Death On the Dlist (2010) (10 page)

HAILEY DEAN CROSSED THE FLOOR OF HER KITCHEN. TWENTY-PLUS STORIES
aboveground, she looked out over the Manhattan skyline from her cottage in the sky, as she called it. It was beautiful from up here. She really missed New York during the months she was back home in Atlanta.

Of course, Atlanta was beautiful, too. Everything was in bloom, the cherry blossoms, the azalea bushes, the magnolias, the tea olive growing outside her childhood bedroom in her parents’ home, the Confederate roses . . . The air was so sweet.

But there was nothing like New York. And she had to get back to her patients. Phone sessions and Skype would only go so far.

Hailey plopped down in front of the computer, booted up, and started reading the news. The national headlines were the usual, Washington politics, troops overseas, and
Prentiss Love dead
?
Single shot to the head, back alley from yoga studio, car locked from the inside, body cool to the touch, one degree below the ambient air in her SUV.

That meant her body had been there for some time. It took hours for the body temperature to drop, and then to dip below the ambient air in the body’s environment . . . plus, she had apparently been working out at something called a “hot yoga” class.

Love’s body had to be soaring hot when she came out of that. That is, if she went straight to her SUV. If she had shopped, strolled, stopped to talk to fans, especially outdoors, her temp may have already recalibrated.

The cops had their jobs cut out for them. Wonder who was on the case? Hailey preferred the hard copy of the
Post
to the online version, so she got up and walked back through the kitchen to her front door, turning on the stove as she passed by to brew a cup of tea.

Dropping a tea bag into her cup, she went on to the door. Glancing down the hall, she could see nobody else had made it out their door yet. All the papers—the
Times
, the
Post
, the
Daily News
, the
Journal
—lay neatly stacked in varied piles just at the carpeted foot of each of the eight doors surrounding her corner apartment.

Sitting on a kitchen barstool with the morning sun at her back, she unfolded the paper. On the front page was a shot of Prentiss Love, her head slumped forward in her car, cops surrounding it, wisely touching nothing, just looking at it first.

She recognized him immediately. It was Lieutenant Ethan Kolker. The lead cop on the murder cases of two of her patients. His back was to the camera, but he was the closest to Love’s body, his face turned to his left as he addressed one of the crime scene techs. Hailey hadn’t seen him since the morning she was found unconscious in the floor of a dentist’s office, drill in one hand, covered in her own blood and that of former-cop-turned-lawyer Matt Leonard.

The moment came shooting back, so vivid it was if it were happening all over again. Next thing she knew, she was looking Kolker in the eyes. Blue eyes. It was all such a blur. But she knew that he apologized. Briefly. The look in his eyes had been so full of sorrow, regret . . . and it should have been.

Kolker had pursued her relentlessly as the killer of not one, but two of her own patients . . . patients turned friends. He wouldn’t listen to a thing she said; nothing seemed to make a dent in his determination that she, Hailey Dean, had lost touch with reality and acted out a murderous fantasy on Melissa and Shannon.

Utterly ridiculous. Impossible. It was against everything she stood for . . . She’d dedicated her life to stopping violent crime after Will’s murder. Hailey was incapable of violence.

Or was she?

Not only had she killed Leonard, albeit in self-defense, she also punched Kolker in the face when he’d arrested her. Then just the other day, she literally had to fight the urge to do the same to that idiot Harry Todd, settling instead for drenching him with a pitcher of cold water on national TV.

What had happened to her impulse control?

She could shrink herself later. Right now, she settled in with her tea and skim milk to read the local version of Love’s death.

Hailey turned back to the front page. Kolker looked tired. Or was she just imagining that? It was only a profile shot. Maybe she was wrong.

Wow. Two celebs in one month. True, they were D-Listers, but still, they were stars. Both murdered with a single shot to the head, both women, both generally the same age, both murdered just about an hour’s drive apart.

Now that was a coincidence. But one thing Hailey knew from her years in the courtroom,
there is no coincidence in criminal law.

