The Eleventh Victim (17 page)

“S
O WHAT DO YOU SAY, FLOYD MOYE? HOW ABOUT WE MEET TONIGHT
at Bones for a little dead cow and some serious bourbon and branch?” C.C. leaned back in his chair, feet propped on his desk, even more pleased with himself than usual.

“That’d be great, C.C.,” Eugene agreed. “I’ll see you there at eight.”

“Eight o’clock it is.” C.C. reached just far enough off his chair to hang up the phone.

So it was all set. Over dinner at the most expensive steak house in Atlanta, they’d meet with the State Democratic sub-chairman to nail down plans for C.C.’s grand announcement for the governor’s race.

It had to be classy and steeped in judicial decorum, something he’d learned early on from the other members of the bench. Judges could get away with pretty much anything if they just kept looking judicial, and even more so if they spoke
with their robe on.

But damn, he’d have to invite Betty up from Dooley County for the El Grande Candidacy Announcement Celebration. Somehow, he’d have to ditch Betty and sneak Tina over. This would take some doing.

Think…think…think!

Betty’s presence in Atlanta would mean he’d have to say bye-bye to any thoughts of an after-party with Tina. C.C.’s pink fuzzy would be pissed beyond belief. She loved special moments together.

How on earth could he maneuver this?

Oh, hell, he’d just have to burn that bridge when he got there.

He opened his top drawer and pulled out his flask. It was cool and comforting, smooth and familiar to the touch. It had seen him through some mighty tough times, mighty tough. He needed it now—and how.

The phone call with Eugene arranging tonight’s meeting put him so on edge he could barely throw back a drink.

Shit.
There was something freaky about that man, always so damn secretive, so damn uptight, meticulously demanding all sorts of details about C.C.’s calendar and whereabouts.

But hey…who gave a crap? C.C. was packing for the state capital, thanks to Eugene.

He took a pull before his secretary could barge back in. Now that was
nice…
bourbon, room temp. Why spoil it with ice?

P
ATIENTS CAME AND WENT. THE AFTERNOON DWINDLED AND DISAPPEARED
before Hailey looked out the double windows into the courtyard again, and when she did, darkness was settling across the Village.

The building was silent—no more muffled noises seeping up through hardwood floors. The ring of office phones, doors below opening and closing, muffled laughter of receptionists and dental hygienists and their patients, even the occasional strains of dentist-office Muzak had all ceased for the day.

Hailey clicked off one of the floor lamps near the foyer and walked through the office, straightening things here and there, wondering uneasily why Melissa never called back.

It wasn’t necessarily uncharacteristic of her to ignore a message—but she usually kept her appointments, and when she couldn’t, she always called to cancel.

According to the microwave’s clock, glowing green in the darkened kitchen, it was already six fifteen.

Hailey dialed over to Dana to ask if she’d like to have dinner, deciding to forgo running the East River in lieu of companionship tonight. No answer.

That was strange. Dana always stuck her head in to say good-night.

Hailey considered trying to catch her on her cell, then opted not to.

Maybe it was a blessing in disguise; she’d logged eight hours straight without a lunch break, then another hour’s work on an article she hoped to publish, about the origins of self-hatred. Her session with Hayden today had infused her with new thought and perspective, but also left her tired, more mentally than physically.

She had noticed dark circles showing under her eyes in her office bathroom earlier that afternoon when she’d splashed water on her face between patients.

Okay. So maybe she’d still skip her jog and try her best to sleep. But before she left the office, she’d try Melissa one more time. She flipped open her appointment book and dialed the number.

“Hi, it’s Melissa…I’m not here, so please leave me a message. I promise I’ll call you back.”

The simple greeting was somehow haunting, almost wistful. Maybe a tiny clue of a yearning for a childhood lost.

“Hey, Melissa…it’s Hailey again.” She made sure her voice was casually upbeat. Melissa didn’t need a guilt trip over the missed appointment. “I wanted to check with you about rescheduling today’s session. I know you have my home and cell.”

Hailey hung up, hearing footsteps heading up the hallway and into Dana’s office.

She hurriedly threw the rest of her things into her bag, closed and locked her door, and crossed the hall. She’d make a peace offering of dinner at Candle Café, one of their favorites.

“Dana?”

No reply, but the door was ajar, so Hailey slipped in.

Darkness and an eerie quiet blanketed the room, though Hailey could hear distant music from a radio somewhere in the building.

“Dana?”

Maybe she wasn’t here after all.
Where was she?
Hailey had just heard her come back up the steps. The door was unlocked, but Dana, like the dentists downstairs, wasn’t concerned about security. She often said that if anyone wanted to steal anything from her cluttered office, they were welcome to it.

