Nancy Grace: The Eleventh Victim

Leonard had been an Atlanta cop for several years but never rose above street cop status, and he still stayed in close contact with his old cronies. Many of them had risen in the ranks. He still had the body of a cop, with a barrel chest and thin at the waist. He was a fitness buff, spending hours watching himself work out in front of mirrors at the gym. He even had to have his suits specially tailored wide at the shoulder and then taken in for an almost freakishly thin waist and bottom. Word was that he left the police force with an Internal Affairs file as thick as your fist, filled with police brutality complaints. Gossip or lore, Hailey never knew the truth of it.

He’d gone through five wives that Hailey knew of. She saw the most recent one at the annual Lawyer’s Club Christmas party: a bleached platinum blonde, tiny, in her early twenties, incredibly frail and thin. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds and was dressed like a runway model. She never said a word, though, looking ill at ease and nervous. Her frosty red lipstick kept glomming at the corners of her mouth, giving her an unnatural clown frown. Hailey later heard they, too, had divorced.

Standing there, facing Leonard’s steely gaze and imposing figure, Hailey had no problem believing that the brutality rumor was true.

“Take the dead-docket, Hailey. It won’t spoil your record. That’s what it’s all about for you, right? Undefeated?”

“This isn’t about my record, Leonard. It’s about what went down on the strip. It’s about your client and what he did. You may win one round in court, Leonard, but it’s not over… yet . I’ve just gotten started with you.”

“What do you want, Dean? To rot in a job as a local prosecutor? Nothing but dopers, thugs, killers?”

“Like yours is any different? Except, oh yeah, you defend the dopers and the thugs and the killers. You put them back on the street.” She shot it right back at him.

“Some life you’ve got going here, Hailey. No family, no kids, just a worn-out, bitter prosecutor. How’s that working for you?”

His hulking frame was hovering closer, his hands clinched, the knuckles white as they gripped the other side of the State’s counsel table. Instead of playing his game, Hailey turned her back on him and started packing her files to leave.

“Don’t do it, Hailey, you’re being stupid,” he hissed, low in the silence of the courtroom. “Here’s the deal. You can go on to a judgeship. I can make it happen for you. That’s what you want in the end, don’t you? To be a judge? Don’t go down the tubes over some dead hookers. Your career is everything to you, right? It’s all you’ve got left…why blow it now? Play this case right, don’t make enemies.”

She snapped, turning around to look him square in the face.

“Leonard, I think you should go get into your car and drive out to the jail to see your client and tell him he’s getting the chair. You know, the electric chair. ‘Old Sparky,’ I believe they call it, Leonard. Ever heard of that? ‘Old Sparky’?” She gestured her head toward the parking deck.

“You little bitch…you just won’t play ball with the rest of us, will you? You think you’re all about justice. You think you’re above us all, don’t you? You’re nothing but a prima donna and I’m bringing you down.”

Leonard advanced around the corner of the table. Too close. Too menacing. She saw his trademark nervous tic erupt across the corner of his lip and eye, his fingers working that ridiculous family crest ring encrusted with rubies. It was monstrous. Pompous ass.

She’d never do it in front of a judge or jury, but now, without anyone watching, she smiled openly at Leonard’s nervous twisting. With all that twitching and sniffing, he unwittingly turned off jurors and witnesses by the drove.

“Now here’s the deal, Leonard. If Cruise walks free out of this courthouse, he’ll do it over my dead cold body. Unlike everything and everybody else, this is one thing you and your politician brother won’t be able to buy. You know why? Because you don’t have a single thing I want, including a judgeship. And I don’t need friends like you, Leonard. You and your client are both freaks. Now get out of the courtroom.”

“When this is over, Dean, I’ll have the nameplate off your office door, and your law license, too.” He let it out low, flinty eyes boring a hole through hers.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” She turned, picked up her briefcase, and left.

It took all her willpower not to turn at the courtroom door and look back at him. As she walked alone down the courthouse’s wide hallway, she could feel his presence right on her heels, like he was going to pounce on her from behind.

Atlanta, Georgia

“THIS, MEMBERS OF THE JURY, IS THE WEAPON DEFENDANT CLINT Burrell Cruise used to murder eleven innocent women. This, and his own brute strength as he circled his fingers around their throats.” Hailey held up the poultry-lifter in her left hand, arm outstretched, slowly walking the length of the jury rail in a courtroom packed with relatives, court watchers, and media. Witnesses lined the halls outside the courtroom, waiting to be called in one by one.

The jurors stared at the weapon, some with their mouths open. This was the weapon that had stumped Atlanta PD for so long. Several of the jurors actually recoiled backward in their seats as she walked slowly before them, intentionally holding the lifter just beneath their chins.

Blood from the last victim, LaSondra Williams, was still on the prongs that left an unmistakable, signature death wound ripping open the lower back of each victim.

Hailey’s mind flashed back to the exact wording in the autopsy.

Angle: 45 degrees, upwards, back to front, just below the lung cavity.

Even with Cassie’s lead, it had taken a while to piece together the puzzle and make an arrest.

Between baker’s twine, the murder weapon itself, and what Cassie said about the smell of garlic oozing from the pores of her attacker, it all slowly fit together. The killer was a chef.

The murder weapon had taken a while to figure out. Months of studying the mortal wounds, their angles of entry and exit, their lengths and their widths, and searching for microscopic fibers or particles left behind inside or around the puncture marks had ended with nothing. Nothing. It was only after Hailey’s comparison of the baker’s twine and Cassie’s observation that a murder weapon was finally identified…in a specialty gourmet kitchen boutique.

The killer used a poultry-lifter to deliver each of the four-pronged stab wounds. A solid stainless-steel Norpro poultry-lifter had prongs sharp and sturdy enough to handle even the biggest birds. The long, seven-inch stainless-steel prongs were easily identifiable once they knew where to look, the individual tines widely spaced to allow a chef to balance the bird.

He’d always ended by staging the scene, postmortem, with the signature bow, tied with baker’s twine around the victims’ bruised neck, wrist, ankle, toe…almost always varying the anatomical location, like a little surprise.

Cruise wrapped each victim like a present to the Homicide Unit. Then later, after the papers announced that Hailey was named head of the investigation, it became a mocking gesture to her alone.

When the murder weapon was finally found in Cruise’s home, pursuant to a search warrant, it was in a Ziploc double-zip bag, wrapped in a stark white bath towel and stuffed inside a gym bag. The bag was concealed far behind a row of perfectly lined shoes in Cruise’s bedroom closet. The rubber grip should have revealed latent fingerprints, but multiple grooved markings on the handle made prints impossible.