Death On the Dlist (2010) (12 page)

She exhaled loudly for emphasis, as if someone were listening. Sookie always imagined she had an audience.

What she did for
The
Harry Todd Show.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY ON THE LINKS. THE SUN WAS SHINING, THE BREEZE
was cold but gentle, and the smell of the ocean carried from the shore all the way to the greens. Scott Anderson strode purposefully across some of the most beautiful grass the great state of New York had ever seen.

The greens and the “rough” as well were manicured to perfection by a fleet of horticulturists, landscape designers, and groundskeepers, and they all would have burst into tears to see Anderson digging his golf cleats into the tender shoots of grass as he headed uphill toward the driving range. Oblivious, Anderson continued off the hand-built path to his next lesson. He didn’t want to be late.

Anderson was finally starting lessons with Fallon Malone. Her personal assistant had been trying for months to schedule times with him, and they had actually had a few lessons planned, written in stone, but for one reason or another, Fallon always canceled or no-showed.

Normally, Scott Anderson would have refused to reschedule a lesson after a no-show, but how often did a golf pro like himself get to teach the game to a movie icon like Fallon Malone? I mean, was there anybody left in America who hadn’t seen her in the car wash scene?

She was a star. And he was going to be her golf guru. And hopefully, more than that. His good looks combined with the manners he’d picked up along the way had served him well. It was no secret Anderson loved the ladies.

It wasn’t hard. The women who took lessons from Anderson wouldn’t leave him alone. The way he saw it, he was doing them a favor.

At the top of the hill, Scott spotted a black limo outside the club house. It had to be Fallon. As soon as he got about thirty feet from the car, a burly, uniformed driver jumped out of the limo and briskly approached him.

“Can I help you, sir?” He stood, nonchalantly but menacingly between Scott and the limo.

“Hello.” Scott beamed his best and friendliest smile, known to disarm cats, dogs, and women alike. It didn’t seem to be working on the driver. He continued. “I’m the club’s golf pro, Scott Anderson. You may have heard of me, twenty-fifth at Pebble Beach three years ago? You a golfer?”

“No, sir. I am not. But I am the driver for Ms. Malone. She’s here for her lesson.” Without another word, he turned on his heel and went back to the limo, opened the back passenger side door, and out she stepped.

Long legs, just like in the movies, swung out of the back seat. The rest of her followed. She took off dark sunglasses and held her left hand up to shade her eyes from the sun. Even without the stage makeup, she was a looker.

“Hello, Mr. Anderson. I hear you’re quite the pro! I’ve simply got to learn to play some semblance of the game for a role I’ve got my eye on. But let me warn you, I’ve never swung anything but a water hose!”

“And I saw that! When you washed the Vette and you swung the hose around like a lasso at the end! You were tremendous! Obviously, I’m a big fan. I still say you were robbed at the Oscars!”

Did he say she was robbed at the Oscars?
Those were the magic words to Fallon Malone’s heart.
He loved her acting.
She beamed up at him and tossed her dark hair back behind her shoulders.

The limo driver rolled his eyes after he turned away from the two and headed back to the car.
Here she goes again.
He grimaced. He knew where this was headed. Another affair with practically a complete stranger . . . and in his limo. If he didn’t get paid so much to cart Malone around, he’d demand she and Anderson go to a hotel.

And as it turned out, the driver was right. The mutual attraction was consummated immediately following Fallon’s “coach-led analysis” to better understand her swing and reach her “full yardage potential.” The two never made it to the personal club fitting so Anderson could precisely match Fallon’s clubs to her swing. In fact, they never made it past the pro quarters adjacent to the men’s locker room.

That afternoon led to rendezvous everywhere, from Fallon’s apartment in Manhattan to Fallon’s limo to the back of the local IHOP a few miles from the club. All the meetings were surreptitious, as Anderson was not allowed to “date” anyone he instructed at the club.

Fallon’s driver predicted it. Same thing all over again . . . the gin bottles and the pantyhose in the back seat again. Gin bottles and pantyhose.

FRANCIS WAS REELING. HE PUSHED HIS DARK HAIR AWAY FROM HIS
forehead with both hands, holding them tight against either side of his head. He couldn’t take it in . . . Prentiss Love
. . . dead?

