A Man to Die for (23 page)

“All well and good, but unless you can find somebody who can swear differently, those notes are an airtight alibi.”

“Let me look at the chart.”

“I didn’t mean
you
. I have one of my guys working on it. You’ll do a lot better if you aren’t seen with us. I have a feeling this is going to turn ugly fast.”

“Too late,” she assured him, rubbing at her eyes. “I’ve already been seen with you, and it
is
ugly. Nothing left to do but help. What about Mrs. Peebles?”

She heard the hesitation in his voice and was surprised by the following sincerity. “I’m sorry,” he allowed with disconcerting sympathy. “That was my fault. I shouldn’t have shown up without warning you.”

Casey was surprised by the sting of tears. Leave it to a cop to be the most compassionate person of the day.

“I’ll live,” she assured him with fraudulent ease. “As you can guess, this isn’t the first time I’ve unsuccessfully bucked the system. Now, what about Mrs. Peebles?”

“Still no connection. No motive.”

Now for the big question. Casey shot a look over to see that Marva’s eyes were closed, but her antennae were up. Casey needed support on this one, because the answer was so important.

“So,” she said, gripping the phone like a handhold on a high tower, her eyes shut against disappointment. “What did you think of him?”

Scanlon shuffled something on his desk. “Well, I’m not sure about AIDS, but I bet he knew Oswald.”

Casey’s face crumbled into a relieved smile. “What did Dawson think?”

“That he’s about the most charming, handsome, intelligent man she’s ever met.” Scanlon’s pause was torture. Casey could hear the ghost of humor return to his next words. “But she wouldn’t put her feet in his stirrups unless she had a gun in her hands.”

Casey felt herself deflating. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d steeled herself against Scanlon’s opinion, judging her own suspicions by it, measuring her own sanity against it. His words validated her, absolved her. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t manufacturing leaps of logic that would have put Helen’s leaps of faith to shame.

Hunsacker was the villain, not her. He was capable of everything she’d accused him of. She hadn’t just manufactured all the funny little things that added up only in her mind. He was bad.

Tears again. Casey wanted to scream. She cried when she was mad and she cried when she was upset and she cried when she was relieved. And right now she was so relieved that she had to squeeze her eyes shut and wipe at her face with her arm, and still her sandwich was getting
soggy
. For a minute she couldn’t even manage to get out the words of thanks that were so important to her.

Scanlon broke the silence first, his end of the line suspiciously still, his voice a little gruff. “You okay?”

Casey nodded three times before she could get the words out. “Yeah…uh, yeah, thanks.” That made her angrier. She knew damn well he could hear the quaver in her voice. She cleared it and tried again. “I just…” That didn’t work, either. It seemed instead of dissipating, her tears were building, like a flood that had finally crested.

Scanlon’s voice was as gentle as she’d heard it. “A little lonely out there all by yourself on the path of truth and righteousness sometimes.”

Casey nodded again, breathing hard to hold herself together. “Yeah.”

“If he comes in to work tonight, be someplace else, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll talk to you again tomorrow. I have some more questions.”

Another nod. Another attempt at composure. “Jack?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

Casey could definitely hear a smile now. “I never overlook a legitimate lead.”

She managed to get the receiver back into the cradle before sobbing.

Marva was already standing next to her, close but not too close, her long face a study in impatience. She thumped a tissue box onto the table in front of Casey and sat down. “What did that boy say to you?” she demanded.

Casey yanked out a couple of tissues and hiccuped with the tears that refused to abate. The smile she gave Marva was a picture of watery exhilaration. “He thinks Hunsacker is pond scum.”

Marva straightened, considered, nodded. “A man with some sense,” she marveled. “ ’Bout time.”

“God, I feel so stupid. I feel so
good
.”

“Wages of righteousness, honey. You got a right.”

“That’s just about what Scanlon said.”

Marva nodded. “Good Christian man.”

That made Casey laugh. She wanted to explain, but it was hard enough explaining Jesuits to Catholics, much less Baptists.

“So what happens now?” Marva demanded.

“Now,” Casey admitted, her flood checked by a backwash of reality, “we just have to prove he’s pond scum.”

