The Eleventh Victim (23 page)

H
AILEY HADN’T SMELLED THE INSIDE OF A JAIL IN A LONG TIME.

But the moment she was pushed through iron doors into the crowded holding cell and took a deep breath, it all came back. Nothing so much as the sense of smell speaks to the human memory, instantly dredging up the good, the bad, the painful and long-buried.

Days-old human perspiration mixed with heavy perfumes the hookers had worn since the night before. Somebody, somewhere, had puked. And the stench of urine on a heroin junkie managed to pierce through it all, hanging heavy in the still air.

Hailey could feel the eyes of the other women on her from the opposite end of the cell where they were all gathered. A card game was going in one corner, and little knots of women congregated to mull over their charges and the hard luck that landed them here.

Ignoring them, she made her way over to one of the only vacant seats, a wooden bench bolted to the floor.

As she lowered herself onto it, she found herself sitting right next to the source of the sickening smell…a heroin junkie sleeping on the bench in urine-soaked clothes. Her deathly white complexion highlighted angry red needle marks along her inner elbow and wrists. Hailey could see the familiar puncture marks on the woman’s left hand, between the knuckles and fingers. She looked like a wizened, shrunken version of what she must have been before she took heroin as a lover.

The others had edged away from the smell toward the other end of the room. Hailey took a look around. It was a large square room with no windows and plain walls devoid of hardware that could be forced off and used as a weapon.

“My babies…what about my babies?” a woman in her twenties sobbed into a handkerchief. Listening to the others trying to comfort her, Hailey calculated the woman’s misdemeanor prostitution bust would mean a probation revocation and a six-month good-bye to her two infant children on the outside.

“I can’t stay in here that long,” the woman cried.

She wasn’t the only one crying. Each one faced charges ranging from prostitution to distribution of meth, to a knifing on Third Avenue outside a deli, driving under the influence, and grand larceny. For the most part, they were either drugged-up, drunk, or strung-out on the roller-coaster ride of a first-time arrest and the shock of literally being thrown in the can.

And the “can” stunk.

“What you in for?” one of them would occasionally sidle up to ask Hailey.

“Bad check.” She lied, of course.

She wasn’t about to tell them the truth, much less reveal her identity as a lawyer, a criminal prosecutor in another life. Now was not a good time to be besieged for free legal advice.

She had to think.

All she knew was that she’d been linked to two murders by the fact that Melissa and Hayden were both her clients, her name and home and cell numbers were found on their bodies, both had sessions scheduled with her the night of their murders. The police weren’t that stupid. They had to have more to arrest her. But what?

And they’d both been strangled and stabbed—apparently like the string of dead women she’d represented in Atlanta.

Hailey looked down at her own hands, clutched together in her lap.

She spread them and imagined them circled around the throats of dark, fragile Melissa and Hayden—young, creative, so alive.

Her throat tightened and her face flushed hot.

Her first murder prosecution as a rookie ADA had been an asphyxiation…manual strangulation coupled with the killer forcing a plastic laundry bag over the head of his victim until she died.

Hailey still remembered walking onto the crime scene. The clear plastic laundry bag was still over the woman’s head, parts of it lodged deeply up into her nostrils as she had sucked it in, struggling for the last bit of air left in the bag.

Hailey never knew the woman in life, but the memory of her face contorted in death with a common laundry bag inhaled into her nose had never really left the back of Hailey’s mind.

It came back to her now, but she couldn’t stop substituting the faces of Melissa and Hayden.

Kolker really believes I did it, that I murdered my own patients, that I stabbed them in the back, that I posed the strangulations, that I have the heart to watch them lying there, the life draining out of them….

She knew she had a right to a single phone call…but who was there to call? Her family was away at Cumberland. Fincher was halfway around the world in Iraq. The realization that she was alone in the world was painful.

A standard, battery-operated, institutional metal-rimmed clock hung high on a wall in the holding pen.

Slumped beside the sleeping junkie, Hailey literally watched the minutes pass, her eyes following each forward jerk of the long red second hand, her ears hearing the loud tick that came with every movement.

It was becoming unbearably hot in the cell as more women crowded in, one by one.

Although the holding cell was packed, Hailey was alone and weary. Her face was drawn, her lips were dry, and her hair was plastered to her head, damp with perspiration. The sweat between her breasts soaked through her blouse and a dark pattern appeared and spread, seeming to blossom, slowly across her chest. As she slumped against the wall, her head fell loosely down toward her right shoulder. Numbness took over. She slept.

The stench in the holding pen seeped through her nostrils and into her dreams.

In the dream, she was back in an Atlanta jail with Fincher, looking through the first set of mug-shot books. They had spent over
two weeks, working into the night, to comb through thousands of photos and, ultimately, cull a newly created photo album to present to strippers and prostitutes across the city for possible leads.

The police department’s profiler had suggested that the serial killer stalking the city was a white man in his late twenties to early thirties, muscular, middle-to-high income bracket, and extremely meticulous, but with artistic tendencies, possibly an only child.