His chest pounded and his mouth went dry. He didn’t even try to fight back the tears.

The cable news networks were wall to wall with funeral plans. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. He hated them. They were totally whoring out the memory of a beautiful, delicate woman that had been one of his great loves. They were dredging up everything, harping especially on her alleged problems with drugs and alcohol, which Francis was convinced were false. Old boyfriends were dragged on and off the screen like it was a parade. Harry Todd especially liked to delve into her romantic past.

But all Prentiss’s so-called “boyfriends” turning up on TV were idiots. They didn’t know her like Francis did. If Todd had a clue, he’d contact Francis. But Francis wouldn’t talk. Not even to Harry Todd. Francis was a gentleman and always would be. He’d rather die than kiss and tell.

Sitting there in the early morning darkness of his mother’s living room, he looked down at his own two hands, stretched out over the expanse of his two knees. They sat there, seemingly innocent. They were hands more befitting a surgeon or a poet . . . maybe a musician, possibly piano or strings.

These hands could never kill Prentiss Love . . . Could they
?

True, the last week had been a big blur. He’d had “dates” with both Leather and Prentiss. The overpowering smell of the incense and candles he burned on those special nights still hung in the air. Then after that, he remembered the Jehovah’s Witnesses skulking around on the front porch. He remembered being angry at Prentiss . . . But then it all seemed to fade away.

When he headed out to Dunkin’ Donuts this morning, he found the gas tank of his mom’s car completely empty, but he had absolutely no recollection of where he’d been. The
Post
had compared the two. Prentiss shot in Manhattan, Leather out in the Hamptons.

Could he? It was Tuesday morning. GNE said so and he had no reason to believe the network was part of the government’s plan to eradicate him and others like him, those who believed in true and unfettered freedom.

If the cable network was to be believed, over two weeks had passed since his last clear recollection. Francis clicked the remote and changed channels to the
TV Guide
station.

He sat and thought, his head in his hands.
Yes,
he had to be honest, at least with himself . . . He’d had dreams of killing them . . . powerful dreams. When he’d thought Prentiss had had an affair with a guy on her show, he was devastated and yes, he’d thought of circling her beautiful neck with his hands and squeezing the life out of her. He’d had similar dreams about Leather as well . . . and other women, too. They’d often coincided with nights he’d argued with his mother. That she-devil from hell.

This was all her fault . . . if she hadn’t harangued him over the years about everything from his meds to his haircut to getting a job, he wouldn’t have had those murderous dreams or ever acted them out.

He still couldn’t take it in. How could he go through with it? True, in the dreams he’d actually enjoyed strangling the women . . . but in real life?
No way.

Francis had an idea. Rousing himself out of his chair, he checked the front porch to ensure neither the Jehovah’s Witnesses nor the Amway reps were lurking, then went out to his mother’s car. He always kept meticulous records of mileage, oil changes, you name it. In fact, he’d kept every gas receipt along with every tune-up and oil change record for the last twelve years. Same for the tires.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. Nearly two thousand additional miles were logged on the odometer. It could only mean one thing. Francis did it. He drove from here, Marksville, Louisiana, to New York and back. Obviously in a murderous haze.

Had he been drugged? He felt groggy. Maybe the government had drugged him up for some reason. S.O.B.’s. But no way he’d let the government get the best of him . . . They weren’t going to drug him up, make him commit murders, and then frame him.

No way.
Francis Merle McGinnis could certainly outthink the U.S. government.
He had to think,
and doing so, he became convinced his fingerprints would turn up on the crime scenes. The government probably knew he collected guns . . . and both Prentiss and Fallon were shot to death.

Should he hide all of them now? Was one of them the murder weapon? He could bury them in the backyard tonight. Wrap them in sheets and bury them. That’s what he would do. Bury his guns.

Was this part of their plan to frame him?

Think . . . Think!!!
He commanded his brain to work.

He was in agony. Had two of his beautiful ladies died at his own hands? The pain was almost too much for him to bear.

Tears rolled down his face. Did he himself do it? True, he’d had dreams of killing Stockton after being rebuffed, but those were just dreams, weren’t they? Plus, in his dreams he never shot her; he’d dreamed he strangled her pretty white neck, not put a bullet through her brain.

