The Eleventh Victim

by Nancy Grace

  23

  Atlanta, Georgia

  JIM TALLEY WAS STUNNED.

  Until this moment, all had been right with the world.

  It was Monday morning, seven thirty a.m. The sun rose on schedule, as predicted last night by the Weather Channel’s “on-camera meteorologists,” as they insisted on calling themselves. What a nerve.

  His coffee brewed on cue by order of his imported coffeemaker’s built-in timing mechanism.

  He arrived at the usual time at the State Judicial Building. His office, adjoining the Judge’s, was precisely as he had left it…carefully jacketed in hundreds of volumes of law books, each in their appointed location, exactly where he’d left them Friday afternoon.

  Jim Talley had just listened to his voice mail.

  C.C…. reversing his opinion in a death penalty murder case?

  And not just a murder case, a serial murder case. The serial murder case.

  And not only did Judge C. want a reversal, with a new trial over some legal technicality, he wanted Cruise to walk free!

  Not once in all the years C.C. had graced the bench had he ever, ever ruled anti–law and order, much less anti–death penalty.

  Yet now, in one of the biggest cases ever tried in the largest metropolitan city south of the Mason-Dixon line, C.C. wanted to reverse his opinion? And based on a bunch of theoretical crap he rambled over a cell phone?

  Jim could tell C.C. was soused when he left the message. His voice was slurred and Duane Allman was playing in the background.

  Whenever the Judge had a snootful, he waxed eloquently about constitutionality, about which he knew nothing.

  Jim was always astounded how a man who knew so little about the Constitution could actually bring himself to the brink of tears just talking about it. He did it every single summer at the State Bar Association meeting in Savannah, and then, just to top it off, forced everyone to suffer through a repeat performance at the law clerks’ annual Christmas party.

  Last year, after two or three cocktails, C.C. had “gone constitutional” with a piece of Christmas tree tinsel stuck on top of his head. The Court personnel had been to afraid to ignore him, so they all listened, which only egged him on to even greater constitutional heights.

  Now Jim would have to go door-to-door within the building and hand-deliver some type of memo explaining his change of position.

  Then he’d have to comb the trial transcript and record to find an actual reason to reverse the damn thing. It would have to be one of the issues brought up by the defense on appeal. The Court just couldn’t—sua sponte—first raise and then sustain its own objection; the issues raised in the appellate briefs bound them.

  Jim turned on his computer and waited for it to boot up. Hell, the judge might not even remember his drunken telephone monologue about how they were the gatekeepers to justice, blah, blah, and blah.

  It wasn’t the first time C.C. had left a long, drunken rambling on his voice mail…far from it. But it was even worse when Jim actually picked up the phone and gave C.C. a captive audience. At least the voice mail only allowed four minutes before cutting him off.

  There had to be some legitimate reason to reverse. Something the feds couldn’t argue with.

  A death penalty case would normally head straight to the federal northern district courthouse for review. Jim considered federal judges truly the worst, all cut from the same cloth. Once they’d made it out of the trenches at the state court level and landed their lifetime appointments, they waited, obnoxiously looking down their noses, for every joyous opportunity to denounce their former colleagues and trash the lower courts.

  The federal judges, though, absolutely loved to let killers walk, that was a known fact. But he had to come up with something legit, a solid reason to reverse. For Cruise to walk free there had to be prejudice. That would disallow the State from ever re-trying the case. Typically that only occurred when there was some sort of prosecutorial misconduct. Unlikely here. Hailey Dean was over the top, true, but misconduct? Doubtful.

  Reversals were easy enough to engineer, but Dean was a good trial lawyer and very few of her cases were ever overturned. The defense lawyer, Leonard, was good, too. Jim doubted either had done anything reversible. Appeals were not mysterious. The case was tried before a judge and jury, and immediately after conviction came a notice of appeal outline, bare-bones, grounds for a new trial. When that was denied by the trial judge, the case headed up to a panel of nine judges, the Georgia Supreme Court, for review. They loved reversing death cases…especially four of the nine on the bench. All it took was one vote to swing the majority.

