The Eleventh Victim

by Nancy Grace

  He casually tossed off even that last part. Never would Cruise let Leonard see him the least bit affected by the idea of Old Sparky.

  No one would ever see that, see him cringe whenever he thought about the Waiting Room. Inmates were forced to stay there in the weeks before they were electrocuted. The jail said it was for security and ease of transporting the inmate.

  BS. It was to make the prisoner sit, sleep, eat, and breathe just feet away from the electric chair. To force the inmate to really think about what was coming.

  Twisted assholes.

  Cruise heard the Waiting Room was a little bigger than his regular cell on the Row.

  There was one big difference: the view.

  The view from the bunk in the Waiting Room made inmates refuse to eat, lose their appetites, lie on their sides on their bunk, turned away from the barred door. Visible through the bars of the Waiting Room doors was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, round-the-clock view of a wall covered with the wires, boxes, and levers that would ultimately activate the juice to run through your body and kill you.

  Cruise’s stomach churned just thinking of it.

  Pushing aside thoughts of Old Sparky and the sickening view from the Waiting Room, he focused instead on the matter at hand.

  “You know what, Matt? I bet the papers will listen to what I have to say.”

  Cruise watched Matt’s eyes narrow.

  Protected by the wall of glass and the knowledge that he had nothing to lose, Cruise went on, leaning in closer to the glass toward Leonard. “They’ll listen, all right, especially if I’m willing to admit to ten of the murders.”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to do that.”

  “Oh, but I do.”

  “You don’t.” Leonard’s face was paler than usual and his voice was so soft Cruise almost had to lean forward to hear it.

  “Any letter you write to the Telegraph outlining the evidence,” Leonard added in a hushed tone, “will ruin your chances of reversal.”

  That was bullshit, of course. Cruise knew there would never be a reversal. Leonard was blowing smoke up his ass, again.

  “You know what I think, Matt?” Cruise’s voice wasn’t anywhere near a whisper. “I think you don’t want the public to know the truth about what a sorry-ass attorney you really are.”

  Matt merely shrugged. But when he reached up to straighten his tie, Cruise noticed a tremor in his hand. Noticed, too, he was still twisting the same ruby ring that had his blue-blood family crest on it.

  “So,” Cruise concluded, “I just thought you should know first…about me writing the papers, giving all the details to the murders. All except the last one. And if the jury was wrong about one, who’s to say they weren’t wrong about the others? I’m even thinking of adding a claim of incompetent counsel to my federal appeal. How will that look in the paper, Matt?”

  “You son of a bitch, you can’t…”

  “There’s a lot of things I can’t do these days, Leonard. But this isn’t one of them.”

  And right there, even though he knew it wouldn’t touch him through the glass, Cruise spat right at Leonard. A big glob.

  With a curse, Leonard got up and walked away without a glance backward.

  10

  Atlanta, Georgia

  OUTSIDE C.C.’S SQUEAKY-CLEAN WINDOW ON THE TOP FLOOR OF the Judicial Building, the Atlanta skyline sparkled in the morning sun.

  C.C. gave it only a cursory glance, winced at the sunlight, and turned back to watch his new assistant close the door behind her. He contemplated her backside, the real reason he hired her if the truth be known. Now that she was done buzzing around his desk and with her rear end completely out of his view, C.C. eased a silver flask from his desk, uncapped it, and took a long pull of pure Kentucky bourbon, followed by a second.

  No mixer for him; he liked it sweet and strong, just like his daddy did. C.C. was just one step away from the governor’s office and he could feel it down in his bones, unless that warm tingle was just the bourbon, now down to nearly half a flask.

  Yes, today he’d take that final step.

  He pressed the intercom button on his phone. “Amanda?”

  The response was nearly instantaneous. “Yes, Judge?”—silky on the other end.

  “Get Eugene’s office on the phone and confirm the tee-off time, will you?”

  “Yes, Judge.” C.C. leaned back in his chair, spinning it back toward the plate-glass window.

  From here, it seemed, he could see all of Atlanta.

  Including the governor’s mansion.

