The Eleventh Victim

by Nancy Grace

  “I’m a little better,” Melissa said. “I saw Tammy this week.”

  Tammy was her half-sister, with whom she had recently reconnected.

  “That’s really good. Did you talk?”

  “You mean…about…anything?”

  Hailey nodded. “Anything” would be Melissa’s stepfather—Tammy’s father—who had beaten and sexually abused her from the time he came into her mother’s life when Melissa was eight until she ran away at sixteen. She’d have left sooner, but she was worried about Tammy becoming the next victim.

  As far as she knew, Tammy hadn’t.

  “We just talked about this movie we both want to see, and her haircut—she got her hair cut. It looks good. She told me I should cut my hair too, but…” Melissa shook her head.

  “You like your hair long.”

  “Right.”

  The better to hide behind, Hailey knew. Melissa’s hair frequently fell over her eyes and across her cheeks, begging a hand to brush it back, but she never did.

  They’d come a long way in the two years Hailey had been treating her, but they had a long way to go. There were still sessions when Melissa would sit, silently rocking in her seat, hugging herself, lost in memories forced to the edges of her mind, examined only at great emotional cost.

  “Last week, we talked about the day you and your sister went to the church carnival,” Hailey told Melissa gently. “Do you remember? You said that your sister made you go on the Ferris wheel because she was too young to ride alone, and you were afraid, but then when you were spinning around high in the sky, with all those lights dazzling below you, you felt strong. Remember?”

  No smile, but Melissa nodded. “I remember.”

  “And it felt good to come up with that memory. Remember how happy you were?”

  Another nod, slower to come than the last. A key part of their recent sessions involved Melissa integrating happy childhood memories along with the disturbing ones.

  “Did you share the Ferris wheel memory with Tammy when you saw her?”

  “I did, but she doesn’t remember it. She doesn’t remember a lot of things.”

  Her sister, Hailey knew, had once accused Melissa of making it all up—the beatings, the sex abuse.

  It was Tammy’s way of protecting her father, or maybe protecting herself.

  But she wasn’t Hailey’s patient. Melissa was. And for all the progress they’d made, Hailey knew they had a long way to go.

  “Can you think of another happy memory?” Hailey asked. Melissa immediately shook her head, a curtain of hair covering her face.

  “Maybe something else about the carnival,” Hailey suggested. “Did you eat anything there? Cotton candy, maybe? Snow cones? I love carnival food.”

  So had Will.

  “Snow cones.” Melissa nodded slowly, a hint of recognition in faraway eyes. “We ate snow cones. I had purple, Tammy had red.”

  Instinctively leaning forward to help her patient once again delve into the past, Hailey had to acknowledge Melissa wasn’t the only one haunted by memories.

  An hour later, Nathan Mazzelli replaced Melissa in the chair opposite Hailey. Mazzelli likely needed a defense lawyer more than a shrink. Hailey kept her expression carefully neutral as he described his latest intricate, sinister nightmare.

  As always, it was about an IRS agent.

  “So there I was”—Mazz twisted a sweat-sopped Hermès bandanna in his lap—“trying to fly away from him—”

  “Fly?” Hailey interjected.

  “Yeah, in the dream, I was a housefly.”

  Interesting. A fly. She made a note on her pad as he went on. “But I saw him coming after me. Big guy, and he was wearing an incredibly plain navy suit. You know—not even pinstriped—and a white dress shirt, a white plastic ID card on his lapel.”

  Typical. In Mazz’s dreams, IRS agents were always dressed in stark contrast to Mazz’s three-thousand-dollar Armani suits and Hermès ties. Sometimes the agents even sported plastic shirt-pocket protectors neatly stuffed with multiple black-ink plastic pens.

  “Oh,” Mazz added, “and he had on a synthetic tie. Maybe polyrayon. I don’t know.”

  Judging by his expression as he delivered this piece of information, a synthetic tie was a crime worse than…

  Well, worse, as far as he was concerned, than anything Hailey suspected Nathan himself had done. He’d never actually confided anything illegal.