“Fincher, it’s so damn hot in here and the smell is giving me a headache.” She rubbed her temples and pushed her chair back from the table. “I’m worried.”

“About what?” He didn’t look up at her but sat staring at the pages of perp photos on the table in front of him. “I mean, other than a stalker who’s strangling one girl after the next and City Hall doesn’t give a damn…at least, as long as it’s not some socialite or a rich little cheerleader gone missing.”

“You’re preaching to the choir. What’s bothering me is that we’re losing time. The more we chase down some profile APD cooked up, the more likely he’ll strike again before we can get a line on him.”

Moments passed before he broke the silence.

“I know what you want, little girl. Forget it. They’re not giving you anybody else on this case. No way will they take personnel off the burglary ring in Buckhead. The rich people are worried about their stereos. So it’s just you and me…as usual. Unless the mayor’s office gets worried over this one, no more funding, no more bodies to help patrol the strip, nobody canvassing the area, nothing. Nada. Nobody. Don’t even ask. They’ll just say no, and you’ll get your feelings hurt. Okay?”

She pushed another album toward him across the table. “Thanks. That helped. Just keep looking.”

They resumed scanning one shot after the next.

Another hour passed before static crackled on the police-band radio Fincher wore at his hip.

“Hold on,” he said into it, and turned to her. “Hailey, I’m stepping out to get better reception.”

“Okay, but don’t leave me in here for long. That door locks on the outside, remember?
And no cigarette break, damn it.
If
I
have to keep working, so do you. This ain’t no tea party, old man.”

“Keep
that
talk up and I will take a smoke. How did you say I’m supposed to lock you in here?”

Laughing, she threw a file folder at him as he closed the door.

She sat sorting photos in piles like a deck of cards and was still smiling when he came back in five minutes later.

Without looking up, she said, “I smell
smoke
!
Cigarette smoke!
”

When he didn’t answer with some retort, she glanced up.

One look at his face and her smile vanished.

He stood frozen at the door, looking at her square in the face.

“What? What happened?”

“Hailey, they found another body.”

She said nothing, just looked back down at the piles and piles of photos.

“It was off Stewart Avenue again. No robbery, same MO, possibly posed manual strangulation, stab wound lower back. Victim partially clothed, mouth and nose full of dirt.”

She swallowed hard, and nodded.

“They’re processing the scene now,” Fincher told her. “Body may be too decomposed to get a DNA match at this point. Looks like it went down sometime after midnight on Friday. No ID on the girl yet. In her twenties, though, they think. Should we head on over and make sure they don’t ruin the crime scene?”

Hailey couldn’t speak, the image of another horrific torture-murder scene creeping into her brain like green mold edging over bread in the fridge. Then there would ultimately be the discovery of the victim’s identity, the late-night visit to her family’s home to tell the next of kin.

What would they find this time? Kids waiting for Mom to come home? A family? Or would there be just another middle-aged or elderly woman rushing to answer their knock, peering through the screen door, wondering where her daughter had been the last few nights?

And the look on the women’s faces when Fincher flashed his badge…

They always knew at that point.

They knew their daughter was dead as soon as they saw the badge.

“Come on, Jezebel. Let’s go.”

Hailey stood and, still without a word, began packing up photos.

Fincher watched her from the door. His radio began crackling again. More news from the crime scene, no doubt. He didn’t answer, standing rooted at the doorway. Then he propped the door open with the chair he had been sitting in, and got down on his knees. Together, they packed their bags.

They left the jail in silence.

The sun was setting and the tall, slender lights lining Atlanta’s streets suddenly clicked on in front of them, lighting up the roadway as far as they could see.

He was out there, laughing, probably. Maybe he was going to work, maybe just coming home. Maybe he was at a movie with his wife or watching TV with his kids.

Or maybe he was cruising the strip at that very moment, stalking the next girl who would die with her neck mangled and twisted…the skin on her back ripped by vicious puncture wounds.

Then suddenly, Hailey was standing by the side of the highway, watching the taillights of the county cruiser disappear into the Atlanta night. Fincher faded into the traffic as the dream scene flickered in and out, and then faded out of her mind.

The real-life smell in the holding pen still assaulted her nostrils.

But then it all morphed into one heavy, cloying scent. A familiar scent.

Carnations.

Carnations not found in nature, but the kind that were over-treated in florist shops for maximum aroma value.

Everywhere she looked in the dream, carnations surrounded her, nauseating her with their sickly sweet smell.

Through the doorway was an open room and in that room were even more carnations: pale pink, yellow, white, blankets of them,
arrangements of all shapes and sizes, sitting in vases on every possible stick of furniture.

Trapped, desperate for fresh air, Hailey looked for a doorway.

She found one and peered into the room and stepped in. Her eyes widened and her heart stopped.

The room whirled around her.

