The Eleventh Victim Read online

  The Eleventh Victim

  Nancy Grace

  To Prince Dragonfly and Princess Lyric

  aka My Parents

  Mac and Elizabeth Grace

  Contents

  Prologue

  A LITTLE SOMETHING. WHAT WAS IT? SOMETHING…SOME DETAIL WAS...

  1

  Atlanta, Georgia

  2

  Atlanta, Georgia

  3

  Atlanta, Georgia

  4

  Atlanta, Georgia

  5

  Atlanta, Georgia

  6

  Reidsville State Penitentiary, Georgia

  7

  New York City

  8

  Atlanta, Georgia

  9

  “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?” CRUISE SPIT THE WORDS…

  10

  Atlanta, Georgia

  11

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  12

  New York City

  13

  Atlanta, Georgia

  14

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  15

  Back Roads One Hundred Miles Southeast of Atlanta, Georgia

  16

  New York City

  17

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  18

  Atlanta, Georgia

  19

  New York City

  20

  Atlanta, Georgia

  21

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  22

  Atlanta, Georgia

  23

  Atlanta, Georgia

  24

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  25

  Reidsville State Penitentiary, Georgia

  26

  New York City

  27

  Atlanta, Georgia

  28

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  29

  New York City

  30

  North Georgia

  31

  New York City

  32

  New York City

  33

  Atlanta, Georgia

  34

  New York City

  35

  Atlanta, Georgia

  36

  New York City

  37

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  38

  New York City

  39

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  40

  New York City

  41

  New York City

  42

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  43

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  44

  New York City

  45

  Atlanta, Georgia

  46

  New York City

  47

  New York City

  48

  Atlanta, Georgia

  49

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  50

  New York City

  51

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  52

  New York City

  53

  New York City

  54

  Atlanta, Georgia

  55

  Atlanta, Georgia

  56

  New York City

  57

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  58

  New York City

  59

  Atlanta, Georgia

  60

  New York City

  61

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  62

  New York City

  63

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  64

  New York City

  65

  Atlanta, Georgia

  66

  New York City

  67

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  68

  New York City

  69

  New York City

  70

  New York City

  71

  Atlanta, Georgia

  72

  Atlanta, Georgia

  73

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  74

  Dooley County, Georgia

  75

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  76

  New York City

  77

  New York City

  78

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Epilogue

  New York City

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by Nancy Grace

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  A LITTLE SOMETHING. WHAT WAS IT? SOMETHING…SOME DETAIL WAS wrong.

  He couldn’t just leave the body lying there like that. There was something missing. It was biting at him. He’d tried to go, walking back to his car in the dark twice now, but the nagging in his brain wouldn’t let him leave until she was absolutely perfect.

  He looked at her lying there in the moonlight. Her dead body was absolutely stunning. Before, when she had been alive, sitting in the passenger seat of his car, talking and talking about her life and herself and her journey from Anniston, Alabama, to Atlanta to break into acting, he thought his head would blow up like a bomb. She just wouldn’t shut up.

  What did she think it was…a date? She was a hooker. He spotted her climbing the steep steps out of the MARTA subway station downtown. She got straight into his car with a big smile when he offered her a ride.

  Once inside, driving, he kept looking away from the road, stealing glances at her neck. Something about it drew him. Maybe the shape, the curve—or maybe it was the soft hollow spot at the bottom. It was the only thing about her he could stomach.

  He lowered the automatic windows so her conversation would fly out into the night and he wouldn’t have to hear it. Her teeth and lips revolted him. The shiny pink lip gloss she was wearing had thickened in spots across her lips and some had smeared onto her front teeth. Looking over at her as she talked, Cruise thought it was the most disgusting thing he had ever seen.

  Back to the task at hand. What was it? It was maddening…he couldn’t bring himself to leave until everything was just right…perfect, in fact.

  Every detail mattered. Like a delicate soufflé or performing his specialty, decorating with boiling-hot spun sugar, perfection was achieved only by acute attention to detail.

  There, in the dark of the clearing, it hit him. Turning, he walked to his car and reached through the open window into the glove compartment and got it. The baker’s twine. It was his favorite brand—it was actually the only twine he would ever consider using—just shipped in from France.

  He had posed her on her back. The four bright-red puncture marks torn into her mid-back didn’t bother him at all. In fact, the dark red against the white skin created a vivid contrast that was somehow pleasing to him. Walking back to her body, which he had spread carefully on a bed of soft grass to more suitably frame her pale limbs in a night lit only by the moon, he paused again.

  He needed the perfect spot. He couldn’t rush this or he wouldn’t sleep all night. The wrist? Like a bracelet? No. She was wearing a tacky, gold-tone watch. That would ruin the whole thing for him. And he couldn’t bring himself to actually touch the timepiece she wore there on her right wrist. It looked cheap; he was sure the gold-tone finish was turning dark at the edges of the band.

