by Nancy Grace
She even did a commercial. A TV commercial, at that. In Japan. She prayed like hell nobody in the States saw the thing. It would ruin her reputation as a serious screen actress.
What more could she do?
Obviously, her agent wasn’t doing her justice. Stu had so many clients in his stable, she should really think of dumping him, but every time she called him, he acted like he was on the verge of securing a part for her.
They just had a way of falling through.
Her legs were feeling the burn, all right. At least having the elliptical here in her apartment, she didn’t have to go to some horrible gym where she’d definitely be spotted. And photographed.
Fallon switched channels to QVC. She adored the shopping network and had memorized her American Express card number by heart, expiration date and secret code number included. That way she could order straight from the elliptical, speaking into her BlackBerry, which she of course had on speaker phone setting so as to have her hands free. Her arms must also be in continuous pumping motion along with her legs. It wasn’t just butt and legs and boobs anymore.
Triceps mattered. No one wanted to look at flabby arms. And she certainly didn’t want to end up in one of those horrible Snoop exposés with a shot of her coming out of a plastic surgeon’s office following a brachioplasty. She’d never heard that word . . . brachioplasty . . . until her plastic surgeon put it in her head. Translation . . . an arm lift.
It was the industry’s dirty little secret. Face-lifts, nose-jobs, and of course, boob-jobs, were all givens. But arm lifts were still considered a little taboo.
As if Fallon cared.
If she’d just go ahead, bite the bullet, and get the arm lift, she could drag this damn elliptical onto the elevator and dump it out on the street. In New York City, it would be gone in three minutes. Some Dumpster-diver would take it away and put in his own cramped little apartment. Speaking of New York, Fallon couldn’t wait to get back to Beverly Hills, it was so dark and cold here. If it weren’t for work, she wouldn’t even visit, much less keep this dreary little downsized apartment.
But back to the elliptical: If she got the arm lift, the torture of two-hour workouts every other day would be over. But there was always her butt. What about it? Wait . . . maybe she could get those butt-enhancement things, like the silicone balloons they insert in your rear end . . .
Fallon heard the maid coming in the side door to the apartment, through the kitchen. She turned her head and yelled out, “Don’t forget to clean between the tiles in the sauna this time! Use something . . . a toothbrush . . . I don’t care what! That’s not my job! But I do not want to sit my bare butt down on mold! That’s why I pay you . . . So I don’t have to sit on mold!”
These people. They come to America. Then they don’t clean your sauna. Ridiculous.
Her BlackBerry tinkled. One glance and she exhaled, even more irritated. It was that horrible, horrible high school boy again. Jonathon. Why wouldn’t he leave her alone? He’d mentioned he wrote for his school paper and wanted more facts about her for a profile on her he was doing. When would he finish? He’d been writing about her for six months, it seemed. Ugh!
The questions never ended with this kid. It wasn’t a newspaper profile . . . It was a book. What’s your favorite color? Do you like animals? What does your bedroom look like? And why did some kid want to know what her bedroom looked like, anyway? Little perv.
Fallon pointed the remote toward one of the two flat-screen TVs positioned on the wall at angles so she could watch both at the same time without turning her head. She hated it though, because by flicking one remote, more often than not she’d change channels on both screens.
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.
Chapter 25
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.
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.
Chapter 26
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.
Crest
lawn 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.