Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

None of the three said anything, so he kept talking.

“You know… women. ”

“Right. We have her address on East 65th Street in Manhattan. Is that right?”

Damn. They’d already checked her out.

“I believe that’s it. We’re not really in touch right now.”

The room went quiet. He got the sense they were waiting on him to keep talking.

Anderson was the first to stand up. Then the three stood up, too. Anderson turned his back and walked toward the front door. He hoped like hell they were following him.

As he opened the door, he turned and to his great relief, they were there with him in the entrance hall. They were leaving. Thank God.

“Thank you, Mr. Anderson. We’ll be in touch.”

His body was flushed with relief; his knees actually felt weak. He gripped the handle of the front door for strength.

“Oh, yes. Anything I can do. And I’m so sorry to hear about Ms. Malone.”

“We knew you would be.”

The three turned and headed down the front porch steps.

“He’s sorry, all right. Sorry she had a camera outside her front door,” the uniformed sergeant muttered to Kolker, who was walking along to his right.

“Yep. You pegged it. He’s lying through his teeth. We need that time of death and the DNA match. We might have our man.”

“So, warrant on his house and the wife’s apartment?”

Kolker responded, “Doubt we’ll need one for her. She’ll be only too happy to help us pin this on her ex, from what I read in the divorce papers.”

“Okay. But I’ll get the paperwork ready.”

“Good idea.” Kolker kept walking along with the other two down the front walk to the unmarked squad car.

He went on, “And get one for the country club where he works. Pretty swanky place. We’ll need a warrant, but once we show it, they’ll be nothing but smiles. Don’t get me wrong. It won’t be because they like us. They’ll just want us in and out as fast as possible. Don’t worry, we won’t get a tour of the place or an invite to lunch on the terrace.”

Just as they were approaching the car, Kolker asked without turning his head either way, “Is he looking?”

Paddy looked back over his shoulder up at Anderson’s house. He immediately spotted a tiny, slight movement in the heavy curtains covering the living room window that looked out onto the front yard.

“Oh, yeah. He’s looking.”

“Straight on? Or is he hiding behind the curtains?” Kolker opened the car’s driver side front door, not looking back at the house himself.

“Behind the curtains, for sure.”

“And I noticed he didn’t follow us down to get the morning paper. It’s been sitting at the edge of his front porch steps since we got there. He didn’t want to be questioned for the time it would take to lean over and get the paper. And now he’s hiding behind the curtains? Yep. We just may have our man.”

Kolker took the wheel, one cop in back, one riding shotgun. He cranked up and eased away from the front of Anderson’s house. When interviewing a potential murder suspect, better to work in teams. Anything could turn on a dime and go sideways.

“He still looking?”

“He’s still looking, boss.”

“Good.”

Kolker eased into surprisingly heavy traffic for a cul-de-sac in a suburban neighborhood.

Lots of station wagons, big heavy sedans, and mom-type SUVs. Everybody was heading to preschool.

Anderson didn’t fit here. Something was wrong.

Kolker looked back at the house, back at the curtains in the front window.

Something didn’t fit. He knew it in his gut.

Scott Anderson… golf pro. Something was wrong.

HAILEY LOOKED THROUGH THE TINTED WINDOW FROM THE BACK OF THE black limo GNE sent to pick her up after her last patient of the day. It was Mazz again. As with her other clients, they’d continued regular phone sessions and Skype while she had been in Atlanta.

Mazz was a high-priced CPA-turned-financial-guru with a stable of wealthy clients. Hailey had long suspected him of criminal activity. Today, Mazz was kicked back in an Armani suit that had to have set him back at least three thousand dollars. Hailey saw the tag on the inside of the jacket when he took it off and hung it on the coat rack standing just inside the door to her office suite.

She’d prepared his coffee just as she heard the buzzer alerting her he was downstairs waiting to be let up. She’d learned Mazz liked his coffee piping hot, loaded with heavy cream and four packets of sugar. Even with all that cream and sugar, he stayed rail thin. Must be the stress of criminal enterprise.

“You look tired, Mazz. Bad night?”

“Oh, Hailey. If you only knew. It was the monkey again.”

“Oh, no! The monkey… What happened this time?”

As if she didn’t know. An evil carnival monkey, actually an IRS agent in disguise, had plagued Mazz for over two years now. Typically in the dreams, two chunky IRS agents chased Mazz through variations of an intricate maze. Sometimes he was lost between high hedges, sometimes he’d be caught in a stone labyrinth, sometimes wandering through a dense forest, and sometimes going through a series of rooms connected by elaborate hallways and secret trap doors.

Whenever Mazz thought he’d eluded the gang of IRS agents, all dressed in dark blue polyester suits with rayon-mix ties, the monkey would literally jump out of nowhere onto his back, screeching loudly.

“It was the house again.”

“Oh, no.” Hailey kept her face completely expressionless, as usual when reliving Mazz’s monkey dreams.

“Were you a fly this time?”

“No. I was a bird.”

“Well, that’s good. At least they weren’t picking off your wings again.”

“That’s true, Hailey. They couldn’t tear my wings off. But Hailey,” Mazz began twisting the Hermès bandana he always pulled, neatly folded into a square, from his back pants pocket. “I tried earlier to fly away out one of the windows… but it was locked. But I didn’t feel like a fly… I was more of a… a… falcon. Some sort of bird of prey. I was definitely not a fly this time. But I crashed into the window and then I had human legs again. I looked down and saw them running. I turned around, and it was the big guy chasing me, the one with the incredibly plain navy suit.”

Mazz always described what other dream characters were wearing in great detail.

“Poly-rayon tie again?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Hmm,” she said, nodding, “no natural fibers… again.” Hailey made a note.

“So I got to my hiding place, you know, behind the metal file cabinets down in the furnace room at the bottom of my office building.” She nodded. Same place he always ended up.

“Hailey, they didn’t find me. They disappeared. I could hear their feet, running away down the halls till it just went silent. And then I woke up.” Mazz was soaked with sweat. He looked across the three or so feet that separated them, she in a wingback chair facing the window, Mazz on a buttery-colored sofa beside her. His expression was one of amazement… disbelief. How could he be so confounded by the same dream he’d been having for over a year?

“I think the fact that you were not a fly, didn’t have your wings torn off, and actually had human feet and legs is a huge step forward.”

“Totally agree, Hailey.”

“But what do you think, in your real life, triggers the dream? The IRS agents, the running, the monkey?”

Mazz suddenly looked extremely uncomfortable and pulled at the neck of his shirt.

“Hailey, that’s a tough one. I forgot to tell you, I gotta go early today.” He had practically leaped off the sofa and headed to the door.

The limo lurched over a pothole. Hailey looked up at the canopy of trees overhead as the car slowed down after following a long, winding driveway that went straight through a swath of apple orchard. After over an hour on the expressway, she was here, at the mansion of Sookie Downs.