by Nancy Grace
The Post was right. Melissa was the dead girl. Hailey’s Melissa…her patient, her friend.
They had been through so much together, hours and hours spent alone in Hailey’s suite, reliving Melissa’s childhood nightmares, each trying their hardest, in their own way, to build a new life.
“I was hoping you could shed some light on her recent whereabouts, her friends, and her lifestyle,” Lieutenant Kolker was telling Hailey from someplace far away. “We found your business card in her purse, with your personal cell number on it and what appears to be your home phone number and address.”
Hailey’s head was spinning; she could only nod, trying to make sense of what he was saying—trying to make sense of everything.
“Isn’t that unusual, Miss Dean? I’ve never had a doctor give me his home number or address before. What exactly was the nature of your relationship with Melissa Everett?”
The questions were too much for Hailey, her head still pounding from the blow. Her eyes were unfocused and her face was hot. Sitting up in the bed, grief came over her again in waves, and with a broken sob, the tears came. “Please leave,” she said abruptly.
“Excuse me?”
“Lieutenant, I need to see a doctor. Dana, thanks for coming to see about me and speaking to the hospital staff. I’ll call you later, promise.”
“But Hailey, how will you make it home? Let me come pick you up.”
She didn’t look up at either of them. “Thanks,” she said flatly.
“Remember, I’ve got the keys to your apartment and office. I’ll even stop by your place and pick up whatever you need, okay?”
“Okay. Right now I just need to get myself together. Really.” She tried not to sound impatient, but her head was spinning and she wanted desperately to be alone.
The two stood looking at each other in awkward silence, not knowing quite what to do.
“Okay. I’m on my cell. Call me.” Dana gathered her assorted belongings and backed out, leaving Lieutenant Kolker standing beside the bed.
After a moment’s silence, he turned and left, saying, “We’ll talk again, Hailey.”
41
New York City
HUDDLED INTO A BACK BOOTH IN A COFFEE SHOP OFF BROADWAY, Cruise decided he didn’t like New York.
No, hate was a better way to describe his feelings. The city was dirty, and noisy—but that was no big deal. He was used to that in Atlanta.
New York, however, was cold. A brutal cold that seeped into his bones and, worst of all, chapped his hands…hands that were burning again.
It was Hailey Dean.
These past days he’d thought of her incessantly. Watching her go in and out of her apartment building, up and down her office steps, standing at her office window looking out onto the courtyard…it was all torture.
That first blow to her face felt so good. He’d wanted to for so long.
Just as he dreamed night after night back in Reidsville, it felt so good…the pain he’d inflicted on her. It was beyond any words he knew to describe it. There would have been more if he hadn’t heard someone coming up the steps.
“What’ll it be?” a heavyset waitress asked brusquely, parking herself in front of the booth where he’d situated himself to escape the cold outside for a while.
“Coffee.”
“And?”
“Just coffee.”
Irritated with him for taking up her booth with just coffee, she all but stormed away.
If only he had her alone for five minutes…
That was the other thing Cruise hated about New York. The people.
They couldn’t be bothered to give you the time of day.
If it weren’t for Hailey, he wouldn’t be here. Again, her fault.
He waited for his coffee and thought about the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her in the Fulton County Superior Courthouse. The courtroom had been packed that morning, with lawyers and witnesses and inmates in prison orange, chained together by leg irons so they couldn’t make a run for it.
He’d been chained, too, directly to the chair which was bolted to the floor of the jury box.
When everyone was assembled and the clock had struck precisely nine o’clock, the back double doors of the courtroom swung open, like a gust had blown in, and with it came Hailey Dean.
She was wearing a black long-sleeved dress that hit just above the knees. He still remembered the blonde hair falling down below her shoulders.
No one had spoken, but it was clear the attorneys and inmates alike all knew this bitch on wheels was calling the shots.
When the judge took the bench and the calendar clerk called his name and case number, Hailey Dean had looked directly at him, shackled in his chair.
Holding his gaze, Hailey announced in open court that the first arraignment of the morning was his. He’d tried to stand up in spite of the chains.
She said it real cold-like…that she planned to try the case of Clint Burrell Cruise herself and that after consultation with the elected district attorney, the State intended to seek the death penalty.
He never made it out of his chair; the chains were biting too hard into his ankles to stand.
Between months of court appearances came the endless shots of her, sound bites at press conferences on the local news.
He watched them religiously.
She won, of course.
Which meant he lost.
Then, after the trial, she left him abruptly.
When she was gone, it all seemed empty. He was like a dry drunk…stuck with nothing but old newspaper clippings to keep him company.
It sucked.
He’d had no reason to live when she left him alone, warehoused away, locked up like an animal.
But thanks to the Internet in the law library, he’d found her. Yahoo was incredible. In all the interviews after the trial, she’d been tight-lipped about her plans, but then…he struck gold.
The Georgia Bar’s yearly directory mistakenly published a New York number under her old Atlanta address, and thanks to Yahoo’s reverse lookup, her address was cake. Further proof lawyers were total screwups.
