The Eleventh Victim (7 page)

O
UTSIDE C.C.’S SQUEAKY-CLEAN WINDOW ON THE TOP FLOOR OF
the Judicial Building, the Atlanta skyline sparkled in the morning sun.

C.C. gave it only a cursory glance, winced at the sunlight, and turned back to watch his new assistant close the door behind her. He contemplated her backside, the real reason he hired her if the truth be known. Now that she was done buzzing around his desk and with her rear end completely out of his view, C.C. eased a silver flask from his desk, uncapped it, and took a long pull of pure Kentucky bourbon, followed by a second.

No mixer for him; he liked it sweet and strong, just like his daddy did. C.C. was just one step away from the governor’s office and he could feel it down in his bones, unless that warm tingle was just the bourbon, now down to nearly half a flask.

Yes, today he’d take that final step.

He pressed the intercom button on his phone. “Amanda?”

The response was nearly instantaneous. “Yes, Judge?”—silky on the other end.

“Get Eugene’s office on the phone and confirm the tee-off time, will you?”

“Yes, Judge.” C.C. leaned back in his chair, spinning it back toward the plate-glass window.

From here, it seemed, he could see all of Atlanta.

Including the governor’s mansion.

The twenty-four-thousand-square-foot redbrick Greek Revival palace sat on eighteen acres of lawn just a few miles northwest. But C.C.’s eyes never strayed from the prize. It was his legacy.

C.C. made his living in politics just like his daddy and his granddaddy had. Their empire was built on backbreaking slave labor in the southernmost part of the state of Georgia, Dooley County. Dooley historically kept one of the lowest income levels pro rata in the entire region, just a hair above poverty level.

But somehow the Carters, headed by Talmadge Carter, who bought the land in 1817, managed to make money hand over fist. It didn’t take long to position his son, T. Carter Jr., in the mayor’s office of the county seat, Vienna, Georgia.

T. Carter’s grandson, Talmadge Carter III, made it to state senator. That came in awfully handy when interstate I-16 was in the works. With T. Carter’s minor adjustments to the plans submitted by the Georgia Department of Roads and Highways, the interstate—and all its motels, gas stations, 7-Elevens, and roadside fruit stands for the Yankees who didn’t know better than to pay five dollars for a nickel sack of Georgia peaches—had cut a swath directly through the old home place.

To hell with the home place. They were multimillionaires at last, the stars were aligned, and the political power C.C. was meant for was on the cusp.

With “family money” as a springboard, T. Carter’s great-grandson C.C. made one political deal after the next until he got the sweetest appointment of all: a spot on the Georgia Supreme Court. He had jumped from one political appointment to another like a frog jumping rock to rock on the Flint’s muddy brown water.

Now, silk stocking attorneys across the state—even the elite Lange and Parker, a blue-blood law firm that stabled four former U.S. senators and every past mayor of the city of Atlanta—would have to kiss his redneck ass, and he knew it.

But he felt instinctively that a judicial position did not wield sufficient political clout. He wanted more. Needed more. His legacy
was
more.

It was time to make a move and make his dear, departed daddy proud.

He spun impatiently in his chair and reached for the intercom again, but there was a knock on the door instead.

He hurriedly stashed the flask in his top desk drawer and called out, “Come in.”

Amanda appeared in the doorway. “I just spoke to Mr. Eugene’s assistant, Judge.”

“And?”

He smiled at her, the perfect campaign smile, courtesy of braces as a teenager and thousands of dollars of caps over the years. Never mind that too much Kentucky bourbon had yellowed the caps and gifted him with a bulbous nose, red-veined around the nostrils.

Amanda smiled sweetly. “The tee-off time is set for noon, like you asked.”

No, he didn’t like doing business on another man’s turf one tiny bit. But after weeks of trying every trick in the book to engineer a meeting with Floyd Moye Eugene—and finding that he, a Georgia Supreme Court Justice, couldn’t get even a simple phone conference with the man, much less arrange a meeting—the invitation to play a round of golf came as a surprise. It all fell into place so much more easily than C.C. had ever anticipated. Eugene was playing right into his hands.

The support of one man was about to swing the balance for C.C. and make his political dreams come true. Floyd Moye Eugene happened to be the chairman of the Georgia State Democratic Party.

