The Eleventh Victim (12 page)

T
HE THIRD BATCH OF HAIRY MARGARITAS WAS KILLER STRONG. IT
was time for Virginia to throw out the bait before her guests started getting sloppy—or sleepy.

“So what does Greenpeace think of the Commission’s plan to replenish the beaches and dredge up all that sediment off the ocean floor?” she asked.

Nothing like plunging right in.

“It’ll be the end of the sea turtles, you know. But then, Greenpeace isn’t involved with that type of issue, is it? You know,
saving endangered species
.” She hoped the lob would create a defensive stir.

It did.

“Well, ‘Peace’ normally attacks higher profile moves so that we can make an environmental difference
and
a statement worldwide. Two birds, one stone.” Ken spoke up first, emphasizing the abbreviated “Peace” to modestly convey his familiarity with the Peace higher-ups.

“It’s such a shame nobody’s acting on the turtles’ behalf. And after all the attention the spotted owl got.” Virginia clucked her tongue. “But then, the owls got a mention by the vice president, so
they
live. The turtles die. God knows what’s on the floor of the ocean outside those paper mills north of the Island. You
know
that’s exactly where they’ll get the sand to dump on the beaches.”

Warming to her subject, she lit another Salem Light off the last butt. “Greenpeace started with such a wonderful concept. But then it turned into sort of a celebrity house pet, snarfing up only the tastiest treats.” Pleased with her analogy, she saw that Renee, at least, was nodding in agreement.

“I guess the little guys like us get left out in the shuffle sometimes,” Virginia said sadly. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. I mean after all, it is just
one
link in the eco-chain.”

Ken bristled, and Virginia realized that nothing else she could have said would have reached so far under his skin. To suggest that Peace was all hype amounted to pure heresy to the four Peacers hunched around the blender under the spell of the hairy margaritas. They didn’t get asked out much and they didn’t want to argue with their hostess, let alone piss off the wieners again.

Virginia was banking on a watershed of discontent among the guerrillas—dissatisfaction with their distant leaders, who seemed more like Hollywood celebrities than comrades united in common goals.

After a moment, Ken said brazenly, “Well, you know the bigs at Peace don’t have to be in on
every
save we make.”

Virginia just looked at him over the rim of her glass, saying nothing, hoping he’d go the next step.

He did. He couldn’t stop himself.

“We’ve been misled by the
Herald and
the county commission!” he promptly decided. “Odds are they’re probably in league together…these things just don’t happen by coincidence. They’ve conspired…This is a conspiracy…I feel it.”

He was on a roll.

“If Virginia’s right, we’re obligated to take some sort of preemptive strike before it’s too late for the turtles. We can’t stand by and wait for this thing to make its way through all the Peace channels. That could take weeks, maybe even months. The time is
now
, the place is
here
, and the people are
us
.”

He was standing now. His words unleashed a grumbling among the guerrillas.

“It’s true. I’ve thought it for a long time but didn’t want to say anything. Peace has become too big, too sensational to care for the turtles,” Renee said. “They’ve gone Hollywood. They’ve turned into celebrities. When’s the last time they climbed a tree?”

“First the turtles, then what’s next?” Dottie wanted to know.

“We have to seize control!” Suz injected herself. “Not slogans and bumper stickers. I’m talking
action
!” She had margarita salt on her nose.

“Exactly!” Virginia trumpeted, trying not to look smug.

A
S VIRGINIA AND THE GUERRILLAS FEVERISHLY PENCILED PLANS
on a yellow legal pad late into the night, two hundred miles to the north, Eugene waited.

In an oak-paneled office in Atlanta, Georgia, a lifetime away from the ocean lapping against the Island dunes, he waited.

Drinking scotch through the night and never leaving his desk-side phone, his cell phone burning in his hand as a backup, he waited.

The call came from a cell phone deep within the Georgia House.

A bottle sat on the floor by his desk, within arm’s reach of his chair, emptied sometime around three that morning. His office was dark when the phone rang; he still hadn’t pulled open the heavy drapes from the night before.

The “insurance bill” had passed.

Not a single question was raised on the floor, not a peep. No one had even noticed the change in definition of “tree.”

Matt Leonard had been right all along. They didn’t even know what it meant.

Democracy at work. They just voted as they were told, like sheep.

Eugene hung up and walked to his window.

Through the slit between the drapes, he peered into the dark.

The Island coast was his.

J
IM 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 inter
ested 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.