The Eleventh Victim (15 page)

“I
’
M GLAD YOU AGREED TO HAVE DINNER WITH ME, HAILEY
.”

“I’m glad, too,” she told Adam Springhurst across the white tablecloth, and surprisingly, she meant it.

Earlier, when he’d come upstairs just as she was packing up, she’d been almost dismayed to see him. It had been a long day, and her last patient was Melissa.

Skittish as she was, Melissa clammed up altogether when her session was interrupted by the arrival of a plumber the super sent up. Hailey shut her office door so Melissa could go on talking about her fifth birthday—the last “happy” one, before her stepfather had shattered her life. But she was distracted by the sound of a wrench clanging against pipes, and finally asked if they could end the session early.

“The plumber found the leak and fixed it,” Hailey told Adam when he showed up, “so you shouldn’t have any more problems downstairs.”

“Good. Want some dinner to celebrate?”

Her gut instinct said no, but on second thought, dinner out would really be nice. Three hours later, they were having coffee and cannoli at a little Italian restaurant a few blocks away from the office. The conversation was easy, Adam was well-educated and well-traveled, full of funny stories. He asked all about her…her life in Atlanta, her apartment, her hours, even the funny story about switching office suites. He seemed keenly interested in every detail.

And he came out of nowhere. No conversation in the preceding months, no hellos over the mailboxes, no bumping into each other in the neighborhood. Nothing. Just hello, need to check your plumbing, let’s go to dinner.

“So if you weren’t here with me,” Adam said, breaking off a piece of pastry, “what would you be doing tonight?”

“I’d have gone to the gym, or for a run. Then home. Pretty simple.”

He smiled. “You answered that without having to think. Sounds like you’ve got a routine down.”

“I guess I do.”

“Same here. Before the divorce, when I was living up in Westchester, I’d get off the train just in time to tuck the kids in, grab something to eat, and fall into bed. I thought
that
was a rut. Now…it’s pretty much the same thing. Without the commuter train or the kids.”

“You said you have two daughters?”

He nodded. “Cammy’s thirteen, Alexis is twelve. I miss them like crazy.”

Hailey sipped her coffee and wondered why he hadn’t stayed near them, in the suburbs, after his divorce.

As if he’d read her mind, he said, “They’re both away at boarding school in Massachusetts. My ex-wife insisted. It was her alma mater, and it’s a great school, the girls love it, so…” He shrugged. “No reason for me to stay in Westchester without them. How about you?”

She hesitated. Hailey couldn’t imagine sending children away to a boarding school. “Do you mean have I ever lived in Westchester?”

He smiled. “No, I mean, do you have children?”

Taken aback by the question, she shook her head quickly. “No.”

Maybe she’d answered it too quickly, because his smile faded just a little and he said, “You’re not into kids, huh?”

“No, that’s not it. I mean, I love children.” And she’d always thought she’d have them. It hadn’t turned out that way. It was still an open wound.

What was she doing here? It was all wrong.

Suddenly, all she wanted was to go home.

Hailey looked at her watch. “It’s getting late.”

“I guess it is.” Adam looked around for the waiter.

Five minutes later, they were outside. Adam raised his arm to flag a cab. “You said you live uptown, too, right?”

“I do, but I’ve got to go back over to the office and pick up some files I forgot.”

“We can swing by and I’ll wait,” he said, as a taxi pulled up to where they stood in the street.

“Oh, that’s okay. I need the walk, after all that food.”

“Right. Well…thanks for having dinner with me, Hailey.”

“Thanks for asking.”

He got into the cab with a wave and a “Talk to you soon.”

She started walking slowly toward the office, wondering whether he realized she hadn’t wanted to share a cab uptown with him.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t enjoyed his company.

For the first time in years, Hailey found herself wondering whether there might not be someone out there for her after all. Someone other than Will.

She didn’t like even thinking of it. She couldn’t wait to get out of the restaurant and felt like running the whole way back to her apartment. That was why she’d cut the evening short. The thought of dinners and dates and movies and theater with another man was just too much like…cheating. Cheating on Will. She knew it didn’t make sense, but the dinner with Adam was just…
wrong.

But walking toward the avenue to look for a cab of her own, she decided Adam Springhurst wasn’t so terrible and could be a nice friend. She’d end it there. There was nothing wrong with Adam…he was absolutely fine, she told herself. Young, handsome, single, educated…he had a great résumé. Right? He looked great on paper. But Adam wasn’t the problem…maybe
she
was. She was sure of it. She couldn’t put her finger on why she suddenly had to get away…from
him
.

T
HE BUS WAS IN THE COUNTRY NOW, NO SIDEWALKS, NO
streetlights…only the gradual incline of the foothills of the Piedmont, the beginnings of the Appalachians. The bus struggled and shifted to make the gentle upward slant.

The two-lane was a curvy old thing, built decades before during Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration.