  The neck? No. It was much too close to the lip gloss. The gloss had a faint, fruity odor, foul as gasoline fumes to Cruise, and that alone made him want to retch. It would totally destroy the twine’s effect.

  Sometime during their “date,” fresh, damp dirt and a little grass h
ad smeared horizontally across her mouth and worked its way up into her nose. He left it there. That was a beautiful and poetic touch of nature, but the lip gloss…disgusting.

  As he stood there at the foot of her body, staring into her face, her own eyes stared away from him and straight up into the sky, her lips still slightly parted just as they had been in life…just as they had been at the zenith, that incredibly beautiful and intimate moment when she exhaled her last breath into the night. And as he relived that moment, it came to him in an epiphany.

  He decided…the left ring finger. Perfect.

  He squatted down and gently picked up her left hand. The wrist was still limp.

  He tied a single, perfect bow around her ring finger just before rigor set in…before the body went stiff and cold and hard. He placed the hand back gently across her stomach.

  Backing away a few feet to take in the whole picture, finally, he could relax. Every detail was exquisite. Finally, he could get some sleep.

  The bow was perfectly symmetrical, and there, in the moonlight, it was just gorgeous. Almost like a wedding band.

  1

  Atlanta, Georgia

  THE PIERCING ERUPTION OF A TELEPHONE STARTLED SPECIAL Prosecutor Hailey Dean, still at her desk late on a Friday night preparing for a Monday-morning trial.

  It was probably Fincher, her longtime investigator and sometime bodyguard. Together, they worked felony investigations from inner-city housing projects to this latest, which involved one of North Atlanta’s elite country clubs.

  “District Attorney’s Office, Hailey Dean speaking,” she said absently into the receiver.

  The silence that greeted Hailey on the other end of the telephone line caught her attention.

  “Hello?”

  Still nothing.

  Realizing what was likely coming next, Hailey quickly reached for a notepad.

  “Hello?” she repeated and waited for the recorded announcement that the call was from the prison. After she accepted the call, which she always did, an inmate would come on the line to offer information in exchange for a full dismissal of his own charges or, at the least, a lighter sentence or a transfer to a better facility.

  As if a dismissal would ever happen.

  No way would Hailey go to hell to get witnesses to put a devil in jail…she said so up front to each and every snitch.

  Still, she’d talk, listening carefully, turning their tips into evidence in court—if she believed them. Then it would become necessary, like it or not, to cut some kind of deal.

  She had never broken a deal, and so far, her snitches in turn had displayed a certain degree of decency. Not one had ever backed down on the stand, even when things got tense in the courtroom or behind jailhouse bars, where her informants lived day to day with the very defendants against whom they were testifying.

  In fact, Hailey often trusted her rats more than her fellow attorneys, whom she routinely fed with a long-handled spoon, keeping them safely at arm’s length.

  “Hello,” she repeated into the phone, wondering if the call got dropped by the prison switchboard. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Silence.

  Just as she reached to hang up, she heard a faint, “Miss Hailey?”

  An older, Southern woman was on the other end of the line, she realized—a woman who still functioned under the rules left over from the fifties that demanded a respectful “Miss.”

  “Yes, hello?”

  Still nothing.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” she asked, trying not to sound impatient, but she had a lot of work to do before she got out of here. “The DA’s office is closed right now…”

  “Excuse me for calling so late. This is Mrs. Leola Williams.”

  Williams…Leola Williams…

  Hailey’s mind whirred like a computer trying to place the name.

  “LaSondra was my first baby girl.”

  Ah. Connection.

  Leola Williams as in LaSondra Williams.

  Otherwise known as Victim Eleven.

  Hailey instinctively started taking notes on the pad, neatly writing “V Eleven” across the top of the page and underlining it. Eleven women across Atlanta, all in their twenties, had been raped, sodomized, and strangled. As the coup de grâce, each woman was stabbed with a deadly, signature four-prong weapon, piercing the lower back, moving upward through the lungs.

  LaSondra Williams was the final woman they knew of to die at the hands of a ruthless serial killer who evaded the Atlanta Homicide Division for well over a year, striking with no real pattern, but always the same MO. It had taken a long time for cops to even connect victims One through Seven, mainly because the victims were prostitutes.

  Most of the city’s residents dismissed the murders as the price streetwalkers paid to make a living. Even as the body count rose, there was little pressure on police to stop the killing and solve the murders.

  The corpses of young women slowly piled up, necks mangled and torsos ripped, left in open fields behind strip bars, cocktail lounges, crack holes, and flop houses.

