Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(28)

Carol thought she heard her kids waking up and ran upstairs to check on them. They were fine. When she came down again, Tim was back to punching Nancy in the stomach. Carol stood by the foot of the bed. When he moved back, Carol stared at Nancy in horror.

Nancy’s skin was exposed. Her blouse was open. There was extensive bluish and yellowish bruising around her midsection, like she’d just spent an hour with Muhammad Ali pounding her gut.

Tim told Carol to get a wet towel. She wasn’t sure why she was doing this, but she wouldn’t dare ask Tim—not now, not when he was so mad. She figured to herself that maybe Nancy’s face was so bloody, she was to wipe it off.

Carol wrung it out and handed it to Tim. He went over to the laundry machine and poured bleach on it. He used the bleach-soaked cloth to wipe off Nancy’s blood that had spattered the wall. Then he wiped his hands with the towel. When she heard another noise from upstairs, Carol left to check on the kids again. She came back down a few minutes later. That’s when she saw Tim holding the towel over Nancy’s face.

Tim was smothering her.

Gasping for air, Nancy squirmed and kicked; then, suddenly, she wasn’t fighting any longer. She just lay there, limp. Hesitantly, Carol came closer and sat on the bed next to her friend. Tim got up and walked away, leaving the towel over her face.

Carol thought she could hear her breathing. Maybe she was still alive. Carol pulled the towel down and freed up her air and sinus passages. Carol heard noise again from upstairs. Her kids. She looked at her watch. It was six o’clock. She had to get them up at seven in time for school.

Leaving Nancy the way she was, they left the basement and went upstairs together. Behind them, they closed the basement door and put a knife in the jamb so the kids couldn’t get in; the door didn’t have a regular lock.





Nine

Tim wondered what it would be like to have sex with a dead body. Carol thought that was repugnant and told him so. Instead, Tim seemed to be satiated when they rutted like pigs on the sofa.

Afterward, Carol looked at her watch. It was 6:00 A.M., November 13.

Tim gazed through the blinds. He was convinced that the phone call Nancy made had not been to the guy who dropped her off but to the cops, who were now staking the house out waiting for them. Carol figured his paranoia came from the stuff he kept smoking.

She tried to reason with him. It was the crack talking, not him. Tim’s response?

He was across the room in a flash and pulled Carol to the door, opened it and, still holding her arm, pulled her down the long driveway to see if there was a police car at the curb.

“Tim, there’s nothing,” Carol urged.

Tim kept looking, at the curb, across the street at the church, at the parking lot next door. There was nothing, save another dreary November morning beginning with a gray overcast sky and a sharp chill in the air.

Before they got to the curb, Tim ordered, “Go back in the house.”

Carol went back in and started to walk toward the bedroom. She planned on calling 911 because Nancy was still breathing when they left her, and Carol was concerned. She figured that if she dialed 911 but said nothing into the receiver, instead leaving it off the hook, they would trace the call. But then Tim came in from outside, so she couldn’t reach the bedroom; he’d be suspicious if she went in alone. Instead, she went to the bathroom.

When she came out, he went into their bedroom and was gazing intently out the window. He still thought the cops were out there. Then he turned and quickly ran into the kids’ rooms. Anxious, lest he do something insane, Carol followed him.

Tim did the same thing; he looked out L’il Man’s window, then Jesseca’s, surprised there were no cops. Then it was into the bathroom and looking out the bathroom window and closing the shower curtain so no one from outside could look in. He went back out to the kitchen and he looked out the dining room window and the kitchen window again. Finally he went downstairs to the basement.

He was down there only a few seconds, but he heard the floorboards above him creaking, so he shot up the stairs to find Carol walking toward the bedroom. His eyes tracked her as she got the kids up and quickly dressed them for school.

“Mama, I don’t want to go to school. I’m sick,” complained her daughter.

No way would Carol let her child stay home, not with Nancy trussed up like a turkey in the basement, and Lord knew if she was still breathing.

Carol insisted: her daughter had to go to school. Jesseca wasn’t very happy, but she acquiesced. She knew her mom always acted in her best interests.

Carol saw both of them off and onto the bus. She went back inside.

“We have to get rid of her,” Tim said. “We have to get rid of Nancy.”

Carol remembered Nancy’s bloody face and shivered at the thought. No matter how she’d tried to help her, someplace, deep down, she knew now that she was dead.

“And then there’s the blood on the mattress, so we have to get rid of the mattress, too,” Tim added.

Carol was afraid she would show her fear, that her voice would crack. She didn’t want to show him she was scared. The whole time they had been talking, he had been walking around the house, looking out the windows, and somehow he had gotten the gun in his hand. She was afraid anything would set him off, anything, especially her fear of discovery.

“How can we just get rid of her?” she said out loud.