The Eleventh Victim (33 page)

C
ANCELING THE DAY’S APPOINTMENTS TO STAY HOME HAD
seemed like a good idea this morning.

But now that Hailey had spent hours alone in her apartment, pacing, paranoid despite the lowered shades, locks, and a .38 at her side…

Maybe she’d feel safer somewhere else.

Here, she couldn’t help but feel like a sitting duck. He’d gotten past the doorman and locks once before. He could do it again.

She paced relentlessly from room to room, making tea, straightening things that didn’t need to be straightened, ignoring the phone every time it rang.

It had been ringing a lot.

Dana had called several times, leaving messages.

“Hailey, are you sick? Why aren’t you here today? Call me. I need you.” She sounded like she was crying. “Greg dumped me.”

Of course. Hailey knew he sounded too good to be true.

“Hailey, it’s me again. Please call me back. I’m so upset.”

Man trouble.

“Hailey, come on…I’m sorry to keep bugging you, but where are you? Pick up if you’re there.”

She felt vaguely guilty, but she couldn’t talk to Dana. She couldn’t talk to anyone.

Including Adam Springhurst, who had also called. She’d thought about it. Adam had it all: the degree, the successful dentistry practice, looks, charm…but something was sideways. Maybe it was just her. Even after all the years, she wasn’t ready for the dating scene, the dinner conversation, retelling all your funny stories to a different person every Saturday night. It probably had nothing to do with Adam at all.

Bottom line…she couldn’t trust anyone right now, including Adam and Dana. Not until this was resolved, one way or another.

It didn’t make sense of course…but Dana was the only person in the city who could have gotten into, or let someone into, her apartment to plant the murder weapon, even if unintentionally.

She had a copy of Hailey’s keys. And then there was the night Hailey had been attacked, in Dana’s office…right after she’d found out about Melissa. Hailey was almost positive she’d heard Dana just moments before the first blow.

Hailey sternly stopped herself. Looking out her window down the twenty-one floors to the avenue, she felt ashamed for suspecting her friend. Hailey wished she could be a different person…a sweet, trusting person. The person she was before Will’s murder,
before she spent so many years surrounded by violent crime. She wanted desperately to be that way again.

But the world had changed her.

As the day wore into night, Hailey sat alone in the darkened apartment, clutching yet another cup of tea gone cold. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t call anyone because she didn’t dare trust anyone.

There had to be an answer, something she was missing. Who knew so much about her? And who knew so much about her last serial murder prosecutions in Atlanta all those years ago? Where did her Tiffany pen come from and who planted it? Would they stop at merely framing her for her patients’ deaths? Did they want her to be shamed? To lose her bar license and psychologist license in one fell swoop? Who wanted her behind bars? Who wanted to destroy her reputation and credibility? Or was she the next victim to die with four metal prongs slicing through her lungs?

Cruise.

It all made sense.

But the pen…how did he conceal it for all these years in prison? Wouldn’t it have been discovered? Taken away? Returned to her…or at the very least confiscated from him?

Hailey had torn through her apartment inch by inch today, exploring the heating and cooling units and behind the fridge, checking the washer/dryer, inside commode tanks, and inside the other light fixtures; checking for slits in mattresses and sofa cushions; searching inside fuse boxes, the dishwasher…even inside the air purifiers.

Other than finding her files askew, she’d found nothing else.

She should be relieved.

But she wasn’t.

Someone was playing a game with her…a deadly game.

She couldn’t just sit in the dark, wondering, waiting.

Her life depended on it.

It was nearly midnight when she strapped on the .38 under a raincoat and headed down to Second Avenue to hail a cab.

The streets of Manhattan were nearly empty. Hailey held her arm up in the air. Almost immediately, a cab materialized.

It took less than twenty minutes to get to her office downtown.

Opening the street door in the night chill, she pulled it closed and locked it behind her before heading up the stairs to her office.

Stepping inside into her office foyer, she found it silent and undisturbed, just as she left it.

She locked the door behind her and crossed the room to a neat row of filing cabinets. Thumbing through the files, she reached back toward the end of the row, pulling out a cream-colored manila folder titled “Hayden Krasinski.”