  In Mazz’s dreams, the agents always chased him relentlessly through confusing mazes. On foot, he ran for his life through hairpin twists and turns, secret passages and trapdoors he never knew existed in the bowels of his own building, and resurfacing in buildings of clients.

  “And did they find you behind the cabinets this time?” Hailey asked him as he wound down the narrative.

  “Nope.”

  Not yet.

  The unspoken phrase hung in the air.

  Hailey snuck a glance at the tiny clock surreptitiously placed on a shelf behind his head and realized they were out of time.

  “Looks like we’ll have to pick it up next week, Nathan,” she said, as though it were just too bad the session was over.

  “Okay, okay…by then, I’m sure I’ll have had a couple of new dreams.”

  Maybe another couple of dreams…but Hailey was willing to bet they wouldn’t be new ones.

  Hayden Krasinski was next.

  For all the months the brilliantly talented, tousled blonde graphic artist had been seeing Hailey, sessions invariably went in fits and starts, depending on her mood. She was either way high or low.

  Today, she was down. Way down.

  They sat in silence for the first five minutes.

  Then Hayden said bleakly, “I just don’t know.”

  The statement, which hadn’t even been preceded by a question from Hailey, was punctuated by a heavy sigh.

  “Hayden, why don’t you tell me about something positive that happened to you since we met last week.” Hailey tried a gentle, upbeat approach.

  “I can’t think of anything” was the prompt reply. “Not a single thing.”

  “Try.”

  Hayden sighed again and fell silent, running her right forefinger up and down the scars on her left forearm.

  Depressed, and not just over the accidental drowning deaths of her mother and kid brother two years ago, she repeatedly self-mutilated, methodically slicing horizontal grooves down her arms and along the insides of her thighs.

  “Have you written anything this week?” Hailey wasn’t giving up.

  “A poem.”

  “Do you want to share it?”

  Hayden shook her head. “No. You said to think of something positive. That wasn’t a positive poem.”

  “It’s a positive thing that you wrote it. You told me your writing is cathartic.”

  Hayden nodded, staring at her scars.

  Hailey paused before deciding to plunge ahead with an idea that had struck her the other day in the elevator of her building, where she’d run into one of her neighbors, an editor at a small publishing house.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about your poetry, Hayden, and the pieces you’ve shown me are really good.”

  Hayden looked up sharply.

  “Really, really good. And you know I’m not just saying that,” she added, reading Hayden’s mind.

  A hint of a smile lit Hayden’s pretty brown eyes, though she said nothing.

  “Maybe you could publish them.”

  “Who would want to publish them?”

  “I have a friend—she’s an editor. She’s done quite a few poetry collections featuring poems from new talent, and I’m sure she’d be willing to take a look.”

  “What if she hates them?”

  “What if she doesn’t?”

  Hayden considered that. “I don’t know,” she said heavily again, but at least this time it was relevant.

  “Think about it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Hailey smiled. “Okay.”


  At least they were making progress.

  She knew the dichotomy of Hayden would haunt her long after the workday ended. It always did.

  She jogged nearly every evening after work, alone along the East River, just as the New York skyline began to twinkle with lights against the darkening sky. The river was deep and gray and beautiful. Tugs and speedboats and huge container ships passed by under bridges that were lit up against the skyline. On days Hayden had been in, Hailey would look out over the dark waters and dwell on the patient with sharp scars marking her arms and beautiful poetry and drawings tucked into her backpack.

  Something Hayden had told her once, early in their work together, remained stubbornly stuck in Hailey’s brain.

  “I’m going to die young, like my mother,” Hayden had said, with a cryptic shrug. “Only a lot younger than she was.”

  Hailey first assumed she was suicidal, but over time, had ruled that possibility out…almost.

  “It’s just a feeling I’ve always had,” Hayden told her recently. “You know—that I’m not going to be here for very long. I just don’t belong here, I don’t fit in.”

