The Eleventh Victim (2 page)

Hailey could see how LaSondra’s family had never known the truth.

And what a series of mug shots. The girl was beautiful, thin, with gorgeous dark hair floating in waves down one side and pinned back on the other. But Hailey spotted telltale facial bruises on one mug shot and a gaunt, hollow-eyed searching stare in others. La Sondra was thin, all right. Cocaine thin.

As Hailey stared at the photos in the bright, overhead lights of the records room, the girl in the picture stared right back.

She closed her eyes to block out the image, and another face, a beautiful face with chiseled features and deep blue eyes, appeared before her. Another murder victim.

Will.

It happened late on a beautiful, vivid, spring afternoon, three weeks before their wedding. Countless minor details were still etched in Hailey’s memory, mundane things that unfolded in the minutes before her life was destroyed.

She remembered hurrying down the marble steps in the university’s Psychology Department and out into the sunlight. She was elated, having just finished the last essay of her final exam for her Masters in Psychology. She’d actually finished a year early.

Practically skipping home from campus, she burst through the door, tossing her books and her favorite coral-colored raincoat onto the scratchy plaid sofa.

Her last thought before she turned toward the answering machine, with its blinking red light, was that she’d been wrong about the raincoat. That morning, she’d had the feeling she might need it, heedless of the forecast, but it hadn’t rained after all. It was sunny.

The message was from Will’s sister.

“Hailey—please call me. As soon as you can.”

That was all there was to the message. Just nine strained words, and a click.

Hailey’s hands shook as she reached for the receiver, fluttering over the dial like moths batting around a porch light in the dark. Instinctively, she knew.

Will was dead.

For months, it didn’t register. Will was murdered. Murdered in a senseless act of what the police called “random violence”—a mugging. Hailey’s beloved fiancé had taken five shots, four to the head, one to the back, over his wallet containing thirty-five dollars, credit cards, driver’s license, and a picture of her. The credit cards were thrown to the ground beside his body.

Her world skidded to a halt.

Nothing mattered anymore; the days, weeks, months that followed melted and blurred, one into the other. Hailey wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, went days without speaking. Then days turned into weeks.

The clocks in her parents’ home were removed when the ticking drove her crazy, and the house stood completely quiet. It was as if time stopped along with the clocks. Her wedding dress hung in the closet and no one dared suggest she put it away. She wouldn’t pack
away his clothes, his letters. Even her notebook of wedding plans sat unmoved at her bedside with the blue pen on top, as if there were more to write.

The fresh-faced girl with the world waiting for her was dead. She died alongside the man she loved on a sunny spring afternoon.

Eight months later, the first, thick package in plain wrapping arrived, jammed into the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

It was from the first law school that wrote her back, answering her query with an application. That single envelope started a trickle that swiftly became a torrent, triggering long nights typing essays, researching scholarships, ordering transcripts, lining up references.

Her original plans—to teach college psychology or counsel patients in a quiet carpeted office—were out of the question, no longer even a remote option. The anger, the rage, but most of all the pain, were simply too big to fit into an antiseptic lecture hall or a muted psychologist’s office.

One year to the day after Will’s murder and with little fanfare, Hailey loaded her belongings—including her wedding dress, delicately folded into a big white box—into her car and left her family standing in the driveway, waving good-bye until they were just a tiny snatch of color in the rearview mirror.

Hailey opened her eyes and saw LaSondra still staring back at her.

Stuffing the photos into the back of the trial folder, she went padding in stocking feet out of the overhead fluorescent glare and into the lamplight of her own office.

There she dialed by heart the number for Christian Brown, managing editor of the
Atlanta Telegraph
, on his private office phone at his faux–Italian rococo behemoth on West Paces Ferry. His wife had dreamed it up. No children, just lifestyle.

No way would Brown budge on headlines for the sake of one bereaved mother’s feelings in South Atlanta, but there was more than one way to skin a cat.

“Christian, Hailey Dean. Problem.” Brown knew her well, so they dispensed with polite hellos.

“What’s up?” He sounded sleepy.

“Listen, I’m doing you a favor.”

“How’s that?”

She reached down deep…and lied. She lied for all she was worth and in great detail delivered the news of a lawsuit hatched by a few personal-injury lawyers just that afternoon after arraignments.

“Christian, I hate to call you at home this late and on a weekend, too. But I knew you’d want to know immediately…they’re going up against the paper for twenty mill on libel, the hooker headlines on the murder case.”

She made it up as she went along. She broke every cardinal rule of testimony on the stand, her story getting more and more elaborate.

“They’re already sweet-talking the victims’ families one by one, meeting in their homes and showing up with all the paperwork ready to be signed.”

Receiver wedged between shoulder and ear, she pictured the usual clientless hacks roaming the courthouse halls, nursing Styrofoam cups of coffee, belts riding low to make room for girth.

