The Eleventh Victim

by Nancy Grace

  His fingers throbbed, pounding with blood rushing through them, as if his heart were thrashing in his hands, not his chest. He balled them back into fists.

  No way could he let some pudgy bitch mess it all up for him.

  Why wouldn’t she just sit the hell down and get out of his vision?

  Her hips seemed to catch against the seats on either side as she passed up the aisle, dragging the bags on the floor behind her. Earphones hung around her neck, blaring music.

  Finally, she flopped into a seat two rows ahead of him to his left.

  Without moving an inch, he could see her blue-jeaned legs stretched out in front of her, the rings of leather around her two big toes to hold brown sandals in place on dusty feet.

  Her right hand rested on the chair arm and her nails were bitten down to nubs, spots of polish still on the centers.

  The thought of having to look over at her the entire ride to New York made Cruise’s teeth bite down on nothing.

  He tried to look away from the girl, but he couldn’t.

  He watched her chew down nervously on her nails, what was left of them. She absentmindedly gnawed and ingested germs, nail polish, and fingernail gristle without ever looking back at him.

  Watching made him want to hit her in the back of her head with his fist.

  Thankfully, she quit biting her nails.

  But then she started thumping her dirty feet to the beat in her headphones. Even from here, he could smell her.

  It poured out of her, oozing from the pores in her skin. She smelled of cheeseburger grease and Jergen’s white hand lotion. They had it in the kitchen at Reidsville and both smells were now physically revolting to him

  When she cocked her head to listen to the music, long, stringy brown hair fell back to reveal her neck.

  The sight of it hit him like a brick. It was totally out of place on such a thundering beast. Her neck drew him.

  Hot streaks pulsed down his arms to his hands.

  His lips parted and his eyes took on a slant. His breathing grew labored. He stared. He felt his mouth water and his body tighten against his clothes.

  Her neck.

  It was beautiful. Just the sight of it brought back the old feeling, an ache, a good ache spreading across him.

  He wondered if she would notice if he just walked by and happened to touch her neck…just once.

  Would she mind? Would she scream? Would she think it was an accident?

  She might complain to the driver. Then there’d be a confrontation.

  Would he be thrown off the bus for simply circling her neck with his fingers? Not to harm her, but more to compliment her on the one attractive part of her body?

  It would just be once, and ever so lightly…like a butterfly kiss.

  She might be flattered. How often did this grubby cow have a man admire her?

  Suddenly, she reached into a bag and dug around, peering into its bottom. She pulled out a rubber band and as he watched hungrily in the dark, she pulled the strands back into a ponytail.

  How could she not sense him, just two rows back, his body on fire?

  He was radioactive, the muscles in his thighs, calves, biceps, and forearms taut and stretched.

  His eyes bored silently into her. Only he understood the power he possessed, that his intense gaze had a magical power that sapped a woman’s strength to reject him. It was a secret power only he knew about and it radiated like a laser from his eyes, melting her, destroying her before he ever laid a hand on her, sucking her life’s energy into his own.

  Her neck was soft and white, almost glowing in the dark of the bus, and with her hair newly pulled back, it was now totally exposed to his view…all the way from the concave hollow of her throat to the delicate neck bone disappearing up into her hair.

  He was imminently more powerful than her. He was just a few feet away from her, and she had no idea of his presence.

  Without warning, she stood up, reaching into the overhead bin to pull down a stack of magazines out of her bag.

  She glanced back at him as she turned to resettle her frame into the seat, and when she did, her eyes, briefly, met his own.

  They were crystal green.

  He had only seen eyes similar to that once before…in court. His mind reeled backward…

  It was late afternoon, and Hailey Dean had leaped up from her chair and shouted Leonard down in a dueling match over an objection she just made.

  The judge ruled against her in a packed courtroom, cutting the bitch down to size. Leonard preened obviously, in his seat at counsel table, over the legal victory, and Cruise, sitting in the midst of his defense team at counsel table, joined in, letting a smile spread across his face.