He’d never disfigure a great beauty like that.

And then, there were the flowers he’d sent Prentiss. He’d gotten a form response. She didn’t even bother to thank him herself. Was it too much effort for her to pick up a pen? And he’d paid plenty for those flowers, too.

But he didn’t really expect Prentiss to blow their secret. Their love transcended the prying minds of her assistants, agents, and all the flunkies surrounding her, much less the general public itself.

He didn’t need a handwritten thank-you. She spoke to him that night on the airwaves and thanked him from the heart. Her eyes, which appeared to be looking into the camera but were really looking at him, had melted his soul.

He would never hurt her. Not intentionally, anyway . . . the dreams were just that, dreams. No matter how vivid . . . how lifelike . . . right?

But just in case, Francis got up and headed to the kitchen. Leaning back against the kitchen sink, he studied the kitchen table. His worst fears were realized. The table was a few inches out of place, he could tell, because the table’s legs were not sitting squarely inside the four indentations they made over time into the linoleum floor beneath it. Somebody had moved the table.

Dragging the kitchen dinette from the center of the floor, he turned back to where it had sat, knelt down on the floor, and placed his right hand between two of the linoleum squares. Lifting a four-by-five-foot block of linoleum upward revealed a crawlspace dug beneath the kitchen floor.

Francis crawled down into the space and pulled the dinette back over himself and the hole in the kitchen floor. He army-crawled the five feet or so to his cache of weapons and HCBs, to get rid of potential evidence.

There were over a hundred weapons down here and he’d lost count of the amount of ammunition he’d stockpiled over the years. Then of course, there were the Homemade Chemical Bombs.

Francis took great time and care creating them and when talking to friends online, he referred to them as his “babies.” He loved them all equally, he swore when asked, but his personal favorites were the ones he’d made of toilet bowl cleaner mixed with Drano and tinfoil, poured into a screw-top Coke bottle for just the right amount of pressure. He had at least twenty-five of them already prepared, but he still wasn’t sure he was sufficiently armed for the inevitable showdown to come.

After all, look at what had happened at Waco and David Koresh. Koresh thought he was ready too, until ATF blasted up in there.

Francis pulled the thin chain attached to a single lightbulb over his head. The bulb was wired into a series of two-by-fours running from underneath the kitchen stove above to the center of the dug-out room beneath the kitchen floor.

Although everything looked untouched, just as he’d left it the last time he was down here, looking around, Francis could sense a government intruder had been in his lair. Several of the long guns were laid out, just as he’d left them, on a wooden work table he’d brought down piece by piece and assembled by the light of the single bulb overhead. Before the murders, he’d always loved coming down here at all hours of the day and night, cleaning them, keeping them all on the ready.

Between his blackout the weeks of the murders, the vivid dreams about strangling his beloveds, the odometer reading, and the obvious tampering with his gun cache, Francis knew the truth. The papers were vague about the calibers. He hardly knew where to start. Could he leave all the guns here? Would it be safe? And more important . . .
Which one was the murder weapon?

What he did for love.

EMORY DAVIS, MD, WAS ON DUTY THAT NIGHT WORKING THE GRAVEYARD
shift. He was the newest medical examiner on the roster, and obsessed with dead bodies since childhood. It didn’t win him many friends in school, but it did land him the chief intern spot, and then a full-time position at one of the busiest morgues in the country. At this hour of the night, all his youthful fantasies were fulfilled.

Over the years, Emory had graduated from dissecting flies at play school to frogs in high school biology to exploring the pulmonary and cardiovascular systems of his own, individual, aged monkey in pre-med. Then . . . the ultimate . . . he was assigned an eighty-year-old male cadaver in med school. But it all paid off for Emory. He finally made it, landing here at murder central . . . the New York County Medical Examiner’s Office.

The diener, Jimmy the morgue assistant, hoisted the body onto the table, still shrouded in the white sheet, and unobtrusively left the autopsy room, waiting just outside the swinging doors until Emory called out for him. He was a tiny man who’d worked for New York County in the morgue for decades.