So. After leaving him there, behind forty-five feet of concrete wall, Hailey wanted to start all over without him, to get on with her new life in New York.
But he wasn’t going to let her leave him behind.
It all came down to right now. Finally, they were back together again.
And after all these years, he wasn’t ready to say good-bye just yet.
42
St. Simons Island, Georgia
VIRGINIA WOKE UP GROGGY, HER SHOULDER AND ARM MUSCLES hurting, hurting like crazy.
That was strange. Something was wrong….
The night before hit her and she sat upright like a bolt of lightning…they did it!
Strike one against the empire.
She eased out of bed, her legs sore from the use of muscles she hadn’t even thought of in twenty years. She made her way down the steps—easy-does-it, one at a time—until she made it to the ground floor.
Immediately, the wieners were awake, racing toward her en masse. The high-pitched yelps pierced her brain like a jackhammer.
“Shut up! Sidney…shut up, damn it!”
The pack cowered back in bewilderment, crouched with their tails between their stubby little legs.
She padded barefoot straight to the front door, opened it, and retrieved the morning paper.
The front page said it all.
“ISLAND VANDALS ATTACK!”
She closed the door and started reading. Analyzing each word, she propped herself up on the kitchen bar, lowering her reading glasses down to the tip of her nose.
She read it slowly; she didn’t want to miss a single word.
43
St. Simons Island, Georgia
AT THE VERY MINUTE VIRGINIA GUNN WAS BREAKING INTO A DEEP belly laugh over the Palmetto Dunes security guard’s speculating to the paper that stealth terrorists were responsible for last nigh
t’s debacle, just a few miles across town the Glynn County Commission chairman was sweating bullets, even with the office window unit on high.
Toby McKissick sat glued to the seat of his brown faux-leather office chair. Four feet of polished oak was the only thing that separated him from the other side of the desk.
There sat Floyd Moye Eugene, darkly shaded aviator glasses covering his eyes and allowing no clue as to his thinking.
But Toby knew Eugene’s reputation well—and something told him Eugene knew his.
Toby’s life centered around dodging his wife, seeking political favor with the bigs in Atlanta, scheming to put another dollar in his pocket, and chasing tail twenty-four/seven.
He owed so many grifters so many political favors he could hardly keep them straight in his own head. Plus, there were always the do-gooders nipping at his heels. And there was the constant fear of exposure…that all his “deals” and “favors” would catch up with him.
But all that was nothing compared to this.
For fifteen minutes now, Toby had been trying to explain why, exactly, the Island police had not yet pinpointed the vandals who had completely destroyed the foundational beginnings of Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living.
“Floyd, I agree two hundred percent, Palmetto Dunes is exactly what the south beaches need. I speak for the Commission in that we absolutely support you in this. It’s a travesty, a sin that the beach has just lain there, undeveloped, for years.”
Toby’s lower parts burned like crazy. He thought he was about to pass out. His urologist warned him repeatedly about stress. In the past few months, since the hush-hush deal with Eugene started up, his kidney stones were worse than ever. He’d already passed nearly twenty of the pellet-size little monsters in all, and he could feel one coming right now.
The pain of passing his second stone of the day nearly made Toby faint. The first had been pissed straight into a Styrofoam Krispy Kreme doughnut coffee cup this morning on the way to work when he got the word about Eugene.
Eugene’s stare, or at least what Toby took to be a stare from behind Eugene’s darkened shades, made his groin hurt even more. Here it comes, and there’s not a thing he could do about it. No way could he make it to the men’s room down the hall.
“Ah…Floyd…you’ll have to excuse me…damn!” The pain washed over him. It was all he could do to stand at the foot of his desk and whiz straight into his metal trash can. In midstream, a tiny metallic “ping” thunked loudly into the metal can, ricocheting off one side, plunking to the bottom. With a series of groans, winces, and twitches, the agony ended.
In the quiet of the office, Eugene sat unmoving, staring straight at McKissick’s bare butt. Toby fell back into his chair, faint, and the chair rolled back of its own volition. His legs hung on the sides of the chair like sticks. When the chair came to a halt, the two men locked eyes.
Toby shifted his weight in his chair and struggled to keep his composure as Eugene stared hard at him.
Finally, Eugene said, “What the hell was that?” Eugene stared at McKissick, unblinking.
“Have you ever had stones, Floyd?”
“Can’t say that I have, McKissick, but I can now report with one hundred percent accuracy that I truly doubt whether you and your people can handle the situation down here. Frankly, I’m not convinced you fit into the deal anymore. It may just be too big for you to handle.”
“No Floyd…I’m on it. I’m all over it. I’ll get new security and ramp it up. No more all-night shifts for one person. We’ll rotate like military units do. Constantly changing guards throughout the night. This won’t happen again. I swear it. And Floyd, I’ll find the vandals. Probably teenagers. Trust me, it’s taken care of. Go back to Atlanta, I’ll call you the second we find out who tore up the layout.”
Eugene sat for well over a minute in stony silence, just looking at the disheveled mess of a man sitting in front of him.
“Damn,” Eugene said at last, “you’re one fat, pathetic mess.”
