Death on the D-List

by Nancy Grace

Genres: Female Sleuths

Synopsis

The brutal slayings of a string of her patients in New York and a horrific attempt on her own life leave Hailey Dean down, but not defeated. After a yearlong respite back home in the Southland, former violent crimes prosecutor Hailey Dean finally returns to her apartment in the sky overlooking Manhattan. Hailey’s determined to rebuild a normal life and settle back into her growing practice as a therapist. But in a twist of fate, Hailey agrees to follow her heart and fight crime once again, this time in a new arena, in front of a camera! Under the hot lights of a TV studio, Hailey learns the TV industry’s not so glamorous. In fact, it’s downright deadly! Waning celebrities, all stunning actresses, each one a shining star turned has-been now struggling to get off the D-List and back into the limelight, meet with a bloody stage exit . . . murder! Hailey’s archenemy, Lieutenant Ethan Kolker, the NYPD cop who hunted Hailey down for the murders of her own patients, now wants the past forgotten and reaches out for Hailey’s help to solve the murders. In a race against the clock, Hailey has no idea that TV can be murder! In best-selling author, attorney, and TV personality Nancy Grace’s second Hailey Dean thriller, life on television is no less dangerous than life in the courtroom!

Release date: August 10, 2010

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

IT WAS ALMOST COLD OUTSIDE. BETWEEN THE COOL AIR OFF THE OCEAN AND the fact the sun set hours ago, you’d never guess it was nearly spring. The perfectly placed gravel covering the walkway around the side of the mansion crunched with each footstep. Anyone could hear it a mile away . . . if anyone had been home. But they weren’t. That was step number one, to make sure the behemoth of a house was vacant while the owners were out in Park City making a spectacle of themselves at Sundance Film Festival.

It was.

They popped up on Entertainment Tonight last night, obviously stoned, at some red-carpet event. She had starved herself down to a bag of bones with a sprayed-on orange tan, and he was showing off new blond implants that had actually turned out pretty well, dipping his head toward the camera and brushing his hair back several times during the thirty-second clip. Everybody and their brother showed up at Sundance now. All the hot, sweaty wannabes cramming every sushi bar in town, hoping to connect with the stars.

Little did they know what was going on in their pool house at the very moment they were smiling for the cameras, sucking in every last drop of attention like two big, vapid sponges. They were completely full of themselves. Constantly throwing exclusive “private parties” only the celebrity elite were invited to.

Wonder what that was like.

The crunchy bleached gravel, which upon closer inspection turned out to be tiny shells of some sort, probably shipped in from the Coast and ridiculously expensive, gave way to damp, closely manicured grass with a stepping-stone walk. Walking around the pool, blue tinted water gurgled out of a fake grotto with a secluded hot tub in the corner. Why would they pay for running this get-up when nobody was here for weeks?

Whatever. It was their water bill.

It was so true . . . If you want anything done right you just have to do it yourself. Huffing up the steps and around the side of the house, the back sliding glass door facing the pool glided open without a sound.

There she was . . . thick, dull, silver duct tape securing her wrists and ankles tightly to a chair. Her trademark blue eyes edged in smoky gray liner widened when the door opened, even though she certainly couldn’t see that far in the dim light. Nearly all the lights were out in both the guesthouse and the main estate. Thank God for Sundance.

At first she looked grateful . . . until she spotted the gun. When she saw the silencer being screwed on, she started struggling wildly against the duct tape binding her wrists.

Then, in just one flash, one sharp instant, it was all over. After all the hours, no, days of planning, calculating, scheming, and maneuvering, it was over. All that anticipation . . . Would there be pain? Sorrow? Regret? Elation? Or just simply revulsion when the trigger finally pulled and one, single bullet sliced through the gray matter of Leather Stockton’s brain.

But now, in the dead silence immediately after the deed, standing there in the darkened pool house looking down at the macabre mask of human flesh and blood and gristle atop the actress’s body . . . What a letdown.

It was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Leather’s left foot spasmed a few times, and then she was still. Okay. That was a lot quicker and easier than expected. Stockton’s whole pampered life led up to this, the zenith of her career.

She’d end up more famous for being murdered in a celeb’s pool house than she ever was for a string of mediocre TV series. It was always the same thing. Stockton lounging by a pool in a bikini. Her in an over-the-top evening gown with a plunging neckline and a push-up bra. Her with tons of eyeliner and mascara to make her blue eyes pop on camera. “Saucy primetime soaps” had been her specialty, then there was a cop drama, and something after that—it all blended together.