If it were true, the suit against the
Telegraph
could easily pass the time while they waited for judges to hand out appointed cases to them. An appointed case was a fast three hundred bucks in exchange for a swift, easy, and unprepared guilty plea from inmates. Judges loved clearing their calendars and defense attorneys loved the three hundred dollars.

“But my God, they
were
hookers!” Christian exploded, as if that would get him out of a lawsuit.

“Yeah, if you can prove it,” she followed up, “but imagine a jury when they see eight-by-tens of eleven murdered women, then listen to their families break down in tears on the stand one after the other, including
their mothers
, Christian. Can you imagine? Plaintiffs will
have a field day, even though they normally can’t try their way out of a paper bag. It’s over, Christian, and it hasn’t even started.”

She knew Brown’s head was spinning as he realized he’d shot his own foot for one day’s circulation boost. Hookers in headlines always sold copy. He hadn’t bargained on a lawsuit.

“Vultures, all of them, Christian,” she went on. “Vultures. You should have heard them. A couple million in a settlement against you makes the good life possible for them. Watch out.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he told Hailey.

Without the least bit of guilt over the huge lie she’d just told, Hailey placed the phone back in the cradle, then immediately picked it up again.

Rap sheets in hand, she dialed the number Leola Williams had given her.

With a pang of hurt for the loss of Leola’s first baby girl and no mention of LaSondra’s extensive rap sheet, Hailey promised into the phone that Leola’s daughter would not be mistreated by the press. Easier said than done, but she had to try.

“Thank you, Miss Hailey. You see that justice comes to the man who did this. You make sure he pays.”

F
OR OVER TWO MONTHS, HAILEY CRUISED THE STRIP IN AN UNDERCOVER
county car with Fincher behind the wheel.

The Odd Couple—that’s what they were called around the County Courthouse. Fincher was a dark-skinned black Marine, six foot three, heavily muscled, and always packing heat hip and ankle. Hailey stood five foot one, slight, blonde, and always unarmed. Secretly, she still recoiled at the sight of handguns, ever since Will’s murder years before. Even when guns came in as evidence in murder or assault trials, she held them lightly, as if they burned her fingertips.

After driving the streets for a while, they’d get out and go on foot from one “gentlemen’s club” to the next.

Fincher, badging their way in at the door, flashing his gold detective’s shield, always starting by asking for the manager.

They carried with them several huge albums of mug shots: every rapist, sex offender, Peeping Tom, obscene phone caller, and pervert booked in the city during the last four years, literally hundreds of suspects in the serial murder investigation. They were, at best, remote possibilities—but they were all Hailey and Fincher had to go on.

Most of the hookers who danced the strip bars wouldn’t ordinarily bother to look through the photos. But since the managers didn’t want any problems with the District Attorney’s Office, they made the girls go through the book in a break room, one by one.

That night, Hailey and Fincher interviewed nearly forty dancers, all of whom looked bored, thumbing through the album without a glint of recognition.

Then they met Cassie.

“I’ll look at your pictures under one condition,” she’d said shrewdly, looking from Hailey to Fincher.

“What’s that?”

“I want dinner. You buy.”

“Deal.”

The three of them went across the street to an all-night Denny’s, where Fincher and Hailey got coffee and Cassie got the works, building her own Grand Slam platter for five ninety-nine.

From across the table, Hailey watched her switch off bites of bacon and a side order of onion rings as she thumbed through the album.

After about twenty pages, she stopped and sank back in the booth.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, help me.” Her eyes widened and her face went pale under heavy stage makeup. She shoved her plate away, holding her right hand palm-flat to the base of her neck and reaching for her cigarettes with her left.

Hailey instinctively flicked on the recorder inside her purse. “What is it, Cassie?”

“It’s him.” Cassie lit a cigarette with a trembling hand, took a few puffs, then ground it into what was left of the Grand Slam. “He put his hands around my neck. He was supposed to give me a hundred dollars for a half-and-half—that’s what we call it, Hailey, when—you know.”

“I know,” she said quickly. She’d tried enough street crime to know what a half-and-half was and didn’t need a tutorial in a booth at Denny’s.

“Then, out of the blue, during the last half, he put his hands around my neck and choked me so hard I puked up right there on the blanket.”

“What blanket?”

“He put out a blue blanket in the park, down at the turnaround past the club. He got it out of his car trunk. We were supposed to just be there a little while and he promised a hundred dollars. I saw him in the club a few times when I was dancing, he seemed okay and the tips were always pretty good. So…I went with him.” Cassie lit up and took a long, shaky drag on a new cigarette.

“So why did he stop?”

“Well when I puked, he lost it, everything stopped. He got all embarrassed, said he didn’t mean to hurt me. But he did hurt me, I was trying to get at his hands and he wouldn’t…until I threw up.”

“Then what happened?”