A man after C.C.’s own heart, Eugene played the party ranks all the way from grass roots in Columbus to the Democratic National Convention. Eugene had been the power behind every man to grace the governor’s mansion on West Paces Ferry since it had been rebuilt in 1968, and the next election would be no different.

C.C. had done his research—or at least commissioned his willing law clerk, Jim Talley, to do it for him.

Eugene had attended UGA just like C.C. Just like him, Eugene was a huge UGA football booster and drank Kentucky bourbon.
Also like C.C., nobody knew exactly what Eugene did to make a living.

Pulling the flask from his drawer once again, C.C. imagined they were twins.

C.C. had dispatched his staff operatives to do whatever it took to ferret out Eugene’s weaknesses. But in the end, extensive snooping, including various political snitches in the know and the services of not one but two private investigators, uncovered not a single vice C.C. could use to his own advantage. Nothing. No drugs, no love child, no porn habit, no secret male lover he could slip a few Gs to. Nada.

“
Too bad…
” C.C. thought. “
A mistress. I could have at least worked with that…a mistress.
” There was always hope.

Meanwhile, Eugene worked out of offices in the Capitol, across the street from C.C. in the chambers of the Georgia Supreme Court. If he had a mistress here in Atlanta, she was well-hidden.

Eugene’s single vice seemed to be an insatiable thirst for power. He had been relentless and merciless in his quest for control over his family, the Georgia House, Senate, even the governor himself. C.C. was an amateur when it came to power play, just a distant planet rotating around Eugene.

How Floyd Moye Eugene had attained his power may have been a mystery, but it was now a force to be reckoned with, not bested.

C.C. was about to enter the game with high hopes and an eye on the prize.

Again, he spun his chair to view the city sprawled below—and not far away at all out there, the governor’s mansion, glittering in the morning sun.

H
OW LONG DID IT TAKE A PERSON TO BUY GROCERIES? VIRGINIA
Gunn was starting to wonder that as she sat crouched down behind the wheel of her Jeep in the Kroger parking lot.

She herself had spent just twenty minutes inside the store—in and out well over an hour ago with a week’s worth of organic produce, soy milk, and the all natural bread she used to make sandwiches every day for lunch.

It was as she rolled her own full cart through the parking lot looking for her Jeep that she spotted it.

A Volkswagen Beetle, circa 1977, badly beaten up but sporting a brand-new shiny Greenpeace bumper sticker.

Ah. Perfect. Hardcore reconnaissance and quick deductions were in order.

First she loaded her groceries into the back of her Jeep, then drove through the parking lot to the row behind the Beetle. From there, she could keep watch—and she had been, for over an hour.

Damn, it was hot, even with all the windows rolled down. So hot that she was almost tempted to run the engine, just for a few minutes, with the air-conditioning on.

Almost. But Virginia had been an eco-fighter long before Al Gore invented the Internet or starred in
An Inconvenient Truth
. In fact, she had some news for Al Gore. He could take his private jet and shove it straight…
Damn it was hot in here!

She smelled under her arms.
Not terrible…yet.

Come on, it’s not like you’re having heat stroke. How can you even consider burning fossil fuel and emitting all that exhaust when you’re just sitting here in a parking lot?

She wiped a trickle of sweat from her forehead and reached for the cup in the cupholder. She had filled it with cold tap water before leaving home early this morning, and left it in the car. Now it was hot enough to steep a tea bag in, thanks to the sun glaring off the windshield.

How she longed to get back to her house, with water views and sea breezes billowing the white sheers.

Virginia Gunn had spent her entire life on St. Simons Island, with its magical strip of coast on either side and in between, acres of live oaks decorated by nature with low-hanging, sea-green Spanish moss.

For hundreds of years, Georgia natives debated which was more beautiful, the ocean coast or the marshland, a hybrid formed of half-land, half-ocean, creating a unique habitat.

The Spanish American War’s Battle of the Bloody Marsh had been waged on the southernmost tip of the Island, not far from Virginia’s childhood home. General Oglethorpe had galloped directly into the Spanish line and attacked. Her father told ghost stories about soldiers willing to die rather than give up the Island jewel, ghosts that still haunted the Bloody Marsh, where, as a child, Virginia and her friends dug up old Spanish bullets.

