Death On the Dlist (2010) (25 page)

ACTUALLY, NO, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BEG.” HAILEY’S CELL PHONE WAS
perched on top of a stack of homicide investigative reports and set on speaker mode. Hailey kept reading files but talked in the cell phone’s general direction.

“What? I can’t hear you.” Tony Russo practically yelled it into the phone. It was a good thing Hailey had her cell on speaker and, consequently, it was several inches away from her head . . . and eardrums.

“I must have the worst reception in the world. You know you’d think cell phones would give you great reception in Manhattan. I mean, it
is
the capital of the world, right? But no, instead of being the best . . . It’s absolutely the worst.”

Hailey didn’t have the energy to commiserate on the tragedy of bad cell reception. Years of dead bodies, crime scenes, and victims’ families had taught her plenty of lessons about what things were worth complaining about, and in her mind, bad cell reception wasn’t one of them.

“And this is exactly why Sookie should have thrown so much money at you that you’d have no choice but to go on the show’s payroll. That way, I wouldn’t have to beg you every time there’s a crime and justice story and we’d have you locked in. It would be your
job
, you’d
have
to come in. Then I wouldn’t be on this horrible cell phone with its horrible reception.”

Tony had talked himself in a circle and lost his train of thought. “What was I saying, anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Hailey turned a page and looked at the LA Medical examiner’s detailed drawing of the Cassie Lake murder scene.

The ME investigators typically did a diagram complete with measurements down to the foot and inch . . . the length and width of the alley, how far the car was parked from the wall, how far it was from the nearest light, details that could become important at trial.

It seemed the car could have easily been parked much farther down the alleyway so as not to have been detected so soon. The body’s evidence suggested Cassie had only been dead a few hours.

Had the killer wanted her body to be found when it was, at San Pietro’s closing time? Eleven p.m. on the West Coast? But this time, he got sloppy; he was possibly spotted, at least from behind. The best evidence would be tracking down the passenger, believed to be a white male with dark hair, five feet ten to six feet tall, based on where his head was positioned in the passenger’s seat. That was, of course, according to the busboy.

Tony piped in. “Oh, yeah. I remember. I was saying I could have sworn I heard you say I didn’t have to beg you onto the show this time.”

“Your phone is fine and so is the reception. You don’t have to beg. I am just sick about Cassie Lake. I want to address the killer directly and Harry Todd’s show, as ridiculous as I think he is, will actually give me that opportunity. I’ve got a very strong feeling the killer’s soaking in every single detail about him that hits the airwaves.”

“You’re going to send a message? To the killer? On
The
Harry Todd Show
?” Tony was thrilled, of course. His mind was racing . . . what was the best headline for the lower third of the screen to maximize its sensational appeal? Of course . . .
Message to Killer!
Short, sweet, and scary! He
loved
it!

“Yes. I am. That he will be caught and when he is, he will be looking at the California death penalty. He could get by with time behind bars as long as he stalks and murders defenseless women in New York, but California’s a whole different story. California’s not afraid to give the death penalty; it ranks right up there with Texas and Florida. So he’s made a big, big mistake. When he sees the needle, maybe he’ll remember the faces of the women he murdered and the children he left behind without a mother.”

Tony was struck. Hailey was for real. She really meant what she said and that was rare in the TV business. Now, if he could only get her to say all that on-air.

“But Tony, it’s way past time for your taping. How will you get the Lake murder on the air?”

“We’re trying to track down Noel Fryer right now. We want to go live at eleven tonight. I’ve been trying to run him down for three hours. Anyway, I can go to his number two if I have to. Really, Sookie should be dealing with this but she pushed it off on me. Probably better that way anyway. Look, where are you? Can you come now?”

“I’m at the Midtown North; I’ll grab a cab. I want to go get some coffee first.”

“Okay. See you!” They clicked off.

Hailey unfolded her coat, hat, and bag and headed toward the precinct’s old elevator. Waiting for its doors to open up and take her down to ground level, Hailey looked down at the old, tile floor. It was worn and yellowed. Oh, the stories it could tell if only it could speak . . . all the killers, thugs, and thieves this hall had seen, along with crime fighters dating back decades.

Out of the elevator, across the precinct lobby, and onto the street outside, the cold, fresh air was bracing, but it felt good after poring through the Cassie Lake case file. Hailey wanted to go for a run out in the cold night air right then and there, but she’d agreed to head across town to GNE for the late-night live shoot.