  The twenty-four-thousand-square-foot redbrick Greek Revival palace sat on eighteen acres of lawn just a few miles northwest. But C.C.’s eyes never strayed from the prize. It was his legacy.

  C.C. made his living in politics just like his daddy and his granddaddy had. Their empire was built on backbreaking slave labor in the southernmost part of the state of Georgia, Dooley County. Dooley historically kept one of the lowest income levels pro rata in the entire region, just a hair above poverty level.

  But somehow the Carters, headed by Talmadge Carter, who bought the land in 1817, managed to make money hand over fist. It didn’t take long to position his son, T. Carter Jr., in the mayor’s office of the county seat, Vienna, Georgia.

  T. Carter’s grandson, Talmadge Carter III, made it to state senator. That came in awfully handy when interstate I-16 was in the works. With T. Carter’s minor adjustments to the plans submitted by the Georgia Department of Roads and Highways, the interstate—and all its motels, gas stations, 7-Elevens, and roadside fruit stands for the Yankees who didn’t know better than to pay five dollars for a nickel sack of Georgia peaches—had cut a swath directly through the old home place.

  To hell with the home place. They were multimillionaires at last, the stars were aligned, and the political power C.C. was meant for was on the cusp.

  With “family money” as a springboard, T. Carter’s great-grandson C.C. made one political deal after the next until he got the sweetest appointment of all: a spot on the Georgia Supreme Court. He had jumped from one political appointment to another like a frog jumping rock to rock on the Flint’s muddy brown water.

  Now, silk stocking attorneys across the state—even the elite Lange and Parker, a blue-blood law firm that stabled four former U.S. senators and every past mayor of the city of Atlanta—would have to kiss his redneck ass, and he knew it.

  But he felt instinctively that a judicial position did not wield sufficient political clout. He wanted more. Needed more. His legacy was more.

  It was time to make a move and make his dear, departed daddy proud.

  He spun impatiently in his chair and reached for the intercom again, but there was a knock on the door instead.

  He hurriedly stashed the flask in his top desk drawer and called out, “Come in.”

  Amanda appeared in the doorway. “I just spoke to Mr. Eugene’s assistant, Judge.”

  “And?”

  He smiled at her, the perfect campaign smile, courtesy of braces as a teenager and thousands of dollars of caps over the years. Never mind that too much Kentucky bourbon had yellowed the caps and gifted him with a bulbous nose, red-veined around the nostrils.

  Amanda smiled sweetly. “The tee-off time is set for noon, like you asked.”

  No, he didn’t like doing business on another man’s turf one tiny bit. But after weeks of trying every trick in the book to engineer a meeting with Floyd Moye Eugene—and finding that he, a Georgia Supreme Court Justice, couldn’t get even a simple phone conference with the man, much less arrange a meeting—the invitation to play a round of golf came as a surprise. It all fell into place so much more easily than C.C. had ever anticipated. Eugene was playing right into his hands.

  The support of one man was about to swing the balance for C.C. and make his political dreams come true. Floyd Moye Eugene happened to be the chairman of the Georgia State Democratic Party.

  A man after C.C.’s own heart, Eugene played the party ranks all
the way from grass roots in Columbus to the Democratic National Convention. Eugene had been the power behind every man to grace the governor’s mansion on West Paces Ferry since it had been rebuilt in 1968, and the next election would be no different.

  C.C. had done his research—or at least commissioned his willing law clerk, Jim Talley, to do it for him.

  Eugene had attended UGA just like C.C. Just like him, Eugene was a huge UGA football booster and drank Kentucky bourbon. Also like C.C., nobody knew exactly what Eugene did to make a living.

  Pulling the flask from his drawer once again, C.C. imagined they were twins.

  C.C. had dispatched his staff operatives to do whatever it took to ferret out Eugene’s weaknesses. But in the end, extensive snooping, including various political snitches in the know and the services of not one but two private investigators, uncovered not a single vice C.C. could use to his own advantage. Nothing. No drugs, no love child, no porn habit, no secret male lover he could slip a few Gs to. Nada.