  He could tell she was trying to hide her disappointment from the jury.

  Hailey turned away from the judge’s bench to go back to her seat, silently crossing the carpet to the State’s table, a thick, sturdy, oak-slabbed monster covered in papers and exhibits. Her shoulders slumped in defeat as she glanced over at the two of them. Faced with their cocky demeanor, she’d pressed her lips together in a straight slash and visibly gritted her teeth.

  After only a moment, she got up again.

  Deliberately, she’d walked to the front of the defense counsel table.

  Resting her fingers on its edge, her eyes locked directly with Cruise’s. She’d faced him head on as she stood there in front of his table, her back to the judge and jury. And for the first time since the trial started three weeks before, she smiled at Cruise.

  It was an odd smile, though, fixed, slanting up on one corner, showing no teeth.

  Crystal green eyes stared into his own, and Cruise felt a hot tingling melt down his body through his spine, into his legs and feet.

  It was then that he knew.

  He was going down for this. She was taking him down.

  He felt the rush of diarrhea and held it in only with a quick, powerful effort, his haunches tensed together.

  Now, sitting on the Greyhound, he remembered. Within seconds, the electricity drained from the rest of his body, out of the muscles across his shoulders and arms, his chest and abs, and instead, all the electricity shot to his hands. They sizzled with energy…they’d explode if he so much as brushed them against the textured fabric of his seat.

  Cruise literally pulled his eyes away from the seat diagonally ahead of him, willing himself to drag his face, chin first, away from the girl and her neck. He tucked himself completely behind the tall, cushioned seat reclined backward just a few inches in front of him.

  Eyes burning and heart thundering, he turned back toward the night whisking by outside his window.

  It physically hurt to turn away from the girl in the dark of the bus. He placed his hands, throbbing hot, against the cool of the bus window. Tall pine trees silhouetted against the lighter shade of black sky made giant figures posing in bunches, mocking him at a distance.

  Eighteen hours to New York City; he’d be there by tomorrow night.

  The next few weeks would fly by, just like he had planned night after night, locked down in a cell. All because of Hailey Dean.

  31

  New York City

  WHEN HAILEY’S CELL PHONE RANG, WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT, SHE was wide awake in bed with a book she’d been trying to read to put herself to sleep.

  She kept telling herself it was the coffee keeping her awake.

  That, and the dinner. With Adam.

  But there was something else, too. Some nagging uneasiness she somehow sensed had nothing to do with caffeine or Adam Springhurst.

  Who was calling so late? Somebody who had her cell number. She reached across her bed and down to her purse on the floor, fishing around for the cell. This late, could it be bad news from home?

  No. The caller ID displayed a local area code.

  “Hello?”

  “Hailey?”

  “Karen!”

  “I’m so sorry to call you so late, but you said to call anytime if I needed you, and�
��I do. I’m so sorry….” Karen spoke the last three words on a sob.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He has a new phone number on his speed dial, Hailey.”

  “What?”

  She didn’t have to ask who Karen was talking about. Of course it was James…again.

  “He assigned it to number one, Hailey. I’m number three—after his mother. Number one used to be his voice mail.”

  “Whose number is it now?”

  “I’m not sure. I called it, and a woman answered.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “Are you kidding? I hung up, plus I blocked my number. I looked up the area code, though, and it’s for Tallahassee. Remember when James went to that conference in Florida a few weeks ago?”

  “Yes. You think he met someone there?”

  “I know he did. And I hired a private eye to find out who she is and what’s going on.”

  Hailey gently spoke to Karen for almost fifteen minutes, working through conflicted feelings for a man she thought she loved.

  A man who now had a twenty-three-year-old pharmaceutical sales rep with long dark hair as number one on his speed dial.

  Finally, Karen yawned and said, “I’m exhausted. I think I can sleep now.”

