Death on the D-List
Page 27
“Don’t you even say her name, you rich-boy perv! Now tell us . . . Why’d you do it? And why’d you follow Prentiss Love to the Javits Center; we saw you in the TV footage, you little freak, staring at her, practically drooling. It’s all on video.”
“I wasn’t at the Javits Center . . .”
“Yes, you were! Don’t lie! It was two years ago in the summer. We saw you, Anderson. Stop lying. You were there, stalking Prentiss Love!”
“Okay! I was there! I was there! But it was to see Phil Niekro! Not Prentiss Love! I got a signed baseball! It’s in my sock drawer! I swear to God! Go look!”
“BS! You don’t deserve to even say Niekro’s name! Give me one stat on Niekro and I won’t shove your mouth down your throat, just one!”
Scott Anderson’s heart was racing and his face was dripping in sweat. “Knuckleball! Knuckleball!” His voice came out high-pitched like a woman’s.
“That doesn’t count! Any idiot could say that!” The cop drew back the big ham at the end of his arm but this time it was balled into a fist. Just before he rammed it into Anderson’s nose, a cop in the corner with his radio to one ear yelled out, “Stop! Wait a minute! It’s not him! He didn’t do it!”
The big cop hulking over Anderson looked disappointed, but still holding his fist wound back, mid-air, he yielded and didn’t land the punch still aimed at Anderson’s face.
“They got the killer downtown. It’s a woman, believe it or not. Some nutso TV producer. Whatever . . . It’s not him.”
The big cop still held Anderson pinned with his fist pulled back. “I don’t believe it. This creep did something . . . I feel it.”
“Oh yeah, he’s a perv, all right. You ought to see the porn collection he’s got hidden in his closet. But he did get the baseball.” One of the rookies stepped into the doorway to the den. He held up a baseball. Niekro’s signature was scrawled across it in blue ink.
“Damn.” The big cop, obviously disappointed, let go of Anderson, who fell back down into the deep brown cushions of his beloved pit group. Another cop rolled Anderson over and uncuffed him.
“I would say we’re sorry, Anderson, but to tell you the truth, you got off easy. We know about that restraining order that girl had against you. And we know all about your wife calling the cops when you smacked her and threatened her. Her face was a mess. And it wasn’t the first time, either . . . you piece of crap.”
They all stood looking at him and for the first time, Scott Anderson realized somebody saw through him . . . saw through the manners, the good looks, the bleached teeth, the scratch golf game. He said nothing back.
The cops filed out of his den, through the arched door to the living room, and out the front door, shutting it behind them when they left.
Anderson looked around. Everything was the same, nothing was out of place. How they’d gotten in was a mystery, and if he didn’t have a carpet burn on his right cheek and a bruise growing on his shin, he’d never have believed what just happened.
He looked at the digital clock glowing green on top of his cable box. It was 1 a.m. Scott Anderson pulled himself out of the deep cushions of his leather pit group, stood up, and headed back to his bedroom to change his underwear.
Chapter 47
IT WAS THE THIRD CIGARETTE BUTT JULES MOREAU HAD CRAMMED DOWN THE back of the pew in Aunt Matilde’s crypt. “There’s just no way Matilde would want to be forever six feet under with the worms and the Devil. She loved the fresh air.”
Jules was dead-set on Aunt Matilde being laid to rest in the sunshine visible from the tiny slits of windows in the elaborate crypt they’d erected here at Crestlawn. Standing there, Jules took a look around the stone crypt and wondered how much the sculpture of the Holy Mother Mary had cost him, even though technically, the cost of the crypt had come straight out of Matilde’s own savings account she’d earmarked for this very purpose, her eternal resting place aboveground.
“Jules, you’re being impractical. You’ve always been impractical. Ever since you were a little boy, you’ve been impractical. Remember when you wanted to jump off the roof with nothing but umbrellas to hold us up? We both got broken arms . . . broken arms, Jules . . . broken arms. I could’a played college football if it wasn’t for a bum arm. Then there was the time you thought we should be street vendors down at the Quarter. That was a fiasco . . .”
“I thought the tourists would like alligator on a stick . . .”
“I told you nobody flies in from Boca Raton or Indianapolis and wants alligator on a stick. I told you.”
“Would you for one minute forget the alligator on a stick? I don’t see what’s impractical about Aunt Matilde being put to rest right here.” Jules lit up another Winston.
“Upkeep, ma sha . . . . upkeep.” Sensing he was making headway, he used the Creole slang for “my dear” on his cousin. “The price of keeping her here is double what the price will be if we leave her where she is . . . ad infinitum . . . Every month we’ll be paying upkeep on dear dead Aunt Matilde’s mausoleum.”
The two had lived off Aunt Matilde their whole lives and now, so did their wives and eight children. She had left each beloved niece and nephew a million dollars apiece at the time of her death. Now, out of earshot of family, friends, neighbors, and priests, Jules Moreau and his cousin, Andre Regard, both dropped the guise that they cared about Aunt Matilde’s wishes.
“Andre Regard, if you weren’t my first cousin and we didn’t share our first Communion, I would think you are lying to me. We save over a hundred grand in just ten years alone if we leave Matilde in the dirt.”
“Hmm. A hundred grand is a nice little piece of change . . .” He also crushed his cigarette down behind the stone pew.
Just as the two shook hands over the agreement to leave Auntie Matilde where she was, six feet under, the Devil himself interceded, or so the rest of the Moreaus and Regards would tell it in the years to come.
When the last burning butt was crushed down into the crack behind the milky-white stone pew, the whole place blew. The sky above Crestlawn Sacred Grounds lit up like the Fourth of July and the Super Bowl half-time show combined.
