Casey knew Bert was watching them, trembling with fury. She couldn't afford to look at him. She couldn't afford to look away from Hunsacker at all. He might strike without warning.
Lightning seared the sky outside her window and jolted Casey from her paralysis. The night, it seemed, was going to shatter instead of the killer.
"I don't..." Her voice stumbled over the sudden, sweeping terror. Thunder slammed into the house, rattling windows and snaking along nerve ends.
Casey had never expected to find him here. Not even after he'd taunted her with her mother, not even after the phone calls. She'd balanced her safety on the assumption that he wouldn't sacrifice his audience. The house groaned with the wind, and Casey shook her head. "I don't understand."
Hunsacker shifted himself up to a sitting position and wrapped his arm around the bedpost, the knife still pointed toward Bert. Casey wanted to scream. She wanted desperately to run, to slam the door and
grab Helen and flee over to Mr. Rawlings. Her heart thundered with it. Her limbs strained with the temptation. Her palms had begun to sweat.
But Hunsacker knew her too well already. He only had to let that knife rise and fall bare inches from Bert's eyes, his exposed throat, to hold her still.
She couldn't risk Bert. She might get away. She might even get Helen to react quickly enough to save her, too, dragging her across the lawn to pound on a closed door for help in a raging storm. If she did, it would be to come back to find Bert sliced into bloody ribbons.
The lightning glittered along the edge of the blade as if to remind her. It sliced along the edge of Bert's throat, yellow-white against his mahogany skin, dipping into the hollows of his throat that exposed vein and artery and nerve, outlining the path of the blade. There was only so much guilt a person could live with, even to save her own life.
The problem was, Casey didn't know how she could possibly save either of them by staying, either.
"Come on in, Casey," Hunsacker invited, motioning toward the chair where it had been pulled out from her desk. "Get comfortable."
Casey could hardly find breath to speak. "Does the offer come with rope and gag?"
Hunsacker actually laughed. "That's what I like about you," he admitted with a little nod. "I have you hemmed in so tightly at work you shouldn't be able to breathe, and you still insult your supervisor. You got cojones."
Casey stiffened. "Don't say that."
He lifted an eyebrow. "Why? You don't like the compliment?"
"Why are you here now?" she demanded, not moving, not able to act without jerking to a start and stumbling. Dogs did this sometimes; horses, she heard, in a fire. She was frozen in place, only her mouth mobile. Only her mouth that always seemed to get her into trouble anyway. "Sit down," he invited genially, "and I'll tell you."
Casey gave her head a choppy shake. "I'd rather not." Hunsacker's slow smile was truly terrifying. "I'd be happy to convince you," he offered, and before she had a chance to react, he reached over and sliced Bert's cheek.
A Man to Die For Page 38