  The feeling could very well be a symptom of her depression, but it waved a red flag. Hailey worried deeply about her between sessions and always met Hayden at her office door with relief that she had shown up again and all in one piece, dressed as always in T-shirts and worn, baggy jeans covered in ink and marker drawings, knees showing through.

  She hoped and prayed Hayden was wrong because she had a whole lot of life ahead of her. When Hayden smiled or laughed, which was rare, she lit up the room.

  They were making progress.

  13

  Atlanta, Georgia

  AS C.C. RECLAIMED HIS SEAT ON THE BENCH AFTER AN EXTENDED visit to the men’s room and tried to look serious-minded, he couldn’t help but feel the heat from Florence Teasley. Giving her a glance sideways, he saw her give him the evil eye.

  Old bat.

  She was nothing but a do-gooder who had terrorized him ever since she’d made it to the bench.

  However he voted, Teasley automatically took the opposite opinion and seemed to relish actually writing the opposing opinion herself, attacking him at every turn.

  Damn reformer.

  At case conferences, she baited him in front of the other justices, lording her own Harvard-degreed intellectualism over his self-titled “down-home Dooley County common sense.”

  But why did he need to know the law? That was what law clerks were for.

  C.C.’s main worry wasn’t Teasley’s insinuations he was not a deep legal thinker. Instead, he was deeply concerned Teasley knew he occasionally took a “nip” during oral arguments. As an arch death penalty opponent, she never missed a chance to suggest the electric chair was appropriate only for drunk drivers, and she always looked straight at him when she said it. And she always seemed to be able to smell bourbon on him, openly sniffing when he was near.

  She could probably do with a drink or two herself. Old-maid-spinster-liberal, but the only thing C.C. had ever seen her drink since she took the bench three years ago was hot water with lemon on the side. She’d sip it like it was a fine wine and damn if she didn’t eat the damn lemon peel behind it, every single time.

  He watched her go through her high-tea protocol every Thursday during the Justices’ weekly case review. It nearly made him jump out of his skin but he couldn’t drag his eyes away when she peeled the lemon off the rind with her teeth.

  Vegan lunatic.

  At last, after grueling hours of sitting on a huge leather easy chair positioned directly next to Florence Teasley and trying his best to chime in with questions occasionally, oral arguments came to a merciful end. Maybe he should just take a cue from U.S. Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas and just keep his piehole shut. Better to remain silent and let others just suspect he was in over his head than actually speak and confirm their suspicions.

  He was pretty sure Lincoln said that.

  C.C. shed his black rayon-polyester robe as fast as he could unzip it and hopped the private elevator down to LP, Lower Parking.

  Augusta National…here comes the judge!

  Then…the governor’s mansion.

  He wondered if what was left of the Allman Brothers would play at his inauguration party. Without Duane, would it even be worth it? Poor bastards.

  C.C. slipped the keys into the ignition of his midnight-blue Cadillac and cranked the music and the AC both on high.

  This was his favorite Allman Brothers CD, and even though he didn’t know all the lyrics it didn’t stop him from singing along all the way to Augusta. There, he tooled around for fifteen minutes looking for the route to the famed Augusta National Golf Course.

  At last, he was driving his Caddy down Magnolia Lane. When visitors first entered the sanctity of the world-renowned course, they took a winding route lined by deep-green Southern magnolias. Breathtaking. But C.C. wasn’t here to soak up nature.

  He was here to bag Floyd Moye Eugene.

  C.C. entered a set of tremendous gates, humming along on “Ramblin’ Man” with Duane Allman. It was virtually impossible to get on the course here, much less obtain a membership, even through bribery. C.C. had tried.

  At the guardhouse protecting the entrance, he was met by a uniformed employee who sized him up with a brisk, “Morning, sir. Name, please.”

  “Nearly afternoon, son,” C.C. observed, not taking kindly to being treated like an outsider.

  “Your name, sir?”

  The guard didn’t take the bait. He had seen it all…everybody and their great-grandmother trying to get into Augusta.