Hailey settled into the wingback chair by the office window, flicked on the floor lamp just beside her, and started reading. The gun and holster dug into her shoulder, so she took it off just while she was reading and hung it right beside her over the wing of the chair.

Two hours passed and she still had no idea exactly what she was looking for; only that she hadn’t found it, despite going over and over everything in Hayden’s file. Now for Melissa’s.

Her head ached and her eyes were burning, but she didn’t dare give up. There might be a clue to the murders here. There had to be, because she didn’t know where else to look.

Rubbing her fingers into her forehead, she stood up and walked across her office floor to the kitchen to brew tea. Just as she was adding milk, hoping the tiny shot of caffeine would keep her going, she heard a single clicking sound.

In the instant, before she spotted the human figure, she heard his voice.

“Hello, Counselor. That’s a standard door lock. Easy to pick. I’m surprised you wouldn’t do better.”

He was dressed in solid black and stood blocking the door of Hailey’s office, facing her, his head and face completely obscured in a green ski mask leaving nothing visible but eyes and lips. Just before hurling the tea cup at him from across the room and turning to run, it registered in the back of her mind…perpetrator approximately
six feet tall, 185 pounds, dark clothing. Race, hair color, other identifying features and characteristics, unknown.

The shot was a perfect aim, but he ducked his head out of the way a few inches and the cup smashed head-level into the wall beside the door. Darting backward, she lunged for the door out of her little kitchen and into the shared back hallway. Before she could get out, he closed the space between them, grabbing her from behind at the waist, yanking her hand off the knob so violently it felt as if several fingers were instantly broken.

He pulled her backward, hard. She hit the floor and tasted blood. He came down on top of her. As she struggled forward to get away from him, her hand grazed the cord to the coffeemaker on the counter above.

She pulled hard.

The coffeemaker, filled with scalding water for tea, smashed down, drenching the ski mask.

He screamed in pain, clutching his face. In that second, she scrambled up off the floor and ran.

She made it through the door and out into the hallway. She knew the door to the street was locked with a key—she had locked it herself. The key was back in her office…. There was nowhere to go but up. One of the older dentists notoriously left his back office door unlocked. She could only pray that was the case tonight. Her boots still lay at the foot of her reading chair; she ran up the hardwood stairs as noiselessly as possible.

What if it’s locked?
The thought ripped through her brain in the last second before she grasped the knob with her uninjured left hand.

She almost cried out in relief when she turned the handle: it was unlocked. Slipping in, she maneuvered through a darkened file room, sliding through the tall metal stacks of patient folders reaching floor to ceiling, then through a side door to the waiting area, closing the door behind her as silently as possible. Her goal…the third-floor fire escape.

Negotiating the darkened room, Hailey passed by the coffee table stacked with magazines, a large ceramic umbrella holder, a magazine rack. Then, in search of the fire escape window, she stepped into the dentist’s clinical exam room.

To her horror, there were no fire escape steps outside the exam room’s window. She had chosen the wrong room.

With nowhere left to go, Hailey huddled down behind a massive piece of diagnostic machinery looming over a cushioned, reclining hydraulic dentist’s chair.

She waited. She hardly breathed for fear of making noise.

It seemed like forever, the silence hanging in the room as she crouched there on the floor…the quiet ringing in her ears…when finally she heard it…a far-off click as the front door lock was jimmied and snapped open.

She stifled a scream and tried to scrunch down even further onto the floor.

She couldn’t hear a thing.

Seconds passed; minutes. She could hear movement now in the waiting room she had just left…. It was the metal magazine rack, she was sure, that crashed to the tile floor.

Then quiet. She strained to hear in the darkness. Nothing more, and then…

The air moved in the room and she knew. He was here.

She could feel him, lurking there in the room with her.

Silent tears flowed hotly down her cheeks.

Why? Why had it come to this? Who was he?

Nothing stirred in the room, yet she didn’t dare believe he had moved on. She could sense him, could feel him in the air. She could see nothing in the black of the room, crouched down near the floor.