Lately, Leather Stockton was only famous for her spread in Playboy and for crashing her car into the front window of a McDonald’s while trying to order fries at the drive-thru. She was drunk out of her gourd of course and went straight to a $60,000-a-week “rehab” in Antigua.

Leather still looked pretty good, though. Not so much right now, of course, with her face blown open and the blood oozing down her neck and matting in her hair. But generally speaking, she was, and had always been, a looker.

This was not the time to dally. The sliding glass door clicked shut.

You could learn a lot on TV, such as how latex gloves were truly the best. Had it been touched with an ungloved hand, the thick glass on the sliding door would’ve definitely grabbed fingerprints.

Glancing at the wristwatch by the light of a glowing lawn lamp highlighting the fake grotto, it was clear there was plenty of time to make it across town to be spotted. Being seen around town as an alibi was really just the icing on the cake because by the time the morons got back from Sundance to find the decomposed mush, there would be no real way to establish a credible time line.

Fresh clothes and shoes were waiting in the car. Even the tiniest blood spatters could be picked up on a shooter’s clothes, so they’d have to be burned, and thrown in the trash off the expressway. Dumpsters behind grocery stores or fast food joints wouldn’t do. They had cameras. And nothing near those horrible freeway cameras that catch idiots cheating the tolls and so forth. That would be tough to explain.

All in all, the whole murder thing was really nothing at all.

A piece of cake.

THE FLIGHT UP FROM ATLANTA TO MANHATTAN HAD BEEN PRETTY PAINLESS. Of course, the security lines and hassle of traveling through the Atlanta airport were hell on earth, but that was a given.

Once Hailey Dean stepped off the Delta 757 and onto the jetport connecting the plane to the terminal, suddenly so much came rushing back. It had been a little over a year, but walking through LaGuardia past Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, the magazine and newspaper stands, down the escalator and to the taxi stand outdoors, it felt like she’d never left. It felt the same as before.

Before two of her favorite clients were murdered at the hands of a man who was once her courtroom adversary, a man who not only passed as an upstanding and highly successful member of the Georgia State Bar, but before that, as an Atlanta beat cop. For just a moment, Hailey felt Matt Leonard’s hands around her neck again.

Hailey shook the sensation off and moved forward a couple of steps in the taxi line. After a few minutes, the next cabbie approached and she hopped in the back seat. Although brusque as expected, he hoisted her only bag into the car trunk, slammed it shut and slid into the driver’s seat in front of her.

“Where to?” The cabbie didn’t turn around, just directed the question toward the rearview mirror.

She’d learned long ago not to speak too many words to New York cab drivers. With what was left of her Southern accent after living in Manhattan, they could hardly understand a word she said.

“Fifty-fourth Street. Manhattan.” She clipped it out short and firm. Less words to misunderstand. It all came back to her without even thinking. The cabbie said nothing, just gunned the motor as dirty-gray snow churned up from the tires and out to the sides of the car.

Hailey buckled her seatbelt and leaned back against the seat of the cab, looking out as Queens raced by outside her window. The row houses jammed together along short streets visible from the Long Island Expressway, diners, apartment buildings, billboards . . . all blended together . . . not particularly beautiful but strangely familiar and somehow reassuring despite the fact it wasn’t really her home. The Southland was home and always would be. But New York was part of her now, and she didn’t realize she missed it until she saw it and smelled it and breathed it again. In that very moment there in the back of the cab, she was glad to be back.

They exited the FDR just before the UN rose into view, turned right, and careened around the corner and lurched to a stop. Hailey gave the driver cash, declined a receipt and pulled her own bag out of the taxi’s deep trunk. Hailey always traveled light, so it wasn’t tough to yank it out and let it drop to the curb. She turned and looked all the way up to the top of her apartment building to where its roof met the sky. Way up there, thirty-one flights above, was Hailey’s cottage in the sky.

Taking the steps up as quickly as she could while pulling the bag behind her, she wondered briefly if the flowers would start up again now that she was back in Manhattan. Ever since two of her patients were brutally strangled, followed by her own false arrest for the murders, the arresting officer, Lieutenant Ethan Kolker, had tried to make amends. As best he could, anyway.