  “Judge Clarence E. Carter. I’m a guest of a longtime member, Floyd Moye Eugene.”

  “Carter…Carter…”

  You’d think he’d recognize C.C.’s name or at least the personalized plate on his car, “GAJUDGE1.”

  Between the name and the plate, he’d never been ticketed after being pulled over on traffic infractions—which happened regularly. Especially around his favorite strip club, the Pink Fuzzy. Didn’t cops have anything better to do than try to trick unsuspecting drunk drivers into an arrest? But at least the Georgia State Patrol usually managed to put two and two together and let him go with a wave and a respectful “You have a good evening now, sir.”

  But no, not the deputy dogs here at Augusta. Here, they were treating a State Supreme Court Justice just like anybody else, keeping him waiting expectantly while they took their time checking his name against a list of expected guests.

  Never mind, they’d beg him to play a few rounds here when he was Governor Clarence Carter.

  Once he made it past the gestapo Checkpoint Charlie, he continued his trip through perfectly manicured grounds.

  Time to reset his sights and wipe the sweat off his neck. With the backing of the head of the State Democratic Party, the single most powerful body in the region, the rest of the state would fall in line. Challengers would back off or be kicked to the curb without the party’s support.

  In exchange for Eugene’s support all the way to the mansion, C.C. was prepared to offer anything Eugene wanted. Thanks to a fruitless investigation of all things remotely connected to Eugene, C.C. had no idea what exactly that might be. But whatever it was, he’d get it.

  He knew he had to be subtle at first, lead him up to it. He couldn’t hit the man over the head with an offer.

  Floyd Moye Eugene was the kingmaker, and C.C. would be king.

  After parking his car, he was met by a pale, stooped, older man, slightly balding and wearing a crisp white uniform bearing the Augusta crest.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m George, and I’ll be ushering you to the clubhouse.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I can make it on over myself,” C.C. said quickly, not wanting to stand out as a mere visitor.

  “I’ll escort you,” the attendant said again, kindly, but leaving no wiggle room for C.C. to roam free.

  But as they made their way, C.C. realized
that without George at his side, he wouldn’t know where the hell to go and would really stick out as one of those who made it in riding somebody else’s coattails.

  Good thing he was perfectly decked out in the most expensive golf clothing available in the resort wear department of Saks Fifth Avenue at Phipps Plaza.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it, sir?” the man asked.

  “Perfect for eighteen holes.”

  “So I take it you play a lot…Ever been here before, sir?”

  “Oh yes…yes…many times,” C.C. lied, embarrassed that a man of his standing in the Georgia legal community had never before been invited to Augusta National—much less invited to join.

  The man chatted him up as they headed toward the clubhouse. Damn, this place was swank.

  Once inside the clubhouse, the guide discreetly disappeared.

  When C.C.’s eyes adjusted to the dark room, he scanned the whole place and could finally make out Eugene, still wearing darkened aviator sunglasses and sitting alone at a table in one of the far corners of the paneled bar.

  Damn, was C.C. that late? Eugene was nearly through with his drink.

  As he strode toward him, C.C. silently cursed the guard for the delay at the front gate. He’d see their minimum wage asses hauled into their supervisor’s office and fired.

  He put on his game face and stuck out his right hand.

  “Floyd Moye, how are you? Have I kept you waiting?” C.C. couldn’t possibly smile any wider, giving Eugene a clear view all the way back to the fillings in his wisdom teeth.

  When Eugene stood to take C.C.’s hand, his grasp was firm and cool on C.C.’s overheated palm. “No, Judge,” he said, “I’m just early. Bad habit of mine.”

  That was a lie, of course. C.C. was late. But in the South, a social faux pas such as arriving late for a tee time would never, ever be pointed out under any circumstances. That would be rude and considered an open act of hostility.

  “Judge, would you care for a drink before we hit the fairways?”

  “Sure, Floyd, not a bad way to start eighteen.”