A Man to Die for (18 page)

And then she saw him.

Her steady pace faltered. The man behind her bumped into her and excused himself. Casey apologized. When she turned back, she couldn’t find him again.

It had been Hunsacker, hadn’t it? There, at the edge of the lane where the shoe store was having a sidewalk sale. Only he hadn’t been looking at shoes, he’d been looking at her.

She thought.

It had looked like him—at least she thought it did. Same height, same coloring. And he’d definitely had his eyes on her. But she wasn’t sure. It was like a dream, where you could see something but not know what it was, the parts just a little rearranged or vague, and no matter what you did your vision wouldn’t clear.

Or maybe it wasn’t him and she’d just collected the sum of her suspicions into a recognizable pattern, when all she’d seen had been a nice-looking Yuppie man in a mall.

Even so, she felt unsettled. She wasn’t sure suddenly that she wanted to go on, afraid that she’d turn a corner to find him there, waiting for her. Smiling.

Casey shook her head. Maybe Marva was right. Maybe she was getting a bit obsessive. Hunsackers following her everywhere, listening in on her conversations, playing cat and mouse with her in shopping malls. Wouldn’t he get off just knowing that he’d upset her so much she’d fabricated him in crowds.

She wasn’t surprised at all when she reached the intersection with the shoe store to find no one waiting around the corner. Even so, she slowed a little before reaching it, her palms just the slightest bit sweaty. He’d found out about Ed. He’d killed people, probably in a fit of anger, and covered his tracks somehow. He wasn’t a harmless crank. Still, he had other things to do with his day than torment her.

Casey gave her head one last shake and then set back off in search of the uniform store. She’d be seeing Hunsacker soon enough. She didn’t need to be inventing him to fill in the lonely hours apart.

Casey didn’t get to talk to Janice that night, nor the night after. Neither one of them walked off the halls before three AM. Casey wished she felt more upset about it, but the fact was she still dreaded wading through Janice’s problems. Janice was getting quieter every day, more brittle. Casey could see it. She could certainly sympathize, especially if Janice suspected her husband of fooling around. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to dig up her own past.

She ended up having to deal with Ed anyway.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she had to tell Ed about Hunsacker’s knowledge. It was only fair. Ed had let her keep the car after the divorce, the least she could do was let him keep his privacy. She called his office and made an appointment to see him.

Nestled deep in one of the classier medical buildings along Ballas Road, Ed’s office reflected his success. He’d built a nice practice for himself specializing in eating disorders and addictive personalities. They were problems not too closely related to his own so that he didn’t really have to face himself. His clients were rich, attractive, and grateful. His decor was sleek southwestern with authentic Indian artifacts under recessed lighting and expressionist weavings hanging from his walls. Ed was as happy as Ed got. Casey did her best to be happy for him.

She was surprised every time she saw him that she’d actually been married to him. He was such a passive person. Pale and thin and bespectacled, the kind of kid you liked to hit in school and the kind of man who only inspired confidence as a confidant. A smooth, cultured man to his clientele, he had a bad knack of whining around Casey. To her own eternal mortification, she remembered when that had endeared him to her. But then, her judgment hadn’t exactly been award-winning along about that period in her life.

“I’m surprised,” he greeted her, walking around his desk to drop a quick kiss on her cheek. He’d affected new horn-rims. They made him look older, more assertive. Of course the image suffered a little when you considered what he looked like in heels.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Ed,” Casey answered, doing her best to contain the remnants of disdain her divorce had left her with. “Your practice looks good.”

Both of them settled into the beige sectional chairs, civilized and proper, as if they hadn’t screamed and battled at each other. Actually, Casey had done the screaming. Ed had ducked every breakable object in the house.

Crossing his leg, he recreased his pants leg and offered Casey his attention.

“You’re troubled,” he offered in that professional voice of his.

Casey immediately bristled. It had been another problem. Every time she’d tried to confront him, he’d disappeared behind all the catch phrases. “Expand on that. I’d like to hear it. How do you feel about that?” Until she’d shown him how she felt about that. With the breakables.