  The guilty verdict and the death sentence were both up for grabs. Letting out a long breath, Jim pulled up the Cruise decision to see where it stood on the Court’s rotation and how the other justices had lined up.

  After skimming a few lines, he froze.

  Holy shit.

  C.C.’s would be the swing-fricking-vote.

  His one vote change would guarantee a serial killer’s death penalty reversal. And all because of one drunk drive up the interstate?

  Did the Judge have any idea?

  Shit.

  For a moment, just a fleeting one, Jim thought back on the testimony at trial, the mauling the victims took before they felt fingers around their necks and an indescribable pain pierce their backs.

  But to hell with them. They were dead.

  More important, what would a reversal do to his own career? He couldn’t name one decent law firm that would be remotely interested in hiring the left-wing liberal wing-nut that crafted the decision to let a serial killer walk free.

  He had to think…

  Resigning himself to the possibility the Judge may actually remember Saturday’s phone call, Jim switched the computer over to the Lexis legal research feature to start scanning for new law in all eleven federal judicial circuits across the country covering the death penalty.

  There was nothing else he could do now. The Judge wouldn’t show up for at least three more hours. C.C.’s ETA, estimated time of arrival as they called it at the Court, was never before 11 a.m. and he was always in a foul mood on Monday mornings. This would be no damn picnic.

  Jim dug in and, four hours later, still no sign of the Judge and no decent grounds for reversal, except a weak argument that a separate warrant should have been obtained for DNA comparison for each of the eleven murder victims. There wasn’t even DNA on all the victims…so how could he conceivably reverse on DNA issues alone?

  His eyes were tired and the words on the computer screen were getting blurry. Talley pushed back from his desk and put his feet up beside the keyboard for a moment, stretching out his limbs. He glanced up at the TV screen there on a shelf, sandwiched in between law books perfectly bookended with bronzed scales-of-justice figurines.

  Headline News was on mute as usual and it was the bottom of the hour, time for the local cable news cut-in. The cut-in was usually just annoying, but this time the screen caught his attention. Three young men, hair cropped short, immaculately groomed and dressed in business suits, were being led out of a courtroom in handcuffs. They looked vaguely familiar.

  Talley’s eyes flipped down to the banner in the lower third of the screen. A guilty verdict had been handed down in federal court. Three Atlanta vice/homicide undercover cops were on the take. Talley remembered reading about the fed’s investigation a few months before.

  The three looked away from the screen, but the cameras were relentless and moved in for close-ups.

  Wait a minute. Conally. The name rang a bell.

  Suddenly it hit him like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t just Officer Conally, it was undercover Detective Tim Conally, one of the lead detectives on the Clint Burrell Cruise case. Conally conducted dozens of interviews, canvassing the city’s hookers, looking for leads, and if Jim recalled correctly, Conally was the cop who’d actually found the murder weapon hidden in a duffel bag in Cruise’s closet.

  Jim’s head was spinning. He felt
a little dizzy.

  Headline News flashed a clip of grainy, black-and-white video, the actual FBI surveillance rigged up in some dopers’ homes. The cops looked and acted like street thugs, busting into the dopers’ luxury homes in gated communities, cleaning them out of tens of thousands on each rogue raid. The cops were caught on tape, robbing Atlanta’s most powerful drug suppliers of vast amounts of drugs, money, jewelry, even taking their wide-screen TVs—anything and everything the dopers had that the cops wanted.

  And now, every one of the detectives’ cases were in jeopardy, depending on the significance of the role they played in each case. Cruise’s case had to be reversed with prejudice—in other words, due to willful misconduct by the State—in order for retrial to be legally impermissible. Hailey Dean was clean as a whistle, but “the State” included the cops.

  This would work. The local papers would have a field day.

  It had to be divine intervention when Talley saw the screen and put two and two together that Conally was a lead detective in the Cruise investigation. Jim pulled up the trial transcript on his screen and plugged in Conally’s name to search. Not only did Conally discover the murder weapon, he also transported some of the DNA evidence from a few of the crime scenes to the lab.