It started small with the old standby, a dozen roses. When she’d promptly had the florist pick them up as a “return,” another dozen came, and then, another. When those too were returned, more thought was put into the order. Kolker tried it all, violets, calla lilies, somehow even finding her favorites, stargazers and Cherokee roses. They too had gone straight back from whence they came, to the florist . . . every last petal.

Although they were beautiful, flowers never impressed Hailey. In fact, flowers made her feel guilty, that such beautiful creations were cut and pulled from the fields (or hothouses) where they flourished, for the fleeting whims of a human. Hailey never responded verbally or in written form to the flowers from Kolker, nor did he ever include any written apology or explanation of his thoughts.

Then came the chocolates. A succession of treats, also including no communication of regret, sorrow or epiphany, arrived and were returned as well, this time directly to Kolker’s precinct in downtown Manhattan . . . no note attached.

Kolker could always tell the boxes had been opened, then carefully repacked and returned with no comment whatsoever, always returned in the boxes in which they’d been sent, a new mailing address placed directly over Hailey’s own home address.

Sure enough, when Hailey pushed through the heavy glass revolving door into her building’s lobby, Ricky the doorman came from around the front desk to give her a big hug.

“Where you been? I missed you! Way to keep in touch . . . Not!” He ribbed her a tiny bit. Hailey had seen him graduate from college and doggedly follow his dream to become a sportscaster. She hugged him back tightly but before she could respond, he said, “And, hey! You’ve already got a package. Let me get it for you.” He bounded back behind the front desk and into a storage area behind an open side door where the doormen stashed deliveries.

This time it was a box, wrapped, as usual, in plain brown paper. One look at the handwriting and Hailey knew it was from Kolker.

“How’d he know I was coming back?”

“Who’s he? The dentist again? He didn’t give up yet?”

Ricky had no problem getting up in her business. He was referring to Adam Springhurst, the dentist who practiced in the office beneath Hailey’s down in the Village. They’d had a fleeting relationship around the time of the murders, but it left Hailey with the feeling she was cheating on Will by even considering dating again. Her heart wasn’t in it, and she disengaged as best she could, sure she came off as cold and uncaring. It was actually just the opposite: She couldn’t afford to care. It could hurt too much.

In any event, because Hailey ended up applying Adam’s dentist drill, whirring at full force, into the temple of the defense lawyer who’d stalked her and murdered her two friends, things between them had been on hold, for lack of a better term.

“No, not the dentist . . . the cop.”

“What cop? Not the one that arrested you? He’s the only cop that’s ever been here . . .”

“That’s the one. How did he know I was coming back?” she repeated the question.

His eyes got wide to display innocence. “I don’t know . . . It wasn’t me! Ask the morning shift. You know how Julio is . . . He’ll tell anything for a hundred bucks!”

“Don’t you worry, I’ll do just that.”

“Don’t tell him I told you! Hey, you need help with that box? It’s kind of big. Want me to carry it up?”

“No. Thanks, though, I can manage.” Hailey glanced at the clock sitting on the counter of the front desk. “Wait, on second thought, let me just dump my bag here. I’ve got to get across town. I’ll pick them both up tonight. You hold it for me? The box and the bag?”

“You got it, sunshine.”

Hailey turned and headed back out. She hurried down the steps and up the sidewalk to First Avenue. Looking into oncoming traffic and holding her right arm up high, Hailey quickly hailed a cab. She slid into the back seat with nothing but her purse and her pad of handwritten notes.

“West Side, Sixth Avenue and 59th.” Hailey rolled the window down to catch the breeze and the driver began inching through traffic across town to the West Side. All the television networks were there, HLN and CNN in the Time Warner Center looking down on Central Park and Columbus Circle. Fox there on the corner at Avenue of the Americas, with American flags flying out front, CBS, NBC, ABC . . . They all made their homes here.

Hailey was glad she stopped at her apartment, vacant nearly a year now. But after the murders of Hayden and Melissa, not to mention her own near-strangulation, she needed to leave the city. She wanted to go home and see the red dirt, smell the azaleas’ perfume in the air, feel the hot afternoons heavy with humidity, see her mother and father.

The apartment sat there during it all, quietly waiting for her to come back. She paid Ricky to water her plants and crack the windows an inch or two every couple of weeks. Her mail had all been forwarded to a post office box in Atlanta. Not that she ever read it. It was all bills and catalogues and flyers. She paid nearly all her bills online, and as for shopping, she’d rather be beaten with a stick than set foot in a shopping mall, much less spend her free time thumbing through a catalogue.

