52
New York City
HAILEY HADN’T SMELLED THE INSIDE OF A JAIL IN A LONG TIME.
But the moment she was pushed through iron doors into the crowded holding cell and took a deep breath, it all came back. Nothing so much as the sense of smell speaks to the human memory, instantly dredging up the good, the bad, the painful and long-buried.
Days-old human perspiration mixed with heavy perfumes the hookers had worn since the night before. Somebody, somewhere, had puked. And the stench of urine on a heroin junkie managed to pierce through it all, hanging heavy in the still air.
Hailey could feel the eyes of the other women on her from the opposite end of the cell where they were all gathered. A card game was going in one corner, and little knots of women congregated to mull over their charges and the hard luck that landed them here.
Ignoring them, she made her way over to one of the only vacant seats, a wooden bench bolted to the floor.
As she lowered herself onto it, she found herself sitting right next to the source of the sickening smell…a heroin junkie sleeping on the bench in urine-soaked clothes. Her deathly white complexion highlighted angry red needle marks along her inner elbow and wrists. Hailey could see the familiar puncture marks on the woman’s left hand, between the knuckles and fingers. She looked like a wizened, shrunken version of what she must have been before she took heroin as a lover.
The others had edged away from the smell toward the other end of the room. Hailey took a look around. It was a large square room with no windows and plain walls devoid of hardware that could be forced off and used as a weapon.
“My babies…what about my babies?” a woman in her twenties sobbed into a handkerchief. Listening to the others trying to comfort her, Hailey calculated the woman’s misdemeanor prostitution bust would mean a probation revocation and a six-month good-bye to her two infant children on the outside.
“I can’t stay in here that long,” the woman cried.
She wasn’t the only one crying. Each one faced charges ranging from prostitution to distribution of meth, to a knifing on Third Avenue outside a deli, driving under the influence, and grand larceny. For the most part, they were either drugged-up, drunk, or strung-out on the roller-coaster ride of a first-time arrest and the shock of literally being thrown in the can.
And the “can” stunk.
“What you in for?” one of them would occasionally sidle up to ask Hailey.
“Bad check.” She lied, of course.
She wasn’t about to tell them the truth, much less reveal her identity as a lawyer, a criminal prosecutor in another life. Now was not a good time to be besieged for free legal advice.
She had to think.
All she knew was that she’d been linked to two murders by the fact that Melissa and Hayden were both her clients, her name and home and cell numbers were found on their bodies, both had sessions scheduled with her the night of their murders. The police weren’t that stupid. They had to have more to arrest her. But what?
And they’d both been strangled and stabbed-apparently like the string of dead women she’d represented in Atlanta.
Hailey looked down at her own hands, clutched together in her lap.
She spread them and imagined them circled around the throats of dark, fragile Melissa and Hayden-young, creative, so alive.
Her throat tightened and her face flushed hot.
Her first murder prosecution as a rookie ADA had been an asphyxiation…manual strangulation coupled with the killer forcing a plastic laundry bag over the head of his victim until she died.
Hailey still remembered walking onto the crime scene. The clear plastic laundry bag was still over the woman’s head, parts of it lodged deeply up into her nostrils as she had sucked it in, struggling for the last bit of air left in the bag.
Hailey never knew the woman in life, but the memory of her face contorted in death with a common laundry bag inhaled into her nose had never really left the back of Hailey’s mind.
It came back to her now, but she couldn’t stop substituting the faces of Melissa and Hayden.
Kolker really believes I did it, that I murdered my own patients, that I stabbed them in the back, that I posed the strangulations, that I have the heart to watch them lying there, the life draining out of them…
She knew she had a right to a single phone call…but who was there to call? Her family was away at Cumberland. Fincher was halfway around the world in Iraq. The realization that she was alone in the world was painful.
A standard, battery-operated, institutional metal-rimmed clock hung high on a wall in the holding pen.
Slumped beside the sleeping junkie, Hailey literally watched the minutes pass, her eyes following each forward jerk of the long red second hand, her ears hearing the loud tick that came with every movement.
It was becoming unbearably hot in the cell as more women crowded in, one by one.
Although the holding cell was packed, Hailey was alone and weary. Her face was drawn, her lips were dry, and her hair was plastered to her head, damp with perspiration. The sweat between her breasts soaked through her blouse and a dark pattern appeared and spread, seeming to blossom, slowly across her chest. As she slumped against the wall, her head fell loosely down toward her right shoulder. Numbness took over. She slept.
The stench in the holding pen seeped through her nostrils and into her dreams.
In the dream, she was back in an Atlanta jail with Fincher, looking through the first set of mug-shot books. They had spent over two weeks, working into the night, to comb through thousands of photos and, ultimately, cull a newly created photo album to present to strippers and prostitutes across the city for possible leads.
The police department’s profiler had suggested that the serial killer stalking the city was a white man in his late twenties to early thirties, muscular, middle-to-high income bracket, and extremely meticulous, but with artistic tendencies, possibly an only child.
“Fincher, it’s so damn hot in here and the smell is giving me a headache.” She rubbed her temples and pushed her chair back from the table. “I’m worried.”
“About what?” He didn’t look up at her but sat staring at the pages of perp photos on the table in front of him. “I mean, other than a stalker who’s strangling one girl after the next and City Hall doesn’t give a damn…at least, as long as it’s not some socialite or a rich little cheerleader gone missing.”
“You’re preaching to the choir. What’s bothering me is that we’re losing time. The more we chase down some profile APD cooked up, the more likely he’ll strike again before we can get a line on him.”
Moments passed before he broke the silence.
“I know what you want, little girl. Forget it. They’re not giving you anybody else on this case. No way will they take personnel off the burglary ring in Buckhead. The rich people are worried about their stereos. So it’s just you and me…as usual. Unless the mayor’s office gets worried over this one, no more funding, no more bodies to help patrol the strip, nobody canvassing the area, nothing. Nada. Nobody. Don’t even ask. They’ll just say no, and you’ll get your feelings hurt. Okay?”
She pushed another album toward him across the table. “Thanks. That helped. Just keep looking.”
They resumed scanning one shot after the next.
Another hour passed before static crackled on the police-band radio Fincher wore at his hip.
“Hold on,” he said into it, and turned to her. “Hailey, I’m stepping out to get better reception.”
“Okay, but don’t leave me in here for long. That door locks on the outside, remember? And no cigarette break, damn it. If I have to keep working, so do you. This ain’t no tea party, old man.”
“Keep that talk up and I will take a smoke. How did you say I’m supposed to lock you in here?”