  Perfect. That destroyed the chain of evidence, so DNA was out the window along with the murder weapon. The State screwed up.

  The case was irreversibly tainted! Cruise would walk. Praise the Lord as far as Jim was concerned. He didn’t have a choice now…he had to reverse! If the jury had known the truth about one of the lead detectives on the stand, they may have had a totally different outcome. Conally now had no credibility. You’d have thought the defense attorney would have brought this up on appeal. True, the conviction had just gone down a few months ago, but the federal indictment had been brewing for months.

  Of course, the truth was, C.C. could still uphold the conviction by holding the evidence against Cruise was so overwhelming that Conally’s testimony didn’t matter. But Judge C.C. wanted a reversal, and here was just cause.

  Maybe nobody would blame Talley after all. Whatever. He could hand Judge C.C. a reversal on a silver platter

  Jim thought again, briefly, of the murder victims and their families. But hey, it wasn’t his fault.

  Shit. Justice sucked.

  24

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  THE TREES HAD WITHSTOOD THE FIERCE WINDS OF HURRICANE season and watched as twisters churned up the land around them for miles. They presided over battles played out beneath their boughs during the War Between the States. They had shaded pirates and Indians and preachers and crooks.

  But they had never before been forced to wear orange markers tied around their waists.

  And this, Virginia knew, was far more humiliating than anything else.

  When she first heard about the markers, she told herself they were most likely placed there by the agricultural Cooperative Extension Service. With active branches in all 159 counties in the state, they routinely marked and destroyed trees that posed a danger—maybe fusiform rust disease, with its deadly orange powder, or some other contagious, coniferous malady.

  But after a late-night run to the 7-Eleven, reality sunk in.

  Virginia slipped in around 10:40, just before closing at 11, on her regular cigarette run. Larry was behind the counter, wearing a white T-shirt, brown polyester Sansabelt pants, and a red fishing hat that said “Kiss My Bass.”

  “Salem Lights. Carton. What’s happening, Larry? What’s with those big dirt trucks parked across from the store? I’ve got to tell you, not only are they unattractive and running away your business, they’re against code. Heavy use trucks aren’t permitted back here on the Island. These old narrow streets can’t take it. They’ll crack under the weight.”

  “V.G.”—he was the only one who got away with calling her that—“it’s really happening this time. You know my daddy and his daddy before him fished these marshes. We’ve had our home place off the point for eighty years that I know of, just us and the June bugs. Can you believe it, V.G.?”

  “Believe what, Larry? Is this about the beach replenishing? Are the trucks here to start loading the sand?”

  “V.G., they’re dumping sand all right, but it’s a whole lot bigger than the Commission’s sand exchange. Plus, they claim that’s just to swap sand off the floor of the water and plump up the beaches for the tourists.”

  “Don’t get me started on that, Larry. You know damn well what it’ll do to the turtles, if anybody cares.”

  Looking hurt that she’d even suggest he didn’t care about the turtles, he protested, “V.G., you know how I feel. Didn’t I wear a bumper sticker about the turtles on the back of the El Camino when nobody else would?”

  “Yes. You did. I apologize. I know you care. What about the trucks?”

  “It’s a helluva lot worse than swapping sand. They’re about a hair away from laying a cement base, from what I can tell. Saw the cement-mixer trucks going in yesterday. I’d have thought you’d be the first one to know about it. It’s an outfit out of Atlanta. They’re building right on the beach, right on the sand, V.G. Right on the sand.”

  Her blood ran cold. All she could manage was a strangled-sounding “What?!”

  “Condos. Nice ones…real lux. Heard tell they’re starting at over a million dollars apiece…over a million, V.G. Who’d pay that kind of money but Yankees or the peeps that drive down from Atlanta on weekends? Nobody from around here, I can tell you that much. And you know what’ll come next, right?”

  She knew. It made her sick. “Don’t say it, Larry,” she begged, as if his saying it would somehow make it come true.

