Lethally Blond (18 page)

I fell asleep in just a wife beater and panties, a book on my chest, and was jarred awake by the sound of my cell phone ringing on my bedside table. I peered at the clock as I reached for it clumsily: 12:02.

There was only silence. I felt a pinch of fear, remembering how the caller from hell liked to use silences.

“Hello,” I said again hoarsely.

And then there it was, that awful laughter I’d been subjected to before.

“Who is this?” I asked stupidly, knowing there wouldn’t be an answer. And then the caller was gone.

I scooted up in bed, my back against the headboard, feeling freaked. There’d been that same undertone of evil to the laugh. And also that same asexuality. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman.

After climbing out of bed, I paced my living room. On the two previous occasions, it had seemed as if the caller had had an uncanny sense of where I was and what a vulnerable state I’d been in, almost as if the person had been following me. And each call had come at such a consequential time. What did the call tonight mean? I wondered.

Just as I tucked myself back into bed, my cell rang again. Grabbing a breath, I answered the call. It took a second to recognize the voice: It was a Manhattan cop named Caleb Hossey, who used to give me tips regularly when I was covering crime for
Get
magazine.

“You still covering the celeb crime stuff?” he asked, chomping on food as he spoke.

“Yeah, what have you got?” I said, scooting up in bed again.

“Got a DOA in Central Park. Celebrity. I don’t know her from Adam, but a bunch of the guys here do—Locket Ford. Soap star.”

My hand flew to my mouth in shock. “Omigod. Do they have a suspect? What were the circumstances?”

“Don’t know. Might be a sexual assault or a mugging gone bad. The report just came in around eleven-thirty, and I thought of you.”

“Where was it, exactly?”

“Near the boat pond, closer to the East Side. Enter the park at Seventy-second Street and just look for the camera crews.”

I thanked him profusely for the tip. By the time I hung up, I was almost shaking. I hadn’t liked Locket one bit, but the fact that she’d been murdered was horrifying. There was a chance, this being New York, that a stranger had assaulted her as she’d walked that little powder puff pooch of hers through Central Park. But my mind immediately leapt to a more likely scenario: that someone she knew had followed her into the park and murdered her, someone who had gotten wind of the fact that she was planning to share a pivotal piece of information with the police tomorrow. I felt a surge of worry, wondering if I’d made a huge mistake in not forcing her to go to the cops immediately. The delay might have cost Locket her life.

And surely it was the
killer
who had called me. The timing was just too perfect to think otherwise. Something else gnawed at my mind, but each time I tried to grab hold, it slipped away.

I called Nash immediately on his cell phone and told him the news, as well as my suspicion that Locket’s death could be related to Tom’s.

“This is big. How soon can you get up there?”

“I’m five minutes from hailing a cab. What are the chances of getting anything in the issue?”

“I’m here now, and there’s still time to have the art department tear up the cover and put Locket’s picture on the roof. Lemme think—we can drop some of the fashion, so you’ve got at least one spread to play with, and we’ll want to move the stuff about the actor into this story. As long as we ship everything by eight in the morning, we’re okay. And of course we’re going to want to break this on the Web site.”

I threw on a pair of pants, sweater, and jacket. As I dashed from my apartment building, I glanced up and down 9th Street. Was there a chance the killer was watching me, just as I’d sensed Friday night? The street appeared nearly empty, though.

There were plenty of cabs tearing down lower Broadway, so I hailed one and had the driver turn down 8th Street and head back uptown. Chugging a Red Bull with one hand, I called Chris on my cell with the other. Not surprisingly, his voice mail picked up. There was a slim chance he knew already, that someone from the show had phoned him, but more than likely he was fast asleep and wouldn’t learn the grim news until morning. My stomach sank as I considered what a wrench Locket’s death would throw into the production of
Morgue
and how that might impact Chris’s career. Would they write her death into the show and try to salvage it? Or would they just scrap the whole show? I wanted to offer as much support as possible to Chris. I also, selfishly, wanted to find out what he knew about Locket’s last day on the face of the earth.