All at once, he pounced from behind, heaving her up by her neck.

She screamed out in pain and fought wildly, lashing out in every direction, kicking at his knee, his crotch, anywhere she could make contact.

He gripped her neck from behind. She wrenched free and scrambled away.

He came after her with a curse. Again, his hands closed around her neck. Again she broke free and tried to claw her way to the doorway.

She didn’t make it. He picked her up and literally threw her across the room. She landed against an antique sideboard. Pain shattered her body, yet somehow she managed to stand. He was on her, strong fingers digging into her neck as he bent her forward at the waist, over the sideboard.

Suddenly, a cloud passed away from the moon outside. In the dim light filtering through the office window, Hailey looked into an ornate mirror above the sideboard and saw his shoulders and head, still shrouded in the ski mask, looming behind her.

She struggled against him. He wrenched her arm and she heard the crack of bone. Searing pain, poker hot, shot through her arm and shoulder. “What’s the matter, Counselor? Still don’t recognize me?”

With her one good arm, she managed to get hold of the mask, pulling at it. But it hit her—just before she saw his face in the dim moonlight—she knew his voice.

After all the years of courtroom practice, this was one with whom she never shared a cup of coffee, a Christmas card, a sandwich at lunch, or even a joke over the phone or in pre-trial plea negotiations. Instinctively, she had always kept her distance.

Now she understood why.

“You don’t have to do this…. Stop now before you make it worse on yourself,” she gasped out. “You know they’ll get you…maybe not now, not tonight, not tomorrow—but they will.”

He held her in a vise grip as he talked, his lips against the side of her head.

“Not if they never find your body, Hailey. That’s the mistake I made with LaSondra. It wasn’t supposed to go down like that. I got a little sloppy with a cheap hooker just once…just once.”

Matt Leonard’s hands circled around her throat and squeezed. Facing the mirror, she saw her own mouth open for air, saw her
eyes begin to bulge. As she watched in silent horror as her own life drained away, she saw it.

The ring with three rubies.

And just before the ring twisted inward to the palm during the struggle, she understood. In that moment, she understood the trident mark on the neck of LaSondra Williams…. She understood why a man like Leonard would volunteer to take the case of Clint Burrell Cruise pro bono. Her mind flashed back to the courtroom and Cruise gnawing his nails down to the quick. He was a nail biter…he couldn’t leave fingernail marks on LaSondra’s neck. She understood it all. Leonard murdered Victim Eleven. He’d strangled LaSondra Williams and set up Cruise to take the fall for her murder.

“Don’t you see, Hailey? I have to…I have to do it.” Leonard breathed it into her hair. “Cruise is out. When I went looking for him, I heard he came to find you. Only you could put it together, only you, Hailey. Only you.”

His fingers dug into her skin, the rubies tearing at her throat.

“I knew the deal with Cruise’s MO—can’t keep a secret in APD Homicide. So I set it up to look like Cruise’s work and took the case pro bono. Brilliant. I knew he’d take the fall. Until the feds nailed your detective for stealing from dopers, and caught on tape, too! Good cop, Hailey. Too bad he was the one that found the murder weapon. But the reversal wasn’t all bad, Hailey. My firm needed the money we started losing after the Cruise conviction. But then Cruise headed up here. I knew once he found you, between you two, you’d put the pieces together. Once you got my Internal Affairs file from APD. There’s no other way, Hailey. Go out with a little dignity. Let me remember you that way…”

In one last spurt of strength, Hailey pushed backward, and they both went sprawling on the floor.

Hailey began crawling again, trying to get to the door.

Leonard grabbed her again by the back of the hips and jerked her back. She flailed, reaching—reaching for anything.

Her fingers wrapped around something and squeezed, and in the moment, she didn’t even know what she had.

She heard a whirring sound just as she sunk the object into Leonard’s neck, hot blood spurting onto her face and shoulder.

The dentist’s drill.

Two things she hated most in the world…a sleazy defense attorney and a whining dentist’s drill…united at last. It was her final thought before she slumped forward.