Southerners also fought and died for this strip of beach at the most bitterly contested battles during the War Between the States. And Daddy personally recalled the era, during World War II, when German U-boats trolled the coastal waters. Back then, the locals, armed with shotguns, sabers, and kitchen knives, prepared to take on the hulking tubs of iron all on their own.

Now, the unsuspecting Island faced a new threat. And like her Island ancestors, Virginia was prepared to do whatever it took to save it.

So here she sat in the unbearably hot car, thirsty, hopefully checking out every customer emerging from the store and heading this way.

So far, no contenders.

The middle-aged woman in head-to-toe Lilly Pulitzer couldn’t belong to the Beetle.

The elderly man in shorts and black dress socks couldn’t either…nor the pair of high-school boys wearing madras and loafers without socks.

Virginia took a closer look at two women in their mid-to-late thirties, both with identically cropped early–Chris Evert hairstyles, both with gold wire-rimmed glasses and both with baggy hiking shorts. From where Virginia sat, the only physical difference between the two was that one wore Birkenstocks over white socks and the other topped her white socks with hemp-woven clogs. Pay dirt.

Sure enough, they started loading a cart full of groceries into the Beetle.

Virginia gratefully exited the steaming Jeep, sneaking between rows of parked cars for a few moments, then approached casually by foot. They had their heads together and were laughing, arms grazing as they put bags into the car, and Virginia deduced an intimacy indicating that they were probably more than roommates.

“Hello, there.”

They both looked up and offered surprised return greetings.

“Gorgeous day, isn’t it? Do you live here on the Island?”

Woven Clogs looked a little wary, but Birkenstocks answered, “Yes it is, and yes we do!”

“So do I. Have for years. Not a stone’s throw from the water. You know, sometimes, before the Island got so crowded, I used to see whales breaching in the sea right from my deck!”

Woven Clogs lost the wary expression in a hurry. “You did? That must have been amazing!”

“Oh, it was. It was,” she said, with just the right note of bittersweet wistfulness. “They’re such beautiful creatures, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” Birkenstocks assured her.

Woven Clogs asked, “Did you see that two-hour PBS special a few months ago?”

“Which special was that?”

“The one about an Indian tribe hunting whales once a year in the Pacific, as part of ancient Indian ritual.”

“No, I hate that I missed it…”

“It was the most horrific thing Renee and I have ever witnessed.” Birkenstocks tossed the last bag into the car and slammed the door hard, clearly incensed just thinking about it. “Those poor whales, savagely slaughtered, and for what?”

“For what?” Renee echoed, shaking her short haircut, eyes solemn behind her wire-rims.

“That’s the kind of thing that really makes a person want to stand up and take action,” Virginia said carefully. “You know…do some good to offset the bad.”

“Oh, we did, didn’t we, Dottie?” Renee asked, nodding at her partner.

“What did you do?” Leaning back on the battered VW, Virginia instinctively knew—right here in the Kroger parking lot—that she had struck gold.

“We had an epiphany, right there on our living room sofa that night after the special. We just looked at each other, and we didn’t even have to say a word. We knew what we had to do.”

“We took two full weeks of vacation time to drive north to Alaska in the VW and stage a protest.”

“All the way to Alaska? I’m stunned…”

They were perfect.

Casually, she asked Renee and Dottie, “I don’t suppose you’re free tonight? You and maybe some of your Greenpeace friends?”

W
HEN THE DOWNSTAIRS DOOR BUZZED, HAILEY GLADLY SET
aside the bills she’d been paying and opened the door to meet Melissa. Standing in the doorway, she could hear footsteps flying up the stairs, could feel Melissa’s stress vibrating toward her, even before she burst into view down the hall.

Her straight, dark hair, almost down to her waist, was windblown back from a face that had a delicate, almost childlike beauty. When the light hit her just right or she flashed a rare smile, it was especially evident. But Melissa’s nose was crooked, having been broken a few too many times—and her brown eyes were perpetually troubled and rimmed with the dark circles of chronic insomnia. “Sorry I’m late, Hailey—track trouble on the number four train.”

“It’s okay. Come on in. Want some coffee?”

“Definitely.”

Hailey didn’t bother to ask her how she took it. She already knew. Black.