Now it was whisking Cruise farther and farther north, neatly separating objects in the night…people, cars, motels, sturdy telephone lines split evenly on either side of the Greyhound.

Outside the bus, the night was magnetic.

Through tinted glass he could make out shapes of things his consciousness had forgotten during his years in maximum-security lockdown. Deep down in his bones, though, in the roots of his hair, in his very skin, he remembered it all.

Cruise peered out his window at trees, trailer parks, RV camps. Tired-looking cornfields and farmhouses were flying by in the night. Split-second images of countless grassroots churches spirited past the window of Cruise’s back-row seat. His eyes could barely focus on makeshift white crosses propped on the pointed centers of their roofs…roofs topping structures that had once passed for single-family homes, now converted to house sweaty Bible-thumpers every Sunday. It was all zooming by like a movie in fast-forward.

His right shoulder was pressed tight, hunched against the bus’s rectangular thermal-glass pane. For hours on end, rarely glancing away from the old two-lane, keeping his gaze reined in as tight as his posture. He wasn’t used to having unlimited freedom of motion yet. He intentionally positioned himself in the very back of the bus, last row.

He was drawn to the view out the window like a wolf to the moon.

His mouth was dry with the painful realization of all he had been denied during those years in a piss-stank Atlanta jail, followed by maximum at Reidsville Penitentiary. His neck tightened and his pulse quickened in the darkened corner there in the rear of the bus. His stomach churned. His hands clenched as he realized what that prosecutor-bitch had cost him.

The ride was getting long and they ground to a stop over and over in every bump in the road that had a stop sign. He was pissed and he couldn’t believe how these morons were slowing him down, actually boarding and unboarding at stops nobody else had ever seen or heard of…the middle of nothing and nowhere.

Cruise glared whenever new passengers—skittish women, sullen-looking teenaged boys—hopped onto the bus. He only noticed them to the extent they disturbed him…slowing his flight north.

The bus lurched again, then heaved to a halt, pushing the passengers forward in their seats.

Cruise peered out to see the pickup point here, a gas station with a single outside-lamp bulb hanging from a chain to light a wooden bench situated near the pumps.

“Blue Ridge, Georgia,” the driver called out in the dark of the bus.

Wouldn’t the good people of Blue Ridge just
love
it if tonight, Clint Burrell Cruise stepped down off the bus and decided to make this his new home?

Think they’d show up with a welcome basket tomorrow morning and invite him to Monday’s Rotary Club luncheon, packed with all the town’s do-gooders and held in the conference room of the local bank?

Maybe…until they found out about a little Murder One conviction on his résumé.

He knew better than to even think about it anyway. The more miles between him and Reidsville, the better for everybody.

Plus, there was a little business matter for him to take care of in the Big Apple.

He’d never actually been to the city before; had only seen it in the movies.

But already, he knew where to look up some of his old friends who were there, living just north of Harlem. Or at least, they had been.

A name change, a new ID, and he’d be just fine in New York. Plus, he didn’t plan to stay too long…just long enough.

He watched a new passenger, a spongy-looking girl, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, lumbering up the aisle toward him.

She came all the way to the back of the bus, dragging two purple canvas bags with her, covered in sewn-on stickers and Magic Marker scrawls.

She disgusted him.

She was too fleshy, wearing low-cut hip-hugger jeans. Her sandals revealed stubby toes in need of washing and still bearing the remnants of a bluish-tinted nail polish. A silver toe ring topped it all off. Repulsive.

She turned, and he spotted a large tattoo on the small of her back…some Chinese-looking characters, an unreadable word permanently burned into her flesh in thick greenish-black ink.

The tattoo made him madder.

What the hell was that Chinese-looking word supposed to mean? Who the hell did she think she was, stupid pig with a Chinese word on her back? It probably said just that: “Pig.”

His fingers throbbed, pounding with blood rushing through them, as if his heart were thrashing in his hands, not his chest. He balled them back into fists.

No way could he let some pudgy bitch mess it all up for him.

Why wouldn’t she just sit the hell down and get out of his vision?

Her hips seemed to catch against the seats on either side as she passed up the aisle, dragging the bags on the floor behind her. Earphones hung around her neck, blaring music.

Finally, she flopped into a seat two rows ahead of him to his left.

Without moving an inch, he could see her blue-jeaned legs stretched out in front of her, the rings of leather around her two big toes to hold brown sandals in place on dusty feet.

Her right hand rested on the chair arm and her nails were bitten down to nubs, spots of polish still on the centers.

The thought of having to look over at her the entire ride to New York made Cruise’s teeth bite down on nothing.

He tried to look away from the girl, but he couldn’t.

He watched her chew down nervously on her nails, what was left of them. She absentmindedly gnawed and ingested germs, nail polish, and fingernail gristle without ever looking back at him.