“He gave me the hundred dollars in tens and he dropped me back off at the club. I never saw him again. I didn’t think about it too much at the time. But you know, later that night when I got home and I was getting ready for bed, I felt inside like I had been touched by something pure evil. I know it sounds crazy, but after all the men I’ve been through, I never felt like that before.”

Fincher looked hard at the woman across the booth. “Why didn’t you report him? If this is the right guy, you know how many women he killed? Women just like you?
Eleven
that we
know
of. And I bet there are bodies out there we never found.”

Fincher was breathing hard and irritated. It was late and they were dead tired, but they both felt an unspoken surge that they had stumbled onto something.

“Well what was
I
supposed to tell the cops…that I was turning a half-and-half out behind the club and the guy got crazy on me? That sounds like a confession to me. That kind of talk will get you ninety hours in the city jail for solicitation. Plus, the man gave me the hundred. Hell,
no
, I didn’t tell the police.”

Cassie ground her cigarette into her plate beside the first butt and started collecting her things to leave. She was pissed. She hadn’t come here for a sermon. She grabbed her purse.

Hailey couldn’t let her go, couldn’t screw this up. Too much was riding on it. She had to smooth it over.

Because out there, somewhere, tonight maybe, he was roaming. Waiting. Looking. Every extra day Hailey spent working the case meant one more night he was free to stalk the city of Atlanta. For all she knew, he was there, outside, this very moment.

“Fincher, go to the car and call back to the precinct. Get this guy’s rap sheet.”

He stalked out sulking, knowing full well he was banished from the booth for reprimanding a woman who could end up being the State’s star witness.

“Cassie, please…” Hailey reached out and gently touched the hooker’s bony, tattooed arm. “Don’t go.”

“I don’t need this shit.”

“Listen, I’m sorry about that. We just don’t want to see another woman, or you, killed. Fincher feels the police didn’t work the case because the dead girls were hookers. Or dancers—like you, Cassie. Please. You could be saving a life. I need you. Don’t you have a little sister? Or a little girl? Would you want this to happen to her?”

Hailey pulled out a crime scene photo of one of the victims and handed it to Cassie.

Cassie paused, looking at the photo. Then, she put her purse back down beside her in the booth, got out a cigarette, and lit it up.

Thank God, a second chance.

“When did it happen, Cassie? Did you ever see him again? Just tell me what you remember.”

“It was July, last year.” She exhaled. “It was sticky hot the minute I stepped out of the back of the club and came down the steps.”

“July. Good. When in July?”

Cassie thought hard about it, as Hailey calculated…July of last year would have been nearly two years ago…when Homicide figured he’d first started the killings. Cassie must have been one of his first victims, but he had gotten put off by the vomit and quit. But by the time he geared up for his next victim, he was past backing out. The next girl wasn’t so lucky.

“You know what?” Cassie said at last. “It was probably, like, the week after the Fourth. I remember because I had made a little outfit for a special show at the club for the holiday and I wore it the next week, too. It had red, white, and blue sequins and a matching sequined choker. I wore the leotard part of the outfit again the next week but without the red tux jacket. It was that night, the night I went with him in the car. He tore the neck of it in the park.”

“Tore the neck out?” Hailey alerted to the significance.

“Yeah. Just the neck was torn.”

“What else? Just tell me what you remember…every detail. It’ll come back to you.”

Cassie shrugged. “It was late, like four a.m. I stepped out of the back of the club. He was waiting for me in his car, looking up at the door when I came out.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know…it was big, but I don’t remember what kind. I thought we’d go to a hotel room or even in the car because it was so big, but he wanted it outdoors. I figured it’d be quick and at that time of night in the cul-de-sac, nobody would be around for sure, so I took him there.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

Cassie shook her head. “He never came back after that night, and up ’til then, he had been pretty regular, same seat every night for about a month. Good tips, too. Then—poof! Gone. Never came back. I told some of the other girls about it. They remembered him, but they said it, too—you know, that he never came back in the club.”

She stopped talking and got quiet, looking down at the ashtray.

“What else can you remember?” Hailey coaxed.

“Yeah…thinking back…you know, I wouldn’t have thrown up, but I had just had my dinner break. He smelled funny, like a kitchen smell, like real strong garlic. But it wasn’t his breath. It was just
him
. It like…came out of his
pores
or something.”

Hailey’s thoughts raced as they sent Cassie on her way and pulled out of the Denny’s parking lot. All they needed was a break…one break. One hint, one clue, one sign.

They finally had something…same MO, outside in a secluded area located off the strip, prostitute-victim, half-and-half, manual strangulation during the trick…a fascination with the victim’s neck…it was all too similar
not
to be connected.

The sheer impact of how close this woman had come to losing her life,
if
this was the right guy, slammed into Hailey like a tsunami.

“Fincher…stop the car.”

“What’s wrong?”

He was out there.

“Nothing. Just…” She turned, looking out the back window, and watched Cassie until she was out of sight, back in the club, safe.

Safe for tonight, at least.