The Eleventh Victim

by Nancy Grace

  It was nearly 10 a.m. when they reached the area. The sun was just starting to heat up, burning the cool out of the air and off the road. Minute by minute, the damp, frosty feel in the air was giving way to another hot Island morning. In another half hour, heat waves would begin to snake up off the dark gray asphalt on the Georgia back roads.

  Virginia and Larry traveled along several miles of bumpy access road. Keeping it casual, they eased past the entrance of Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living at about fifteen mph. He kept it in the road while Virginia surveyed the area.

  “See anybody around?”

  “No, but keep going straight a little bit. Just in case.”

  He nodded and continued on toward the south beaches for about a mile, then U-turned and doubled back to the construction site.

  “Wanna go in?”

  “No other way to find out where the cameras are. Plus, you have tinted windows. They can’t see us, but we can see them.”

  Larry turned in, inching down the private drive toward the plum spot picked for the high-rises.

  “It’s the sweet spot, that’s for sure.” He was right. There at the cusp, where grassy, firm ground turned to pink-white sand under your feet, was the exact spot Palmetto Dunes planned to erect two grayish-red high-rises, twenty-four stories each.

  The two of them leaned forward in the El Camino, looking up to the tops of a cluster of tall pines.

  And there they were, two black security cameras perched high above Palmetto’s entrance, glinting down toward the guardhouse like computerized metal birds of prey, waiting to catch their victims on videotape

  “Clyde was right,” she told Larry as they both still squinted upward. “No one would ever spot those cameras unless they knew just where to look.”

  “Okay, so, now that we’ve seen ’em…” He pointed toward the guardhouse. “Let’s get out of here before Deputy Dog burps his coffee and turns around.”

  The rest of the site looked exactly as it had before. From what they could see from inside Larry’s El Camino, not much more had changed since Virginia had led the second foray against Palmetto to destroy the construction ground work.

  The guardhouse stood just as it had for weeks. Virginia could even make out the back of a head, resting against the glass…the same head as before. It was the former security guard from the Brunswick Wal-Mart. He hadn’t been fired after all.

  The window AC roared away right beside his head and, true to form, the guard sat oblivious to two spies thirty feet behind him. He was absorbed in his TV, same as before, but this time he was engrossed in The View.

  Larry gently eased the El Camino into reverse and they backed out undetected.

  When they were back on the main road, he glanced over at Virginia. “Well, what’d ya think?”

  “We’ll just let them lay out the foundation again and then, the night before they’re ready to pour the concrete, we’ll tear it all up again.”

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t know nothin’ about nothing! I’m just working reconnaissance here.”

  “Right…you’re just a spy. So how can we get in without using the trail by the guardhouse?”

  “Don’t know…lemme percolate.”

  They headed back toward the 7-Eleven.

  Virginia’s mind was spinning over the game of cat-and-mouse she was playing with some of the most high-powered financiers in the South. Could they possibly be outwitted a third time?

  When she got back, she’d round up the guerrillas from their various daytime callings…the Radio Shack, the local high school, the Wal-Mart, and the Shrimp Boat Restaurant. Construction was under way again, and they had to be ready for action forty-eight hours from now.

  Once the concrete was poured and set, destruction of the foundation would be almost impossible without the use of explosives. Time was of the essence. Millions of dollars were riding on the Palmetto Dunes high-rises. She learned a lot from the County Records Office. She wondered how long Eugene had been buying up the land….

  Larry broke the silence with three words.

  “Amphibious sneak attack.”

  Virginia pulled her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose, just barely keeping them on, and looked at him over the rims. The look posed the obvious question.

  “Clyde’s damn cameras cut you off from the main entrance.” He turned down the radio. “The only other path in is off the highway…too dangerous. Might get spotted. They’re on to us now…. They’ll be waiting up front for somebody to sneak in. So we got to go from another angle.”

  “Another angle?” Virginia didn’t get it.

  “V.G., didn’t you ever see Caddyshack? My God, it’s a classic.”

  “Of course I saw Caddyshack, I haven’t been living in a cave, for Pete’s sake. But what does Caddyshack have to do with Palmetto Dunes?”

  “V.G., you saw it, true. But I’ve seen it twelve times…minimum. If I only learned one thing from the movie…just one thing…it’s this. If you want to beat a varmint…you got to think like a varmint. These varmints are using the beach. So’ll we. We come in after dark by dinghy, shore at the south beach, and walk in. They’ll never suspect a rear attack.”

  Brilliant.

  “‘We’? So you’re in the foxhole with me?”

  “I got to stand for something, V.G. I’ve let the Seven-Eleven take over my life. Running a convenience store takes on a life of its own…it’s sucking me dry, V.G. The deliveries, the gas pumps, the customers, the damn Slurpee machine. They’ve become my raison d’être.”

  She didn’t want to interrupt, so she just nodded her head and kept looking straight ahead, watching the yellow line in the middle of the road as it flew under the front grille of the car, disappearing then popping up again behind them.

  “It takes a toll, V.G. The grind of business. It’s robbed me of my purpose in life. The D reminded me of that. So, yeah. I’m in, V.G. I’m in the foxhole with you.”

