The Eleventh Victim

by Nancy Grace

That, and I know. I know how you feel…

  But she didn’t—couldn’t—say that. Even after all these years, she never verbally acknowledged that she still suffered the same grief, the same sleepless nights, the same nearly disabling pain.

  Hanging up the telephone, Hailey spun around in her desk chair, toying with the silver Tiffany pen hanging from a black silken cord around her neck.

  She had never been attached to many of her possessions, but the pen was a gift from Katrine Dumont, whose fiancé, Phil Eastwood, had been murdered.

  It had been one of Hailey’s very first cases. The newly engaged couple—both just twenty-two, with their whole lives ahead of them—stepped out onto the patio of their apartment to sip wine and watch the sun set over Atlanta. They toasted each other and their future and were about to call their families to tell them about their upcoming wedding—but they never got the chance.

  Two brand-new parolees with heavy rap sheets ambushed them from behind a thick hedge surrounding the patio. Phil tried to fight back and was immediately gunned down at point-blank range. His fiancée was dragged into the apartment and repeatedly raped and beaten.

  To complicate matters, Katrine had been so emotionally devastated, so weak and fragile, no way could she take the stand and survive cross-exam. Without an eyewitness to the shooting, Hailey knew a guilty verdict would be nearly impossible.

  At the outset, Hailey rejected a lenient plea deal that both the defense and the trial judge, Albert Grimes, tried to push on her. A pushover on the bench, the trial judge had a reputation of always siding with defendants no matter how petty or brutal the crime, and for displaying his Harvard degree in the foyer of his chambers for all to see. After Hailey kicked back the deal Grimes had cooked up with the defense, the judge was in a foul mood at actually having to preside over a case throughout the weeks to come.

  It had been especially tough for Hailey personally, dredging up all the old memories of Will’s murder. But after a three-week presentation of evidence, the jury convicted. Hailey was exhausted and drained at the end.

  Katrine came to see her not long after, still a fragile wisp.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to testify at trial,” Katrine said, handing her a sky-blue velvet box.

  Inside was the pen, etched with the words, FOR HAILEY, SEEKING JUSTICE, KATRINE DUMONT-EASTWOOD.

  They hadn’t been married, but Katrine, Hailey learned, had officially taken his name after his death.

  “I know it sounds crazy, but in my heart, I’m his wife.”

  No. It didn’t sound crazy at all.

  For the next ten years, Hailey wore the pen hanging on a black silk cord around her neck during every jury trial and often in between.

  Now, she gazed out the window at bright lights shooting upward at Turner Stadium, slicing the dark sky. The night air hummed with cars flying past on interstate I-75.

  Just for the moment, she allowed herself to consider the eleven women, long silenced, dead in their graves.

  Hailey had studied the eight-by-ten crime scene photos, hundreds of them, at length, from every possible angle in the weeks leading up to trial, poring over each one to determine any possible probative significance she could use to State’s advantage in court.

  But tonight they haunted her, not as potential evidence at trial, but as photos of the suffering of real people. Now the media was circling the case like vultures, threatening to pick clean the bones of the women by exploiting them again, this time in sensational news accounts.

  The headlights blurred, flying by outside her window. She thought of LaSondra Williams, strangled, her slender neck marred by three long, angry scratch marks and her torso ripped open. If the papers had their way, her name…and lifestyle…would make city headlines, maybe further if the Associated Press picked up on the trial from the death-penalty angle.

  It’s the least you can do, she told herself, leaving her office and heading to the record room to start running rap sheets.

  By midnight, Hailey’s eyes were red and irritated from squinting at the computer screen.

  Fingerprints don’t lie, and they told Hailey that Leola Williams’s first baby girl, just twenty-four, was a crack hooker.

  LaSondra worked motels near the strip clubs on Stewart Avenue skirting Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the seediest piece of highway with the highest crime rate in the entire state. LaSondra was just part of the scenery outside strip bars, motels that rented rooms by the hour, and crack houses doing their business.