I had the cab let me off at East 72nd Street, near two or three TV vans with satellite dishes on their roofs. There were fewer vans than you’d expect, but the murder had gone down at an awkward time for the TV stations, when they would have already sent their crews home for the night. The ones who usually showed up at late night crime scenes were freelance camera guys who a reporter friend of mine liked to call “the ghoul squad.” Some of them even kept traffic cones and yellow police tape in the trunks of their cars so that if the cops had cleared out before they arrived, they could re-create the scene for their camera.

I entered the park and headed west. I wasn’t far from the Boathouse café where Locket and I had stopped on Sunday. Seeing the vans made me think that there’d be lots of activity in the park, but as I hurried along the rambling sidewalk scattered with leaves, I suddenly found myself alone. Ordinarily, I’d never be so stupid as to go into Central Park by myself this late, but here I was. I paused and looked around me anxiously. Get a grip, Bailey, I told myself. Far off through the trees to the left, I saw flashes of white, which I assumed were the police lights. I broke into a jog and made my way in that direction.

The scene I emerged onto had that eerie quality that crime scenes always have—the overly bright lights like a movie set and the hum of the generator overpowering the quiet of the night. Yellow police tape had been strung around a wide area, and there were a bunch of cops congregated inside—forming almost a human shield around the body. I spotted only the tiniest sliver of a white sheet up against a cluster of large bushes, yards away from the path. I winced as I thought of Locket lying there dead, that lovely white skin possibly bruised and battered. Why had she gone off the path? I wondered. Had she let the damn dog wander in the darkness? Had she been lured there by someone she knew and then strangled or bludgeoned?

The crowd rimming the yellow tape wasn’t huge—a few dog walkers, a handful of reporters, several camera crews—but it pulsed with a nervous energy. Standing on the periphery was a reporter from Channel 5, nearly sixty, who I used to bump into regularly when I was covering the crime beat for
Get
. He had once dispatched reports from the Middle East in tan safari jackets, but after losing his hair and his stamina ten or so years ago, he’d ended up as a local reporter, covering murders, water main breaks, and elderly women found dead in their apartments from heat exhaustion.

“Hey, Stan,” I called out, strolling toward him. He greeted me with his typical warm but weary smile.

“What took you so long?” he asked. Though he’d kicked the two-and-a-half-pack-a-day habit a few years back, he still had a hoarse smoker’s voice. “You don’t have access to up-to-the- minute police info at that slick little rag you work for these days?”

“No, but I can tell you what kind of shoes Nicole Richie had on tonight. So give me a fill-in, will you?”

“Well, as I guess you heard or you wouldn’t be here, it’s Locket Ford lying over there. She was apparently out walking her dog—on the late side, I’d guess—and someone nailed her. Not sure if we’re talking rape or not—the ME’s people have been in there for a while, but no one’s saying anything yet.”

“Who found her?’

“Another dog walker. Heard Locket’s dog whimpering over by the bushes and went to investigate.”

“Has her boyfriend shown up yet?”

“Alex Ottoson?” He shook his head. “My news desk says that they haven’t been able to locate him yet. That’s usually a bad sign. You know about the other death, don’t you? I wouldn’t be telling you this if you were with Channel Four, but someone else on the show got knocked off lately. Just a small-time actor, but still . . .”

“Yeah, thanks, I did hear about that,” I said vaguely. “Are the police saying they might be linked?”

“No, but our assignment editor mentioned it to me. Ironic, isn’t it—the show’s called
Morgue
?”

“Yeah, I’ll say. I’m gonna wander around a little. I’ll check back with you later, Stan.”

I pulled my reporter’s pad from my purse and moved along the border of the police tape, trying to manage a better glimpse of the body, jotting notes about the scene. I found one of the freelance photographers
Buzz
uses and arranged for him to contact the photo department about selling shots of the scene. I also approached each of the six people with dogs, thinking one of them may have been the first on the scene, but they all admitted they’d arrived only later. Suddenly, the cops reconfigured their positions inside the cordoned-off area, and I caught a full view of the body, Locket’s tiny frame draped in the death sheet, a chunk of her blond hair sticking out at the end. Seeing her body that way made me feel like puking into the bushes.

