Nancy Grace: The Eleventh Victim

Cruise was even approached by the Food Channel to launch his own televised daily hour of infusion art. He was all set to be up there alongside the others, Rachael Ray, Paula Deen, the Iron Chefs, and maybe one day, Martha Stewart herself. Many times he’d imagined lingering over the made-for-TV kitchen counter, casually straddling a bar stool, sharing techniques with Stewart.

It could happen.

As much as he adored Martha Stewart, he hated Emeril Lagasse with that frickin’ “Bam!” every time he did something. God he hated that man. He, Cruise, should have Lagasse’s fame.

Screw him and his worn out “Bam!” routine.

The last time some ass had turned on Lagasse in the rec room, Cruise picked up a metal folding chair and threw it at the TV. He got thirty days in solitary for that, but if Lagasse said “Bam” just one more time Cruise swore he’d kill him dead with his own two hands.

The Food Channel…just when it was all coming together…it all came crashing down. Because of her. Hailey Dean. That bitch hunted him down like a bloodhound.

After his arrest, she came to the jail. He could smell her halfway down the cellblock. She smelled like cold wind, like the night air in Atlanta after it rained. Even that memory plagued Cruise now, made him twist at night in a sweat on the two inches of flat cotton over rusted springs they called a cot.

When she’d come to the jail that day, she had him pulled out of his cell with a warrant and dragged to the sick bay. He knew what she wanted and he fought like hell until two guards forced him into a seat and cuffed him to the chair. There, she watched the nurse jab him with a needle to draw blood from his arm. He stared right back at her, neither one ever once breaking their gaze, even when the needle bit into his skin.

Not one muscle moved in her face, even though behind her, talking into her ear the whole time she watched, there had stood a huge black man wearing a heavy coat and a black fedora. She seemed to listen to him, but never once responded, never looking away from Cruise’s face. When the blood was drawn and siphoned into separate vials, she stepped around the glass wall and into sick bay. Even as she spoke to the jail nurse, she still kept a razor lock on Cruise.

“Mark it, please. Name and cell,” he heard her say. “And would you hand it directly to my investigator? I can’t touch it myself, can’t break the chain of custody. I’d hate to be a State’s witness in a murder case I’m prosecuting myself. And ma’am, let me give you this subpoena in case the drawing of the blood is called into question by the defense.”

The nurse marked the two glass vials and handed them over to the investigator.

“Fincher, seal it.” Hailey stood completely still, never laying a finger on the vials, vials that literally held Clint Cruise’s future within their thin walls. Fincher placed them into a brown manila envelope, and sealed it.

Hailey Dean handed the nurse a court order of appearance, then backed toward the door. Still staring him in the face, she fired one last remark, like a hollow-point bullet. “DNA evidence is a miracle. Isn’t that right, Fincher?”

“Sure is, it’s a miracle.”

They both looked at him with no change of expression, then turned on their heels and walked out.

Later, at trial, Cruise learned Hailey Dean was so concerned about the admissibility of DNA evidence at trial, she was shoring up her evidence before the jury was even struck. She knew full well that defense attorneys far and wide labeled DNA “junk science” when it suited their defense.

With Fincher by her side, Hailey had drawn up an additional warrant for the trial judge presiding over Cruise’s murder trial and presented it to him in chambers. She’d sworn in Fincher using the judge’s desktop Bible, and asked him a series of quick, carefully constructed questions they’d rehearsed in the elevator on the way up to the judge’s chambers.

The questions were all regarding the Atlanta serial murders, and their answers would support the judge in signing the warrant to look for additional evidence to prove the State’s case. The “search” amounted to having a second, backup series of Cruise’s blood drawn for comparison to sperm found in and on the bodies of several of the victims.

Several, but not all of them.

There was one victim, the last one, whose body offered up no trace of DNA matter to compare: no blood, no sperm, no hair.

LaSondra Williams.

The eleventh victim haunted Cruise every night.

Couldn’t they see she wasn’t his type anyway? Why hadn’t Leonard argued that to the jury?

LaSondra Williams looked nothing like the others, all of them slight and pale-skinned, with hair parted over to the right and falling in waves down to their shoulders. LaSondra had been tall and gangly, much taller than Cruise himself.

With no DNA, Matt Leonard, if he had taken his head out of his ass for one minute, could have argued the State was wrong about Williams’s murder and, therefore, could likely be wrong about the other ten hookers. Then he could have argued the rest was planted by police… It only takes one juror to hang a jury.

Most nights now, in the quiet of maximum security in the innermost cells of Reidsville, Cruise woke up sweating, back in the courtroom with Hailey Dean staring him down. Hailey Dean passing just inches from him as she questioned each witness on the stand. Hailey Dean so close he could feel the whisper of air melting around her as she passed, always wearing black, hair always pulled back tightly from her face.

Her voice was sharp as a whip on cross-exams, yet cajoling and hushed on direct with her own witnesses. During her closing argument to the jury, she spoke so softly, leaning in with her fingers resting on the jury rail, that Cruise had to strain to hear her words. His mouth went dry, his palms sweaty as hell as he’d watched the jury leaning forward toward her, and he caught himself doing the same.

Then, without warning, she turned on him and lashed out loudly, causing the jury to look directly at him while she practically shouted out the evidence.

His stomach burned with the memory.

And the stench of this place was giving him another pounding headache. Like the kind he used to get each time he’d go hunting for the next woman, the next victim. The tension building, he’d watch his own hands at work in the highest-tech kitchens in Atlanta. Then, later that same night, almost as if in a dream, off Stewart Avenue, hidden in the shadows of motels lining the strip, he’d have the hooker facedown in front of him, his hands choking, out of control, pulsing as if they belonged to someone much stronger, someone superhuman.

Only after, when he walked away and headed for his car, could he ever breathe again.

His body needed the kill, needed the feel of skin under his fingertips, digging, digging into flesh, to feel alive.

And who were the “victims” anyway? They were all hookers. He was doing the city a favor.

In court, the photos of the women’s necks showed mangled flesh, as if the killer had torn the skin with his fingers in the frenzy of the strangling. Once, as Hailey Dean looked down at crime scene photos she was holding in her hand, he thought she was going to crack.

A flush of victory loomed for Cruise when her voice broke in the middle of questioning a lead homicide detective. She’d been looking at a shot of the knees of one of the hookers, scratched and bruised from the dirt where she’d knelt.

It was LaSondra Williams.

This whole mess was his lawyer’s fault. That stupid ass. He had never finished working Cruise’s alibi for the night LaSondra Williams was strangled. Cruise knew Leonard didn’t believe him. But he’d stood there lying that the private investigator couldn’t locate the leads Cruise gave him.