  52

  New York City

  HAILEY HADN’T SMELLED THE INSIDE OF A JAIL IN A LONG TIME.

  But the moment she was pushed through iron doors into the crowded holding cell and took a deep breath, it all came back. Nothing so much as the sense of smell speaks to the human memory, instantly dredging up the good, the bad, the painful and long-buried.

  Days-old human perspiration mixed with heavy perfumes the hookers had worn since the night before. Somebody, somewhere, had puked. And the stench of urine on a heroin junkie managed to pierce through it all, hanging heavy in the still air.

  Hailey could feel the eyes of the other women on her from the opposite end of the cell where they were all gathered. A card game was going in one corner, and little knots of women congregated to mull over their charges and the hard luck that landed them here.

  Ignoring them, she made her way over to one of the only vacant seats, a wooden bench bolted to the floor.

  As she lowered herself onto it, she found herself sitting right next to the source of the sickening smell…a heroin junkie sleeping on the bench in urine-soaked clothes. Her deathly white complexion highlighted angry red needle marks along her inner elbow and wrists. Hailey could see the familiar puncture marks on the woman’s left hand, between the knuckles and fingers. She looked like a wizened, shrunken version of what she must have been before she took heroin as a lover.

  The others had edged away from the smell toward the other end of the room. Hailey took a look around. It was a large square room with no windows and plain walls devoid of hardware that could be forced off and used as a weapon.

  “My babies…what about my babies?” a woman in her twenties sobbed into a handkerchief. Listening to the others trying to comfort her, Hailey calculated the woman’s misdemeanor prostitution bust would mean a probation revocation and a six-month good-bye to her two infant children on the outside.

  “I can’t stay in here that long,” the woman cried.

  She wasn’t the only one crying. Each one faced charges ranging from prostitution to distribution
of meth, to a knifing on Third Avenue outside a deli, driving under the influence, and grand larceny. For the most part, they were either drugged-up, drunk, or strung-out on the roller-coaster ride of a first-time arrest and the shock of literally being thrown in the can.

  And the “can” stunk.

  “What you in for?” one of them would occasionally sidle up to ask Hailey.

  “Bad check.” She lied, of course.

  She wasn’t about to tell them the truth, much less reveal her identity as a lawyer, a criminal prosecutor in another life. Now was not a good time to be besieged for free legal advice.

  She had to think.

  All she knew was that she’d been linked to two murders by the fact that Melissa and Hayden were both her clients, her name and home and cell numbers were found on their bodies, both had sessions scheduled with her the night of their murders. The police weren’t that stupid. They had to have more to arrest her. But what?

  And they’d both been strangled and stabbed—apparently like the string of dead women she’d represented in Atlanta.

  Hailey looked down at her own hands, clutched together in her lap.

  She spread them and imagined them circled around the throats of dark, fragile Melissa and Hayden—young, creative, so alive.

  Her throat tightened and her face flushed hot.

  Her first murder prosecution as a rookie ADA had been an asphyxiation…manual strangulation coupled with the killer forcing a plastic laundry bag over the head of his victim until she died.

  Hailey still remembered walking onto the crime scene. The clear plastic laundry bag was still over the woman’s head, parts of it lodged deeply up into her nostrils as she had sucked it in, struggling for the last bit of air left in the bag.

  Hailey never knew the woman in life, but the memory of her face contorted in death with a common laundry bag inhaled into her nose had never really left the back of Hailey’s mind.

  It came back to her now, but she couldn’t stop substituting the faces of Melissa and Hayden.

  Kolker really believes I did it, that I murdered my own patients, that I stabbed them in the back, that I posed the strangulations, that I have the heart to watch them lying there, the life draining out of them….

  She knew she had a right to a single phone call…but who was there to call? Her family was away at Cumberland. Fincher was halfway around the world in Iraq. The realization that she was alone in the world was painful.

  A standard, battery-operated, institutional metal-rimmed clock hung high on a wall in the holding pen.

  Slumped beside the sleeping junkie, Hailey literally watched the minutes pass, her eyes following each forward jerk of the long red second hand, her ears hearing the loud tick that came with every movement.

  It was becoming unbearably hot in the cell as more women crowded in, one by one.

  Although the holding cell was packed, Hailey was alone and weary. Her face was drawn, her lips were dry, and her hair was plastered to her head, damp with perspiration. The sweat between her breasts soaked through her blouse and a dark pattern appeared and spread, seeming to blossom, slowly across her chest. As she slumped against the wall, her head fell loosely down toward her right shoulder. Numbness took over. She slept.

  The stench in the holding pen seeped through her nostrils and into her dreams.

  In the dream, she was back in an Atlanta jail with Fincher, looking through the first set of mug-shot books. They had spent over two weeks, working into the night, to comb through thousands of photos and, ultimately, cull a newly created photo album to present to strippers and prostitutes across the city for possible leads.

  The police department’s profiler had suggested that the serial killer stalking the city was a white man in his late twenties to early thirties, muscular, middle-to-high income bracket, and extremely meticulous, but with artistic tendencies, possibly an only child.

