The Eleventh Victim by Nancy Grace Read Free Book Online Page B

center of the massive courtroom. Her investigator was several rows back in the courtroom sitting with the State’s witnesses. He had stupidly let his guard down and left her alone. In that one moment, Cruise made it across the courtroom to Hailey Dean.
    He reached out and barely fingered her neck, when a pain burned through his skull as the sheriffs clubbed him from behind.
    Idiots. They couldn’t understand the artist’s mind, a mind like his. They thought he was enraged over the verdict. But all he wanted was to touch her neck. His hands were pumped with energy, and they ached to circle her neck, just below her chin.
    Dean stood silent when they dragged him off her, eyes still locked on him, as if he had never touched her.
    Tonight, in the dark of his cell, his hands felt hot with electricity, that old feeling that took hold of him. He was superhuman again.
    He thought of her. She wasn’t so smart. A smile spread across his face.
    He was the only one that knew just how stupid Hailey Dean really was. Because he, Clint Burrell Cruise, hadn’t strangled LaSondra Williams.
    Imagine Dean’s expression when she finds out the truth. Stupid bitch. So stupid, she didn’t have a clue.
    If his own incompetent lawyer had proven him innocent on the eleventh murder count, doubt would have been cast on all the othermurders and the jury would have let him go…let him walk out of the courtroom and onto the elevator. Down to the lobby and out into the street, mingling with all the others on the sidewalk until he disappeared into the evening.
    The cell row was deafeningly quiet. Cruise’s hands were so electric tonight he thought he’d come out of his skin.
    Hailey Dean.
    It was like she was here, in his cell with him. He still remembered her smell. In the dark, he could still smell her, like the outdoors.

7
New York City
    TWO YEARS LATER
    W AVES OF HEAT SHIMMERED OFF THE GRASS IN THE CLEARING where she sat cross-legged in the red Georgia dirt. The sun baked the pine trees and their sap boiled over, spilling onto the trunks, making the air even heavier with the scent. Digging with a spoon from the kitchen, the girl’s skin felt as if it had been baking, too.
    Suddenly, her tiny fingers tensed around the spoon handle.
    Someone was coming. Something was wrong.
    She sensed it before she heard faint footsteps.
    Peering between slender trunks, she made out the form of her own mother.
    But momentary relief gave way to apprehension…her mother was moving slowly, stealthily toward her, creeping across a smooth floor of strewn pine needles and cones.
    Her mother approached with neither word nor recognition, raising a sharpened hoe over her head that the child had only seen used for planting daylilies or digging in the fields on Saturdays.
    She dropped the spoon to the ground. Palms up on her knees, she saw the hoe raised up evenly, then pulling back, her mother’s face like a stone. And in one smooth, violent, powerful plunge, the woman thrust the blade forward.
    At the very last moment, the child squeezed her eyes shut.
    She never cried out, opening her eyes to see her mother sink without a word to her knees.
    There, just inches beside them along with the little dirt pies, lay a Southern timber rattler, its head neatly chopped from its body, still coiled in fat and convulsing circles.
    The girl sat still as her mother rose up from the red earth, scooped her to her feet, and without a word between them, carried her across the field and into the house.
    Once inside the darkened kitchen, everything was safe again. The world was right….
    Then Hailey was spinning, spinning…comforting arms on a sunny afternoon were gone and suddenly, it was dark.
    The pain in her chest made her think for a moment she was having a heart attack. Her heart beat violently, her blood pumping hard, her fingertips throbbing, her ears ringing.
    Somewhere in the night, a car slammed on squealing brakes and then, gunning its motor, took off down Fifty-fourth toward