Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

So he’d come after her. Her clients were the collateral damage. It was all Hailey’s fault, or at least she believed it was, on nights like these. This wasn’t the first time she’d had nightmares where she was visited by Hayden or Melissa, although she always prayed each visit would be the last.

There was no way she could go to sleep now, icy chill replacing the heated spikes flashing through her body just moments ago. She trudged toward the kitchen,.38 held down and close to her right side. She wanted to check the apartment… just to make sure.

The lights were still burning brightly all across Manhattan, and the dark sky rose above it. There were a million points of light sprinkled across the high-rises and office buildings. The Crown Building, Chrysler Building, Citigroup Center’s sloping peak, and of course, the spike of the Empire State Building, were all lit up in the night for tourists and residents alike to adore. Looking down onto the city somehow gave her comfort tonight.

Hailey switched on an eye of her gas stove and put on the kettle to brew a cup of tea. Heading back to her bedroom, she picked up the notebook she was keeping on the serial killings… the “murdered D-Listers,” as Kolker called them.

Once in her bedroom, she settled back into her bed with her hot tea, propping herself up against pillows. Opening her notebook, she clicked on her bedroom TV. A few days before, she’d spotted Malone’s golf pro at a charity event Leather Stockton also attended. Not much, but it was something. Earlier that evening, she’d been reviewing clips again for Kolker. They were a mélange of various appearances the three women had made. Hailey stared at the screen, sipping her tea. Her blue pen rested in the center fold of the notebook, inviting her to start work.

She watched the first thirty minutes of one of the Prentiss Love DVDs without making a single note. There were award speeches, red carpet events, interviews about various projects, especially her gig on Celebrity Closets.

The next DVD was of Prentiss’s funeral. It was pure Hollywood. Several blowup head shots that must have each stood eight feet tall hung by nearly invisible strands from the top of the auditorium where the public service was held. They were stunning. The place was packed with special friends and family sitting in reserved seating up front.

They’d all filed in one by one or in little knots of two or three. There was a little bit of a stir when Prentiss’s yoga instructor came in with his boyfriend. Apparently, all her entourage knew she had a huge crush on him and had invested quite a bit of money in his studio as well as his plan to build a “yoga empire.” No one, not even Prentiss, knew he had a boyfriend. No doubt Prentiss Love’s investment decisions would have been far different if she had known that tiny detail. An argument broke out between one of Prentiss’s girlfriends and the yoga instructor, and the boyfriend intervened.

It wasn’t pretty.

Anyway, after that bumpy start, the service got under way. Hailey watched the whole thing intently, but found nothing of merit to report back.

She got up and headed to the kitchen to heat up more water. Brushing past her doorjamb, Hailey got a chill. In her mind’s eye, Hayden had just been standing there. Hailey’s eyes burned and tears welled up in them.

Had it all been her fault? Would they have been alive if it hadn’t been for their connection to her, Hailey Dean?

Climbing back into bed, she clicked the remote to start the next DVD, then took a sip of tea, holding the cup with both hands. She could hear the wind blowing outside her window high up in the sky.

The old, familiar ache was spreading from her chest up to her throat, and it felt like she’d swallowed a huge lump. No matter how hard she tried to get away from the pain of Will’s murder, it just kept coming back. As a psychologist, her mind told her that the new wave of grief she was feeling was simply an aftershock from the murders of Hayden and Melissa, her patients.

Her heart didn’t care why, it just hurt.

Leaving Atlanta and her career as a felony prosecutor had seemed like such a great idea at the time, and for a few years here in Manhattan, it actually seemed to have worked. But now, not only was the pain over her patients’ deaths dredging up the old grief from Will’s death, she was alone… completely alone. Again.

Hailey swallowed hard to try to get rid of the lump in her throat. She wiped her eyes and face, now wet with tears, with the edge of the bed sheet, and took a sip from the cup of tea she’d been clutching.

She stood up. Walking over to her bedroom closet, she opened it with one hand, still holding the tea in the other. She carefully set it down on the closet floor. There in the corner. There it was. Hailey just looked at the white cardboard box. She didn’t need to open it to see what was inside. She just wanted to look and see that the box was still there. She knew what was inside.

Her wedding dress, still beautiful and pristine, still made of silk the color of champagne. With the gown would be her veil, both gently folded away between layers of crinkly tissue paper, and placed in the white cardboard box. She’d never sealed the box, just in case she wanted to take them out and look at them just once in a while. But she never let herself do that. It would be too risky.

It always seemed to end up there in the corner of her closet, not far away at all. The white cardboard box had taken on its own identity over the years, and although she never lifted the lid, she carried it like a treasure… a reminder of another life and another time, a fresh-faced girl who grew old too young.

She used every ounce of self-control to step away from the closet, to shift her thoughts away from Will and Melissa and Hayden, and attempted to focus on the stack of DVDs still left to sort through. She headed back to the bed and the remote, rewinding the part that had already played while she was thinking of Will, and not Prentiss Love, Leather Stockton, or Fallon Malone.

She started with the raw footage of the Harry Todd shoot. Tony had gotten all of it for her, including the parts that never made air. She saw the tour of Fallon’s apartment, and it was just as beautiful and jaw-dropping as the day Hailey saw it herself. Fallon spent a lot of time standing on the front staircase landing, directly in front of the towering Penley portrait of herself. It was magnificent and Fallon worked it to her best advantage.

Then there was a segment where Sookie positioned Fallon in the kitchen as if the actress were whipping up a homemade dish. Trying their best to get a flattering shot of Malone, Hailey glimpsed Tony Russo and Sookie several times in the background hovering over the shoot. But after much fidgeting with lighting and positioning and such, the segment fell flat when Fallon admitted she had no idea how to light her gas stove.

The viewers weren’t stupid. Fallon Malone was not the Betty Crocker type. The minutes dragged by and Hailey learned nothing new. The wind was howling outside, screaming up and down the avenues, and gusting off the street all the way up to Hailey’s apartment windows.

She pushed a different DVD into the player and tried her best to focus on Prentiss Love as she thanked a group, mostly men, at what appeared to be a memorabilia event. Love seemed entirely genuine when she spoke out to the crowd. There was no doubt in Hailey’s mind that she loved her fans.

They may have been the only ones who really loved her back. Prentiss had been notoriously unlucky in love.

She was absolutely beautiful, standing there at a mike stand almost as tall as she was, dressed in a gorgeous white halter dress, her hair falling in long waves around her heart-shaped face.