Marva rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah,” she muttered.

“That oughtta be easy.”

IT WAS ONLY
the first day of June, and already the streets of the city shimmered with heat. The sky was washed out, the air heavy with the smell of hops from the brewery. Sunlight struck sharp shards of lights from car roofs. Pedestrians walked as if through a high tide, battling the humidity and exhaust for breathing space. St. Louis sweltered as it waited for its first big storm of the season, long overdue and badly needed. Natives watched the sky and wiped their foreheads and ached for thunder.

Fewer cops stood out on the headquarters’ steps today. They littered the lobby instead, standing in clots of blue beneath the high, echoing ceiling. More visitors crowded onto the stark brown bench in the waiting area, but Casey had the feeling it was more for the air-conditioning than the justice.

Scanlon met her by the elevators behind the control desk.

“Thanks for coming down,” he greeted her, hands in pockets, jacket coat splayed back again, attire not appreciably different. Casey wondered if he had a different color dark shirt for every day of the week. The priesthood seemed to have ruined him for pastels. But then, she couldn’t imagine him in anything else.

Pulling out one hand, he held the door open until Casey joined him.

“Hey,” she said, stepping on board. “Who wants to sleep past eight in the morning anyway? I’d feel more self-righteous if you didn’t look like you need the sleep more than I do.”

Scanlon almost smiled as he let go of the door and punched a button. “I’m sorry I called you so early. I was tied up yesterday and couldn’t get back to you.”

“I’m sorry Helen answered the phone.”

He resumed his position, eyes up on the progressing numbers. “She wanted my advice on signs from God.”

Casey groaned. She hadn’t heard that part.

Scanlon shot her a sly look. “Then she said it didn’t count since I wasn’t Catholic anyway.”

Casey offered a weak grin. “She’s not sure the pope should have ever reinstated Jesuits back in 1720.”

“That’s all right,” he allowed. “Neither is the pope.”

The doors opened to another green and brown hallway. This was Casey’s third trip to homicide, and she still got lost in the rabbit warrens that made up the fourth floor. All the crimes investigations units were stationed up here: burglary, juvenile, sex crimes, bomb and arson, homicide. Each section had more people than space and a floor plan that had been laid out about the turn of the century.

Homicide opened up to the left. Scanlon led her through the door into the first office where two detectives looked up and then returned to work. They were members of the service crew, the detectives who responded to a murder call, who worked with the medical examiner and the evidence technicians to secure the scene and get down the details. They conducted initial on-site interviews and collected what data they could before handing the case over to one of the investigating officers next door.

The investigating officers worked the case until it was solved, or until it went back into the file room with only periodic updates to keep it open. There was a flow board in the lieutenant’s office delineating each murder, its status, and the team working on it. Casey saw that Scanlon had his name associated with eight different listings.

Two doors down the side hall from the service crews was the sergeant’s office, which Hunsacker shared with three other people. It was where Casey had first met him, where she’d sweated and stammered through her story. Walking in today, she smiled easily at the other two men who shared the office with Scanlon and Sgt. Dawson.

The detectives were in the process of shrugging into jackets. One was a tall Viking type, the other compact and Mediterranean. Both dressed much too well for the homicide officers Casey had ever seen. She’d been exposed to the county’s lovely brown polyester uniform jacket, and the Jefferson County cowboy look. She’d watched years of
Columbo
and read Waumbaugh, and figured cops dressed like refugees from a bargain basement. Evidently the mandate was different in St. Louis City.

“Where are you going?” Scanlon asked them as he shrugged out off his own jacket.

“We’re on the way to make America safe for snitches everywhere,” the small one announced, opening his desk drawer and pulling out a gun. He checked it and slid it into a waist holster, his movements quick and broad, as if he could barely contain his anticipation.

Scanlon pulled over two well-used mugs and filled them from the coffee maker. “Got warrants on Ice Man?” he asked.

“Got warrants, got an address, got his girlfriend fixin’ us all breakfast if we get there quick enough.”

“Casey,” Scanlon said almost as an afterthought. “This is Nick Capelli.” The skinny one.