“Dana?”

Hailey glanced out Dana’s windows across the street at the vacant building under reconstruction, looking shell-shocked in the night. She was so glad she had ended up with the back office—what a dismal view.

She turned away and spotted Dana’s office trash can, tipped over by the door, Hailey’s kidnapped
Post
spilling out of it.

Trash can spilling, no good-bye, and no returned
Post
as customary…Dana must have really been in a hurry tonight. She usually returned the paper every afternoon, with the same clocklike regularity as taking it.

Well, hopefully she was on a date, although Vegas odds were next to nothing Dana could have a date and not talk about it for days ahead of time.

She fished the
Post
out of the trash, the pages out of order. She went over to Dana’s coffee table to spread it out neatly, reassembling it in order to read it on the way home.

Pages two and forty-three, joined at the spine, were missing.

She made another trip to the trash can and found the missing pages, oddly singled out, balled up tightly and buried in a pile of discarded bills and psych journals.

Hailey flattened the missing pages out on the table.

She froze. The grainy black-and-white photo.

It was Melissa.

Melissa Everett was on page two.

Melissa was the dead girl…the girl they’d found on the East Side last night.

An anguished, painful moan came from somewhere far away.

It took a moment for Hailey to recognize that it had come from the back of her own throat.

She tried to hold up the paper to look again at the photo, but her hands were shaking erratically, as if they belonged to someone else. She saw them, but couldn’t make them stop. Ice water ran through her veins, instead of warm, red blood.

She stumbled toward a cushioned chair to sit down in the darkened room.

Yes…sit down and read the article…there had to be a mistake…Melissa couldn’t be dead…she was scheduled for an appointment…Hailey could help her…

Before she could make it to the chair, quietly, out of nowhere, someone came up behind her.

She sensed movement, started to turn, but it was too late.

A crushing blow landed on the back of Hailey’s head and neck.

Pain shot through her face as she tried to stand, but she tumbled forward from the momentum of the blow. Careening across the sidearm of the chair, she went down hard onto the sharp corner of Dana’s coffee table.

Warm blood began to seep from just behind her temple. Through dark gray swirls that were closing in on her, she saw a pair of blue-jeaned legs approach her at floor level. One of them was limping.

She tried, tried with all her strength, to turn and look up to see his face, to call out for help, but her body refused to follow her brain’s command.

She couldn’t turn, couldn’t speak, her neck and face burned by the wool of the rug, her mouth open as she tried to breathe, blood across her lips and cheek.

When the first, vicious kick landed, perfectly aimed at her kidneys, Hailey screamed out in pain, but the scream went muffled into the carpet and then, with the next excruciating kick, the dark gray swirls disappeared. Hailey Dean’s world went black.

I
T WAS NEARLY
3
A.M., AND THE GUERRILLAS WERE ASSEMBLED IN THE
stealthiest and most mysterious black outfits they could muster, hoping to blend into the night like the cat burglars they’d seen on TV. Clustered amid the pines outside Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living, they were locked and loaded, primed and ready for the moment they’d waited for their whole lives.

There would be plenty of time ahead to plan an overall strategy for a meaningful deterrent strike at the mastermind of Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living. But for now, for tonight, the guerrillas were taking a notorious page from the Vietcong’s book.

A sniper attack was the only obvious choice for a successful strike against a power much greater than the guerrillas: a construction company out of Atlanta with big money backing.

From behind the cover of dense pine saplings, twelve pairs of eyes were trained on the solitary guard inside his shack. Biding their time, they waited, poised, for just the right moment to attack.

“Anybody seen him before?” Virginia asked in a whisper.

None of the twelve were sure who he was, although they speculated in minced whispers, until it dawned on Renee.

“I know who he is! He’s the guy that works security for the Brunswick Wal-Mart.”

“He must’ve gotten a serious pay increase,” Ken chimed in. Ken was an authority on many, many subjects, and apparently the compensation at Wal-Mart was one of them. “I happen to know for a fact the security guards at Wal-Mart eat free at the Wal-Mart grill.”

Free lunch or no free lunch, in exchange for the speculated pay raise, he was now sitting alone in a glorified outhouse at three in the morning, watching TBS.

But there he sat, apparently mesmerized by a late-, late-, late-night TBS showing of
Conan the Barbarian.

After fifteen minutes or so of keen surveillance, Virginia was convinced the guard was actually going to watch
Conan the Barbarian
in its entirety, so there was no use waiting for him to fall asleep. The good news was he was so engrossed in the movie he wouldn’t possibly notice any movement outside.

