Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

So irritating.

Juggling one remote in the left hand, another in the right, and both feet pumping up and down on the machine, she was trying to get Lifetime on one screen and QVC on the other. If she was correct, it was Beauty and Age Prevention hour. Not that she needed any more such lotions and potions; her bathroom shelves, counters, and drawers were packed full of them, as were her bedside tables, but you never knew what you might need until you saw it on QVC or the Home Shopping Network.

Ah, she finally got both screens to her two choice channels. First, she focused on QVC. She’d been right. It was beauty treatment hour. She’d apparently just missed two hours of linens. The screen flashed up a grouping of facial creams, all different sizes and shapes, but all the slender bottles and tiny round pots were in the same pastel pink. A gorgeous set of hands, beautifully manicured with mother-of-pearl-tinted fake nails.

Hmm. Age-defying lotions. She already had plenty of those. Wonder if there was anything to that pure oxygen treatment to the face? Fallon had heard about it recently; it was the next, new thing.

Of course she’d done time in one of those hyperbaric oxygen chambers, just like everybody else. Hers was at a spa in Arizona. It worked wonders. She woke up feeling years younger.

It was a simple concept, really. A Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Chamber, a cylindrical tube in which the patient sleeps, delivers 100 percent oxygen at a pressure greater than that at sea-level atmospheric pressure. In essence, the patient breathes 100 percent oxygen while covered under a hood, or wearing a mask. Athletes used them all the time; then the skin industry got wind of them and now they were the rage.

But other than going to a spa and being caught on camera doing it, her only other choice was to buy one of the huge, coffinlike things to sleep in at night. Now if that didn’t hit the gossip pages, nothing would.

She could see the headline now… FALLONMALONE’S DESPERATE BID TO STAY YOUNG. Or worse yet, she could be associated with some type of illness, which was generally the kiss of death in the business.

There were now allegedly oxygen treatments applied directly to the skin at a doctor’s office. And she certainly wouldn’t be driving to the doctor’s office and traipsing through a parking lot. He’d come to her.

With both hands free again, Fallon scrolled to the voice note recorder feature on her BlackBerry and spoke into it. “Note to self. Home oxygenation treatments. What are they? Do they work? Where can I get them? And how much do they cost?”

The bullet tore from its chamber a few feet behind Fallon just as she was about to lower the BlackBerry from grazing her lips.

The device ricocheted out of her right hand upon bullet impact, and the bullet, taking two of her long, fake nails with it, burst the PDA into a hundred shards of black plastic and bits of metal, some slicing the delicate skin of her face, tiny bits of it lodging around her mouth and nose.

The bullet tore through the skull, upward through the mouth cavity and out the front of her face, just below the bridge of her nose, glancing off the BlackBerry, and finally slamming into the wall a few feet in front of the elliptical.

The bullet took several of her teeth with it, three of them hurtling out of her mouth to the floor, landing underneath the TV screen. The hostess on the screen smiled lovingly out at all the millions of purchasers of age-defying moisturizers at that precise moment, and then moved on to exfoliators.

THERE’S A MATCH? OH, MAN… ARE YOU SURE? ”Before Kolker could answer, his partner, O’Brien, went on… “Does the press know? Now what do we do?”

“I know one thing: Before this gets out, I want to nail down every single detail, you know, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I need to get it all figured out before we take it to the District Attorney’s Office. They leak like a sieve. It’ll go straight to the Post . Just like the Prentiss Love crime scene photos. Just like Snoop got the Leather Stockton shots of the body being wheeled out of the pool house. Somebody’s tipping them off.”

They didn’t want to talk about it at the office and had ended up back at the diner in their usual booth.

“Coffee, black?” Behind the counter and looking over a display of pies on a three-tiered plate underneath a glass cake cover, Shirley aimed the question in the general direction of Kolker’s booth.

“Make it two. Thanks.” Turning away from Shirley, he looked back at O’Brien.

“There’s no doubt about it. The medical examiner managed to fish one sliver of fragment out of Prentiss Love’s head, and bingo… it’s a match. He did a consult on Stockton. I’ve never seen anybody so fascinated with dead celebrities as that ME.”

“Same shooter?”

“Same shooter. No doubt about it. Kelley Trent over at Ballistics had it under the microscope for hours. He’s the best. I went over and watched him do it. Saw the markings myself. They definitely came from the same weapon. And whoever it is, he’s a decent shot. You know, even at close range, amateurs screw up.” Kolker kept his voice low even though no one was in the booth behind them.

“You know Trent’s thorough. Even tried to get prints off the one bullet from out in the Hamptons. No good. It was a long shot, but Trent tried. And the sliver from Love’s skull was barely big enough to analyze, much less get a print.”

“IBIS match?”

“Nope. Already sent it. Trent knows somebody. Got a rush. No match.”

“Well, did Trent keep it quiet?”

“Did he keep what quiet? We don’t have the murder weapon, so we didn’t have to do any shooting. Just looking under the microscope.”

To make a positive ballistics match to a specific gun, the tester takes the weapon in question, uses the same caliber as that in the murder, and fires the gun, usually into a tub of water with padding at the bottom. The high velocity of the bullet, hurtling down the gun chamber, causes distinct, identifiable tool markings on the bullet itself. Like a fingerprint, each gun leaves its own unique markings on the bullet. The inside of the barrel is made of metal, metal that cools after being heated in a molten state. Each gun has one-of-a-kind markings on the inner barrel left during the cooling process; hence, those unique markings appear on the bullet.

“I don’t mean the testing, and I know we don’t have the murder weapon… yet, that is. I mean, did Trent keep it on the QT that we think there’s one shooter? And who’d want to shoot these two, anyway? I mean, they’re D-Listers at best… What’s the draw?”

“Don’t know. I need to run it by some sort of strategist, maybe one of the profilers, somebody that knows what they’re doing. Somebody that can keep their mouth shut and has nothing to do with NYPD.” Instinctively, Kolker looked around to confirm no eavesdroppers.

“Good luck with that one.” The coffee came. “Motive?”

“I’m not even close. I haven’t even started with that one. I just found out it was from the same gun a little under an hour ago.” Kolker stared down into his coffee, at the little tendrils of steam floating up.

He’d turned into somewhat of an overnight local hero after the Hailey Dean case, despite the fact he arrested the wrong person for double murder. Hailey had always been tight-lipped about what happened and actually praised him and the Force in the press. So, while the public at large liked him, he couldn’t afford another screw-up. Kolker had to nail this one or he’d be looking at a desk job till he left the NYPD, which would probably be forced on him earlier rather than later.

They weren’t subtle about these things at the NYPD. He’d be directing traffic in the middle of First Avenue and Fifty-ninth, if he didn’t solve the case before he handed it over to the DA.