  “Fincher, it’s so damn hot in here and the smell is giving me a headache.” She rubbed her temples and pushed her chair back from the table. “I’m worried.”

  “About what?” He didn’t look up at her but sat staring at the pages of perp photos on the table in front of him. “I mean, other than a stalker who’s strangling one girl after the next and City Hall doesn’t give a damn…at least, as long as it’s not some socialite or a rich little cheerleader gone missing.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir. What’s bothering me is that we’re losing time. The more we chase down some profile APD cooked up, the more likely he’ll strike again before we can get a line on him.”

  Moments passed before he broke the silence.

  “I know what you want, little girl. Forget it. They’re not giving you anybody else on this case. No way will they take personnel off the burglary ring in Buckhead. The rich people are worried about their stereos. So it’s just you and me…as usual. Unless the mayor’s office gets worried over this one, no more funding, no more bodies to help patrol the strip, nobody canvassing the area, nothing. Nada. Nobody. Don’t even ask. They’ll just say no, and you’ll get your feelings hurt. Okay?”

  She pushed another album toward him across the table. “Thanks. That helped. Just keep looking.”

  They resumed scanning one shot after the next.

  Another hour passed before static crackled on the police-band radio Fincher wore at his hip.

  “Hold on,” he said into it, and turned to her. “Hailey, I’m stepping out to get better reception.”

  “Okay, but don’t leave me in here for long. That door locks on the outside, remember? And no cigarette break, damn it. If I have to keep working, so do you. This ain’t no tea party, old man.”

  “Keep that talk up and I will take a smoke. How did you say I’m supposed to lock you in here?”

  Laughing, she threw a file folder at him as he closed the door.

  She sat sorting photos in piles like a deck of cards and was still smiling when he came back in five minutes later.

  Without looking up, she said, “I smell smoke! Cigarette smoke!”

  When he didn’t answer with some retort, she glanced up.

  One look at his face and her smile vanished.

  He stood frozen at the door, looking at her square in the face.

  “What? What happened?”

  “Hailey, they found another body.”

  She said nothing, just looked back down at the piles and piles of photos.

  “It was off Stewart Avenue again. No robbery, same MO, possibly posed manual strangulation, stab wound lower back. Victim partially clothed, mouth and nose full of dirt.”

  She swallowed hard, and nodded.

  “They’re processing the scene now,” Fincher told her. “Body may be too decomposed to get a DNA match at this point. Looks like it went down sometime after midnight on Friday. No ID on the girl yet. In her twenties, though, they think. Should we head on over and make sure they don’t ruin the crime scene?”

  Hailey couldn’t speak, the image of another horrific torture-murder scene creeping into her brain like green mold edging over bread in the fridge. Then there would ultimately be the discovery of the victim’s identity, the late-night visit to her family’s home to tell the next of kin.

  What would they find this time? Kids waiting for Mom to come home? A family? Or would there be just another middle-aged or elderly woman rushing to answer their knock, peering through the screen door, wondering where her daughter had been the last few nights?

  And the look on the women’s faces when Fincher flashed his badge…

  They always knew at that point.

  They knew their daughter was dead as soon as they saw the badge.

  “Come on, Jezebel. Let’s go.”

  Hailey stood and, still without a word, began packing up photos.

  Fincher watched her from the door. His radio began crackling again. More news from the crime scene, no doubt. He didn’t answer, standing rooted at the doorway. Then he propped the door open with the chair he had been sitting in,
and got down on his knees. Together, they packed their bags.

  They left the jail in silence.

  The sun was setting and the tall, slender lights lining Atlanta’s streets suddenly clicked on in front of them, lighting up the roadway as far as they could see.

  He was out there, laughing, probably. Maybe he was going to work, maybe just coming home. Maybe he was at a movie with his wife or watching TV with his kids.

  Or maybe he was cruising the strip at that very moment, stalking the next girl who would die with her neck mangled and twisted…the skin on her back ripped by vicious puncture wounds.

  Then suddenly, Hailey was standing by the side of the highway, watching the taillights of the county cruiser disappear into the Atlanta night. Fincher faded into the traffic as the dream scene flickered in and out, and then faded out of her mind.

  The real-life smell in the holding pen still assaulted her nostrils.

  But then it all morphed into one heavy, cloying scent. A familiar scent.

  Carnations.

  Carnations not found in nature, but the kind that were over-treated in florist shops for maximum aroma value.

  Everywhere she looked in the dream, carnations surrounded her, nauseating her with their sickly sweet smell.

  Through the doorway was an open room and in that room were even more carnations: pale pink, yellow, white, blankets of them, arrangements of all shapes and sizes, sitting in vases on every possible stick of furniture.

  Trapped, desperate for fresh air, Hailey looked for a doorway.

  She found one and peered into the room and stepped in. Her eyes widened and her heart stopped.

  The room whirled around her.

  There was Will, lying dead and made up in heavy funeral home makeup to cover the bullet wounds to the side of his face.

  His face. Asleep? No, dead. Will was dead.

  The smell of carnations closed in on her, choking out the fresh air and suffocating her with a deadly overdose of funeral perfume. She gasped it in, sucking in the flowery smell as hard as she could for any trace of oxygen, but there was none—