Picking up the remote control from where she left it the night before, she clicked onto GNE and immediately saw an ad for
The
Harry Todd Show
. The ad showed clips of Todd’s last interview with Love. It was just after
Celebrity Closets
had shot through the roof, dragging Love out of obscurity and back into the limelight. Todd was capitalizing on Love’s murder, of course. What did she expect?

Glancing at the digital clock on the side of the TV’s control panel, Hailey realized with a start she was late leaving. Tony Russo had called sounding distraught and insisted he had to see her in person ASAP. Judging by the tone in his voice, she’d agreed to meet him in an hour at Century Plaza just a few blocks away. Sliding into her boots, out the door of her apartment, and walking briskly, Hailey pushed through the diner’s tiny front door in less than twenty minutes.

From her seat at the front of the restaurant, Hailey looked out the window. Tony Russo was late. She picked up the diner’s copy of the
Post
. It was only when she’d sat down to open it, expecting the Prentiss Love story, that she discovered it was one of last week’s papers. The banner printed across the top of the
Post
’s cover page was in huge, bold, black letters.

“
PLASTIC FREAK
!” The headline quoted her from the set and the cover picture beneath the headline was a still-frame grab off
The
Harry Todd Show
as she threw a gallon of icy slush onto Todd’s head.

Hailey shook her head. She knew no good could possibly have come from appearing on TV. What a horrible idea.

But she still had a soft spot for Russo. He reminded her of every kid that got picked on, kicked in the lunch line, not invited to birthday parties, the odd one left standing alone when sides were choosing teams on the playground. She knew that he was the one that always got spiked first during schoolyard dodgeball.

Through the diner window, she spotted Tony get out of a cab at the corner, rush up the sidewalk, and hurry into the restaurant. His eyes scanned the room until he spotted her and came over.

“You look
amazing
!
”

Didn’t this guy have any other adjectives in his vocabulary?

“Thanks. How’s Todd? Has he dried out? I guess he’s still mad.”

“Actually no, he’s not mad at all. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. He wants to apologize for the way he treated you on the show. And it doesn’t hurt that your episode turned out to be the second highest-rated show we’ve had in two years, and that’s saying a lot!”

“Oh, really? What was the first?”

Russo glowed. “The Leather Stockton show! We had her last live, one-on-one interview, less than a year ago when she got drunk and ran her car into a storefront at a strip mall . . . Or maybe it was a McDonald’s . . . or both. Anyway, it was right after her husband gambled away all the money, you know, that investment guru . . . What’s his name?”

“I haven’t kept up with Leather Stockton’s marriage . . .” She said it with a hint of sarcasm, which was completely lost on Russo, especially when he was discussing ratings.

“Oh yeah, Kenny DePaul. Used to be a big deal on Wall Street, then turned into the financial planner to the stars. Tons of celebs lost money. Anyway, she got drunk after the husband lost all the money. Big mess. She came on to talk about booze and rehab, you know, image repair. We re-aired it the night she was murdered, patched in with the
Snoop
shots of her body being wheeled out to the ambulance on a gurney. Numbers through the roof . . .
amazing ratings
! I only wish she could die all over again! But now we’ve got Prentiss Love!”

“Congratulations, I guess . . .” Hailey didn’t know exactly what to say about Prentiss Love’s murder, on the heels of huge ratings over a dead body in a pool house. She’d read about Stockton’s murder in the papers. “Back to Stockton. Wasn’t her body found in Eric Saxton’s house in the Hamptons? Has he been cleared? He was at Sundance, right? I think I read that . . .”

“Oh yeah. It was his house all right. He wasn’t home. He had nothing to do with it, is what I hear.
Anyway,
what I wanted to talk to you about . . .”

“What can I get you two?” The waitress appeared at Hailey’s elbow.

“I’ll just have hot tea with skim and the chicken Caesar.” Hailey had had plenty of time to look at the menu waiting for Russo to show up.

“I haven’t looked at the menu, I’ll just have the same but no tea. Diet Coke for me.”

The waitress smiled at Hailey. “I read in the papers what you did to that slimy lawyer. I wish I could do the same to the one that closed on my apartment out in Queens. Right in the head, I’d give it to him. Right in the head.”