He grinned with a set of perfect flashing teeth and slid a black snap brim over his eyes that perfectly matched his tailored black suit, white shirt, and skinny tie. He looked like a hit man. “He never buys
me
coffee.”

Scanlon didn’t seem to hear him. “And that’s Rich Whelan.”

The Nordic type nodded from where he was pulling a beeper from a desk drawer. Then he lifted another snap-brim hat from the rack and preceded Capelli out the door.

“Later,” they chorused.

Casey lifted an uncertain hand in response.

Waving her to a free chair, Scanlon pulled his out and settled into it. There were more files on his desk, and a stack of return-call messages.

“You know,” Casey marveled, still looking after the departing detectives, “it really is different down here.”

Scanlon leaned back in his chair and took a first sip of coffee. “How so?”

Casey couldn’t help a grin. “My area of the county’s a little white bread, if you know what I mean. I guess I expected the cops down here to be the same way. Do you have a hat, too?”

Scanlon inclined his head from behind his coffee cup. He was leaning so far back, Casey wondered how he kept from tipping over. “I have my stingy brim. Sure.”

“Stingy brim?”

Scanlon motioned to the black hat that had been left behind atop the coatrack. “Official hat of homicide. Narrow brim, flipped up in the back like a duck’s ass.”

“So you all look like Mafia dons.”

His mouth twitched with humor. “Something like that.”

Casey took to her own coffee. The brand down here wasn’t much different than what they inflicted over at the hospital, equal parts fuel oil and old socks. “Why do you all wear hats?”

“To protect our heads. Do you know what kind of a mess you can walk into when you show up for a jumper?”

Almost before he got the words out, Scanlon stiffened. Casey could tell he’d spoken before he’d thought about it, revealing more to a civilian than he thought he should have.

But Casey wasn’t really a civilian in that sense. “No kidding?” she retorted thoughtfully, and then grinned. “Shows you the difference in our professions. By the time we get ’em, we’re worried about keeping our feet clean.”

Scanlon didn’t move, but Casey had the impression that the distance he maintained between them had just narrowed. Fingering his cup, his expression betraying nothing, he turned his attention to the work on his desk. “How are things doing over at the hospital?”

Casey shifted in her seat, crossing her ankle over her leg and resting her mug atop her jeans. “If I were a person given to clichés, I’d say I’m finding out who my real friends are. Nobody likes a good rumor like a hospital, and the latest is that I accused Hunsacker to pay him back for spurning my advances.”

“Did you?”

That brought Casey up short. Even in that straight, uncompromising chair, she stiffened like a queen being accused of treason. “What kind of question is that?” she demanded.

He watched her, passive and quiet, his eyes half-closed again. “It’s a question somebody’s bound to ask. You leveled a hell of an accusation on him. Why should you be so surprised that somebody’d think you’re just being vindictive?”

That brought Casey to her feet, the outrage out of proportion even to his assertion. After all she’d gone through just to get up the nerve to come down here, after the hours of doubt and disbelief, the threat to her career and personal peace of mind, it infuriated her that the first reaction she’d get was that she was just paying Hunsacker back for not returning her sly winks.

It was so damn typical of the way the official world thought. It was so typically male. It was so familiar to her. But Scanlon had become the last person she expected it from.

Frustration propelled her into motion. Turning away from him, Casey stalked to the window and stared out at the pallid, limp day. She clutched that coffee cup in her hands just to keep them still and tapped her toe against the institutional green radiator just to hear the soft clanking.

“It’s always back to that, isn’t it?” she asked no one in particular. “No matter what I say, nobody will really believe me. After all, everybody knows how emotional women are. Every man on earth knows what happens when a woman has PMS. It’s so much easier to blame her bitchiness than have to deal with the possibility that she’s really right. It’s so much more…
understandable
.”

There was no sound behind her, only the echo of voices down the hall, the flat clack of computer keys, the gurgle of the coffee maker. Below her on the street, a police car jockeyed for a parking spot. A spider negotiated the air in front of her, sailing on an invisible lifeline. Tenuous and slippery. Casey wondered if spiders were terrified of the chances they took just to get across a room. Did they remember the wall they left, cold and bitter against their legs, and hesitate before the next one? Or was it all preordained, too deeply imbedded in their instincts for them to refuse? Did they have to sail across, braving the terrifying void to seek substance, no matter what they remembered or wanted?