Had she died because of what she knew? If only I’d pressured her to go to the police
sooner
. I wondered if
Alex
had killed her. Locket may have decided to ’fess up to him, knowing that he might learn the truth anyway once she spoke to the police. He would have been furious to find out about Tom. But if he hadn’t known about Tom until tonight, that would mean he wasn’t
Tom’s
killer. Could there be two separate murderers? It just seemed too far-fetched.

Once again, a vague thought gnawed at my brain, but this time I finally grabbed it. When I had talked to Harper on the phone earlier, I had goaded her, implying that Tom had been involved with someone else, someone on the show. Perhaps she had known Tom had cheated, had killed him in a fight about it, but had never been exactly sure who his other lover was. I’d given her the hint she needed. And then she might have gone looking for Locket.

CHAPTER 15

F
or the next fifteen minutes nothing much happened, though more reporters arrived, as well as several additional camera crews, unshaven guys with rumpled hair who looked as if they’d been called out of bed by their news desks. The crime scene people shuffled about looking for evidence, the ME investigators poked around alongside them, and in terms of excitement, the whole thing ended up being one notch above waiting in a line at the DMV. Of course, if I was a good citizen, I would have called over one of the cops and announced that I had important information to share. But if I did that, I’d be spending the next two hours talking to the cops instead of doing my job.

Since there was a lull in the action, I called Harper. She answered on the second ring. Was that because she’d been up dealing with the horrible mess for a while now—or because she was the creator of the horrible mess?

“Yes,” she demanded, sounding wired.

“It’s Bailey. I take it you know about Locket.”

“God, don’t you ever go away?”

“I’m covering the story for
Buzz
. Can I get a statement from you?”

“It’s horrifying and sickening. There’s nothing more I can say.” Though she was wide awake, clearly she hadn’t had time yet to cook up the perfect canned statement with the people at the top, and she wasn’t seasoned enough to do a great job just winging it. Harper was probably in over her head on this one.

“What about Alex?” I asked. “I’ve heard that the police can’t find him.”

“That’s absolutely not true. He was out with friends tonight. And now he’s talking to the police in his apartment.”

“What will they do with the show? Will they have to scrap everything they’ve shot so far, or will they write Locket’s death into an upcoming episode?”

“That will all be determined over the next few days. I’ve got to go.”

“Some people are saying there’s a
Morgue
curse. What comment do you have on that?”

It was a cheap shot, but Nash might want something on the curse angle, and I didn’t want to return empty-handed.

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” she said. “There is absolutely
no
curse. This show is going to be a huge hit.” Then she disconnected. She had sounded extremely wigged out, but it was impossible for me to tell whether that was due to guilt or stress over everything that was going down.

“Who you talking to?” It was Stan behind me. I liked the guy, and he’d given me the fill-in, but I was hardly going to offer up Harper’s name and number to him.

“Just my boss. I have to file something before too long. Do you think they’ll make a statement?”

“From what I hear, not tonight. I’m probably going to pack it in myself before long. At this point there’s not much to run with, is there? Unless you know something from your end about Locket’s personal life? You get all that kind of dirt at
Buzz
, don’t you? How were things between her and this Alex Ottoson guy?”

“Locket wasn’t exactly the kind of A-lister they keep tabs on at
Buzz
. Now, if she’d been living with Jude Law, that would have been a whole different story.”

I made another sweep around the periphery, watching the cops work, eavesdropping on conversations among crews, taking a few more notes on the scene. Eventually one of the cops from the press office gave us some info “on background only.” The victim was Locket Ford. EMS pronounced her dead at 23:14. They would await the medical examiner’s cause of death at the postmort. I phoned Nash and told him I’d be coming in soon. I would have preferred to stay at the scene, just in case the cops did make a statement, but it was almost two a.m. and I needed to start writing.

As I was planning my exit, I spotted Stan with his camera crew starting to make their way from the scene, and I scurried over in that direction. I hated feeling like a scaredy-cat, but I had no interest in walking through the park alone. I followed about twenty yards behind, not so close to be obvious but close enough to feel safe. One stretch we traveled was absolutely desolate—nothing but black trees and bushes and the intermittent puddles of light from the streetlamps along the path.