When she left the courtroom years before, the need for new business clothes to wear in front of juries no longer existed. No more long-sleeved black and navy dresses, black pumps, hose. In fact, she hadn’t forced herself into a pair of pantyhose in years and the clients she counseled in her psychologist’s practice would suspect something very amiss, even downright wrong, if they saw her in anything but her favorite pair of worn jeans and scuffed brown cowboy boots. Living in Manhattan where everything was cement, she’d already had the boots resoled twice, but there was no way she’d break down and buy another pair. These fit just right.

Sights and sounds of the city glided past as she looked out the backseat window. Throngs of pedestrians at every corner waiting to flood into crosswalks, vendors cooking God knows what. Hailey called it “street meat”; she never really knew what it was, but it sure smelled good. Makeshift carts selling knock-off purses, watches, pashminas, scarves, and jewelry. The big avenues going north and south, up and down. The island floated by . . . First Avenue, Second and Third, Lexington, Park, Fifth, Sixth . . . before she knew it, the cabbie hit the brakes in front of GNE, Global News and Entertainment.

With her purse on her shoulder and her notepad clutched to her chest, Hailey wove through the people milling in front of the towering skyscraper that housed GNE. She’d never been in the building before, although she’d jogged by it many times in the past en route to Central Park. She rarely detoured off her regular jogging path up and down the East River. To get to the park from the East Side required ducking through hundreds of cars, thousands of pedestrians, and way too many exhaust fumes. Whenever she did do it, however, she was always struck by the park’s beauty. The first time she ran through it forever stuck in her mind.

It was a brilliant Sunday morning and she’d been running over an hour when she unexpectedly came upon the park exit leading to the Plaza Hotel. At a distance, she saw a gold-plated statute, high up on a pedestal, shiny and glittering in the sun. It was one of the largest around. Wondering who deserved such glory, she stopped running and walked up to see it.

It turned out to be a shrine erected to William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general responsible for literally burning a wide, sweeping swath of a path through the South, including the city of Atlanta, during the Civil War. The destruction of country so beautiful—carried out not to win the war, but out of pure joy at the South’s devastation—remained a dagger in the hearts of many Southerners to the present day.

“Driver’s license, ID” An old, gray GNE security guard repeated the phrase by rote without looking up from behind a long, glossy bleached wood counter.

Fishing through the deep leather purse hanging on her shoulder, Hailey pulled out her old District Attorney’s badge, cased in a worn wallet holder. From behind the shiny gold badge, she pulled her Georgia driver’s license and held it over the counter for the guard to inspect. He took it from her hand and began copying the information down on a sign-in sheet. Looking around, Hailey noticed several well-dressed security guards strategically placed throughout the lobby. They all wore blue sports coats with gray pants, with nearly invisible earpieces in their ears.

“Hailey Dean, Hailey Dean. That name rings a bell.” He looked up at her and then lowered his glasses to peer at her over their upper rims. “Right. I remember you. I read all about you in the Post, saw you on the TV too. That nut-job lawyer almost did you in, but you got him good. Right in the head. Dentist drill, right? Man I’d like to do it to my lawyer. Made my divorce worse than the old lady did. Almost called the divorce off just to get rid of the lawyer!”

The last thing she wanted to talk about was the night she was nearly murdered. She remembered the feel of Leonard’s hair, slicked back as always, when her hand, clutching the buzzing dentist drill, slammed into his temple. She never remembered actually turning the thing on.

Funny how little details like that can bug you for the longest time.

Hailey managed a smile, telling herself the security guard’s heart was in the right place.

“Yep. Hailey Dean. Right in the head with a dentist drill. Wonder if the dentist used that drill again. He shoulda framed it. Right?”

Before Hailey had to come up with a response, she heard her name screeched out across the large expanse of the GNE lobby floor.

“Hailey! Hailey Dee-e-an! You made it! You’re so much smaller than you look on TV! I thought you were at least five feet ten! I just love it!”

IT HAD TO BE TONY RUSSO. SHE’D RECOGNIZE THAT VOICE ANYWHERE. IT had been in her ear for hours on end for months. The Jersey accent had actually grown on her, but this was the first time she could attach a face to the voice on the phone.