There was Will, lying dead and made up in heavy funeral home makeup to cover the bullet wounds to the side of his face.

His face. Asleep? No, dead. Will was dead.

The smell of carnations closed in on her, choking out the fresh air and suffocating her with a deadly overdose of funeral perfume. She gasped it in, sucking in the flowery smell as hard as she could for any trace of oxygen, but there was none—

“Dean!” Her name rang out.

No answer. Hailey’s head was still slumped on her shoulder, her eyes closed.

“Dean! Answer up! Hailey Dean!” A female bailiff barked her name at the entrance of holding. She was holding a clipboard in her left hand, staring down at the pages of a computer printout to make sure a Ms. Hailey Dean had not already left the cell.

“Hailey Dean…where are you?”

It took a moment for Hailey’s head to clear…to realize this wasn’t just more of a bad dream. The dream was over. She truly was in the bowels of a Manhattan holding cell.

Hailey rose from the bench, weak-kneed. A stabbing pain shot through her ribs as she spoke. “I’m Hailey Dean.”

“Let’s go. This ain’t no garden party, Missy. They want you upstairs an’ I got to take you.”

Hailey stepped carefully over several women sleeping it off on the filthy linoleum-tiled floor.

Making her way out through the others, it hit her that the smell no longer nauseated her.

She’d take a packed holding cell any day over the sick, sweet scent of death and funeral home carnations.

T
HE FEMALE WARDEN WAS TIGHT BEHIND HAILEY, LIGHTLY TOUCHING
her shoulder as they walked single file down a worn, pale-beige institutional corridor.

“Left,” the warden called out, and Hailey turned into an interrogation room. She naturally and immediately took in the lay of the land. In lieu of a window, a long, wide, seamless mirror covered one of the walls.

Hailey was seated in a metal folding chair. She looked around. These four walls had seen it all, and it showed, in layer upon layer of semi-gloss paint jobs. Hours of interrogations, confessions, threats, denials, hushed whispers between lawyer and client, witnesses, victims…it all played out between these four walls.

Now it was Hailey’s turn…forced to match wits with some of the best homicide detectives in the business, skills honed by years of working the streets and solving the unsolvable.

But so are yours
, she reminded herself.

She wasn’t shackled, so she got up and walked over to the two-way mirror. It covered the entire length of the interrogation room’s wall, from the chair rail up to the low-hung ceiling of industrial perforated squares. The detectives were undoubtedly leisurely kicked back in worn chairs on the other side. She decided to spoil their fun and chose a straight-back office chair, setting her back squarely against the mirror, keeping her face hidden from their view.

She looked straight ahead at the opposite wall, taking in the blank expanse covered in peeling beige paint. They’d be so disappointed they couldn’t watch her face as she sweated it out…no nail-biting, wringing of hands, fidgeting, let alone crying for them to enjoy. Nothing. Just the back of her head.

But forget the goons on the other side. How the hell was she going to get out of this mess?

Think…think…think…

Her mind kept churning over bits and pieces. It all had to be connected.

Crumpled up on the floor of Dana’s office with the carpet rough on her cheek while she took a manic beating from…whom? And why? Just before she had passed out, she was sure she’d heard a voice.

It was low and soft, almost a hiss…drifting out of the grayness closing in around her, familiar.

But as hard as she struggled, she couldn’t remember what it had said or place who it was. It remained just a voice—angry, evil, spit out close to her ear there on the carpet.

Reliving the night of the attack was getting her nowhere fast. She could worry about her aching ribs and the break-in later. She hadn’t even been able to process it all, much less to mourn the loss of two patients.

But right now, she had to somehow convince hard-boiled New York City homicide detectives that she was not the perp in the double murders of two longtime patients. She was armed only with a few facts she gleaned from the
Post
, combined with a little information Kolker unwittingly gave up.

Footsteps in the hall…She tensed, waiting.

But then the hall beyond the door fell quiet; no more footsteps to be heard.

So she sat, not twitching even a muscle, forcing herself to gaze neither at the mirror nor the door.

Commanding her mind to shift gears, she focused on the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Melissa and Hayden.

If she could just think just one step ahead of the homicide detectives…. Over and over she spun the story in her head, to think her way out of this beige-painted hellhole and get home.

First, what did Kolker spill? In his attempt to come off like the big guy, he had likely spouted off information known only to police. Same old story…a self-important official leaking like a sieve.
Even if he couldn’t actually be a captain, he could at least feel like one for a moment. His bragging may have given her all the information she needed.

She predicted an interminable wait before Kolker showed up to meet her, and she was right.

But those were the rules of the game, and in order to win, she had to play by the rules. A frustrating wait in the interrogation room, after hours in lockup, sitting on a hard wooden bench and pacing a concrete floor, was meant to wear her down and soften her up.

She knew it…and they knew it.

Finally, after a good twenty minutes more had passed, Hailey made the next move. She stood up from the metal chair and strode purposefully up to the two-way mirror.