Traffic was light in the city for a change, and with the cab driver darting this way and that between cars, they pulled up at GNE headquarters in minutes. She paid the cabbie and turned toward the glass front.

There in the lobby, standing in front of the long security desk, was Tony Russo, hunched over his BlackBerry. A closer look revealed he had one BlackBerry wedged between the top of his left shoulder and his ear, his neck crooked downward to keep it in place. In both hands, he was feverishly working another one, thumbing messages with all the speed the two short inner digits could muster.

Even though he’d come down to secure her onto the set ASAP, he didn’t notice when Hailey walked in, and looked up only when Hailey touched him on the shoulder.

“Holding up okay?” She knew he’d been working nonstop putting together the Cassie live show that night. Due to the angle of his neck, Tony gave an abbreviated nod of “yes,” but didn’t stop talking into his shoulder where the BlackBerry was pinned in place. He did, however, pause to hand Hailey a two-page synopsis of the night’s show he’d left sitting beside him on top of the security desk. Hailey looked down at that night’s show guests.

Russo had managed to cobble together quite a cast of characters for the show: Cassie’s family priest; her aunt; reporters out in LA, no doubt standing by at the alleyway where she’d been murdered; Hailey to explain the investigation and criminal law; Derek Jacobs to repeatedly admonish everyone that the killer was presumed innocent; and, believe it or not, Billy Ryan, the busboy who found Cassie’s dead body.

Hailey was surprised the state’s eyewitness was telling his story before the trial, but there was no legal way to stop him. His appearance on
The
Harry Todd Show
would definitely be fodder for cross-examination at trial, much less if he sold his story to the tabloids. The tabs had been the ruin of many a Hollywood witness after they’d sold their stories or photos, having made money off a crime. Juries don’t like someone making money off murder.

Still talking to somebody on the other end about getting a satellite truck into the alley behind San Pietro’s out in LA, Tony nudged her toward the elevators and up they went. As Tony still worked the phone, trying to arrange wedging a fat satellite truck into a narrow alley behind a restaurant two thousand miles away, Hailey looked up at the two flat-screen TVs flush against the elevator’s wood-paneled walls.

At that precise moment, an ad for
The
Harry Todd Show
flashed across the screen. It showed Harry and Cassie sitting across from each other there at his desk in her last interview before her murder. Then it flashed to her singing at the end of the show, which then dissolved into a video of the alley with her car parked in it, surrounded by police, blue lights swirling atop squad cars, and yellow crime-scene tape across one end of the alleyway.

The elevator doors opened and the two made their way down a maze of hallways to a darkened control room that looked down on the
Harry Todd
set. The control room was in chaos, in preparation for the live show set to start in just over an hour. The show could be taped, making it an easy job to edit out all of Harry’s snafus. But tonight was live; they couldn’t afford any errors. A show producer was back in Harry’s dressing room at that very moment trying to tutor him on the facts as best he could. If he’d just stick to his cue cards, everything would be fine.

“Hold on just a minute, Hailey, and I’ll take you to your studio. I just need to check the banner.”

“Okay.” Hailey stood back against the wall and watched staffers rushing by, their arms full of stacks of papers, carts of video, and steaming cups of coffee. The volume in the room suddenly lowered and Hailey turned back toward one of the control room’s doors just in time to see Sookie Downs enter, arms crossed over a clipboard full of show notes she held to her chest.

She looked perfect as usual. Makeup, purple stilettos to match a deep burgundy miniskirt paired with a pale lavender silk blouse . . . it was all impeccable. Her hair, usually blown out long and perfectly trimmed, was pulled back in a sleek ponytail hanging just below her shoulders.

Sookie spotted Hailey and immediately made a path to her. “Hello, dear. How
are
you? Excited about the live show tonight?” Sookie always put the emphasis on
are
, as if speaking to someone who had been extremely ill.

Hailey extended a hand and Sookie held out her own. Looking down, Hailey spotted a thin line of dirt under all ten of Sookie’s nails. Sookie Downs . . . dirt? Did she garden? She loved plants? “Thank you for inviting me on. Sookie . . . What happened to your nails? They’re always so perfect . . . Do you garden too?” Hailey nodded toward Sookie’s nails.

