Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

He loved his Barcalounger. He rubbed the soft curved arm with his fingertips. He’d always wanted one but could never really afford it. Now he had one, and she was a beauty!

His wife, Marjorie, had objected at first, based purely on aesthetics. But this baby was so swank, you’d never even know it was a recliner! He even chose the nailhead-trimmed, large-scale Vintage option with a deep-tufted back and turned legs with a stained cherry finish. Fashionable and functional!

What’s not to love?

The Longhorn purred into three different positions with absolutely no effort at all by using a control panel tucked between the arm and the seat cushion. After discussing it in-depth with the Barcalounger sales rep, he even went all the way and went for the optional leather-seat cushion upgrade. And it was all top-grain leather… He could tell.

The Leather Stockton murder photos had been viewed all around the world and Snoop was having a field day, going after any and all outlets that used any of the pictures without their consent. That meant even more money for Snoop .

Walker told his bosses he’d used old info from a longtime source, a doorman at the L’ Hermitage Park Towers, where Fallon Malone lived, to get inside her apartment and get even more murder photos. Years ago, the same doorman had spilled to Walker about the servants’ entrance to Malone’s place. The maid’s door wasn’t caught on the hall’s surveillance camera because it used a kitchen entrance that opened up into the high-rise’s common stairwell.

Walker had used the info to catch a big-time movie director, who happened to be “happily married” at the time, sneaking in and out of Malone’s apartment. That was back when Walker was a young hotshot who’d do anything for a story. Now that he was older, a few gray hairs had popped up, but he cured that with his Just for Men hair color. “Darkest Brown” was his shade… Even his wife didn’t know about it.

Now all these years later, Walker knew exactly how to get photos from inside Malone’s apartment without his minion turning up on grainy surveillance video. And nothing had changed. Malone still left her spare key under a ficus in the hallway like she used to. Hadden was in and out in less than fifteen minutes. Piece of cake.

Hadden’s shots netted Walker another fifty grand from Snoop . They were stunned Walker got the first photos of Stockton still dead on the murder scene, plus the gurney shots were primo. As to the shots of Prentiss Love dead in her SUV, he told his bosses he was tailing Love 24/7 in order to catch her boozing, hopefully at a public bar. He’d said he had to have a private eye stay on her day and night due to her unusual drinking habits. That’s how Walker explained the fresh shots of Love behind the yoga studio. He even got them before the Post .

The bigs at Snoop never bothered to ask too many questions. They obviously understood he had a true journalist’s integrity.

Naturally, he had to pay Hadden out of his own paycheck, but other than that, the three murders had pulled him out of the red and put him not just in the black, but in the pink. The good thing about Hadden was he always showed up pretty quickly no matter how late he had been out snookered the night before, and importantly, he never asked questions. Walker liked that in a photog. Just snap the shot and keep your yap shut.

And now, there were even rumors that if Walker came through with another big story get, he could be in the running to topple the mag’s executive editor, who’d been in place nearly fifteen years. That was a record at Snoop .

The TV was on low, one of the morning shows droning on in the background. Same old, same old. Weather, Washington, women’s health, and a stupid cooking segment.

Walker pressed the hidden automated control panel stuffed conveniently between the chair’s rounded arm and the seat cushion. The Longhorn made a gentle humming sound as it reclined him nearly prone. He loved this thing.

Where would the story go next? Walker was about to doze off there in the Longhorn with the TV on low. He could see Snoop ’s headline now… “Madman Serial Killer Stalks Silver Screen Beauties.” Wait… no… the headline should be “ Who Dies Next? ”

Brilliant!

Snoop hadn’t had a good Death Watch in over two years. They could use the Death Watch headline and place red-hot actresses underneath, suggesting they, too, had been labeled for murder! It would be in all caps across the top of the mag. He’d have the sole byline.

The news. Man, what a business.

IT WAS HOT AND DARK AND THE SHEETS WERE TWISTED AROUND HAILEY’S WAIST like ropes. There at her bedroom door stood a figure, partially shrouded behind the door frame, only the left half of the body, head to toe, visible. The intruder was silent, seemingly content for the moment just to stare across the room at her as she lay sleeping.

Although the intruder made no sound or movement whatsoever, the feeling she was not alone woke Hailey with a start, and she sat straight up in the bed, instinctively reaching for the.38 she kept in the shoulder holster hanging on the bedpost beside her pillow. She tried her best to peer through the dark of the room, lit only by dim, milky moonlight filtering in from behind the bedroom window shade.

Hailey saw her standing there. Hayden Krasinski. She stood staring without blinking. Her face was pale white but blue around the mouth and her eyes bulged out of the sockets as a result of a strangling death. Her neck looked shrunken halfway between her jaw and her clavicle, the result of a powerful ligature strangulation.

On the front center of the old hooded sweatshirt she wore so often was a huge blossom of dark red blood that had seeped through her clothes, the result of a searing, double-pronged stab wound to the back. She had been left to die over a year ago, face-down in slushy ice of a Manhattan back alley, and blood from the stab wound that punctured her lungs, staining not only her T-shirt and sweatshirt but the ice lying beneath her.

And here she was at 1 a.m. in Hailey’s apartment, high above the city. How did she get in? Hailey had locked up tight and set the alarm, a new feature in her apartment she’d added after Atlanta defense attorney Matt Leonard had come after her. Not to mention his client, Clint Burrell Cruise. Hailey convinced a jury to send him to death row for the murders of eleven young female prostitutes, but between a bad cop and a bad judge, the case was reversed on appeal and Cruise walked. He was last spotted in New York City.

Hayden just stared, her blue lips twisted into a curve. First smiling, she then opened her mouth to speak, but at that precise moment, a gush of blood came pouring out, a result of the piercing of the lungs, the blood involuntarily pushing upward through the throat and out the mouth. Hayden looked shocked, alarmed, afraid when the blood poured out of her mouth and downward onto her sweatshirt, leaving a wide, deep-red trail from the neck of the sweatshirt down.

She looked up from her shirt to Hailey and began to scream… a bloodcurdling scream. Hailey leaped out of the bed and ran toward the door, to Hayden, and just as she got there… Hayden dematerialized, simply vanishing, particle by particle, into the dark of the apartment.

Hailey stood rooted to the floor, not moving an inch. Her mouth seemed locked open, her heart beating wildly in her chest, sweat pouring down the front and back of her neck and into the white T-shirt she’d worn to bed that night.

It took several minutes for Hailey to understand what had happened.

It was a dream. It had to be a dream. Hayden and Melissa, both her longtime patients, both murdered in a plot to discredit and frame Hailey Dean. Matt Leonard had, in fact, murdered the eleventh hooker and let his own client, Clint Burrell Cruise, take the fall. Only Hailey had access to all the files and all the facts of the murders, and although she might have failed to put together the pieces, Leonard believed otherwise.