  “I hope so. For some reason, things always seem better in the morning. It’s getting through the night, sometimes, that’s the tough part.”

  “I’m so sorry I woke you in the middle of the night, Hailey.”

  “Don’t worry. Go to sleep.”

  Hanging up the phone, she glanced at the book she’d dumped when the phone rang.

  Instead of picking it up again, she turned off the lamp and burrowed her head under the pillows.

  Like Karen, she was exhausted.

  But instinctively she realized she wouldn’t sleep in the hours ahead.

  All was not right in her world tonight. What was it?

  She didn’t know how she knew, she just did.

  32

  New York City

  AS HAILEY STEPPED OUT OF THE ELEVATOR IN THE LOBBY OF HER building on a cold February morning, Ricky, her favorite doorman, flashed a familiar grin. “Hello, Ms. Dean.”

  “How are you today, Ricky?”

  “Same as every day, just happy to be alive,” he replied. “How about you?”

  “I’m great, thanks,” she replied, same as she did every day, and their morning ritual was complete.

  She left him to his New York Post, folded so that most of the front-page headline was hidden.

  Only the last four bold black letters were visible: R-D-E-R.

  You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that the missing letters were M-U.

  Murder. Never a lack of crime to report. There was always a headline. Print reporters only had to wait overnight, the TV people got it instantly.

  She stepped out into bright winter sunlight. Nine a.m., and Second Avenue was already tangled in a honking snarl.

  She raised her arm to hail a cab headed downtown. Ordinarily, she’d start out walking the first few blocks in the morning air, but didn’t feel like it after no sleep the night before.

  She had gotten home at eleven last night to find a message from Adam.

  “Hi, Hailey. I’m leaving tomorrow morning on that ski trip, so I wanted to tell you Happy Valentine’s Day, and…I’ll see you when I get back.”

  They kept running into each other at the mailboxes in the common hallway downstairs at work.

  She had turned him down for a gallery opening they were both invited to, but he didn’t seem upset, and coincidentally, the two days she had actually left the office last week to go out for lunch, he’d shown up almost instantly at the same spot. It was just around the corner and had the best homemade soup in town, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a coincidence. They’d shared the same table and the same newspaper. It was pleasant and she couldn’t explain why, but Hailey found herself instinctively avoiding another chance meeting, staying in for lunch the rest of the week, ordering salads over the Internet that showed up twenty minutes later. Adam had appeared out of nowhere…and he’d probably disappear into nowhere the same way.

  Why, then, had she had such a hard time sleeping last night, and woken feeling troubled again today?

  Hailey felt her cell phone buzz in her pocketbook a second too late to catch the caller. Checking her messages, though, she heard her mother’s voice.

  “Hailey, your dad’s feeling so good, we’re heading down to Cumberland for a few days. We’d love you to meet us down there. We’re driving but we could pick you up at the airport. I love you, sweet girl. Let me know.” The phone clicked off.

  Cumberland Island was just off the Georgia coast, so extreme an opposite to Manhattan Island that they might as well be on different planets. Rustic and remote, with thirty miles of undisturbed Atlantic coastline, Cumberland boasted no TVs or phones, no cell pockets, no paved roads. Maybe a dozen residents, and even fewer homes and cars. Just natural beauty.

  Looking out the window of the cab, she daydreamed briefly about going back home and meeting her parents at Cumberland. A nice dream, especially this morning. A bitter wind blew off the East River.

  Hailey sat back and listened to the radio, glad it was tuned to 1010 WINS.

  “All news, all the time. Give us twenty-two minutes and we give you the world,” the radio voice promised the backseat.

  The local segment was recycling the discovery of a body. “NYPD this morning is investigating the discovery of a body at around midnight on the city’s East Side. The identity of a white female, estimated to be between twenty to thirty years old, has yet to be determined. Witnesses on the scene described her as small in stature.”

