Nancy Grace - The Eleventh Victim

She gazed out the window, and when she looked down, the ground was swirling, her vision blurred from the beating.

Concentrate. You have to keep going…

The window was up.

Now…if she could get her leg up and out, the rest of her could follow…

It was too late.

Two hands grabbed her shoulders, pulling her back, away from the window.

The pain was so intense. She couldn’t fight anymore. Where was Sidney? What did they do to Sidney? The room disappeared in black.

New York City

HAILEY HUNCHED FORWARD INTO THE COLD WITH HER ARMS crossed over her chest, moving quickly up the street toward her own apartment.

Her own apartment.

It seemed like months had passed since she’d been home.

Ricky was there, manning the front door, holding it open for her, and she stepped into the familiar warmth of the lobby.

Habit carried her through the lobby, nodding good-night to the snoozy second doorman manning the desk, past the mailroom hidden behind the elevators.

Now, finally, she slipped into the elevator alone, humming its way up. She leaned back against the wooden panel and focused on the one thing that had consumed her for the past three hours.

Her silver pen.

Now, years after she had lost the memento of one of her most famous murder trials, it turned up again. Not in an old trunk or trial file, not crammed to the back of her underwear drawer where she often put letters and cards she wanted to keep, but in the hands of the NYPD, lifted as evidence off the dead body of one of her own patients.

When the elevator’s muted bell rang to a stop at her floor, Hailey stepped off and headed down the carpeted hallway to the end of the hall to her corner apartment. It seemed amazing to her to take out her key, open the door, and find everything as it had been when she’d left. The light still burning over the stove, the window still cracked slightly in her bedroom to let in cool, fresh air, her clogs still sitting at the edge of her bed, as if nothing had changed.

But it had. It had changed horribly.

Home. Home at last.

She could hear her own footsteps in the quiet of the apartment, stepping back to the bathroom attached to her bedroom to fill the tub with hot water.

Leaning over to plug the stopper, her thoughts raced. She was clearly the cops’ chief suspect. They’d be out for blood now that she’d trumped their theory from behind bars. They’d want to nail her on this no matter what. They’d never admit they were wrong, especially after she’d humiliated Kolker. Plus, if she wasn’t the killer, they’d be screwed at trial. How could they testify under oath to a jury they were positive they had the killer, when a few short months before, they’d been were positive she was the killer? They couldn’t. They were locked into her, and they’d make the evidence fit.

She knew it. She felt trapped.

Hailey turned abruptly, leaving the bath water running. She went into her closet and kicked off her boots and socks, leaving them there on the closet floor. Barefoot, she went silently across the hardwood floor into the kitchen.

The pen. That’s what they had against her, that, the hair match, and a few pieces of circumstantial evidence. They’d be working the case against her now harder than ever. They wanted her at all costs. She was going down. They’d find a way to do it…unless she could figure it out before she was re-arrested.

She robotically went through her cabinet until she found the tea she wanted. Filling the kettle at the sink, she wondered…

The pen had never been in her apartment or her office here in the city; she was certain of that. That ruled out Hayden lifting it by accident. It hadn’t happened that way, but for the very first time, Hailey had lied to police. To save her own skin.

Standing there in her kitchen waiting for water to boil, her lips curved up wryly on one side. The shoe was finally on the other foot.

How many dozens-no, hundreds-of times had she shredded criminal defendants and their lawyers in open court when they had been caught in a lie to cops after a crime? And when defendants were foolish enough to take the stand, she carefully dissected their every word, twisting them, slicing them, slowly roasting them until sometimes they broke down and cried. Sometimes they had confessed…and sometimes they lunged at her across the witness stand. Unsuccessfully.

The stillness of her apartment was disconcerting compared to the sounds of the city, so alive outside, far below, even at this time of night. The water was heating and she walked from room to room, innately seeking some sort of comfort from the things around her. She glided back across the hardwood floor onto the cold slate kitchen floor.

The only sound was the hot water running on high in the bathtub. She stopped at the den window beside her mother’s piano and leaned against the built-in heater, staring out at the Empire State Building. She was hundreds of miles away from the old life full of murder, rape, gun violence, child molestation, and drug lords. She thought she’d left it all back in Atlanta to come here, to start over lost in crowds where nobody knew her name, where every time she ate out, she wasn’t surrounded by a potential jury pool.

But tonight, she was right back where she started.

Images of Hayden and Melissa appeared in her mind’s eye, then suddenly blurred with the dead and decomposing bodies of the murder victims she represented for so many years. They all blended together.

Shaking it off, she turned away from the window and walked back through her bedroom to the bath. Reaching across the tub to twist off the hot-water tap, she was relieved, once again, to see that all was as she had left it.

Back in the master bedroom, she went to the rosewood wall unit at the far side of the room, directly across from the bed. She’d had it specially made and installed, and it covered the entire wall.

The shelves on one side were full of volumes and volumes of research, both legal and psychological, notes, presentations, and oral arguments. The other side, when opened, revealed a built-in desktop computer topped by shelves that held a fax, printer, dictionary, thesaurus-all tools of her trades.

Hailey adroitly reached beneath the computer’s slide-out keyboard, pulled a lever, and a panel along the back swung open.

It had been nearly a year since she’d opened the cabinet’s concealed door to survey its secret contents. Tonight, it was pure instinct.

A small overhead light in the back of the unit automatically illuminated the gun and knife collection she had amassed over a decade of prosecuting everyone from bank robbers to drug lords to street gangs.

Yes, she’d been the only assistant district attorney who, on principle, never carried a weapon.

But these weapons-which were entered into evidence in Hailey’s more memorable prosecutions-were always carefully stored in a locker in her office. At some point, when the appeals process was exhausted, they’d all be auctioned off or just melted down somewhere.

Unbeknownst to Hailey as her flight jetted her from Atlanta to LaGuardia on the day of her move, somewhere below her on the interstate snaked a moving van full of an arsenal she never intended to bring with her. When the movers had packed her belongings from the office, they had simply shipped the huge lockbox along with everything else.

It had taken a while to discover what happened. She was in no hurry to unpack the boxes she thought contained old trial files…in no hurry to relive the violence, the hatred, the crimes that had worn her down…that caused her to leave her roots for a so-called regular life.

But the day she finally unpacked the box and realized what was inside had actually not been upsetting at all. She hadn’t been upset…no…she was almost…nostalgic. Nostalgic for her old office, the friends she’d had there, and the dedication that propelled her for so long.