Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

Kolker had a fleeting, horrible vision of the traffic piled up, snarled bumper to bumper, horns honking, exhaust spewing, radios blaring… Everybody trying to get on or off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. His insides turned hot and it wasn’t the coffee.

Then, it came in a flash. Hailey Dean… Would she help him?

Was there any way? Probably not… but he could try. He could at least try.

She could have blasted him to hell and back over what happened… the way he’d treated her. She was in the hospital the first time he questioned her. He’d been so sure she was the killer. And he needed the collar so badly.

But what was he thinking? Knowing Dean, she’d probably punch him right there at the front door of her apartment when, and if, she opened the door. Or worse. He’d heard she was a pretty good shot. She could take aim at him and claim she thought he was an intruder…

He tried to make reparations. Bombarding her with flowers. That was pretty good for a cop, wasn’t it? But never any response. Now that she was back in the city, he’d tried again. But, after seeing her drench Todd, he definitely remembered her temper.

Kolker rubbed the side of his face, reliving the moment Hailey Dean had punched him right in the nose. It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten a snoot full of knuckle, but it had been, by far, the most memorable. And the only time a woman had ever decked him. Dean packed a pretty good punch.

And it had to hurt her hand, but he never even saw her rub her knuckles. Later, when he was questioning her at the station, he saw they had bled.

And you know what? He deserved the punch.

Maybe that’s the first thing he’d say, if he actually went to see her in person.

“Hey! Kolker! Where you going?” Kolker had gotten up from the booth, taken his jacket off the coat stand, and was heading toward the diner door.

“Is it something I said?” O’Brien was smiling, but he was confused. They had just been brainstorming…

“Hey, pay for the coffee this time. We’ll start getting a bad reputation as freeloaders! Tell Shirley I’ll see her tomorrow.”

“But what about breakfast? Aren’t you going to wait?”

“You can have mine. You always try to get it anyway.”

“You can’t wait five minutes?”

“Nah… I think I’m on to something.”

Let’s see… It was only 8 a.m. Bet she’d still be home. Kolker walked across the sidewalk dodging the New Yorkers who never look up when they walk along with the tourists who are always looking up.

He unlocked his unmarked squad car and got in. No reason to radio back to headquarters where he was headed. They didn’t need to know.

The less said… the better.

DAMN THE GROUNDSKEEPER TO HELL AND BACK. WHY WOULDN’T HE GO away? Why wouldn’t he leave ?

How long had he been here, anyway? Sitting crouched down in a cold, moldy-smelling mausoleum, Francis had a bird’s-eye view of the Crestlawn Sacred Grounds groundskeeper. He’d had the guy in his crosshairs for nearly an hour now, and Francis’s knees were all the worse for it. He was squatted down behind one of the crypt’s ornamental windows, windows which were really nothing more than tiny slivers cut in the mausoleum’s marble walls.

Why have windows at all? Like the dead want to enjoy the view? Absolutely no need for the dead to see out. Hunkered down on the cold stone floor, keeping his eye trained on the groundskeeper, Francis contemplated the need for windows in a crypt.

Was that a big, fat doobie the guy was smoking? Oh, hell! If it was, Francis might as well dig in for the duration.

Francis had tried his best to get rid of the arsenal he’d been amassing under his mother’s kitchen floor. He really had. But he couldn’t. The guns were his friends. They were even indexed in long, elaborate journal entries.

And his collection of HCBs, Homemade Chemical Bombs as the Feds insisted on calling them, were almost like his children. He’d spent hours upon hours researching them on the Internet, watching online videos about how to create them, days collecting just the right ingredients, and weeks finally putting them together. They were dangerous and beautiful. He adored them.

But now, knowing the Feds were coming down on him at any moment for what had happened to Leather Stockton and Prentiss Love, he had to do something. But what?

He wasn’t about to destroy them. A storage facility was out… that’s the first place the Feds would look. Attic? No. Basement? No. Hole in the backyard? No. Friend’s place? No. Other than his girlfriends, he didn’t have any friends anyway. And he didn’t want to jeopardize them. He loved them.

Crestlawn Sacred Grounds was his only alternative.

The few times he’d been here, mostly to visit his mother’s headstone and rub it in to her how great he was doing without her, he noticed the door hanging wide open at one of the mausoleums down the row. He’d never seen a single soul visit whoever was interred there, so the intermittently open door creeped him out all the more.

Was the dead person opening and shutting the door to his own mausoleum? It could happen. Francis believed firmly in the spirit world. So finally, he mentioned it to Danny, the groundskeeper.

He and Danny were somewhat kindred spirits, although Francis knew immediately that Danny was by no means his intellectual equal. They first met when Francis’s mother was buried. Danny caught him spitting a big glob down on the fresh dirt just raked over his mother’s casket. Instead of judging him as so many others would have, Danny started laughing.

They bonded instantly.

For one thing, they both hated the government. They both hated their mothers and they both had a thing for Prentiss Love. But Francis wasn’t jealous of Danny; he obviously didn’t have a relationship with Prentiss like Francis did.

Francis wasn’t one to kiss and tell, so he didn’t brag about himself and Prentiss.

During their long discussions about their mothers, Francis learned from Danny that the particularly creepy mausoleum was not only empty, but also a point of legal contention within the deceased’s family. Hours of conversation over the pint of gin Danny snuck into work every day yielded a lot of information about burials, cremations, grave diggers, dead bodies, and the like. Swapping off the bottle swig for swig, Francis learned all about the intended resident of the ornate crypt.

Specifically, she was ninety-six years old, Aunt Matilde Coco from Bayou Blanche, Louisiana. Aunt Matilde had a knack for plucking up the wealthiest men around and had been through quite a few husbands, each one richer than the last. Neighbors swore she put a love hank on them to make her irresistible in their eyes, because by all accounts, Aunt Matilde was not much too look at.

Maybe it was true. Plain and simple, Matilde, as Danny told it, practiced the ancient art of Santeria, or voodoo for short. Even though traditional Catholics frowned on sorcery, and the Vatican was firmly against it, Aunt Matilde was forever cooking up some foul stench on the stove in order to heal the sick, bring home a loved one, or seek Christian vengeance on an enemy. “Enemies” were normally gossips, cheats, liars, ne’er-do-wells, other members at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, evil neighbors, or anyone and everyone she believed had mistreated her beloved nieces and nephews.

On good days, her huge home smelled heavily of flower-scented potpourri, Glade PlugIns, and Creole cooking. On others, it reeked of boiling chicken entrails stirred up with God knows what. Aunt Matilde was notorious for smearing the gooey stuff near the target’s front door at an opportune moment, or in special cases, actually feeding a tiny voodoo replica of the enemy to the stank as it boiled on the kitchen stove in the apartment. They all knew better than to ask Aunt Matilde what exactly stank, but for safety’s sake, never, ever, casually grabbed a bite from the fridge.