It always amazed Emory how Jimmy could single-handedly maneuver even the largest of the dead, some tipping the scales at nearly three hundred pounds, but he did it. It was all in the technique. Emory figured practice made perfect.

The sheet would have to be removed extremely carefully, just in case fibers or other evidence was still attached to the body. The majority of morgues, especially the older facilities, still sported the old porcelain or even marble tables. They were charming, true, in a nostalgic sort of way, but Emory much preferred working with the sleeker, modern versions.

And here in New York County, he had the top of the line. She was a beauty. The autopsy table itself was a waist-high, cold, spotless stainless steel fixture. Not a single scratch on her . . . yet.

She was also plumbed for running water, too. Nice.

Several faucets and spigots running along the width of the table facilitated rinsing away the copious amounts of blood released during the procedure. Blood flowed by the quart, depending on the mode of death, of course, down into long, slender receptacles unobtrusively located at the edges of the table.

This particular sweetie was basically a tray, slanted for drainage. And it had slightly raised edges, preventing blood and other bodily fluids from spilling onto the floor.

Without much preamble, Davis pulled his long, dark hair into a ponytail, secured a surgeon’s cap over it, and flicked on one of the intense overhead lights above the autopsy slab. Taking a cursory look up and down the body, he inhaled deeply through his nose, breathing in the heavy smell of the woman’s bloody leotard.

Emory Davis loved his job.

Cutting through the skimpy Danskin with a surgical knife, the autopsy began. He started speaking cordially but routinely into a handheld microphone, taping for the record the COD, formally pronouncing cause of death.

“Well-nourished Caucasian female, brunette, approximately thirty to thirty-five years of age, sixty-five inches in length.”

Hmm. No personal effects like a purse with a wallet and driver’s license inside to check the date of birth. He’d have to guesstimate the age. He was usually right-on with all of it at the first guess . . . age, weight, height.

He clicked off the recorder and pulled out his measuring tape. Just to double-check. He quickly extended the yellow ribbon from the top of her head, what was left of it, to the bottom of her heel.

His first guess was right. Five-five.

It was a little game he’d created all alone back in one of the morgues where he’d interned in med school. He guessed the exact length of corpses. It was amazing the acumen you could develop after years of dead bodies.

Well-nourished was a stretch. This girl needed to eat. “Well-nourished” was a term of art to indicate that starvation was not the cause of death and that the body was within the acceptable weight parameters for height. And those parameters were wide, indeed. Emory guessed this was just another anorexic New York woman who lived off drinking Perrier and picking at salads.

“Weight, one hundred pounds.” Davis continued speaking into the handheld mike, detailing the autopsy as he went along. The overhead hot light bored into the brick-brown blood caked around the victim’s neck.

He punched a button on the side of the autopsy table, rigged with automatic scales. The digital number shone dull red. Emory smiled. Dead on . . . again. A hundred pounds on the nose.

“Single shot to the head. Near-decapitation of victim suggests to this doctor subject is the victim of homicide.”

Of course it was homicide. He’d spent nearly six months in med school in a class titled Methods and Assessment of Homicide and Suicide. Statistically speaking, no way would a white female of this age, and judging by the expensive jewelry, this income bracket, shoot herself in the face.

Maybe it was vanity or just pure instinct, but rarely did women shoot themselves, much less in the head, in order to off themselves. They usually went the pill-overdose-mixed-with-booze route, maybe gas from the car or oven; and sometimes he’d get a jumper; but shooting to the head?

Nope. It was homicide for sure.

Plus, there was the obvious trajectory, the path of the bullet or bullets.

That spoke volumes.

Emory paused to whip out the Polaroid camera from the lower shelf of the metal side table again, taking close-ups of the head wound. He had to take photos, even if a jury wouldn’t be able to discern what they were seeing amid the bloody pink tissue in the Polaroid close-up.

Suddenly he stopped. There was something familiar about this autopsy. It was like déjà vu. He’d done it before.

Of course, he’d performed literally thousands of autopsies, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t the repetitive nature of the autopsy. He suddenly had the intense sensation he’d done this exact autopsy of this exact woman before. Since Emory believed in nothing other than that proven by science, he shook it off and continued narrating.

Practically poking his nose into the woman’s skull, he observed the gunshot wound had left her left temporal lobe totally exposed. Taking a close look, Emory continued narrating into the handheld.