  From the get-go, Hailey believed the murder scenes were staged. Once she started comparing notes from each murder, she realized that a “calling card” was left on each victim.

  The autopsy reports referred to it simply as “string” found on or around the body—no detail, and no description whatsoever. No wonder nobody connected the dots.

  Various rotating doctors had performed the eleven autopsies and, as a result, there was no big picture, no overview, no single go-to doctor at the Medical Examiner’s Office with all the answers. When Hailey ran down one of the doctors who performed two of the postmortems, she had to press hard to actually view the effects, that is, every single item found “on or about the body.”

  But there it was. In separate plastic bags marked with an ME’s Office case number, thin but sturdy string. She insisted on seeing the chief medical examiner, known across the jurisdiction as “Jack the Ripper.” After a closed-door meeting, he ordered all the effects in each case assembled for Hailey’s inspection. Her theory was laid out before her eyes.

  Eleven of them were arranged on a sterile metal table there in the morgue.

  A bow of twine was always there, sometimes on an ankle, sometimes tied around a pinkie or toe. Victim Five was nearly excluded from the series of murder victims when no twine was found on the body. It was only during the routine dissection of the head that the twine was found, shoved up the left nasal cavity.

  The twine was forced so deeply into the ear of Victim Seven that blood had trickled down the side of the woman’s neck, indicating the bow had been painfully inserted during life while blood still flowed freely.

  Hailey had the twine traced and analyzed by the FBI. It was high-end imported baker’s twine. Sisson Imports, made in France, sold in tightly wound balls, three hundred inches of pure white linen kitchen twine—preferred by chefs because it neither burned nor frayed during the cooking process.

  Each body was found cold, with an unmistakable wound to the delicate flesh of the lower back—four thin, perfectly symmetrical puncture wounds, like a quartet of exactly paralleled, venomous snake bites.

  Callous headlines referred to each of the victims not by her name, but by her profession.

  She was a hooker, so who really cared?

  I cared. I still care.

  It was all running through her head rapidly, like a home movie on fast forward. Hailey lit a fire under the Atlanta Police Department to at least attempt to make the women aware they were being stalked, but that was a daunting task. How do you effectively reach an underworld made up of streetwalkers, escorts, junkies chasing johns for a hit of crack, and strippers turning the occasional trick?

  Finally, as a last resort and at Hailey’s urging, the city’s night court took action. Officials began reading a form warning to every woman processed through the city jail when she was booked in and fingerprinted for soliciting prostitution. The same warning, in writing, was then placed
in the hand of every hooker at every guilty plea, court date, and trial. The Xeroxed warnings were subsequently found littering the courthouse steps, the ladies’ bathrooms, sidewalks, and the bus and trains stations at the courthouse stop. But Hailey insisted that they continue handing them out. Begrudgingly, they were.

  “Miss Hailey, I can’t hardly bear you all calling her what you called her in the paper. LaSondra, she went to Mt. Zion Baptist real regular. She just got her a new job keeping the books for a man up in Tucker. She didn’t walk no streets, Miss Hailey.” The pain in Leola’s voice cracked through the receiver, and Hailey’s chest hurt hearing it.

  “I know, Mrs. Williams, I know she was good.” She tried her best to keep an impersonal, professional tone. She steeled herself.

  It was easy to forget that these women, these prostitutes, were once somebody’s little girls.

  But Hailey knew better than to let emotion get in the way of a case, or let sympathy cloud her decisions on a trial matter.

  Sentimentality in a courtroom angered judges. Anything but a cool head resulted in adverse rulings from the bench, botched cross-exams, bad trial tactics, and not-guilty verdicts.

  Tonight, with a high-profile case looming on Monday’s trial calendar, she couldn’t afford to get emotionally attached to a voice on the other end of the phone line.

  “You’ve got to make them stop saying those things about her, Miss Hailey. You don’t know what it’s been like for me, waking up every morning and remembering she ain’t comin’ home again.”

  Hailey swallowed hard. “No,” she lied softly, “I don’t know.”

  “Promise me you’ll make them tell the truth about her. That she didn’t walk no streets. Promise?”

  Hailey didn’t make promises she wasn’t sure she could keep.

  Instead, she said, “I’ll get to work on it right now.” Never mind that “now” was 10:30 p.m. on a Friday night, long past time to go home.

  “Thank you, Miss Hailey.” The woman’s voice shook with gratitude as she gave Hailey her phone number. “You call me back, then, when you know more.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll be up all night.”

  “Oh, no need to do that, Mrs. Leola.”

  “Miss Hailey,” the woman said flatly, “I ain’t slept through the night since I found out about my baby girl.”

  “I…I’m sorry” was all Hailey could think of to say.