Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(29)

“Well, I can take her to Rouge Park or someplace in Detroit. Just leave her in the park or wherever.”

“Well, you can’t do that in daylight.”

“Then we’ll have to wait for tonight,” Tim said.

He mumbled something about making Nancy look like the victim of a drug deal gone bad. Tim pulled the knife out of the door to the basement. Carol followed him downstairs, where he immediately checked to make sure that no one had come through the basement windows.

Carol looked over at the bloody, unmoving heap on the bed. She didn’t dare step closer, for fear she would find out for sure that Nancy was dead. By staying back, there was still a small sliver of hope.

They went back upstairs and Tim said, “Come on, let’s go.”

“Where to?” asked Carol, putting her coat on.

Tim wanted to go to Flint to get a pickup truck. The idea he had was to use the truck to transport the body to a place where they could dump it.

On the way, Tim explained that they were in this together. Carol didn’t reply.

Tim said if they got caught, the cops would use one against the other. They needed to stay strong. But if they got arrested, for whatever reason, “just look in their eyes and don’t act fidgety. Because that’s what they look for. If you use your hands or you move your legs when you talk, they know you’re lying.”

Carol talked with her hands. It made Carol more nervous to sit motionless.

“If you look in their eyes and ya tell them, they’ll believe you,” Tim stated.

Carol didn’t think she could do it; Tim though, seemed able to do it. He could lie to someone by looking him or her right in the eye and be totally convincing. Tim always talked about cops like they used this psychology to get you to confess and to do what they wanted you to do. And then Tim said what he’d been saying since the day that she met him back at the hospital:

“You never leave witnesses to a crime.”

Carol did her best to look him in the eye and not look scared.

When they got to Flint, they drove up and down unfamiliar streets, at least unfamiliar to Carol, but Tim seemed to know where he was going. Tim was looking for a friend’s place. He had a friend who had a garage. After a while, they found the place and they went in to talk to somebody.

“Know where I can get a truck?” Tim asked his friend.

His friend told him to come back in an hour. They got back in the car and went over to Tim’s uncle Sammy’s house.

The man who answered the door was in his early fifties, tall and thin. She didn’t know him, but from what Tim had said about him in the past, it sounded like Sammy was his dad’s brother. The two greeted each other warmly and then Sammy invited them in.

Tim and his uncle smoked crack while Carol watched. She didn’t say a word. Finally, Tim had had enough and said, “Come on, let’s go.”

They went back to his friend’s place to pick up the truck, but the guy had punked out. He couldn’t get them a truck. By then, Carol was starting to get worried about her kids. They’d be getting home, she wouldn’t be there, they’d start looking for her, and they’d open the door to the basement. Whoops! “Hey, Ma, what’s Aunt Nancy doin’ with all that blood over her face, and her dead and everything?”

That was the last thing Carol wanted to happen. But Tim rode around Flint for a while anyway, until Carol told him they had to get back to the house.

“Nancy’s back there,” she reminded him.

They had a body they had to get rid of.

Tim turned the car around and headed for the interstate, got on and began clocking at about 70 mph.

They hadn’t been gone as long as Carol thought; they got home around 1:30 P.M. It was still early. First thing Tim did was state that they had to “get rid of Nancy and the bed.” They went down to the basement.

Nothing had changed. Nancy was still tied up to the bed. Nancy’s face was still bloody. Nancy was still dead. Carol noticed that the dead woman’s hands were an unnatural shade of white.

Tim got a pair of scissors and severed the bonds around her hands and feet. The pantyhose were still tied to the bed but not to her. The hose wouldn’t be able to be used as a clue when the cops eventually found her, Tim figured.

“Come on, help me,” Tim ordered.

Tim wrapped her up in the blanket and then Carol grabbed her by the head and they started to pull her up the stairs. Tim walked up backward first, carrying her legs; Carol followed in the back, holding up her head.

Maybe it was the way Carol was holding the blanket. She wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, the damn thing ripped. Nancy’s head fell out and hit the floor with a loud thud. She didn’t moan. If there had been any doubt before, there was none now.

Nancy Billiter was definitely dead.

Carol felt bad; she’d dropped her dead friend’s head. She picked her up again. Tim was pulling her, and Carol was barely able to keep Nancy’s head above the ground. But they got her up the steps and then, when they got up the basement steps, they walked a little bit into the kitchen, then down the breezeway steps. It was only three steps. Tim walked too fast down them and Carol dropped the blanket and Nancy’s head hit the ground again.

Tim finished the job himself, pulling the corpse into the garage. Carol’s car was parked backward in the garage. He took her around the middle and set her down.