“My name is Malone,” I said. “That young woman on the couch is Tracy Jacobs. Your friend Alan tried to kill her. What I want from you is some help, in the form of a pot of hot coffee. Can you handle that, Mrs. Fox?”

“You’re a bit of a shit, aren’t you.”

“On a good day, sure. By the way, I met your friend Danny. Bit of a shit himself, isn’t he?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Do you want milk?”

Back in the living room, Megan was shivering within her quilt. She had pulled a chair up to the couch and was sitting in it, stroking Tracy Jacobs’s cheek. She looked up as I entered the room.

“Where is Ross, by the way?”

“I’ve got him locked away.”

“Locked away? Where?”

“He’s in the trunk of his car.”

“Outside?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Kind of cold out there, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

Megan laughed. Too hard, it turned out. Her shoulders began to shake, and her breath got away from her. The transition to tears was seamless. Her smile curdled, and she pulled the quilt tight around her neck. Her eyes grew large and frightened as the tears flooded down her cheeks. I took a step toward her, but she shook her head. “No.”

She doubled over in the chair and began sobbing. I came forward anyway and touched her lightly on the top of her head. You’d have thought I pushed a button. She came forward out of the chair, out of the quilt, and wrapped her thin arms around me, pressing her face into my chest, crying unashamedly. Hanging on for dear life.

55

AFTER STRANGLING Cynthia Blair and leaving her body at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, and at the last minute hitting upon the inspiration of driving a pen into her chest so as to secure her hand over her heart, Alan Ross had assumed that the authorities would immediately turn their attentions to Marshall Fox. Naturally, Fox had been questioned, but the police had been interested primarily in obtaining background information concerning Cynthia. Not once had their questions suggested any suspicion of Fox.

Although Marshall Fox had trusted Ross possibly more than anyone else he knew, his affair with Cynthia was one aspect of his personal life that he had chosen not to share with his trusted friend. Ross was privy to most of Fox’s numerous dalliances, more so than he cared to be. Marshall liked to brag. Ross had known about Nicole Rossman, although not by name. Fox had been unable to keep from boasting about some of the outrageous things he had been doing with the malleable doll-woman he had met online. In the days following Cynthia’s murder, as it became clear to Ross that the police were not including Fox on their list of top suspects, the television executive had formulated a plan. Under the guise of concern for Marshall Fox’s mental state, Ross arranged with Fox’s driver to be kept informed on the entertainer’s doings and his whereabouts. And so it was that when Nicole Rossman emerged from Fox’s building at three in the morning ten days after Cynthia Blair’s murder, she was met by none other than Alan Ross of KBS Television.

Gloria was off in Los Angeles, so Ross had no tracks to cover on that front. Getting Nikki Rossman into his car proved even easier than he’d guessed. He’d merely had to give her his credentials and tell her that he needed desperately to talk with her about Marshall. The attack took place just north of Central Park. Ross pulled to a stop near the Duke Ellington statue on 110th Street and produced a hammer. Three swift blows and Nikki Rossman was crumpled against the passenger door. Ross drove into the park, pulling off the road into a cove of trees just north of Cleopatra’s Needle. The forty seconds required to transfer Nikki’s body from the car to the base of the monument was the riskiest part of the endeavor, but Ross took the gamble and won. Using a hunting knife he would later discard, he opened up the young woman’s throat. Then he nailed her hand to her chest. Four-inch nail. Driven all the way to its head.

When Fox wasn’t arrested the very next day, Ross went ballistic.

TRACY JACOBS UNDERWENT emergency surgery at Eastern Long Island Hospital and was then transferred to Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery. My small concussion was nothing compared with the damage Alan Ross had inflicted on the actress. It was deemed highly unlikely that the doctors’ facial reconstruction efforts would eliminate all evidence of the severe beating. Word emerged almost immediately from the entertainment industry that a replacement actress for Tracy Jacobs’s role in Century City was being actively pursued.

Investigators going over Ross’s cavernous office at the network turned up what Joe Gallo referred to jokingly as “a little Nixony thing.” Ross’s office was wired to record all conversations that took place there. There were wireless microphones located at key spots throughout the office. A sound technician at the network confirmed that Ross had been a fanatic about recording every single encounter that took place in his office. This included his phone calls. All the recordings were downloaded onto Ross’s computer. Rodrigo and his IT team went to work. My chat with Ross surfaced, but Gallo wasn’t overly interested in that. He was interested in retrieving Alan Ross’s interview with Tracy Jacobs when she allegedly threatened to go to the police with her allegations of Marshall Fox’s abusive and violent tendencies. He was even more curious to hear the recordings of Tracy’s audition for Century City and Ross subsequently offering the role to her. It was no real surprise that neither of these recordings appeared to exist.

Gallo called Gloria Ross in several times and roughed her up in his gentlemanly way. She was generally cooperative. She admitted to having heeded her husband’s “urgent request” that she sign Tracy Jacobs to an Argosy contract, only half believing his story that the actress was a recent lover of Fox’s who was threatening to raise a very public stink in the media about the entertainer. To the extent that she bought her husband’s willingness to cave in to such a craven extortion scheme, Gloria had chalked it up to the pressures that Ross was under concerning Fox’s growing difficulties. During an extended period of questioning, Gallo managed to extract from Mrs. Ross her suspicions that her husband had harbored “excessively proprietary feelings” toward Marshall Fox’s producer, Cynthia Blair. When Gallo pressed her concerning any thoughts she might have had on her husband’s possible role in Cynthia’s murder, Gloria had demurred, if only slightly: “I didn’t go there. That’s all I’m going to say.”

A WEEK AFTER the final surgery, Tracy Jacobs was moved to a rehabilitation center located in Briarcliff, under five miles from Alan and Gloria Ross’s Westchester home. Gallo took the short trip north out of the city to speak to the woman. Despite the doctors’ warnings that Tracy’s memory could be compromised, the actress’s recollection of the events “that changed my life” proved intact. She told Gallo that she had indeed met with Alan Ross in his office and voiced her concerns about Marshall Fox. She told Gallo that Ross had treated her with exceptional respect and, after hearing her concerns, had pleaded gently but firmly with her not to go to the police. “As a personal favor to me” was the phrase he had used, she said, over and over again. Eventually, he had steered the conversation away from the topic and over to her career-such as it was-and had floated the offer of the audition as well as the possibility of having Tracy talk with his wife about representation. Tracy told Gallo that she’d found it peculiar that her audition the following day took place in Ross’s office and with no one else present except Ross himself. He’d set up a video camera on a tripod and given her a short script to read. He made her read the script nearly two dozen times, each time asking that she read every word with a different emphasis than she had used in the previous run-through. At one point, she said, Ross seemed to become frustrated and demanded that she read the script one word at a time. No sentences, simply word after word, as a means, he said, of getting her to loosen up.