“If you just give me one more chance, Floyd, I know we can handle the whole thing. You won’t be sorry. Pulling out on our people at this point is very premature and—”
“Premature? You idiot! You country-hick moron. This sets us back at least three weeks. Money’s at stake here, you hayseed Billy-Bob. More money than you’ve ever dreamed about in your miserable little life. Now listen to me and you listen good. One more chance. And for God’s sakes, keep it quiet. I’m sending the crew out first thing in the morning to restart. One more screwup on the security end, you’re over. I know about every two-bit bribe you’ve ever taken. You don’t fool a single damn soul with your Rotary luncheons and your Kiwanis membership. I know your broke-down deal in this town and I’ll blow you wide open if I have to. There’ll be nothing left for the locals to do with you but indict your sorry ass. Understood?”
Eugene turned on his heel and left. Toby could hear his footsteps on the tile of the hallway, passing by Toby’s secretary and heading to the front door. She brightly offered him coffee to go but Eugene brushed by her without answering. He never once removed his glasses.
The sound of the front door slamming made it all the way back to Toby’s office and then the offices settled into quiet, except for the humming of the window unit. Toby sank his forehead down into his hands.
But in one brief moment of clarity, a single thought rang through Toby’s head like a bell in a belfry.
Virginia Gunn.
44
New York City
HAILEY PLAYED OVER AND OVER IN HER HEAD THE LAST TIME SHE met with Melissa.
She could hardly think. Had she missed something?
Was there a clue to a problem, some sort of menace? Could she have averted disaster in some way?
Who had done this to Melissa?
Had she suffered?
Of course she had. There was no way of getting around the sheer horror of Melissa’s last moments.
A double knock at her door swung her around again. Her side throbbed.
“Come in,” Hailey called out in the direction of the door.
“Hi, Hailey.” A man appeared, dark hair and eyes, handsome in a way, wearing a white coat. He closed the door behind him. “I’m Dr. Lopez.”
“Hi, Doctor. Thank you for coming by, it’s nice to meet you.”
“Actually, we’ve already met, but you probably don’t remember. I admitted you in the ER. How are you feeling?”
“Hurting.” She was thinking of Melissa.
“Who’s the goon with a badge outside your door?”
“Good question. I take it he’s still there?”
Dr. Lopez nodded emphatically. “You took quite a beating, Hailey. Boyfriend…Husband? You can be totally candid with me. Everything we say is protected by my oath as a doctor.”
Hailey’s jaw dropped, her eyes widened, and then she laughed. “Thank you for your concern, Doctor, but I’m not keeping anything from you. I wasn’t beaten. I was just…shocked.”
He looked confused for a moment, then skeptical.
“No, really,” she said, realizing he thought she was covering for someone. “I’m a psychologist with an office in the Village. At the end of the day, I was packing up to leave to go home or maybe to dinner. I picked up my Post to take with me and…I saw one of my patients in the paper. She had been killed. She was murdered.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “Even now, I’m having a hard time saying the words out loud. We’d been working together for over a year. She was so brave, braver just getting out of bed in the morning and facing life every day than I could ever hope to be.” Her throat choked up again.
“I’m sorry. I know how it feels to lose a patient. It hurts. It’ll take a while for it to really sink in. But what I still don’t understand is how you went from reading the paper to landing in the ER, out cold with a blow to the head and serious bruising, external and internal, to your side. You’ve got two rib fractures, too. You know, your kidneys could
have been permanently damaged.”
He paused to let it sink in.
“Listen, I don’t mean to give you a hard time, but your version of what happened last night just doesn’t add up, medically speaking.”
He stood leaning against the heat vent under the window, poised with pen and medical chart in hand, waiting to scribble some plausible explanation into her chart. She looked back at him without hesitation, shaking her head.
“Look at these.” He crossed the space between them in two strides and pulled a series of snapshots out of the file.
When she took the first glance, she couldn’t believe her eyes. They looked like crime scene photos. Her naked side was covered in deep black-and-blue bruises spreading across her ribs and hips like ink. She couldn’t believe these were really of her.
In disbelief, she reached down and gingerly touched the same spots on her own body, and winced in pain.
She opened the side of her hospital gown and looked down at her side to see that it matched the photos, then up to meet his deep brown eyes.
“I don’t understand either. My friend from work was here earlier. She said I hit my head on the coffee table. And I remember that I was standing there when I saw the article about police identifying Melissa’s body. But…that’s it. I don’t understand the rest…the bruises.”
“Well, when you’re ready to talk about it, or to think back on it, here’s my card.” He set it on her bedside table. “Page me. Okay?”
She shook her head yes. “Okay.”
“Get dressed, but before you go, you’ll need some directions on how to function with those ribs. A nurse will come by and show you how to wrap them. You’ll have a tough time walking, getting up and down, or coughing over the next few weeks. And for God’s sake, don’t laugh…it’ll hurt like hell.”
She couldn’t imagine what she’d laugh about. “Okay. I’ll be careful…and I’ll keep them wrapped. Thanks.”
“Remember, you have my card. Use it.”