  And LaSondra hadn’t just been arrested. She’d been arrested over a dozen times for soliciting sex for the purpose of prostitution, pleading guilty or no contest under oath every single time.

  In addition, her record was dotted with at least a dozen other charges for pandering, minor possession of cocaine, and one conviction for spitting on an officer at the time of arrest. They were all actually petty crimes, none warranting hard time…maybe an occasional overnight in the city jail, maybe a fine.

  Hailey could see how LaSondra’s family had never known the truth.

  And what a series of mug shots. The girl was beautiful, thin, with gorgeous dark hair floating in waves down one side and pinned back on the other. But Hailey spotted telltale facial bruises on one mug shot and a gaunt, hollow-eyed searching stare in others. La Sondra was thin, all right. Cocaine thin.

  As Hailey stared at the photos in the bright, overhead lights of the records room, the girl in the picture stared right back.

  She closed her eyes to block out the image, and another face, a beautiful face with chiseled features and deep blue eyes, appeared before her. Another murder victim.

  Will.

  It happened late on a beautiful, vivid, spring afternoon, three weeks before their wedding. Countless minor details were still etched in Hailey’s memory, mundane things that unfolded in the minutes before her life was destroyed.

  She remembered hurrying down the marble steps in the university’s Psychology Department and out into the sunlight. She was elated, having just finished the last essay of her final exam for her Masters in Psychology. She’d actually finished a year early.

  Practically skipping home from campus, she burst through the door, tossing her books and her favorite coral-colored raincoat onto the scratchy plaid sofa.

  Her last thought before she turned toward the answering machine, with its blinking red light, was that she’d been wrong about the raincoat. That morning, she’d had the feeling she might need it, heedless of the forecast, but it hadn’t rained after all. It was sunny.

  The message was from Will’s sister.

  “Hailey—please call me. As soon as you can.”

  That was all there was to the message. Just nine strained words, and a click.

  Hailey’s hands shook as she reached for the receiver, fluttering over the dial like moths batting around a porch light in the dark. Instinctively, she knew.

  Will was dead.

  For months, it didn’t register. Will was murdered. Murdered in a senseless act of what the police called “random violence”—a mugging. Hailey’s beloved fiancé had taken five shots, four to the head, one to the back, over his wallet containing thirty-five dollars, credit cards, driver’s license, and a picture of her. The credit cards were thrown to the ground beside his body.

  Her world skidded to a halt.

  Nothing mattered anymore; the days, weeks, months that followed melted and blurred, one into the other. Hailey wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, went days without speaking. Then days turned into weeks.

  The clocks in her parents’ home were removed when the ticking drove her crazy, and the house stood completely quiet. It was as if time stopped along with the clocks. Her wedding dress hung in the closet and no one dared suggest she put it away. She wouldn’t pack away his clothes, his letters. Even her notebook of wedding plans sat unmoved at her bedside with the blue pen on top, as if there were more to write.

  The fresh-faced girl with the world waiti
ng for her was dead. She died alongside the man she loved on a sunny spring afternoon.

  Eight months later, the first, thick package in plain wrapping arrived, jammed into the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

  It was from the first law school that wrote her back, answering her query with an application. That single envelope started a trickle that swiftly became a torrent, triggering long nights typing essays, researching scholarships, ordering transcripts, lining up references.

  Her original plans—to teach college psychology or counsel patients in a quiet carpeted office—were out of the question, no longer even a remote option. The anger, the rage, but most of all the pain, were simply too big to fit into an antiseptic lecture hall or a muted psychologist’s office.

  One year to the day after Will’s murder and with little fanfare, Hailey loaded her belongings—including her wedding dress, delicately folded into a big white box—into her car and left her family standing in the driveway, waving good-bye until they were just a tiny snatch of color in the rearview mirror.

  Hailey opened her eyes and saw LaSondra still staring back at her.