Watching made him want to hit her in the back of her head with his fist.

Thankfully, she quit biting her nails.

But then she started thumping her dirty feet to the beat in her headphones. Even from here, he could smell her.

It poured out of her, oozing from the pores in her skin. She smelled of cheeseburger grease and Jergen’s white hand lotion. They had it in the kitchen at Reidsville and both smells were now physically revolting to him

When she cocked her head to listen to the music, long, stringy brown hair fell back to reveal her neck.

The sight of it hit him like a brick. It was totally out of place on such a thundering beast. Her neck drew him.

Hot streaks pulsed down his arms to his hands.

His lips parted and his eyes took on a slant. His breathing grew labored. He stared. He felt his mouth water and his body tighten against his clothes.

Her neck.

It was beautiful. Just the sight of it brought back the old feeling, an ache, a good ache spreading across him.

He wondered if she would notice if he just walked by and happened to touch her neck…just once.

Would she mind? Would she scream? Would she think it was an accident?

She might complain to the driver. Then there’d be a confrontation.

Would he be thrown off the bus for simply circling her neck with his fingers? Not to harm her, but more to compliment her on the one attractive part of her body?

It would just be once, and ever so lightly…like a butterfly kiss.

She might be flattered. How often did this grubby cow have a man admire her?

Suddenly, she reached into a bag and dug around, peering into its bottom. She pulled out a rubber band and as he watched hungrily in the dark, she pulled the strands back into a ponytail.

How could she not sense him, just two rows back, his body on fire?

He was radioactive, the muscles in his thighs, calves, biceps, and forearms taut and stretched.

His eyes bored silently into her. Only he understood the power he possessed, that his intense gaze had a magical power that sapped a woman’s strength to reject him. It was a secret power only he knew about and it radiated like a laser from his eyes, melting her, destroying her before he ever laid a hand on her, sucking her life’s energy into his own.

Her neck was soft and white, almost glowing in the dark of the bus, and with her hair newly pulled back, it was now totally exposed to his view…all the way from the concave hollow of her throat to the delicate neck bone disappearing up into her hair.

He was imminently more powerful than her. He was just a few feet away from her, and she had no idea of his presence.

Without warning, she stood up, reaching into the overhead bin to pull down a stack of magazines out of her bag.

She glanced back at him as she turned to resettle her frame into the seat, and when she did, her eyes, briefly, met his own.

They were crystal green.

He had only seen eyes similar to that once before…in court. His mind reeled backward…

It was late afternoon, and Hailey Dean had leaped up from her chair and shouted Leonard down in a dueling match over an objection she just made.

The judge ruled against her in a packed courtroom, cutting the bitch down to size. Leonard preened obviously, in his seat at counsel table, over the legal victory, and Cruise, sitting in the midst of his defense team at counsel table, joined in, letting a smile spread across his face.

He could tell she was trying to hide her disappointment from the jury.

Hailey turned away from the judge’s bench to go back to her seat, silently crossing the carpet to the State’s table, a thick, sturdy, oak-slabbed monster covered in papers and exhibits. Her shoulders slumped in defeat as she glanced over at the two of them. Faced with their cocky demeanor, she’d pressed her lips together in a straight slash and visibly gritted her teeth.

After only a moment, she got up again.

Deliberately, she’d walked to the front of the defense counsel table.

Resting her fingers on its edge, her eyes locked directly with Cruise’s. She’d faced him head on as she stood there in front of his table, her back to the judge and jury. And for the first time since the trial started three weeks before, she smiled at Cruise.

It was an odd smile, though, fixed, slanting up on one corner, showing no teeth.

Crystal green eyes stared into his own, and Cruise felt a hot tingling melt down his body through his spine, into his legs and feet.

It was then that he knew.

He was going down for this. She was taking him down.

He felt the rush of diarrhea and held it in only with a quick, powerful effort, his haunches tensed together.

Now, sitting on the Greyhound, he remembered. Within seconds, the electricity drained from the rest of his body, out of the muscles across his shoulders and arms, his chest and abs, and instead, all the electricity shot to his hands. They sizzled with energy…they’d
explode if he so much as brushed them against the textured fabric of his seat.

Cruise literally
pulled
his eyes away from the seat diagonally ahead of him, willing himself to drag his face, chin first, away from the girl and her neck. He tucked himself completely behind the tall, cushioned seat reclined backward just a few inches in front of him.

Eyes burning and heart thundering, he turned back toward the night whisking by outside his window.

It physically hurt to turn away from the girl in the dark of the bus. He placed his hands, throbbing hot, against the cool of the bus window. Tall pine trees silhouetted against the lighter shade of black sky made giant figures posing in bunches, mocking him at a distance.

Eighteen hours to New York City; he’d be there by tomorrow night.

The next few weeks would fly by, just like he had planned night after night, locked down in a cell. All because of Hailey Dean.