Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(30)
“Help me put her in.”
Carol came over. Tim went around to the driver’s side of the door and popped open the trunk. Carol helped lift her, this time taking the feet. She was very heavy. Carol’s arms and shoulders burned with the effort. She started to feel weak. Tim saw her struggling; he came over before she dropped her, and grabbed the blanket, and sat her up in the trunk.
She was too big. He tried to bend her, but she wouldn’t go; rigor mortis had made her stiff as a board. He laid her down toward the left side and managed with great effort to get her in sideways. The blanket at the top parted.
Carol saw Nancy’s face, a blue-white death mask laced with bright red blood, which was stuck in her hair like some thick syrup. She wanted to look away, but something just made her continue to stare.
Tim closed the trunk on her and went around to drive when Carol spied Nancy’s shoe. It had fallen to the ground when Tim pushed her in. She picked it up and gave it to Tim, who nonchalantly popped the trunk again and tossed it in.
It was 1:30 in the afternoon. Carol knew the kids would be home at 3:20 P.M. That gave them a little under two hours to get rid of her and get back. But they also had to get rid of the mattress and they didn’t have a truck.
They thought about that—the mattress was too big to fit in the car. The mattress with all of Nancy’s blood on it. What could they do with it? Tim decided to bleach it and hide it in the garage.
He went back to the basement. Carol gave him a few minutes, then followed. When she got there, Tim had already treated the mattress with the bleach. She didn’t smell anything, but she assumed that he had done it, since it was his idea.
They carried the mattress together up the stairs and out into the garage. Tim climbed on her car and up into the garage’s attic, not really an attic but the four-by-fours and two-by-fours that laced through the top of the garage right below the ceiling.
He pushed the mattress up into the latticework. When he was satisfied it was lying there okay, he stepped back down on the car’s roof and down to the garage floor.
They went back downstairs again and got the two small box springs the mattress had lain on. They brought those up and put them up in the rafters in a different section of the garage. Everything was secreted in such a way that when the garage doors were opened, you wouldn’t see the mattresses and springs, at least not immediately.
“You can lie about the blood on the mattress,” Tim said, sounding out of breath, “but if the police, ya know, come over there, they’ll test it and see it’s Nancy’s blood. I have to find a truck so I can get rid of them, but until then, we’ll just leave it here.”
Back in the basement, Carol swept the area where the bed had been. Tim cut the pantyhose off the frame and put it in a garbage bag. Then he took the bed frame apart. When he was finished, he put the frame away in a corner.
“Change your clothes,” Tim ordered.
She put the old clothes in the garbage bag and put the garbage bag in the kitchen next to the garbage can. With their work done, they decided to wait for dark before disposing of the body.
Soon the kids came home from school. They were hungry, so Carol fixed them each a sandwich. Then she sat down to do homework with them, and afterward, they watched a little TV.
Tim, meanwhile, was going from room to room. When he was out of sight, he’d take a hit of crack, pacing from room to room, looking out the window; he was still worrying the cops were there. Gradually the day wore down; the light faded; until finally, it was dark.
Carol fell asleep.
November 13, 1997
It was 8:30 P.M. Tim woke her. She had been sleeping for hours. During that time, he had gone back to Flint to scout out a dumping location and had come back.
Carol got up and ate part of a sandwich. Then she helped the kids get ready for bed. Jesseca had a headache, so she gave her some Tylenol to help her sleep. Her son didn’t want to go to sleep because he’d had a nap earlier. It took a while to put him down. By the time they were both tucked in and sleeping, it was a little after nine.
The stress was killing her. Carol took another nap and Tim woke her at midnight. Time to finish it.
With both kids sleeping soundly, but without a baby-sitter in case they awakened, Carol and Tim got into the gold Caddy and drove out of the driveway of the home, past the police station, on the way to the interstate.
As snow fell, the wipers whisked back and forth. Behind the wheel, Carol peered out into the darkness. Tim thought she was driving too slowly and insisted on driving. Carol pulled off into a snowbank, where they switched seats. Tim took over. He looked at the illuminated dashboard. The fuel tank arrow was on EMPTY.
“We need gas,” he said.
They really shouldn’t have stopped. After all, they had a body in the trunk! But if they didn’t, they’d get stuck someplace between West Bloomfield and Pontiac. Sure, it was cold, but that didn’t mean the body wouldn’t start to stink. And that’s all they needed; a suspicious tow truck operator reporting a strange odor in their car to the cops.
Tim found a station that was open and quickly filled the tank. He also filled a big red five-gallon gas can that he had happened to bring along. It was the kind of can you could buy in any auto supply store.
They got on Interstate 70 and headed north into the driving snow. An hour later, they got off at the Flint exit. They had to stop by some railroad tracks to let a train pass. Tim wouldn’t wait; he got out of line instead of waiting. After they turned around, two white guys in the truck behind them rolled down their windows and shouted out an epithet. Tim reached for the gun in his waistband.