  Stuffing the photos into the back of the trial folder, she went padding in stocking feet out of the overhead fluorescent glare and into the lamplight of her own office.

  There she dialed by heart the number for Christian Brown, managing editor of the Atlanta Telegraph, on his private office phone at his faux–Italian rococo behemoth on West Paces Ferry. His wife had dreamed it up. No children, just lifestyle.

  No way would Brown budge on headlines for the sake of one bereaved mother’s feelings in South Atlanta, but there was more than one way to skin a cat.

  “Christian, Hailey Dean. Problem.” Brown knew her well, so they dispensed with polite hellos.

  “What’s up?” He sounded sleepy.

  “Listen, I’m doing you a favor.”

  “How’s that?”

  She reached down deep…and lied. She lied for all she was worth and in great detail delivered the news of a lawsuit hatched by a few personal-injury lawyers just that afternoon after arraignments.

  “Christian, I hate to call you at home this late and on a weekend, too. But I knew you’d want to know immediately…they’re going up against the paper for twenty mill on libel, the hooker headlines on the murder case.”

  She made it up as she went along. She broke every cardinal rule of testimony on the stand, her story getting more and more elaborate.

  “They’re already sweet-talking the victims’ families one by one, meeting in their homes and showing up with all the paperwork ready to be signed.”

  Receiver wedged between shoulder and ear, she pictured the usual clientless hacks roaming the courthouse halls, nursing Styrofoam cups of coffee, belts riding low to make room for girth.

  If it were true, the suit against the Telegraph could easily pass the time while they waited for judges to hand out appointed cases to them. An appointed case was a fast three hundred bucks in exchange for a swift, easy, and unprepared guilty plea from inmates. Judges loved clearing their calendars and defense attorneys loved the three hundred dollars.

  “But my God, they were hookers!” Christian exploded, as if that would get him out of a lawsuit.

  “Yeah, if you can prove it,” she followed up, “but imagine a jury when they see eight-by-tens of eleven murdered women, then listen to their families break down in tears on the stand one after the other, including their mothers, Christian. Can you imagine? Plaintiffs will have a field day, even though they normally can’t try their way out of a paper bag. It’s over, Christian, and it hasn’t even started.”

  She knew Brown’s head was spinning as he realized he’d shot his own foot for one day’s circulation boost. Hookers in headlines always sold copy. He hadn’t bargained on a lawsuit.

  “Vultures, all of them, Christian,” she went on. “Vultures. You should have heard them. A couple million in a settlement against you makes the good life possible for them. Watch out.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he told Hailey.

  Without the least bit of guilt over the huge lie she’d just told, Hailey placed the phone back in the cradle, then immediately picked it up again.

  Rap sheets in hand, she dialed the number Leola Williams had given her.

  With a pang of hurt for the loss of Leola’s first baby girl and no mention of LaSondra’s extensive rap sheet, Hailey promised into the phone that Leola’s daughter would not be mistreated by the press. Easier said than done, but she had to try.

  “Thank you, Miss Hailey. You see that justice comes to the man who did this. You make sure he pays.”

  2

  Atlanta, Georgia

  FOR OVER TWO MONTHS, HAILEY CRUISED THE STRIP IN AN UNDERCOVER county car with Fincher behind the wheel.

  The Odd Couple—that’s what they were called around the County Courthouse. Fincher was a dark-skinned black Marine, six foot three, heavily muscled, and always packing heat hip and ankle. Hailey stood five foot one, slight, blonde, and always unarmed. Secretly, she still recoiled at the sight of handguns, ever since Will’s murder years before. Even when guns came in as evidence in murder or assault trials, she held them lightly, as if they burned her fingertips.

  After driving the streets for a while, they’d get out and go on foot from one “gentlemen’s club” to the next.

  Fincher, badging their way in at the door, flashing his gold detective’s shield, always starting by asking for the manager.