Sookie looked down and smiled. “Yes, as a matter of fact I do! I was planting daisies out in back of the house. I love them. Gardening takes my mind off stories like this awful case. Poor Cassie Lake.”

“I know, I feel so bad for her children.” Hailey realized this was the first time the two had discovered a single thing in common. Gardening . . . plants . . . the outdoors . . . maybe Sookie wasn’t the plastic Barbie Hailey had first thought, after all.

“Poor things, they must be devastated.” Sookie’s tone had gone flat . . . almost bored, and at the same that she spoke, she was scanning the room. “Has anyone seen Noel? Noel Fryer? I’ve turned the building upside down looking for him. He’s always hovering when we go live, so irritating, but the one time you need him . . .”

Sookie, looking annoyed, didn’t finish the sentence, letting it just hang there. A couple of the producers looked up to shake their heads “no,” then promptly returned to what they were doing.

“Tony, quick, call GNE security. He called from home earlier. I’ll bet you anything he’s locked himself in his condo again. Let’s keep police out of it. He’s becoming a laughingstock. Let GNE security handle it. Tony, get Einst Schlager on the phone. Last I heard, he was in Bahrain installing a new security system in the palace. Good luck. Bye, Hailey, I’ll see you on the show.”

With a quick toothy smile, she turned and left through the same door she had entered. Sookie left a cloud of perfume behind her, hanging there in the control room even after the door was closed. It smelled expensive.

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE CONTROL ROOM DOOR SWUNG CLOSED
, Tony poked his head back through it and motioned to Hailey to follow him. Heading down to her tiny “studio,” he could hardly contain himself.

“Hailey, you just don’t know. Tonight is huge for us. Sookie even showed up! And she’s been AWOL with her boyfriend since the taping yesterday! When she shows up to work, you know it’s big! If we get the numbers I think we will, we may go from daytime talk to a live nightly broadcast! It’ll be huge!”

“I thought you said you were already huge.”

“And it can’t go wrong. With the interview we just did with Cassie yesterday . . . I mean, the timing! . . .”

“You told me you were already huge before,” Hailey repeated. “And that you loved daytime.”

“Oh. We
are
huge. But we can be huge-er. Can you hold this while I unlock the door?” Tony handed her a thick stack of show prep papers arranging satellites, studio times, commercial breaks timed down to the exact second, segment topics, and guests’ names and satellite locations.

He pushed the studio door open. “Here, sit there in front of the
Harry Todd
background. They’ll be in in just a few minutes to tweak your lights. Remember, Harry just
loves
it when you fight with him.”

“Right.” Hailey knew better. It was only too clear how much Harry Todd hated being challenged on-air. The only people that loved it when she contradicted the host were Tony and Sookie. They referred to it as “fireworks.”

No one ever came to adjust the lights shining up from the foot of her chair and onto her face, but Hailey heard the show’s theme music start up, and they were live, lights tweaked or not. The music melted into a long video montage of Cassie singing at various locales, then dissolved into a reporter track about the murder, and video of her Mercedes parked there in the restaurant’s back alleyway.

The montage ended with still shots of
Snoop
’s
front-page story. It had just hit the newsstands in the last hour. How they got the shot so quickly and got it on a cover was a mystery, but it was in full color, a long lens shot from a distance showing police huddled around Cassie’s Mercedes, the EMTs standing by helplessly, and Billy Ryan sitting back against the wall.

Hailey wondered briefly how the heck
Snoop
got there before the scene was even processed, but before she could finish her thought, Tony came in her ear and told her to smile.

She gave Tony a withering glare in response. There was nothing to smile about. Just at that moment, the camera flashed to her. She saw her own angry face on the camera in front of her, but before she could assume a more neutral expression, the shot of her was over. Todd threw the first question to a reporter, who gave all the details—all the details known by the public, that is.

Hailey listened carefully. She glanced down at her notes in the darkened studio. Instead of her own notes, she saw the words “Dark Chocolate” and “Intense Red Copper Shimmer.”
What?

Hailey took a second look. She still had Tony’s notes on top of her stack of research. Rather than her handwritten comments on the facts of the murder, there was a Xerox copy of a drugstore receipt for pantyhose, hand lotion, and hair dye. One look and she realized she was still holding Tony’s notes, now intermingled with her own.