“Bullet entry wound is through the deceased’s cranium, left temple entry, angle front to back, direction is left to right, at a mildly lowered angle, from up to down. Bullet exiting victim’s head just below and behind right ear.”

He went back to document details of the entry wound. Carefully looking at the bullet’s entry, Emory detected stippling, the gunshot residue, and markings on the skin. He spoke again into the handheld. “Stippling noted in and around the entry wound with maroon-tinted particles, likely part of the gunshot debris.” He continued to make his way along the bullet’s path.

Emory looked intensely, barely breathing. He delicately pulled away layers of brain matter as fine as tissue paper to precisely confirm the exact trajectory path, although a look at the outside of the head normally tells all. Based simply on bullet entry and exit wound locations, here, the entry wound was a huge, gaping hole, not a clean and tidy entry at all. Emory would have to burrow further into the head to get the exact angle. Details matter.

“Neither bullet nor bullet fragmentation is observed anywhere within the brain cavity or for that matter, within the entire cranium itself.”

Wait. Without moving his head or averting his gaze to look up, Emory reached above himself and pulled down the bright retractable light hanging over the table. It was hot to the touch, and getting hotter by the moment.

There it was. Deeply embedded in brain tissue, he saw it.

A tiny, tiny metallic fragment. It had clearly splintered off upon impact with the skull. Disturbing the least amount of tissue possible, Emory reached over to the steel surgical tray he’d placed directly at his right elbow to grab a pair of tweezers.

Carefully, carefully, barely breathing, with the thin pair of tweezers, he plucked the speck of metal from her brain. Placing it in a tiny Zip Lock bag designed specifically for this purpose, Emory finally exhaled deeply, and then inhaled. The surgical smell of the room, combined with the tiniest whiff signaling the inception of human decomposition, didn’t bother Emory in the least.

He did it. Many, if not most, doctors would have missed the fragment. It was extremely important, possibly crucial to the case.

If the fragment was not damaged beyond medical and forensic use, it could be analyzed at the crime lab. Actually, Emory could pretty much call the caliber of a sliver of fragment himself, but best to leave it to the experts in ballistics at the lab.

From the sliver, caliber could be determined and possibly traced to a specific handgun if that particular handgun’s tool markings were registered in the national database.

The database, The Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), is a highly specialized computer program that compares markings on crime scene bullets to those in other cases. It accesses a database maintained by ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

IBIS would scan the bullet for markings, then run those markings against a database of known weapons to identify matches that police and crime technicians might never have identified. Who knew if there was enough bullet to get a match, but at least Emory had done his part.

Good thing he taped his narration before dedicating it to writing for the formal autopsy report. He rewound and played it back, listening to his own words. “Neither bullet nor bullet fragmentation is observed anywhere within the brain cavity or for that matter, within the entire cranium itself.”

Wrong! He re-narrated his discovery of the fragment sliver.

And to think, he actually got paid for this.

Incredible.

Just then, it hit him . . . the déjà vu . . . she was familiar all right. Emory looked at the toe tag. Holey moley.

This was Prentiss Love. He’d had a poster of her tacked up in his bedroom since he was twelve years old. Used to drive his mom crazy.

In retrospect, Emory realized it hadn’t been the poster girl, but instead it was the tacks he’d pushed into the wallpaper to secure the poster to the wall that bugged her.

His mom, God love her, had gone to great lengths to personally spend an entire weekend cutting, pasting, and hanging sports-themed wallpaper up on his walls, covered in footballs, baseballs, and basketballs. His mom had tried anything, especially encouraging sports of all types, to get him to think of something other than dissecting bugs and animals.

So when she saw the Prentiss Love poster, she was probably thrilled he was dreaming about a girl . . . any girl . . . any
thing
, actually, other than dead creatures he could dissect.

But she was proud when he walked across the stage to get that med school diploma and a handshake from the president of the university. They talked on the phone nearly every Sunday. But this time he’d have something to talk about she’d be interested in . . . not just more dead bodies and where he’d gone to dinner to tell her about.

Wow. Prentiss Love. They’d never believe this back home. Emory took another Polaroid just for good measure.