The Eleventh Victim by Nancy Grace Read Free Book Online

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 futurewithin 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