Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(14)

“‘We’re in this together. The police won’t believe I did it. I was never here. We’ll take Nancy somewhere.’ I was sitting on the couch, watching him pace the floor back and forth, back and forth. Before I know it, I had to get the kids up for school. It was 7:05.”

She got the kids up and out for school. Carol went back to her bedroom, where Tim was smoking crack.

“‘Sit down,’ he said.

“I sat next to him on the bed.

“‘I’ll take Nancy for a ride. Everything will be all right,’ he said.

“‘Timmy, I’m scared,’ I said.

“‘Just remember, look them in the eye and say you don’t know anything. If you look them in the eye, they’ll never know.’

“I just sat on the bed while he smoked. Time just went … on by.

“‘Come on,’ he said finally.

“We went downstairs. He untied Nancy and wraped [sic] the blanket around her. I just stood there.

“‘Come and help me,’ he said.

“I couldn’t. I just stared at him. He pulled her by the legs and started towards the stairs. Her head hit the floor and she didn’t scream. I almost cried out. He pulled her up the stairs. He pulled her to the garage. He put her in the trunk of my Sable. Tim acted real nervous. Fidgety. He kept smokin’ crack.

“‘I’ll get rid of all the evidence and the body. They’ll never know.’”

They wound up going north and dumping the body in a park in Flint that he knew.

And that was Carol’s statement.

After he finished reading it, Shanlian knew Carol was full of shit. It was his gut telling him that. He just knew it. But he couldn’t prove it, at least not yet. One essential element had been established, though.

The murder had been committed in West Bloomfield Township, part of Oakland County and not in Flint, part of Genesee County. The county where the murder took place had venue in the investigation and prosecution. That meant the ball was now in West Bloomfield’s and Oakland County’s court, literally and figuratively.

Flint had more than its fair share of homicides; the force was already overworked. In just the brief time he’d been in West Bloomfield, Shanlian had discovered that homicides were rare. The locals were really looking forward to working the case.

At 2:00 A.M., Kevin Shanlian officially turned the case over to Helton and the West Bloomfield Police Department.

“Whatever you need on my end, just let me know,” Shanlian told Helton.

“Will do.”

Driving north on the interstate, Shanlian was weary. He needed sleep. But he was a good detective; his mind kept working. He needed to know who had actually killed Nancy Billiter.

And why. He was convinced it wasn’t because Tim suspected Nancy of faking a burglary. There had to be another reason. There had to be.

Otherwise, human life was just too damn cheap.

Back in West Bloomfield, Carol Giles was thinking nothing of the sort. Actually, she wasn’t thinking at all, at least consciously.

Police officers had checked her into Haven. She found the place to be exactly that. Once she put her head down on the pillow in her rather large room, she slept and slept and slept.





Five

A search warrant was quickly obtained for Carol Giles’s car. At the Giles house, Helton entered the garage area. There was a Caddy there; he found nothing of value inside. Outside, Carol’s Sable was still in the driveway. Helton searched it and made a list of what he found:

1. From the center area between the two front seats, I found a white plastic container that contained battery acid. It was about 1/6th full.

2. Just in front of the container of acid, under some napkins, I found a loaded .32 Caliber Titan. It was unloaded by removing the loaded magazine and also taking a round from the chamber.

3. In the drivers side vassar I found written directions to a road near Flint.

4. Under the drivers seat I found the victims drivers license.

5. In the trunk, I found an empty red gas can.

6. In the trunk I found suspected blood on the floor carpet. The whole floor carpet was removed.

After removing the items from the vehicle, Helton carefully bagged, tagged and secured them. A copy of the search warrant tabulation was made out and left in the vehicle.

Officers Duncan and Renaldo were lounging in their patrol car on Main Street in Flint when they saw the gold-colored Cadillac go by. There was a young black man behind the wheel. Something about him and the car looked familiar to Renaldo, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

About an hour later, the car went by again. This time it was Duncan who noticed it, because his partner was catching a few winks. It looked familiar to him, too.

The guy hadn’t broken any laws. There wasn’t any need, let alone reason, to stop him. Of course, had the two officers remembered the APB they had received earlier in the evening on a gold-colored Cadillac being driven by a young black man named Tim Collier, who was wanted in connection with a murder down in West Bloomfield Township—well, they certainly would have stopped him.

Parked in the driveway of the Giles house, Officer Ralph Sampson felt lonely. Usually he had Rollo, the department’s German shepherd, to keep him company.

Sampson was the department’s canine officer. Usually it was just he and Rollo on a case. But he’d been drafted into service because he happened to be in the office at the time the call came in. Rollo, meanwhile, was back at the kennel, happily sleeping through the night. That sounded good, being in bed at home, instead of staking out a house, waiting for a suspect to come back, who probably …