When I tore into
Buzz
fifteen minutes later, there were more than a dozen people hanging around the bullpen—a deputy editor, a couple of production guys, the art director and a designer, a copyeditor/fact checker, and a few reporters. Nash spotted me immediately through his glass door and jumped from his desk.

“Bailey, get in here,” he called from his doorway. “And everyone else, too.”

We all crowded into his office, congregating near the round conference table. People seemed tense but also giddily excited. Though they were used to breaking stories that required pulling all-nighters, they generally involved celebrity breakups or DWI arrests, not homicide.

“Tell us what you’ve got, Bailey,” Nash said, shoving his reading glasses on top of his head, “and then we’ll put it all in play.”

I filled everyone in on the fairly meager details I’d learned about Locket’s death.

“That’s enough to work with,” Nash said. “We’ve got shots of the scene and plenty of pix of her.” He nodded toward one of the staff reporters. “Bethany’s done all the background on Locket. She’s writing the sidebar—and she’ll help you fill in any blanks you have about her brilliant career in soaps. I’d write long, and that’s what we’ll post on the Web site. Then we’ll trim it back for the magazine. Try to get me something in thirty or forty minutes, okay? I’m gonna work on the cover.”

I nodded, but as people hustled out of the office, I hung back.

“Why do I smell a Bailey Weggins bombshell?” Nash asked, staring me straight in the eye as I stood planted in the middle of his office.

“It’s pretty big—and it’s going to ruffle some feathers,” I told him. “On Sunday, Locket admitted to me that she had been having a fling with that young actor who was murdered, Tom Fain. She was at the house in the Catskills several hours before he was murdered.”

“Holy shit. Bethany told me Ford was living with Alex Ottoson. Do you think he found out about the affair?”

“I don’t know. If he found out, it makes him a suspect in both deaths. If he didn’t know, learning the truth in
Buzz
is going to piss him off. That’s what I mean about ruffling feathers.”

“Why would Locket Ford tell
you
what was going on?”

“Because I stumbled on some information, and I told her I’d figured it out. She was afraid that if I went around looking for proof, it would cause more problems for her than if she just ’fessed up.”

“Okay, I better get the lawyers on the phone and run all this by them. How do you see working your personal conversation with her into the piece?”

“I’ll just be very up front about it. ‘In an exclusive interview, Ford told this reporter’—that kind of thing.”

“Okay, get going. And I hope you’re ready for your close-up—because you’re going to be doing a hell of a lot of press this week.”

I grabbed a cup of coffee first, though I was pretty sure I could have survived without it: I was being powered by a high-octane mix that could have given crack cocaine a run for its money—it was a blend of agitation, grief, a fierce desire to make a mark with my story, and a big splash of fear. I’d mentally outlined my story during the cab ride to
Buzz,
so as I soon as I sat at my computer, I started writing. Though questions about the murder kept dragging at my brain—Had Alex murdered Locket because she’d confessed about Tom? Had I inadvertently goaded Harper into killing Locket?—I knew I couldn’t include them in the story, and I had to shove them aside so they didn’t slow me down.

I spent just over a half hour pounding out the article. I broke the news about Locket’s relationship with Tom right at the end of the opening paragraph and then, after offering the few known details about her death, circled back to her revelation and how it might mean the two deaths were linked.

I’d told Nash my piece was going to ruffle Alex Ottoson’s feathers. But the police were going to be bent out of shape, too. I was sharing info in my story that I hadn’t yet offered up to them. Not everything, though: I was
not
going to spill the news about Locket’s phone call to Tom and his comment about the person heading up the driveway. It would have been great to be able to include that stuff, but those details would be critical to the official investigation, and just because Locket hadn’t had the chance to go to the police with them didn’t mean I could run with the info. As soon as I had a chance today, I needed to share what I knew with them.

There were other feathers that might get ruffled, too: Chris’s. He’d brought me into this whole business as a friend, and he’d confessed his discomfort when I’d morphed into reporter. Now I was taking things one step further: I was exposing the affair, something Chris had obviously wanted to keep under wraps. That’s why he’d snatched Locket’s note to Tom. Of course, with Locket dead, there was no reason now to safeguard her privacy. I knew I’d done the right thing for my story. But I was worried Chris would feel I’d betrayed his trust. We’d literally clung to each other after Tom’s death, and I’d liked that clinging. After Chris learned what was in my piece, however, he might be pissed enough to blow me off. Maybe I should have realized that his job and my job were never going to be simpatico.