Today she just wanted to get through this without too much trauma. Crossing her own legs, she worried at the edge of her skirt with nervous fingers.

“Ed, something came up I thought you might need to know about.”

He inclined his head just the proper distance. “Go on.”

Casey almost smiled. “There’s a new doc on staff down at Mother Mary who knows you,” she said, her hand stilling as she faced him. “He knows…about you. And he made it a point of telling me.”

Ed snapped to attention like a sail in a storm. “He what?” Already his voice was beginning to lift. His legs uncrossed, as if he were preparing to bolt. Probably envisioning those artifacts out front disappearing one by one, like his patients.

Casey did her best to wave off the threat. “His name’s Hunsacker. He—”

It was Casey’s turn for a surprise. “Dale?” Ed retorted with a delighted smile. “Well, why didn’t you say so? God, Casey, you scared me. I thought you’d been bad-mouthing me all over town or something.”

Casey closed her mouth just in time to keep from gaping like an idiot.

“
You
told him?” she demanded, rigid within the folds of her chair.

Ed wasn’t nearly upset enough. Not after what Casey had gone through the other night.

“We’re golf partners,” he assured her, settling back into his chair. “He’s a new member of the club.”

“You haven’t told any of your other golf buddies that you prefer Maidenform to Fruit of the Loom.”

Ed wrinkled his nose a little, as if it were Casey, not he, with the unique taste. “Alternative choice doesn’t intimidate Dale.”

Casey almost burst out laughing. Well, that was certainly one way of putting it. She wondered if Ed had any concept just what kind of alternate choice old Dale was into.

“In fact,” Ed said with a new smile, suspiciously smug. “Dale’s pretty open about his own tastes. And his idiosyncracies.” The smile grew wider, as if he were talking golf stories instead of sexual inclinations.

“He likes teddies, too?” The funny thing was, Ed knew that it hadn’t been the attire Casey had finally revolted against. As long as he didn’t wear it around her, she didn’t really care.

“Schedules.” He grinned. “I thought I was compulsive. He’s got a notebook with every minute of the day accounted for. He jokes about the fact that he always makes love to a woman the same time every day.”

“I guess it’s easier to keep all those different girlfriends in order.”

“He even had a hooker with a bigger notebook than he does.”

“A what?”

Ed waved off his admission. He’d never kept a secret around her, divulging patient stories and problems, bouncing ideas off her. He’d always known she’d keep her silence. He didn’t realize this time that she couldn’t.

“You won’t say anything,” he assured himself. “He was experimenting, you know how it is. Decided to try her out for a while. She’d actually yell at him if he didn’t keep as tight a schedule as she did.”

Casey couldn’t believe it. Here was a practicing psychiatrist with a seven-figure income, and he was chortling over Hunsacker like a Peck’s bad boy. Ed had absolutely no idea what Hunsacker was about. No wonder Casey had ended up healing herself.

Was Hunsacker Ed’s new repository of trust? Did Ed tell him all those embarrassing little stories that could so hurt someone if they fell into the wrong hands? Confidences no psychiatrist should divulge to anyone? If Ed had fallen beneath the Hunsacker spell, it would make sense. And if Hunsacker was privy to Ed’s secrets, Casey shuddered to think what he could do to the people involved.

Especially her.

“When did you start playing golf with him?” she asked, suddenly afraid of the answer.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s been about six weeks or so, I guess. Good handicapper.”

“And you talked about me?”

There wasn’t any discomfort in Ed’s shrug. “We traded ex-wife stories, sure.”

Casey’s throat closed a little tighter. She didn’t even want to think about what Hunsacker had learned about her.

“Funny,” she countered quietly, still instinctively wishing after all these years that Ed would show more insight than he did. “He’s been a real regular visitor out to M and M the last couple of months. Until the other night, he hasn’t said a word about you.”

What did she tell Ed? How did she warn him? Ed was just smug enough to carry her warnings right back to Hunsacker as more ex-wife fodder. But he was just vulnerable enough for Hunsacker to shoot him down in flames as an example to her.

Ed settled it for the moment by checking his watch and getting to his feet. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he assured her, reaching out a hand to help her to her feet. “I really appreciate your coming to me, Casey. It means a lot to me that you’d think to warn me about a possible problem.”