She turned on her heel and still muttering to herself, pushed through the swinging doors leading into the kitchen before Hailey could begin explaining it was self-defense. Did it matter? People believed what they wanted and they seemed pleased at the thought Hailey murdered a lawyer with a dentist’s drill. So be it.

Back to the business at hand. “So what’s so urgent you had to meet and couldn’t talk on the phone? I did what you wanted, I came on with Todd to talk about violent crime. It was awful. So what . . . He wants to sue me for throwing water on him? Bring it on. He’ll be a complete laughingstock for a lawsuit over getting wet. Plus, I could always counter-sue. Don’t start with me.”

“No! No! That’s not it at all!” Tony was alarmed at talk of a lawsuit with Hailey Dean. He knew she had a 100 percent win record as a felony prosecutor, she’d never lost a case. And that was on behalf of
other
people . . . much less if
she
were the target . . .

“No! Harry wants you back!”

Hailey couldn’t believe her ears. “Wants me
back
?
On the show? Why in the world would he want me back on? I don’t believe that for one minute. What’s going on? And don’t try to lie about it. I’m beginning to know you.”

“Okay. It’s not Harry. It’s Sookie. She wants you on. It’s the ratings. They shot up when you were on. The phone lines lit up and the e-mails poured in. We’ve gotten
tons
of viewer response.”

“But Todd hates me . . . hates everything I stand for. It was awful. Why would I do it again?”

The salads came. As the waitress turned to leave after setting the plates down between them, she said it again: “Right in the head. I’d do it if I could . . . right in the head . . .”

Hailey couldn’t summon up another denial. People seemed to love that she killed a defense lawyer. The fact she stabbed him in the side of the head with a whirring dentist’s drill only added to their joy.

“Did that waitress just spit in our food?”

“What?” Hailey had no idea what Tony was talking about.

“I think when she was talking to you, some saliva came out of her mouth. I think it landed in our food.”

Hailey tried to take it in without laughing.

“Tony. She did not spit in our food. Plus, even if saliva did actually come out of her mouth when she spoke, which I did not see at all and I was looking directly at her, she was a good three feet away from our plates.

“Even gunshot residue only travels about three feet. So if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about a little spit . . . or a sneeze coming from across a football field. And as to doing the show . . . no. Thanks, but no. I’d tell Sookie to her face, but I’ve never met her. Does she ever leave her mansion in the apple orchard and actually come into work?”

“No. She doesn’t have to. She can think much better out there than in an office. Plus, she’s got
me
to do everything for her. We talk
all day
.” He was clearly thrilled he had the ear of the powers that be.

“Plus, she’s busy. She’s just found romance again after the husband ran off with a teenager. But I can’t tell you who it is. He’s a lawyer and he’s married. You might know him.”

“I have no interest in who may or may not be dating a married lawyer. And her job sounds pretty cushy to me. Sitting in a mansion looking out the window and
thinking
all day while servants wait on you . . . Whatever . . . I guess it works
.”

“How’d you know about the servants? You know she actually makes them wear uniforms.”

“So happy to hear it. I was just guessing.”

“She’s going to be upset you won’t come on.” He sounded worried.

“Don’t care. I was upset when Todd threw Will’s murder in my face.”

“Sookie sent you flowers! Didn’t you get them?”

“BS, Tony. You did that and I know it!”

“Okay! I did send them! How did you know that? But it was
for her
; in her heart she
wanted
to!”

Hailey took a few bites of the salad, giving him a hard, long look while she chewed. Silence didn’t bother her in the least, but Russo was the type who needed to fill the void with chatter. Hailey had learned a lot this way over the years. The less you talked, the more you learned.

“Come on, please. We can make Harry behave. You
will
get the chance to push anti-crime. Sookie wants you to be a regular, to come on at least once a week for whatever story we’ve got going on. Harry does what we tell him. He doesn’t even know the topic till he gets to the studio each day. And that’s just thirty minutes before air, just enough time for hair and makeup. He couldn’t care less what we do. If he had his way, we’d do sports every night, seven days a week.”