  “Too bad…” C.C. thought. “A mistress. I could have at least worked with that…a mistress.” There was always hope.

  Meanwhile, Eugene worked out of offices in the Capitol, across the street from C.C. in the chambers of the Georgia Supreme Court. If he had a mistress here in Atlanta, she was well-hidden.

  Eugene’s single vice seemed to be an insatiable thirst for power. He had been relentless and merciless in his quest for control over his family, the Georgia House, Senate, even the governor himself. C.C. was an amateur when it came to power play, just a distant planet rotating around Eugene.

  How Floyd Moye Eugene had attained his power may have been a mystery, but it was now a force to be reckoned with, not bested.

  C.C. was about to enter the game with high hopes and an eye on the prize.

  Again, he spun his chair to view the city sprawled below—and not far away at all out there, the governor’s mansion, glittering in the morning sun.

  11

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  HOW LONG DID IT TAKE A PERSON TO BUY GROCERIES? VIRGINIA Gunn was starting to wonder that as she sat crouched down behind the wheel of her Jeep in the Kroger parking lot.

  She herself had spent just twenty minutes inside the store—in and out well over an hour ago with a week’s worth of organic produce, soy milk, and the all natural bread she used to make sandwiches every day for lunch.

  It was as she rolled her own full cart through the parking lot looking for her Jeep that she spotted it.

  A Volkswagen Beetle, circa 1977, badly beaten up but sporting a brand-new shiny Greenpeace bumper sticker.

  Ah. Perfect. Hardcore reconnaissance and quick deductions were in order.

  First she loaded her groceries into the back of her Jeep, then drove through the parking lot to the row behind the Beetle. From there, she could keep watch—and she had been, for over an hour.

  Damn, it was hot, even with all the windows rolled down. So hot that she was almost tempted to run the engine, just for a few minutes, with the air-conditioning on.

  Almost. But Virginia had been an eco-fighter long before Al Gore invented the Internet or starred in An Inconvenient Truth. In fact, she had some news for Al Gore. He could take his private jet and shove it straight…Damn it was hot in here!

  She smelled under her arms. Not terrible…yet.

  Come on, it’s not like you’re having heat stroke. How can you even consider burning fossil fuel and emitting all that exhaust when you’re just sitting here in a parking lot?

  She wiped a trickle of sweat from her forehead and reached for the cup in the cupholder. She had filled it with cold tap water before leaving home early this morning, and left it in the car. Now it was hot enough to steep a tea bag in, thanks to the sun glaring off the windshield.

  How she longed to get back to her house, with water views and sea breezes billowing the white sheers.

  Virginia Gunn had spent her entire life on St. Simons Island, with its magical strip of coast on either side and in between, acres of live oaks decorated by nature with low-hanging, sea-green Spanish moss.

  For hundreds of years, Georgia natives debated which was more beautiful, the ocean coast or the marshland, a hybrid formed of half-land, half-ocean, creating a unique habitat.

  The Spanish American War’s Battle of the Bloody Marsh had been waged on the southernmost tip of the Island, not far from Virginia’s childhood home. General Oglethorpe had galloped directly into the Spanish line and attacked. Her father told ghost stories about soldiers willing to die rather than give up the Island jewel, ghosts that still haunted the Bloody Marsh, where, as a child, Virginia and her friends dug up old Spanish bullets.

  Southerners also fought and died for this strip of beach at the most bitterly contested battles during the War Between the States. And Daddy personally recalled the era, during World War II, when German U-boats trolled the coastal waters. Back then, the locals, armed with shotguns, sabers, and kitchen knives, prepared to take on the hulking tubs of iron all on their own.

  Now, the unsuspecting Island faced a new threat. And like her Island ancestors, Virginia was prepared to do whatever it took to save it.

  So here she sat in the unbearably hot car, thirsty, hopefully checking out every customer emerging from the store and heading this way.

  So far, no contenders.

  The middle-aged woman in head-to-toe Lilly Pulitzer couldn’t belong to the Beetle.

  The elderly man in shorts and black dress socks couldn’t either…nor the pair of high-school boys wearing madras and loafers without socks.