She almost said it then, her hand caught in his, her hesitant smile pale in comparison with the beaming delight on his face. Carefully proportioned to show sincerity. She’d seen him practice that smile in the mirror in the mornings.

“It was the least I could do,” she answered, taking her hand back. “Next time, will you kindly send me an update of people in the know? It’d sure save me some grief.”

She let herself be steered back across the dun-colored carpeting.

“You’ll be the first to know,” he promised. “Are you still living with your mother?”

From anybody but a shrink, that would have sounded like an innocuous statement. Casey caught herself bristling again. “Yeah, well, nursing just doesn’t pull in the big fees.”

Ed chuckled just in time to open the door and be overheard in the waiting room. Several female faces looked up with maternal smiles. Casey imagined they thought he was being spontaneous and genial.

She got another careful peck on the cheek and a wave. Thankfully, she didn’t want more.

“One more time, Reeva.”

Jack clicked his pen back into gear and leaned over the table. Huffing in indignation, the skinny black woman across the table took a minute to smooth out her spandex skirt and hike her bra strap from where it was slipping down her arm. Pockmarked and bony, she was about sixteen and looked more like thirty.

“Moses come over ’bout six,” she recited in a bored monotone. “I knows ’cause we always does it while we watches the news. Moses says he gets a hard-on watchin’ other people have troubles. He stay to my place till next mornin’. Tha’s it. I got nothin’ more to say.”

Jack leaned his chair back against the wall and stretched a kink out of his back. He’d been in the interview room for two hours trying to break Reeva’s story. If Moses was with Reeva the night Crystal was killed, then he had an alibi. But Jack couldn’t imagine any reason Reeva would have stayed inside on a Friday night. He couldn’t imagine Moses letting her stay inside. So he settled the chair back on the floor and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

“How ’bout it?” he asked quietly.

Reeva snatched one like a starving child going for meat. Jack let her light up and savor the first few drags. Across the table from her, he did his own savoring, inhaling the pungent aroma of tobacco as it curled off the end of her cigarette. Even secondhand was better than nothing.

“Why weren’t you out at your corner?” he asked.

She watched the smoke curl from the end of her cigarette. “I had my period.”

“Doesn’t keep you from givin’ head.”

“When I gets my cramps, I in no mood to be gentle.”

Settled quietly in the corner with the notebook and recorder, Barb Dawson lifted one eyebrow. The woman had a point.

There was a knock on the door. Reeva cursed. Jack reached back to grab the handle.

“You available to take a call, Sarge?”

Jack traded looks with Barb. “Take a message, Nick.”

The door closed and Jack righted his chair again. Barb hit the play-record button and Reeva ground the last of her cigarette onto the tabletop.

“One more time, Reeva.”

“Shee-it.”

Casey was back at her list. She’d learned a lot in the last few days, and she didn’t know any other way to keep it straight. She didn’t know how to sort the important from the useless.

How did you weight the value of grapevine gossip? Where on the list did you include a perfect alibi that needed puncturing, or the contrary conviction that the alibi was a lie? How about an ambiguous threat? An ex-husband with a big mouth who had the ability to ruin her?

Casey didn’t want to think about the damage Ed could do in his little golf outings. She’d been as much of a patient as anyone, settling onto his couch when it had still been vinyl instead of leather and chrome, offering up her own insecurities and uncertainties. She’d come to Ed for help and ended up marrying him. In the end, he’d never really helped her. But he still held her secrets. Secrets Hunsacker would consume with the greatest of relish and then spring back on her when she could least afford it.

Casey was a different person now. Stronger, just as Marva had said, because she’d had to be. Clearer, more focused. Much more pragmatic. She knew what a person could expect in this world, and what she couldn’t. And she knew that the only way to survive was to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and focus on the next step and the one after that.

She was just afraid that when she looked up, she’d find Hunsacker standing in front of her.

Casey wished Sgt. Scanlon would call her back. She wanted to ask about Crystal’s penchant for promptness. Was she the hooker with the notebook? Would Hunsacker have been in it?