Virginia gave the command.

The guerrillas obediently slipped through the pines.

Without speaking, they moved on, past the guardhouse—then stopped short, all of them, all at once.

There it loomed, about twenty yards ahead: a horrible, manmade clearing where once there had been a series of graceful, sweeping dunes.

They simply stood, gazing at the scarred landscape.

Then Virginia gave a firm nod.

They stepped out of the pines to begin the endless task of dragging Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living—the whole kit and caboodle, load by load—to the water’s edge

Thin pine slats lay precisely over the ground to mark the outlines where cement would be poured. Now they were yanked away and placed on bedsheets they’d brought from home. Along with the slats went the strings that had been measured, cut, and staked with
an engineer’s unquestioned accuracy. Every vestige of orange marker was untied from surrounding trees. Bag upon heavy bag of dry concrete mixture was lugged across the sand.

Against all their deepest, heartfelt convictions against littering in
any
form, they heaped it all there on the shore. Mother Nature would have the morning tide take most of it, wave by rhythmic wave, out to sea and, ultimately, to the ocean’s floor. In a matter of hours, the fishies would be gnawing delicately at the stripped-down boards, still smelling of sweet pinesap.

“H
AILEY. CAN YOU HEAR ME AT ALL? HAILEY, WAKE UP
.”

Hailey heard it all, but from far away. She thought Fincher had been standing over her, calling her name, but then he disappeared. Hailey’s eyes opened to a pale-green hospital room, the faint smell of medicine hanging in the air.

Dana was standing beside her.

“What…happened?” she whispered. Even her throat hurt.

“You fell and knocked yourself out, Hailey. You took a really bad blow to the head.”

“What? Where? What are you doing here? Where are we?”

“You were in my office.”

Right. Dana’s office…

It was all so fuzzy, though.

“Where are we now?”

“The hospital. You’ve been out for hours, and I’ve been worried sick. How do you feel?”

Hailey opened her mouth to answer, but Dana shook her head. “No, don’t try to talk. Now that you’re awake, I’ll call a doctor to come check on you.”

“Dana, don’t, I’m fine.” She tried to sit up to prove her point, and a sharp pain shot through her torso.

Tears sprung to her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

“See? You are not fine!”

She sank back against the pillows. “You said I hit my head, but it’s my side that’s killing me. What happened to me, exactly?”

“How would I know? I wasn’t there! I can’t believe you don’t remember it all. Meanwhile, I’m a
wreck,
Hailey, nothing but a
wreck
! I swear I’m going to have a breakdown over this whole thing and—”

“If you don’t tell me what—”

“Okay, okay, o-
kay
…here’s what happened. I’m minding my own business, as always, on my way home after one of those
horrible
singles mixers at MOMA, I don’t know why I even
bothered
to go, they’re always disasters, and besides, I do have Greg, but he was busy last night, and like I always say, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, am I right about that?”

“Right,” Hailey said weakly, knowing Dana expected a response. It hurt to speak. It hurt to breathe.

“So I stopped back at work, thinking he might have come by and left a note on the door, because he’s done that before, and I found you lying in my office, out cold. You lost a lot of blood, too, on the rug. Don’t worry though, I think the dry cleaner can fix it. You split your head wide open on the coffee table. I know you have really low blood pressure. You must have passed out. Or maybe you tripped and fell—my office was kind of a mess—but how did you get those
horrible
bruises down your ribs and hips? What are you, a professional stunt girl, too? You must have done one crazy flip.”

My office was kind of a mess…

Suddenly Hailey sat up in bed again. A sharp pain sliced through her head and an incredible ache pierced her ribs, but she barely noticed.

The
Post
article.

“Oh my God, Melissa.” She felt sick to her stomach, and the warm taste of vomit came up her throat and to the back of her mouth.

“No…I’m not Melissa. Hailey, it’s me, Dana.”

“No, Dana, it’s Melissa…”

“No, you’re Hailey.
Haaay-leee.
Oh, my God. I’ll go get a doctor.”

“Dana, no…”

The door opened abruptly, stopping Dana in her tracks.

A tall, angular man in his late thirties, looking too weather-beaten and deeply tanned for a New Yorker, came in uninvited. His face was hard, with a cool glint in a pair of icy-blue eyes and a square, seemingly immovable jaw. Dana turned on him. “Excuse us, this is a
private
room.”

“And
this
is an NYPD badge, miss.” He casually took it out of his jacket pocket and flipped open his shield.

“Which one of you is Hailey Dean?”