Between Francis’s ammo, his stash of Homemade Chemical Bombs, and the twenty or so burning cigarette butts the two Cajuns between them had crushed down on top of the homemade arsenal, the blast had to have been three hundred feet straight up in the air.
Even though the families had to bear the cost of rebuilding the mausoleum, no one complained. The Devil had risen up and roared at the world. Auntie Matilde was clearly too good, too saintly, too holy to remain in the Lower Kingdom. Her divine presence irritated Satan and agitated all his evil minions. And thus, it was decided. Matilde would have her wish and her eternal soul would no longer have to be concerned with washing away in the next flood.
Francis was sitting in his mother’s favorite wingback chair, minus the doilies, his eyes fixed on the living room’s TV set. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d been up all night watching the coverage of the “D-List Killer,” obsessively switching channels during every commercial break so as not to miss a moment. Rooted to the seat of the chair, around midnight, he saw two bloody people, a man and a woman, being wheeled on gurneys out of GNE world headquarters in New York City. The woman had unnaturally bright red hair and was handcuffed to the gurney and surrounded by uniformed NYPD. The man had a bandage over his eye, but was smiling broadly into the camera.
Then he saw the new blonde TV legal analyst come out walking, a little unsteady on her feet, but walking. Her arm was in a sling and she had a bandage on her shoulder. She was being helped by a plainclothes cop holding her tightly by the elbow, his other arm around her shoulder. Images of Prentiss Love, Fallon Malone, Leather Stockton, and Cassie Lake were turning on a revolving cube on the lower right of the screen.
The killer was some TV producer madwoman . . . a tall redhead who worked at GNE. Apparently she nutted up and committed the string of murders because her show was on the verge of getting axed. Shortly after snagging
an interview with one of the stars, she’d offed them in order to have the last interview of record. With exclusives like that, the ratings skyrocketed. She and that freak, Harry Todd, were getting all sorts of offers, big-money ones from other networks.
Not anymore. She was headed to Bedford or Sing Sing or wherever it is they babysit killers in New York. All the TV people should go there, Francis decided.
It had been hard enough to grapple with the pain of losing his girlfriends in such a brutal manner, all the while feeling convinced that the Feds had somehow engineered the whole thing to frame him so he would no longer be a threat to their regime. But now, he was consumed with hate. He hated Sookie Downs with all his heart and soul.
Again, Francis looked down at his hands. So they weren’t the hands of a killer after all? The dreams about strangling Prentiss and Leather and Fallon . . . they’d seemed so real. He prayed to God the police had the right perp and it didn’t turn out to be him after all. Would he ever know the truth?
Even though the sun was now up and shining brightly outside, the interior of the house was dark with the windows covered in newspaper. Francis sat with his head buried in his hands, elbows balanced on his knees in despair.
What he wanted was vengeance, and in that very moment there in his mother’s wingback, he vowed revenge on Sookie Downs for killing the women he loved. Somebody had to do the right thing and kill Sookie Downs. Of course, Francis couldn’t trust the criminal justice system to prevail. What a joke.
Sookie Downs must die.
He looked out from over his fingers back at the screen. Abruptly, the images switched. A live shot of a police press conference going on on the front steps of GNE in New York City was interrupted by an emergency local cable cut-in. The news alert showed a towering fire and dark plumes of smoke billowing up over a cemetery. Something about the background looked vaguely familiar to Francis. The handheld camera shook as another explosion rocked the cemetery . . . the banner read in all caps CRESTLAWN SACRED GROUNDS CEMETERY THE TARGET OF TERRORIST ATTACK.
Francis jumped to his feet. A third blast ripped out of Aunt Matilde’s mausoleum, which he knew so well, while flames roared into the sky.
Francis instantly decided this would be a great time to get out of town. Prepared to live out of his car for a while again, he hastily threw clothes into his old duffel bag, along with several cans of Vienna sausage, and, of course, the new .38 he just bought at the bi-annual gun and ammo show. He gathered up his mother’s gas card and Leather Stockton’s red thong, still in its plastic baggie. Gently placing them both in his coat pocket, he turned off the lights in the living room and locked the front door.
Hey . . . why not kill two birds with one stone? He could easily track down Sookie Downs once she made bond. A thought hit him . . . Would Sookie Downs make bond? It would be a lot harder to kill her if she didn’t bond out of jail after initial murder charges.
Wait a minute . . . What was he thinking? Of course she’d make bond. It was New York City . . . even terrorists make bond in the Big Apple.
New York wouldn’t be such a bad place to go for a while, anyway. Francis had a new girlfriend there who’d been coming on to him for months on the airwaves. He didn’t know that much about her, but he planned to get to know her very well. She was beautiful and quite the spitfire. Francis loved that in a woman. And obviously, his new love needed him now more than ever.
Her name was Hailey Dean.
Acknowledgments
First, my deepest thanks to my editor, Gretchen Young, who maintained great faith in me and conspired with me to create Death on the D-List. You are not just editor, but friend tried and true. (Plus your daughter will grow up to be a New York City cabbie and will be of great use to us both.) Thank you.
To Jim Walton and Ken Jautz, who are NOT the inspirations for this book, thank you for the support, the opportunities, and the friendship.
To our wonderful staff on Nancy Grace. To Dee Emmerson, bless you!
Dean Sicoli, my Executive Producer, “Bestie,” without you there would be no HLN Nancy Grace and I’d probably be prosecuting shoplifting cases in night court right now. Friend, forever.
And last and dearest, thank you, David. Finally I got it . . . true love. You and the twins are the joys of my life.
And my deepest thanks to my Father God and Christ, nothing can separate us from Your Love.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
The Eleventh Victim
Objection!
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction, and the events, incidents, and characters are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 Toto Holdings, LLC
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Hyperion e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2313-4
EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9781401396084
FIRST EDITION
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgments
Also by the Author
Copyright