Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

Oh, how he hated the doilies.

Then there was the Elvis collection. It wasn’t as irritating as the doilies, but there was so damn much of it. The pillows, the Elvis clock in the kitchen with the hips swinging back and forth on the second hand, the commemorative dishes on little stands covering every inch of the china cabinet. At least he could actually listen to some of the Elvis stuff. In fact, as he distinctly recalled, Prentiss Love was a big Elvis fan. Another thing they had in common.

Speaking of his mother’s junk, he couldn’t bear to think of all the cardboard boxes of Princess Diana stuff he’d lugged out to the corner of the street. He’d briefly considered a yard sale, but he couldn’t stand the thought of strangers picking through all the dishes while standing around in the front yard. And they invariably wanted to come in for something, the phone, the bathroom, a glass of water… He couldn’t stand the thought of those… people.

In less than forty-eight hours after his mother was safely six feet under, he had totally redecorated the home. Now he could finally breathe without having a mournful-looking Christ on the Crucifix staring down at him over the back of his head at the dinner table. On the other wall was The Last Supper , with Judas Iscariot obviously the bad guy.

His cell phone blasted out the theme to James Bond. He adored his cell phone, although with all the special bells and whistles it had on it, it cost him nearly his whole disability check each month. It was worth it.

And he loved the James Bond theme song. Bond always got the women.

Francis looked down at the cell phone’s tiny screen. Fallon wrote back! He was getting closer and closer to her, and she didn’t even know it! She’d be so surprised. Francis focused on the text. She was a vegetarian after all! She’d just been joking about the turkey! He knew it!

What about that, Mom?

HAILEY DEAN CROSSED THE FLOOR OF HER KITCHEN. TWENTY-PLUS STORIES aboveground, she looked out over the Manhattan skyline from her cottage in the sky, as she called it. It was beautiful from up here. She really missed New York during the months she was back home in Atlanta.

Of course, Atlanta was beautiful, too. Everything was in bloom, the cherry blossoms, the azalea bushes, the magnolias, the tea olive growing outside her childhood bedroom in her parents’ home, the Confederate roses… The air was so sweet.

But there was nothing like New York. And she had to get back to her patients. Phone sessions and Skype would only go so far.

Hailey plopped down in front of the computer, booted up, and started reading the news. The national headlines were the usual, Washington politics, troops overseas, and Prentiss Love dead ? Single shot to the head, back alley from yoga studio, car locked from the inside, body cool to the touch, one degree below the ambient air in her SUV.

That meant her body had been there for some time. It took hours for the body temperature to drop, and then to dip below the ambient air in the body’s environment… plus, she had apparently been working out at something called a “hot yoga” class.

Love’s body had to be soaring hot when she came out of that. That is, if she went straight to her SUV. If she had shopped, strolled, stopped to talk to fans, especially outdoors, her temp may have already recalibrated.

The cops had their jobs cut out for them. Wonder who was on the case? Hailey preferred the hard copy of the Post to the online version, so she got up and walked back through the kitchen to her front door, turning on the stove as she passed by to brew a cup of tea.

Dropping a tea bag into her cup, she went on to the door. Glancing down the hall, she could see nobody else had made it out their door yet. All the papers-the Times , the Post , the Daily News , the Journal -lay neatly stacked in varied piles just at the carpeted foot of each of the eight doors surrounding her corner apartment.

Sitting on a kitchen barstool with the morning sun at her back, she unfolded the paper. On the front page was a shot of Prentiss Love, her head slumped forward in her car, cops surrounding it, wisely touching nothing, just looking at it first.

She recognized him immediately. It was Lieutenant Ethan Kolker. The lead cop on the murder cases of two of her patients. His back was to the camera, but he was the closest to Love’s body, his face turned to his left as he addressed one of the crime scene techs. Hailey hadn’t seen him since the morning she was found unconscious in the floor of a dentist’s office, drill in one hand, covered in her own blood and that of former-cop-turned-lawyer Matt Leonard.

The moment came shooting back, so vivid it was if it were happening all over again. Next thing she knew, she was looking Kolker in the eyes. Blue eyes. It was all such a blur. But she knew that he apologized. Briefly. The look in his eyes had been so full of sorrow, regret… and it should have been.

Kolker had pursued her relentlessly as the killer of not one, but two of her own patients… patients turned friends. He wouldn’t listen to a thing she said; nothing seemed to make a dent in his determination that she, Hailey Dean, had lost touch with reality and acted out a murderous fantasy on Melissa and Shannon.

Utterly ridiculous. Impossible. It was against everything she stood for… She’d dedicated her life to stopping violent crime after Will’s murder. Hailey was incapable of violence.

Or was she?

Not only had she killed Leonard, albeit in self-defense, she also punched Kolker in the face when he’d arrested her. Then just the other day, she literally had to fight the urge to do the same to that idiot Harry Todd, settling instead for drenching him with a pitcher of cold water on national TV.

What had happened to her impulse control?

She could shrink herself later. Right now, she settled in with her tea and skim milk to read the local version of Love’s death.

Hailey turned back to the front page. Kolker looked tired. Or was she just imagining that? It was only a profile shot. Maybe she was wrong.

Wow. Two celebs in one month. True, they were D-Listers, but still, they were stars. Both murdered with a single shot to the head, both women, both generally the same age, both murdered just about an hour’s drive apart.

Now that was a coincidence. But one thing Hailey knew from her years in the courtroom, there is no coincidence in criminal law.

Picking up the remote control from where she left it the night before, she clicked onto GNE and immediately saw an ad for The Harry Todd Show . The ad showed clips of Todd’s last interview with Love. It was just after Celebrity Closets had shot through the roof, dragging Love out of obscurity and back into the limelight. Todd was capitalizing on Love’s murder, of course. What did she expect?

Glancing at the digital clock on the side of the TV’s control panel, Hailey realized with a start she was late leaving. Tony Russo had called sounding distraught and insisted he had to see her in person ASAP. Judging by the tone in his voice, she’d agreed to meet him in an hour at Century Plaza just a few blocks away. Sliding into her boots, out the door of her apartment, and walking briskly, Hailey pushed through the diner’s tiny front door in less than twenty minutes.

From her seat at the front of the restaurant, Hailey looked out the window. Tony Russo was late. She picked up the diner’s copy of the Post . It was only when she’d sat down to open it, expecting the Prentiss Love story, that she discovered it was one of last week’s papers. The banner printed across the top of the Post ’s cover page was in huge, bold, black letters.