  The news announcer’s voice gave way to a taped man-on-the-street account from a male bystander with a strong New York accent.

  “We were all there when the ambulance came up, but it was too late. They covered her with a sheet and took her away.”

  Back to the announcer. “Police investigating cause of death and matching the body’s description against missing persons in an effort to identify the victim. The victim had been both stabbed and strangled, according to sources within the NYPD.”

  With that announcement, Hailey sat forward and frowned. Two causes of death? Strangulation and stabbing…that didn’t make sense….

  Strangulation suggested a “sweetheart murder,” requiring close physical contact, even a struggle between killer and victim suggestive of sex or intimacy between the two in the past, or at the time of death.

  Analyzing the MO, she lowered the window for a lungful of cold air off the East River, gazing at the glass-and-concrete landscape as the cab crept another block, approaching the United Nations.

  Police were most likely holding back information from the public to avoid jeopardizing the ultimate jury trial. Even worse, too many details to the media could spin off a copycat killer.

  1010 WINS had jumped to the weather—cold and sunny with potential for snow flurries tonight. Hailey barely noticed, still caught up in the murder of a total stranger.

  The canned news report left out crucial details and sent her mind spinning.

  Where on the East Side was the girl found? In the dark waters of the East River, where Hailey jogged every evening? Thrown from a car off the FDR? Dumped in an open area—if there was such a thing in this city? Or was she stabbed and strangled right there where she was found? If so, the crime techs at the scene could make or break the case by the way they handled the forensic evidence on and around the body.

  Through force of habit, Hailey methodically began to fill in details. Friends and foes alike accused her of having a clairvoyant streak, but reading minds did not account for her ability to decode a criminal mind. That talent was hard-won, via ten years in the trenches of one of the busiest courthouses in the world…serial murders, rapes, child molestations, and arson all routine.

  “And now, traffic and transit on the eights,” the radio voice declared.
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  The cab hummed forward, miraculously dodging pedestrians who showed neither fear nor respect for oncoming vehicles. Incredibly, few were ever mowed down. Knowledge being power, that statistic only egged them on.

  Watching traffic whiz by, she knew why the news report had grabbed her attention and not let go. The stabbing/strangulation MO reminded her of her final jury trial, the Clint Burrell Cruise serial-murder case.

  33

  Atlanta, Georgia

  CLARENCE E. CARTER WAS NOW KNOWN AS THE JUDGE WHO HAD a heart, the fair-minded champion of the people, not too proud to listen to reason nor afraid to hold the justice system to the careful scrutiny allowed only by the bright light of the Georgia Supreme Court.

  In other words, he’d reversed himself midstream.

  Tipped back in his desk chair on a glorious morning, C.C. gazed out the window at the glittering city, basking.

  He had let a serial killer walk free with a single vote and blamed it all on the State. It was the cops’ fault.

  Now he was the centerfold in legal journals across the country. Suddenly, even the American Bar Association lauded him, despite his profusely and publicly ridiculing the ABA repeatedly in the past. He publicly declared it was headed up by liberals and law professors who had never been in the trenches and knew nothing about the real world, frequently describing them as bloated house pets who lounged in plush ivory towers.

  Funny, he saw them in a whole new light now that they had invited him to a genuine Hawaiian luau in Hawaii next month, and would fly him and Tina first-class to present him with an ABA Certificate of Honor, shellacked to a high sheen and embedded in oak.

  The Prosecuting Attorney’s Counsel had never shelled out like this.

  And then there was last week’s invitation to an all-expense-paid trip for two to Italy, where the Criminal Defense Lawyers Association was planning to fete the Cruise reversal. Although he’d heard American Italian food was much better than real Italian.

  Of course, not everyone applauded his vote.

  His law clerk, Jim Talley, resigned. So much for his chances of landing a spot at Lange and Parker. For all C.C. knew, Talley was waiting tables at Cracker Barrel. But hey, if you can’t take the heat…