Nancy Grace: The Eleventh Victim

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.”

Atlanta, Georgia

FOR 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.