“And vindictive,” she said, her sight internal now, personal. “That’s a wonderful word. ‘No, of course I didn’t molest my child, Judge. My wife’s just being vindictive.’ ‘Don’t be silly. I didn’t run around on her. She’s just being vindictive.’ ”

Her voice slowed. Her eyes dropped to hands that suddenly trembled. “ ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Officer,’ ” she finished, her words slowing, trembling as badly as her hands. “ ‘I never shoved a gun into her mouth and threatened to blow her head off if she left. She’s just being…’ ” Casey’s breath caught; her words faltered with the poison they hadn’t released in so long, the memory that still brought bile up her throat even after seven years. “ ‘…vindictive.’ ”

And she knew exactly how bitter and defeated her voice sounded.

Silence gathered in the little room like dust. The sun was hot through the old glass in the stark, square window. The air smelled like old cigarettes, coffee, and disinfectant. Male smells, power smells, the smells of another station so long ago where she’d had to gather her courage. Where it hadn’t helped.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” Scanlon finally asked, his voice straight out of a confessional. If Casey closed her eyes, she could imagine herself back in that tiny, musty box facing the red velvet curtain. Holding her breath, terrified of that smooth, concerned voice that could so easily turn to judgment. The shame already too hot in her to risk more.

Instead, she turned to see that Scanlon hadn’t moved, hadn’t changed position or expression. Still watching and waiting and soaking it all in. Surprisingly, she did want to tell him. She wanted to tell him all of it, because deep in those smoke-gray eyes she saw the kind of history that would let him understand. Scanlon was precise, and he was tightly wrapped, but he still couldn’t quite hide the rumpled kind of comfort he carried with him.

It didn’t matter, though. Casey wasn’t shopping for comfort. She’d given that up a long time ago. She smiled, but there was little humor.

“I cannot tell a lie,” she admitted. “Hunsacker reminds me of someone. Someone I was powerless against, and it was such a memorable experience that I prefer living with St. Helen of Webster than chance it again.”

“The ex-husband?”

Casey could afford humor now as she faced off with Scanlon from across the room. “No,” she admitted. “Ed was the change that refreshed. At least for a little while. When you meet him, please don’t think less of me. I was a confused little girl then.”

Finally allowing himself to move, Scanlon righted his chair and stood for a new cup of coffee. Casey was sure she saw something dark and sad in his eyes. “If all we were judged by were our mistakes, hell would have about as much room as the city workhouse.” Turning, he lifted the pot in invitation. “More?”

Casey tilted her head a little, keeping her careful distance from those rumpled gray eyes. “I don’t know. Are you about to get all ecclesiastical on me?”

He did smile then, a grudging revelation. “I wasn’t ecclesiastical when I could have been.”

“Which made you a perfect Jesuit.”

“You seem well acquainted with the subject.”

She shrugged, relieved to have the conversation turned away from her. “My uncle Martin was a Jesuit. The only thing he couldn’t stand about the church was the fatheads who ran it, most of canon law, and the fact that he wasn’t allowed to proselytize in the jungles.”

Scanlon held out a hand for her cup. Hesitating only a moment, Casey pushed away from the window and walked back, clenching the mug hard until the telltale trembling in her hands eased.

“Tell him he didn’t miss anything,” Scanlon offered. “I was in the jungles. It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

Casey handed him her cup. “With the Jesuits?”

“And the marines.”

A hundred new questions popped up. Casey tried to shove them back down. Scanlon returned her cup and she turned for her chair, fascinated anew by the concept of a policeman who had been both a priest and a soldier. What an incredible dichotomy of ideologies to carry into the station with him. What a burden to carry through life, if that sadness in Scanlon’s eyes had meant anything.

She wondered what scars the marines had left him with, what guilt the church had left him with.

“So, how
does
a person get from the marines to the priesthood to the precinct?” she asked.