  “Yep, there goes the marshland. You know how they dry up when construction comes in. No more marshland, no more St. Simons. That’s what I say.”

  He was right. Marshes adjacent to construction dried up like hardened Play-Doh. Everything growing in them that made the marshes one of God’s lush, green creations, would die a slow, thirsty death.

  Larry stared out through the plate glass and across the street at the dirt trucks, their mud flaps already splattered from work on the site.

  “Who are they?” she demanded. “What’s their name? Seen any locals with them?”

  She tried to keep the questioning casual, but her face was hot, and she realized she had unthinkingly scratched a gnawed-looking hole into the carton of Salems.

  Larry thought about her questions for a moment and she didn’t rush him. She nervously opened a pack and wedged a cigarette into the corner of her naked lips. Not even Chapstick, she didn’t trust it.

  “Well, I seen the trucks,” Larry told her. “Two white pickups in and out. Got the name ‘Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living’ on the side, on top of some fake coat-of-arms picture, like a family crest or a shield or something. And a heavy man with Atlanta tags has been down here a coupl’a times. First time, he came in asking about directions to the Cloister Hotel. Second time, he came in all sweaty-like, wanting a case of Diet Cokes and ice. Oh, yeah, plastic cups, too. The big red jumbo ones.”

  “Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living. Hmmm. Atlanta tags. Diet Coke. Let me think. What access road are they using, Larry?”

  “Not sure, but he asked for directions from off what sounded like the old King’s Plantation site. He was headed to the Cloister. I told him he better call ahead, because you know they’re pretty picky over there on Sea Island, what with all the millionaires living there and everything. You know, V.G., they won’t even think about letting you book a room if you don’t call ahead. You know, I bet they lose a lot of business that way, don’tcha think?”

  “They call it reservations, and whatever business the Cloister loses, it doesn’t want anyway, Larry.” She took a long drag.

  “So, you going out there, V.G.?”

  “I might just take a little drive by and take a look. Bye, you.”

  “Stay out of trouble, V.G. Hey, if they ask me, I didn’t see you. You know me, V.G.,
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’.”

  “You know it, Larry.” Virginia headed for the door, the carton of Salems tucked under her arm.

  Thinking again, she turned back. Larry had already turned his “Kiss My Bass” hat around backward on his head again and was bent down, working on the tiny motor in the Slurpee machine.

  “So what kind of car was he driving?”

  Virginia would bet everything she owned that he’d know, seeing as his daddy owned the biggest junkyard and auto salvage business in the city of Brunswick.

  Bent down over the Slurpee, his response was automatic, sure, and dead on the money.

  “Two thousand nine Mercedes SUV, solid white. Oh, yeah, V.G., that car was top of the line, all right, top of the line. Shiny, too. Nice wax job on that baby, girl lemme tell you what! Even had one of those vanity tags. Looked like it was gold-plate detailed, instead of your regular chrome metal.”

  “White Mercedes utility, gold detail, and a vanity tag. Well, that’ll blend.” She made a face.

  The Island was more rusty-pickup style. Talk of a vehicle with gold plate–colored accessories and curb feelers would spread like wildfire.

  “So, Larry…you didn’t happen to see what was on the plate, did you? You know, the tag number?”

  “Mercedes owner had to be from Atlanta, don’t you think? Whole city’s headed straight to hell, full of nothing but a bunch of rude Yankees relocating from jobs up north.”

  “Of course they’re from Atlanta. Larry—didja get the tag?”

  “Couldn’t help it.” His face beamed with pride. “You know how I can’t help but remember numbers and stuff. It was FME.”

  “FME? You sure?”

  “Positive. I couldn’t help but think of that blinking sign up around Savannah off the interstate that says ‘Food, Movies, Enjoy!’ Remember the giant FME that blinked for about a mile away?”

  “I sure do, Larry. I always loved that sign. It was there since I was a little girl. Thanks.” She was already at the door, waving backward at Larry over her right shoulder.