  They carried with them several huge albums of mug shots: every rapist, sex offender, Peeping Tom, obscene phone caller, and pervert booked in the city during the last four years, literally hundreds of suspects in the serial murder investigation. They were, at best, remote possibilities—but they were all Hailey and Fincher had to go on.

  Most of the hookers who danced the strip bars wouldn’t ordinarily bother to look through the photos. But since the managers didn’t want any problems with the District Attorney’s Office, they made the girls go through the book in a break room, one by one.

  That night, Hailey and Fincher interviewed nearly forty dancers, all of whom looked bored, thumbing through the album without a glint of recognition.

  Then they met Cassie.

  “I’ll look at your pictures under one condition,” she’d said shrewdly, looking from Hailey to Fincher.

  “What’s that?”

  “I want dinner. You buy.”

  “Deal.”

  The three of them went across the street to an all-night Denny’s, where Fincher and Hailey got coffee and Cassie got the works, building her own Grand Slam platter for five ninety-nine.

  From across the table, Hailey watched her switch off bites of bacon and a side order of onion rings as she thumbed through the album.

  After about twenty pages, she stopped and sank back in the booth.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, help me.” Her eyes widened and her face went pale under heavy stage makeup. She shoved her plate away, holding her right hand palm-flat to the base of her neck and reaching for her cigarettes with her left.

  Hailey instinctively flicked on the recorder inside her purse. “What is it, Cassie?”

  “It’s him.” Cassie lit a cigarette with a trembling hand, took a few puffs, then ground it into what was left of the Grand Slam. “He put his hands around my neck. He was supposed to give me a hundred dollars for a half-and-half—that’s what we call it, Hailey, when—you know.”

  “I know,” she said quickly. She’d tried enough street crime to know what a half-and-half was and didn’t need a tutorial in a booth at Denny’s.

  “Then, out of the blue, during the last half, he put his hands around my neck and choked me so hard I puked up right there on the blanket.”

  “What blanket?”

  “He put out a blue blanket in the park, down at the turnaround past the club. He got it out of his car trunk. We were supposed to just be there a little while and he promised a hundred dollars. I saw him in the club a few time
s when I was dancing, he seemed okay and the tips were always pretty good. So…I went with him.” Cassie lit up and took a long, shaky drag on a new cigarette.

  “So why did he stop?”

  “Well when I puked, he lost it, everything stopped. He got all embarrassed, said he didn’t mean to hurt me. But he did hurt me, I was trying to get at his hands and he wouldn’t…until I threw up.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He gave me the hundred dollars in tens and he dropped me back off at the club. I never saw him again. I didn’t think about it too much at the time. But you know, later that night when I got home and I was getting ready for bed, I felt inside like I had been touched by something pure evil. I know it sounds crazy, but after all the men I’ve been through, I never felt like that before.”

  Fincher looked hard at the woman across the booth. “Why didn’t you report him? If this is the right guy, you know how many women he killed? Women just like you? Eleven that we know of. And I bet there are bodies out there we never found.”

  Fincher was breathing hard and irritated. It was late and they were dead tired, but they both felt an unspoken surge that they had stumbled onto something.

  “Well what was I supposed to tell the cops…that I was turning a half-and-half out behind the club and the guy got crazy on me? That sounds like a confession to me. That kind of talk will get you ninety hours in the city jail for solicitation. Plus, the man gave me the hundred. Hell, no, I didn’t tell the police.”

  Cassie ground her cigarette into her plate beside the first butt and started collecting her things to leave. She was pissed. She hadn’t come here for a sermon. She grabbed her purse.

  Hailey couldn’t let her go, couldn’t screw this up. Too much was riding on it. She had to smooth it over.

  Because out there, somewhere, tonight maybe, he was roaming. Waiting. Looking. Every extra day Hailey spent working the case meant one more night he was free to stalk the city of Atlanta. For all she knew, he was there, outside, this very moment.

  “Fincher, go to the car and call back to the precinct. Get this guy’s rap sheet.”