Nancy Grace - The Eleventh Victim

Here in Reidsville, he had plenty of time to relive the trial, all the errors his lawyer had made, and all the other indignities Hailey Dean subjected him to.

He followed her career from behind bars. He had gone to the law library and Xeroxed every document he could find on her. He had every news clipping, every blurb, every shred of information on Dean. It was too obvious to just thrust it under his cot, so instead, at night, he’d meticulously tear apart the thin layers of cotton that made up his mattress and press each article between the strips. He had to be careful.

He read all about her cases, every appeal of every case she ever tried, even the hard-luck story that came out about the murder of her fiancé. The thought of her and the memory of his attorney screwing him over consumed him.

The day the verdict was handed down, she was pale. Her hair was pulled back and he couldn’t take his eyes off her neck.

He remembered watching her neck as the verdict was read.

Guilty. All eleven counts.

The courtroom turned into a reddish, hazy blur when the last count was read, the last verdict of guilty, for the murder of LaSondra Williams.

His body took over, his hands felt the electricity surging through them, shooting through his wrists down to his fingertips and he leaped.

Lunging across the table, strewing law books and notes and paper cups…he made it. He made it all the way to where she stood, unprotected in the center of the massive courtroom. Her investigator was several rows back in the courtroom sitting with the State’s witnesses. He had stupidly let his guard down and left her alone. In that one moment, Cruise made it across the courtroom to Hailey Dean.

He reached out and barely fingered her neck, when a pain burned through his skull as the sheriffs clubbed him from behind.

Idiots. They couldn’t understand the artist’s mind, a mind like his. They thought he was enraged over the verdict. But all he wanted was to touch her neck. His hands were pumped with energy, and they ached to circle her neck, just below her chin.

Dean stood silent when they dragged him off her, eyes still locked on him, as if he had never touched her.

Tonight, in the dark of his cell, his hands felt hot with electricity, that old feeling that took hold of him. He was superhuman again.

He thought of her. She wasn’t so smart. A smile spread across his face.

He was the only one that knew just how stupid Hailey Dean really was. Because he, Clint Burrell Cruise, hadn’t strangled LaSondra Williams.

Imagine Dean’s expression when she finds out the truth. Stupid bitch. So stupid, she didn’t have a clue.

If his own incompetent lawyer had proven him innocent on the eleventh murder count, doubt would have been cast on all the other murders and the jury would have let him go…let him walk out of the courtroom and onto the elevator. Down to the lobby and out into the street, mingling with all the others on the sidewalk until he disappeared into the evening.

The cell row was deafeningly quiet. Cruise’s hands were so electric tonight he thought he’d come out of his skin.

Hailey Dean.

It was like she was here, in his cell with him. He still remembered her smell. In the dark, he could still smell her, like the outdoors.

New York City

TWO YEARS LATER

WAVES OF HEAT SHIMMERED OFF THE GRASS IN THE CLEARING where she sat cross-legged in the red Georgia dirt. The sun baked the pine trees and their sap boiled over, spilling onto the trunks, making the air even heavier with the scent. Digging with a spoon from the kitchen, the girl’s skin felt as if it had been baking, too.

Suddenly, her tiny fingers tensed around the spoon handle.

Someone was coming. Something was wrong.

She sensed it before she heard faint footsteps.

Peering between slender trunks, she made out the form of her own mother.

But momentary relief gave way to apprehension…her mother was moving slowly, stealthily toward her, creeping across a smooth floor of strewn pine needles and cones.

Her mother approached with neither word nor recognition, raising a sharpened hoe over her head that the child had only seen used for planting daylilies or digging in the fields on Saturdays.

She dropped the spoon to the ground. Palms up on her knees, she saw the hoe raised up evenly, then pulling back, her mother’s face like a stone. And in one smooth, violent, powerful plunge, the woman thrust the blade forward.

At the very last moment, the child squeezed her eyes shut.

She never cried out, opening her eyes to see her mother sink without a word to her knees.

There, just inches beside them along with the little dirt pies, lay a Southern timber rattler, its head neatly chopped from its body, still coiled in fat and convulsing circles.

The girl sat still as her mother rose up from the red earth, scooped her to her feet, and without a word between them, carried her across the field and into the house.

Once inside the darkened kitchen, everything was safe again. The world was right…

Then Hailey was spinning, spinning…comforting arms on a sunny afternoon were gone and suddenly, it was dark.

The pain in her chest made her think for a moment she was having a heart attack. Her heart beat violently, her blood pumping hard, her fingertips throbbing, her ears ringing.

Somewhere in the night, a car slammed on squealing brakes and then, gunning its motor, took off down Fifty-fourth toward the East River.

Hailey Dean sat up abruptly, clutching her chest.

In the dim light, her bedroom began to materialize, pieces of furniture reassembling themselves in the darkness. Tonight, in the dark of her Manhattan apartment, it was all real.

Clutching the sheets of her bed, she remembered how her mother had saved her life that day. Her life was saved, but she hadn’t been able to save Will’s, not all the lives that had touched her own since-all the victims whose cases she went on to prosecute.

Two years ago, she kept a promise to Leola Williams and sent her daughter’s killer to Death Row.

And then, she left. In a new city, she started a new life.

The old dark days were thousands of miles and years away.

Years of courtroom battles and an endless parade of victims looking out at her from crime-scene photos and autopsy tables at the morgue had taken their toll.

It was January in New York City, yet sweat bathed her forehead. The hair against the back of her neck was soaked and perspiration beaded across her chest. Her nightgown was twisted around her waist and tangled with the sheets.

As always, she ordered herself to be free of it all…if only her mind would let her.

It never did. Will was dead and he had been for years.

Hailey lay awake until the sun came up and the alarm went off.

She showered, then returned to the bedroom. She did her best to ignore the cardboard box on the top shelf as she pulled a couple of outfits on hangers from her closet.

Inside, her wedding gown and veil lay carefully folded between layers of crinkly tissue paper.

The dress was champagne silk, off the shoulder, simple; not too much of a train, but a train nevertheless. The veil was brocade. The two, gown and veil, should have swished gently down an aisle sprinkled with flower petals and lit by candlelight, should have been admired by hushed onlookers. They should have been memorialized in wedding photos displayed to the delight of children and grandchildren to come.

Hailey hadn’t sealed the box. But in all the years since Will’s murder, in all the years since she had finally folded her wedding gown carefully away, she never once opened the lid.

The box was always close at hand. She carried it like a treasure to law school. It was her only traveling companion when she headed to Atlanta after graduating.