Just like her outfit: black skirt, black boots, black leather jacket. Hailey wondered whether it was a fashion statement or a reflection of Melissa’s state of mind. Maybe both. It only accentuated her pale, drawn features.

“So how are you?” she asked when she and Melissa were settled in her office—Melissa with her coffee, which Hailey noticed she clutched in both hands, as if trying to warm them. She looked so frail sitting there, like she could barely hold the mug. Hailey hoped the coffee wouldn’t slosh over the rim and burn her.

“I’m a little better,” Melissa said. “I saw Tammy this week.”

Tammy was her half-sister, with whom she had recently reconnected.

“That’s really good. Did you talk?”

“You mean…about…anything?”

Hailey nodded. “Anything” would be Melissa’s stepfather—Tammy’s father—who had beaten and sexually abused her from the time he came into her mother’s life when Melissa was eight until she ran away at sixteen. She’d have left sooner, but she was worried about Tammy becoming the next victim.

As far as she knew, Tammy hadn’t.

“We just talked about this movie we both want to see, and her haircut—she got her hair cut. It looks good. She told me I should cut my hair too, but…” Melissa shook her head.

“You like your hair long.”

“Right.”

The better to hide behind, Hailey knew. Melissa’s hair frequently fell over her eyes and across her cheeks, begging a hand to brush it back, but she never did.

They’d come a long way in the two years Hailey had been treating her, but they had a long way to go. There were still sessions when Melissa would sit, silently rocking in her seat, hugging herself, lost in memories forced to the edges of her mind, examined only at great emotional cost.

“Last week, we talked about the day you and your sister went to the church carnival,” Hailey told Melissa gently. “Do you remember? You said that your sister made you go on the Ferris wheel because she was too young to ride alone, and you were afraid, but then when you were spinning around high in the sky, with all those lights dazzling below you, you felt strong. Remember?”

No smile, but Melissa nodded. “I remember.”

“And it felt good to come up with that memory. Remember how happy you were?”

Another nod, slower to come than the last. A key part of their recent sessions involved Melissa integrating happy childhood memories along with the disturbing ones.

“Did you share the Ferris wheel memory with Tammy when you saw her?”

“I did, but she doesn’t remember it. She doesn’t remember a lot of things.”

Her sister, Hailey knew, had once accused Melissa of making it all up—the beatings, the sex abuse.

It was Tammy’s way of protecting her father, or maybe protecting herself.

But she wasn’t Hailey’s patient. Melissa was. And for all the progress they’d made, Hailey knew they had a long way to go.

“Can you think of another happy memory?” Hailey asked. Melissa immediately shook her head, a curtain of hair covering her face.

“Maybe something else about the carnival,” Hailey suggested. “Did you eat anything there? Cotton candy, maybe? Snow cones? I love carnival food.”

So had Will.

“Snow cones.” Melissa nodded slowly, a hint of recognition in faraway eyes. “We ate snow cones. I had purple, Tammy had red.”

Instinctively leaning forward to help her patient once again delve into the past, Hailey had to acknowledge Melissa wasn’t the only one haunted by memories.

An hour later, Nathan Mazzelli replaced Melissa in the chair opposite Hailey. Mazzelli likely needed a defense lawyer more than a shrink. Hailey kept her expression carefully neutral as he described his latest intricate, sinister nightmare.

As always, it was about an IRS agent.

“So there I was”—Mazz twisted a sweat-sopped Hermès bandanna in his lap—“trying to fly away from him—”

“Fly?” Hailey interjected.

“Yeah, in the dream, I was a housefly.”

Interesting. A fly. She made a note on her pad as he went on. “But I saw him coming after me. Big guy, and he was wearing an incredibly plain navy suit. You know—not even pinstriped—and a white dress shirt, a white plastic ID card on his lapel.”

Typical. In Mazz’s dreams, IRS agents were always dressed in stark contrast to Mazz’s three-thousand-dollar Armani suits and
Hermès ties. Sometimes the agents even sported plastic shirt-pocket protectors neatly stuffed with multiple black-ink plastic pens.

“Oh,” Mazz added, “and he had on a synthetic tie. Maybe polyrayon. I don’t know.”

Judging by his expression as he delivered this piece of information, a synthetic tie was a crime worse than…

Well, worse, as far as he was concerned, than anything Hailey suspected Nathan himself had done. He’d never actually confided anything illegal.