She had imagined someone tall, dressed in a suit, businesslike, maybe like an on-air anchor. He couldn’t be more different. Barely topping five-feet-six, he was dressed in a baggy pair of low-rider jeans working their way down. Fashion “trends” were not for everyone, and with that in mind, Hailey didn’t want to see Tony’s other side.

The show’s host, Harry Todd, was Tony’s polar opposite. Todd had to be in his late fifties despite insisting, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary, that he was only thirty. He’d undergone every plastic surgery procedure known to man and doggedly followed every trend to stay young. His current stab at youth was spiking his highlighted hair straight up in the middle, stiff with gel, like a mohawk. Ego aside, he was the undisputed star of daytime talk.

Somehow, Todd garnered a huge share of the daytime market and not only managed to hang on for nearly twenty years, but was still perceived as a ratings monster, and nobody dared suggest otherwise. GNE would go right down the crapper without Todd as the tent pole holding up the daytime numbers.

And Anthony Russo was Todd’s chief booker.

Russo booked Martha Stewart on Harry Todd straight out of jail and even got her to wear the famous green poncho she knitted behind bars. He got Brad and Angelina, and every sitting president since Reagan.

The show was executive-produced by a female power broker by the name of Sookie Downs. Downs had come up through the network and landed at the helm of the biggest daytime talk show in the industry. She ran the show with an iron fist from her mansion somewhere in the Hamptons, literally smack in the middle of an apple orchard.

Rarely making the trek into the city, she relied on her henchman, Tony Russo, to hold the show together and do her bidding. He carried a private cell phone on his hip at all times so they could stay in constant contact. Right now, Russo looked Hailey straight in the eyes. “You’re so beautiful. I had no idea! Do people just come up to you on the street and say ‘You’re beautiful’? I love it!”

Hailey gave him a hard look. Was he serious?

He looked so sincere . . . but glancing over at him as they walked side by side toward a huge, swanky bank of elevators, she noticed he had already looked away from her and was scanning the lobby of the building to see if there was anyone there he needed to glad-hand before they got on. Meaningless compliments apparently just rolled off his tongue.

Okay. She sized him up pretty quickly. He was just one of those TV types she’d always heard about, shallow, frenetic, would say or do anything to get a story. Note to self . . . Take Russo with a pinch, no . . . a box . . . of salt.

The elevator was so spacious it felt like a room, oak paneled with high-def flat-screen color TVs installed flush on either side of the doors. Pretty luxe. Both screens were tuned to GNE and were flashing shots of dead civilians on a roadside in Afghanistan. The screen quickly dissolved into four old white men in suits, in boxes like The Brady Bunch intro, politicians arguing about White House strategy.

The elevator shot smoothly up to the thirtieth floor, where they stepped off and turned right. Russo swiped another security pad built into the wall next to huge swinging glass doors. Pleasant music piped into the area just outside the elevator banks ended abruptly and Hailey could hear raised voices in the distance. Even a long corridor away from the show’s headquarters, tension was palpable. It hung in the air.

Walking along with Russo, she turned right into his office. The windows looked down onto a tiny park with cement instead of grass and some sort of statue in the center. It was surrounded by high-rises whose windows were grimy, many of them looking back vacantly, their blinds askew, suggesting they desperately needed tenants.

“Nice office, huh? I love it!”

He certainly loved a lot.

“Took me ten years, but I got the window!” I guess beauty’s in the eye of the beholder . . . Hailey managed to keep that thought to herself. He seemed so proud of his window office, she felt guilty for noticing the bleak view.

“You’ll just have to excuse me, Hailey. I don’t feel so good today. I ate at the diner across the street, and I’m pretty sure there was a hair in my eggs. I’ve felt nauseous ever since. Has that ever happened to you? You know . . . a hair in your eggs?”

“No . . . I don’t recall a hair in my eggs . . .” She could add nothing to Tony’s personal horror story.

He went on. “Yep . . . I finally got the window office. Everybody wanted it, but they gave it to me.” While Russo’s face and body were angled toward her from behind a corporate-looking desk, the same as every other desk in the building, his eyes remained glued to his computer, its lighted screen glowing dimly back onto his face.

Something on his computer screen triggered Russo to leap straight up, rolling his chair back. “Hold on . . . I gotta get a print-out right now! Don’t move! I’ll be right back!”

Racing from around his desk and out the office door, Russo left Hailey alone with the rows of TV monitors covering the walls. They were all tuned to daytime talk, and nearly every screen had a group of women sitting on a couch in front of a st. . .