  Virginia took a closer look at two women in their mid-to-late thirties, both with identically cropped early–Chris Evert hairstyles, both with gold wire-rimmed glasses and both with baggy hiking shorts. From where Virginia sat, the only physical difference between the two was that one wore Birkenstocks over white socks and the other topped her white socks with hemp-woven clogs. Pay dirt.

  Sure enough, they started loading a cart full of groceries into the Beetle.

  Virginia gratefully exited the steaming Jeep, sneaking between rows of parked cars for a few moments, then approached casually by foot. They had their heads together and were laughing, arms grazing as they put bags into the car, and Virginia deduced an intimacy indicating that they were probably more than roommates.

  “Hello, there.”

  They both looked up and offered surprised return greetings.

  “Gorgeous day, isn’t it? Do you live here on the Island?”

  Woven Clogs looked a little wary, but Birkenstocks answered, “Yes it is, and yes we do!”

  “So do I. Have for years. Not a stone’s throw from the water. You know, sometimes, before the Island got so crowded, I used to see whales breaching in the sea right from my deck!”

  Woven Clogs lost the wary expression in a hurry. “You did? That must have been amazing!”

  “Oh, it was. It was,” she said, with just the right note of bittersweet wistfulness. “They’re such beautiful creatures, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely,” Birkenstocks assured her.

  Woven Clogs asked, “Did you see that two-hour PBS special a few months ago?”

  “Which special was that?”

  “The one about an Indian tribe hunting whales once a year in the Pacific, as part of ancient Indian ritual.”

  “No, I hate that I missed it…”

  “It was the most horrific thing Renee and I have ever witnessed.” Birkenstocks tossed the last bag into the car and slammed the door hard, clearly incensed just thinking about it. “Those poor whales, savagely slaughtered, and for what?”

  “For what?” Renee echoed, shaking her short haircut, eyes solemn behind her wire-rims.

  “That’s the kind of thing that really makes a person want to stand up and take action,” Virginia said carefully. “You know…do some good to offset the bad.”

  “Oh, we did, didn’t we, Dottie?” Renee asked, nodding at her partner.

  “What did
you do?” Leaning back on the battered VW, Virginia instinctively knew—right here in the Kroger parking lot—that she had struck gold.

  “We had an epiphany, right there on our living room sofa that night after the special. We just looked at each other, and we didn’t even have to say a word. We knew what we had to do.”

  “We took two full weeks of vacation time to drive north to Alaska in the VW and stage a protest.”

  “All the way to Alaska? I’m stunned…”

  They were perfect.

  Casually, she asked Renee and Dottie, “I don’t suppose you’re free tonight? You and maybe some of your Greenpeace friends?”

  12

  New York City

  WHEN THE DOWNSTAIRS DOOR BUZZED, HAILEY GLADLY SET aside the bills she’d been paying and opened the door to meet Melissa. Standing in the doorway, she could hear footsteps flying up the stairs, could feel Melissa’s stress vibrating toward her, even before she burst into view down the hall.

  Her straight, dark hair, almost down to her waist, was windblown back from a face that had a delicate, almost childlike beauty. When the light hit her just right or she flashed a rare smile, it was especially evident. But Melissa’s nose was crooked, having been broken a few too many times—and her brown eyes were perpetually troubled and rimmed with the dark circles of chronic insomnia. “Sorry I’m late, Hailey—track trouble on the number four train.”

  “It’s okay. Come on in. Want some coffee?”

  “Definitely.”

  Hailey didn’t bother to ask her how she took it. She already knew. Black.

  Just like her outfit: black skirt, black boots, black leather jacket. Hailey wondered whether it was a fashion statement or a reflection of Melissa’s state of mind. Maybe both. It only accentuated her pale, drawn features.

  “So how are you?” she asked when she and Melissa were settled in her office—Melissa with her coffee, which Hailey noticed she clutched in both hands, as if trying to warm them. She looked so frail sitting there, like she could barely hold the mug. Hailey hoped the coffee wouldn’t slosh over the rim and burn her.