Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(11)

From previous interviews—cop speak for interrogations—Shanlian knew that 90 percent of what he and the suspect said in the interrogation room wouldn’t even go into his report. It wasn’t that he was hiding anything, far from it. Contrary to TV stereotypes, cops gain statements and confessions from suspects not by violence but by trust. So Shanlian let Carol talk.

She kept going back to her kids and how much she loved them. He lent a sympathetic ear. She relaxed. When Shanlian sensed that she was getting comfortable with him, he asked her a straight question.

“How can I find Tim Collier?”

“You take 1-75 [north] to 1-475, get off on the Carpenter Road exit. Then you cross the railroad tracks and drive on some side streets across from a church. He’s staying someplace over there.”

Right, “over there,” very specific, he thought.

“Okay, what kind of car was he driving?”

“My car. A rose colored ’88 Caddy DeVille.”

“Plate number?”

“BPE, or maybe FMW-10.”

She wasn’t sure, but that was okay. He’d tap into the state’s motor vehicle database and get that information. Once he had it, he could put out a bulletin to law enforcement agencies requesting Collier’s apprehension.

“Mrs. Giles, you mentioned before that your husband had died. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

“Could you tell me what he died from?”

“He had had a stroke about a year ago and he’d been in ill health ever since.”

“Ill health or bad health?”

Both, it seemed. The guy was a diabetic with a heart condition. He weighed almost 500 pounds.

“I think my husband knew he was dying, because he asked me to go shopping. When I returned, he was dead.”

He didn’t want her to be there when death took his body.

“How long were you married?” Shanlian asked solicitously.

“Eleven years. We were together since I was fifteen.”

As the conversation wore on, she got friendlier. From the way she answered questions, she sounded like a people pleaser. Shanlian sensed that someplace down the line, back in her past, Giles had been abused. Psychologically, physically, it did not matter. It made you anxious to please another human being so you wouldn’t be abused further.

“Jessie, that’s my husband, he treated me badly,” she volunteered.

“Really?” said the cop sympathetically.

“Yeah. If one of his customers needed, you know, a favor, I was there for them.”

“You mean a sexual favor?” asked Shanlian with quiet, seemingly naive interest.

“Yes.”

She wasn’t a prostitute, but her husband had prostituted her.

“And what business was he in?” the detective asked, knowing the answer.

“Drugs,” she replied.

It was quite common for drug dealers to offer their girlfriends to regular buyers. The girlfriends agreed. It was a business arrangement. Sex occasionally with clients, in return for being taken care of—cars, money, whatever they wanted.

Carol Giles, Shanlian felt, was the kind of woman who would tell a man what he wanted to hear. She may not have been a prostitute but in that sense, she acted like one.

“How long were you dating Tim Collier?” the detective wondered.

“Several months,” she replied.

“Carol, would you pass a lie detector test if you were asked if Tim Collier had murdered Nancy Billiter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you scared of Collier?”

“Yes, yes,” Carol said, practically jumping to answer that question.

“Why?”

“Timmy told me that he had done seven people, seven murders, while he was involved with a gang in Sacramento, California.”

“What can you tell me about those homicides?”

“I can’t remember. When me and Timmy were in Port Huron recently, he wanted to get a seven-man tattoo to represent the killings.”

“What about sex? Between Nancy and Collier?”

“Nah, I don’t think they were involved together.”

Shanlian remembered the burn marks on Billiter’s body and the bong on the coffee table in Giles’s house.

“Has Tim Collier ever burned you with a bong?”

Carol had been looking down at the table. After the question was asked, she looked up and began to cry.

“Tim used to use acid to do that,” she blurted out. “It’s still in my car at my house. The acid is. And,” she sobbed, “Nancy and Tim, they had been smoking crack in the basement on Wednesday night.”

She looked over at Shanlian.

“Yes?”

“And they were talking about the burglary. See, I didn’t believe Nancy that a burglary had occurred, because I found my daughter’s coin bank in the car I’d loaned to Nancy.”

In Carol’s mind, that meant that it was Nancy who had stolen the VCR and other stuff and she had made up some cock-and-bull story about a burglar.

“What happened after Tim and Nancy smoked crack? What time was that?”

“About eleven-thirty. Then about one-thirty, I went upstairs to check on my children, who were sleeping. When I got back to the basement, Nancy was on the bed, tied up with nylons, and she was screaming.”