Though we had until eight to get the piece out the door, we ended up finishing before four—with the exception of the production guys, who stayed behind just in case I called in an update. Nash walked out with me, hammering out press details on his cell with someone in the PR department.

“Great news,” he said to me as he snapped his phone shut, “you’re on the seven o’clock hour of the
Today Show
.”

“The
Today Show today
?” I exclaimed, trying to keep my eyes from bugging out of my head.

“Yeah, a car will pick you up at six, so it’s probably best just to stay up. Our PR people are suggesting what they call an even-break strategy—giving the story exclusively to a few places—the
Today Show
, CNN, a few radio stations. You can crash later this morning.”

Thank God I was too wired to feel sleepy or freaked about the TV appearance. I’d done both television and radio for previous articles, and though I didn’t relish the day ahead, I knew I could handle it without breaking into a cold sweat.

Back at my place I showered, dug out a little purple suit I hadn’t worn in a year, and used about a quart of volumizer when I styled my hair. Then I plopped down on the couch with a cup of tea.

I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew I was being roused from my sleep. I’d had a dream, an ugly one. There’d been a snake in it, the size of an anaconda, and then later an interminable train ride in the darkness. I rode in a near empty car that rocked back and forth. I was filled with anxiety because I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to disembark. When a noise jarred me awake, it felt as if I were surfacing from the bottom of a lake. With a damp hand I slapped at what I thought was my alarm clock buzzing until I remembered I was on the couch, and that it was my cell phone that was going off. I fumbled for the phone and flicked it open. Chris’s number was on the screen.

“Oh, Chris, there you are,” I said hoarsely as I checked the time: 5:15. “Are you okay? I’ve been so worried about you.” What I didn’t add was that I was feeling guilty, too.

“You’ve heard, then?” he said.

“I’m covering it for
Buzz,
so I was up in the park late last night after word leaked out. This must be awful for you.”

“One of the producers just woke me and told me the news. I’ve got to see you, Bailey. This is awful. Can I come over? Needless to say, we’re not shooting today.”

“Believe it or not, I’ve got to leave here at six. But why don’t we meet in the coffee shop in my building. They’re open all night.”

“Okay, see you in ten minutes.”

After gulping down a glass of OJ, I went online and skimmed through the reports on Locket. I hadn’t missed much while I was sleeping. The police had released a sheet saying Locket had been stabbed numerous times. And that was it. A few of the news sites mentioned my report. Some had a more polished statement from Harper than the one she’d given me, and there was also a comment from a network suit, declaring that they were determining what to do with the show but that for now their thoughts were focused on Alex Ottoson and Locket’s family. Alex was reportedly sequestered in his apartment and not making any statement. Last, I checked the
Buzz
site. Already people all over America were sipping coffee and discovering the bomb I’d dropped.

Chris was already in the near-empty coffee shop when I arrived, staring gloomily into a coffee cup, his long legs stretched out sideways from the table. I felt a terrible stab when I saw how dejected he looked. He rose from the table at the sight of me, and we hugged each other tightly. It was a relief to have those arms around me. But I dreaded having to disclose to him that I’d busted the Locket-Tom affair. From his tone on the phone, I was pretty certain he hadn’t heard yet.

“I was desperate to talk to you last night, but you didn’t pick up your cell phone,” I explained as I sat down. “I wanted to tell you the news myself.”

“I had my cell phone near my bed, but I guess I didn’t hear it when you phoned last night. After I hung up with the producer, three different reporters called. God knows how they managed to get my cell phone number. There was no press outside my building this morning, but I bet it’s only a matter of time before the vultures descend in force.”

Oh boy. I was technically one of those vultures.

“This has got to be such a nightmare for you,” I said, stroking his hand.

“Yeah, I feel sick about Locket,” he said, laying his hand over mine. “
And
, I’m ashamed to admit, I’m worried about what all of this means for me and the show.”

“Don’t be ashamed, Chris. Your world got turned upside down today, and that’s a totally legitimate concern. Any inside word about what the network might do?”