In Mazz’s dreams, the agents always chased him relentlessly through confusing mazes. On foot, he ran for his life through hairpin twists and turns, secret passages and trapdoors he never knew existed in the bowels of his own building, and resurfacing in buildings of clients.

“And did they find you behind the cabinets this time?” Hailey asked him as he wound down the narrative.

“Nope.”

Not yet.

The unspoken phrase hung in the air.

Hailey snuck a glance at the tiny clock surreptitiously placed on a shelf behind his head and realized they were out of time.

“Looks like we’ll have to pick it up next week, Nathan,” she said, as though it were just too bad the session was over.

“Okay, okay…by then, I’m sure I’ll have had a couple of new dreams.”

Maybe another couple of dreams…but Hailey was willing to bet they wouldn’t be new ones.

Hayden Krasinski was next.

For all the months the brilliantly talented, tousled blonde graphic artist had been seeing Hailey, sessions invariably went in fits and starts, depending on her mood. She was either way high or low.

Today, she was down. Way down.

They sat in silence for the first five minutes.

Then Hayden said bleakly, “I just don’t know.”

The statement, which hadn’t even been preceded by a question from Hailey, was punctuated by a heavy sigh.

“Hayden, why don’t you tell me about something positive that happened to you since we met last week.” Hailey tried a gentle, upbeat approach.

“I can’t think of anything” was the prompt reply. “Not a single thing.”

“Try.”

Hayden sighed again and fell silent, running her right forefinger up and down the scars on her left forearm.

Depressed, and not just over the accidental drowning deaths of her mother and kid brother two years ago, she repeatedly self-mutilated, methodically slicing horizontal grooves down her arms and along the insides of her thighs.

“Have you written anything this week?” Hailey wasn’t giving up.

“A poem.”

“Do you want to share it?”

Hayden shook her head. “No. You said to think of something positive. That wasn’t a positive poem.”

“It’s a positive thing that you wrote it. You told me your writing is cathartic.”

Hayden nodded, staring at her scars.

Hailey paused before deciding to plunge ahead with an idea that had struck her the other day in the elevator of her building, where she’d run into one of her neighbors, an editor at a small publishing house.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about your poetry, Hayden, and the pieces you’ve shown me are really good.”

Hayden looked up sharply.

“Really, really good. And you know I’m not just saying that,” she added, reading Hayden’s mind.

A hint of a smile lit Hayden’s pretty brown eyes, though she said nothing.

“Maybe you could publish them.”

“Who would want to publish them?”

“I have a friend—she’s an editor. She’s done quite a few poetry collections featuring poems from new talent, and I’m sure she’d be willing to take a look.”

“What if she hates them?”

“What if she doesn’t?”

Hayden considered that. “I don’t know,” she said heavily again, but at least this time it was relevant.

“Think about it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Hailey smiled. “Okay.”

At least they were making progress.

She knew the dichotomy of Hayden would haunt her long after the workday ended. It always did.

She jogged nearly every evening after work, alone along the East River, just as the New York skyline began to twinkle with lights against the darkening sky. The river was deep and gray and beautiful. Tugs and speedboats and huge container ships passed by under bridges that were lit up against the skyline. On days Hayden had been in, Hailey would look out over the dark waters and dwell on the patient with sharp scars marking her arms and beautiful poetry and drawings tucked into her backpack.

Something Hayden had told her once, early in their work together, remained stubbornly stuck in Hailey’s brain.

“I’m going to die young, like my mother,” Hayden had said, with a cryptic shrug. “Only a lot younger than she was.”

Hailey first assumed she was suicidal, but over time, had ruled that possibility out…almost.

“It’s just a feeling I’ve always had,” Hayden told her recently. “You know—that I’m not going to be here for very long. I just don’t belong here, I don’t fit in.”

The feeling could very well be a symptom of her depression, but it waved a red flag. Hailey worried deeply about her between sessions and always met Hayden at her office door with relief that she had shown up again and all in one piece, dressed as always in
T-shirts and worn, baggy jeans covered in ink and marker drawings, knees showing through.

She hoped and prayed Hayden was wrong because she had a whole lot of life ahead of her. When Hayden smiled or laughed, which was rare, she lit up the room.

They were making progress.