At that precise moment, of course, Todd fired a question at Hailey. “Why pick a public alleyway for a murder, Hailey Dean?”

From her peripheral vision, Hailey could see her own face on the screen and responded without the benefit of any notes. “I find it highly unusual, Harry . . . highly unusual. Yes, it was a darkened alley; yes, apparently no one witnessed the crime so it was isolated to that extent, but the killer had to know the car . . . and the body of Cassie Lake . . . would be found in a matter of hours. It’s almost as if he wanted her to be found.”

So far, no one had mentioned the caliber of the bullet or the fact that the busboy told cops a dark-haired male was in the passenger seat of Cassie’s Mercedes around 8 p.m. Had those facts managed to remain known to the police only?

No. Todd then bounced from the reporter’s set-up to the busboy, who promptly blurted out there was a dark-haired man in Cassie’s car in the hours before her murder. Harry Todd didn’t dwell on the car’s passenger, apparently not digesting its import, but went straight on to ask the busboy to describe, in detail, what Cassie Lake looked like with half her face blown off.

Hailey winced. She prayed none of Cassie’s family was watching tonight. Billy Ryan, clearly coached by one of the show producers, gave a description of the dead body in graphic detail. Tony Russo must be dancing a jig in the control room right now.

The music geared up underneath the segment’s remaining conversation, and Todd looked into the camera conspiratorially and said, “When we come back, Cassie’s private, family priest is with us, a prime time exclusive!”

“Prime time exclusive? Is eleven p.m. considered prime time?” Hailey knew little about television scheduling, but was curious. It was the first question she asked into her lapel mike to Tony during the break.

“Don’t be so technical. It doesn’t matter and the viewers don’t know. You need to smile.”

“About Cassie Lake’s murder? Hey, pantyhose and lotion?” Hailey held up the receipts to the camera for Tony to see in the control room.

“It’s Sookie’s. I told you, I graduated journalism school so I could be Sookie’s errand boy. Makeup, pantyhose, aspirin, you name it . . . I’ll find it!” He said it jokingly, but Hailey knew the disappointment behind the words.

The conversation ended and Hailey could hear dead air again until the show’s theme music began playing about ninety seconds later.

Todd started the second segment of the hourlong show by engaging Cassie’s priest in a Q and A about the star’s divorce, her alcohol addiction, and her weight problems. The priest tried his best to answer diplomatically in light of the sensational nature of the questions Harry Todd was reading verbatim off his yellow cue cards. The priest wisely continued to steer the conversation back toward Cassie’s unwavering faith. Through her earpiece, Hailey could hear the control-room producers urging Todd on, trying their best to goad the priest into revealing more of Cassie’s troubles on national TV.

When the pastor wouldn’t budge, Todd turned to Hailey and asked her to compare Cassie Lake’s murder to the other murders. She gave a recitation of what had already been released to the public. She didn’t leave out a single fact, but carefully avoided citing anything she’d gleaned from police files. Hailey had a firm grasp of all the similarities, and the rest of the panel remained silent as she described the crime scenes, dates, times, and locations. She ended by pointing out the glaring difference, that the killer had struck three thousand miles away when he murdered Cassie Lake.

“Now,” she concluded, “the killer’s next step, and there will be a next step, can no longer be predicted.”

“Go to break, go to break!” She heard Tony Russo yelling it in her earpiece and the music played over more footage of Todd’s last interview with Cassie.

“Man, you know how to give a sound bite! You’re a star!” Tony blared it in her ear as soon as they were in commercial break.

His words struck her cold. She was hoping to reveal the horrible truth about violent crime, not let the perfumed, airbrushed edition be the facts of record. But to the others, it was all just sound bites and video. Hailey glanced at the red numbers on the camera’s digital clock. There were only a few minutes left in the show, two of which were a commercial and one, Todd droning on in a monologue at the end.

In the last segment, Todd went to a phoner, a high school friend of Cassie’s who hadn’t seen her in twenty years. She was absolutely irrelevant, but was apparently the best “friend” the show could dig up. The woman gave a few recollections of Cassie in high school and Harry started his monologue about the life of Cassie Lake. The show producers wisely cut him short and ended the show with a video package of Cassie set to sad, emotional music in the background.

Hailey heard the countdown in her ear, “. . . four, three, two, one, and . . . we’re out! Thank you, everyone. Great show!”