Cold Day in Hell by Richard Hawke Read Free Book Online Page A

one sick, angry bastard here. And when word gets out that Ms. Burrell was found with her hand mutilated against her chest like those other two…” Gallo let the sentence hang.
    “Any more thoughts on whether it’s a copycat or if this guy actually did the Central Parkers?”
    “The answer to both those questions is maybe. But I sure as hell hope it’s the first one.” He indicated the tote bag. “I wish you could tell me he’s in there.”
    “Sorry, Joe.”
    Gallo came forward in his chair and plucked one of the e-mails from the bag. As he read it, I took a few of the other photographs and flipped through them. It was a reckless thing to do. I knew there was likely to be at least one of them that could get under my skin. There was. The wiseass crime-scene photographer had fashioned what he’d probably thought was an art shot. The photograph was taken looking down from the crown of Robin’s head as she lay on the floor. Her hairline, her eyebrows and her nose were in the foreground, slightly blurred. The focus of the shot was on the mirror fragment protruding from Robin’s neck, just above her collarbone. The photographer had angled the shot to capture the reflection of a portion of Robin’s face. This wasn’t exactly the last memory of the woman’s deep hazel eyes that I’d have preferred to hold.
    Joe Gallo finished reading the e-mail. He set it faceup on his desk, squaring it perfectly. “Suspect number one.” He made a rueful face. “So begins the glamorous side of law enforcement.”
     
6
     
    I’VE NEVER BEEN SITTING on top of the world myself, so I don’t honestly know what that’s like. For that matter, who can say that having the number-one-rated late-night show in the midnight slot and getting mountains of money thrown at you truly qualifies as “sitting on top of the world,” but that was the tag that
Time
magazine had given Marshall Fox when they’d put his grinning mug on their cover just three months before the murdered bodies of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman surfaced in Central Park a little over a week apart. Fox’s emergence on the entertainment scene three years earlier, almost literally from nowhere (“South Dakota isn’t nowhere,” Fox joked during the first week of his show, “we prefer to think of ourselves as just south of nowhere”), and his blurringly fast trajectory to stardom had made the high school dropout and former ranch hand a household name almost overnight. Fox’s particular combination of easy charm, faint naughtiness and at times downright reproachful wit struck an immediate chord with viewers. The
Time
story called it “a near-fluke-ish alchemy.”
     
One has to conjure the incongruous image of a cowboy Lenny Bruce wandering in from the heartland. Like Bruce, Mr. Fox is not one to mince his words, a trait that also lands him in the grand American populist tradition of Will Rogers or Mark Twain. But ask any female fan of Marshall Fox if she thinks either of those two venerable sagebrush sages had even a fraction of the edge or especially the sex appeal of this new kid on the block, and you’re likely as not to hear a resounding “As if!”
     
    Within months of its debut,
Midnight with Marshall Fox
was a ratings gold mine for the network. The diamond-blue eyes and the slightly damaged nose peered out from newsstands all over the country. The guy was hot goods. Even Margo, who is not one to be easily starstruck, contracted a case of Fox fever and stayed up past pumpkin time to get her dose of the man. When Fox took up with socialite beauty and celebrity heartbreaker Rosemary Boggs within a year of landing in New York and the two tied the knot a mere three months later, they were given the sort of ink once reserved for royal couples. The media could not get enough of them.
Vanity Fair
reportedly paid the Foxes over a million dollars to pose as scantily clad modern-day Antony and Cleopatra (
Cowboy & Cleopatra
) for the cover of their magazine, snakes and