Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(36)

He carried two cups of coffee and a manila folder. Without saying a word, he placed one of the coffees in front of her.

“Thanks,” said Carol warily.

He sat down next to her, crowding her a bit. He took a couple of sips of his coffee. While he did so, he kept tapping the manila folder with his fingers.

“Smoke?”

He offered her a cigarette from a pack in his pocket. She declined. Messina got up and reversed his chair, turning it around so he was now straddling it. He still calmly sipped his coffee.

For a full minute, he didn’t say a word. Just looked at her.

“Carol, things are just not adding up,” he finally said, putting his coffee cup down. “The motive thing is not working out in my head. Something’s just not kosher there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t believe you and Tim would kill Nancy for stealing a lousy bag full of drugs and faking a burglary.”

She met his steady gaze just as Tim had advised her. But instead of backing down, he bore in.

“It’s not adding up,” Messina repeated.

He opened the manila folder and held up a typed sheet of paper.

“That’s a copy of the statement Tim gave to us when he was arrested. Read it,” Messina suggested, but he made it sound more like an order.

He put it down on the table and Carol picked it up to read. It was the first she had seen of it. Her face sagged as she read it. Afterward, she looked up, clearly shaken, and for good reason.

Tim said that everything was Carol’s idea. Carol was the driving force behind Nancy’s murder. If the cops believed him, she was facing hard time.

“I want you to look at Tim’s statement again,” Messina instructed her. “Look carefully at Tim’s sworn statement and circle every part of it that isn’t true. Then we’ll talk about the inconsistencies between his version and yours.”

“Okay,” she said, and began to circle all the discrepancies, which, she knew, were many. Messina noticed her hand was shaking. Before she was halfway down, Messina interrupted her.

“Carol?”

She looked up.

“Do you think we can prove it, after someone has been buried, that they’ve been murdered?”

For a split second, nothing happened. Then, at once, her head slumped down, her shoulders dropped. Tears welled up in her eyes. She buried her face in her hands.

“If we gave you a polygraph right here and now, would you pass it?”

She didn’t answer for a moment and then said quietly, “I can’t believe I killed Jessie.”

Messina didn’t show any emotion, but inside, he had a broad smile.

“You have to get it out in the open, Carol, before it consumes you,” he said, like a father confessor. “No more hiding anything or keeping anything back. If you don’t tell a hundred percent, it’s like not telling the truth at all.”

Messina sensed that despite her deprivations, she still had a conscience. But for a long time, she said nothing. Had he been wrong?

“I’ll give you a statement,” she said finally.

They took a break and in the interim moved into a large conference room that was lined with law books. On a rectangular oak conference table, around which the brass regularly met, he set up the tape-recording equipment. When they were ready, he depressed the machine’s button to record.

First thing he did was to advise her, once again, of her rights. The last thing he wanted was a conviction overturned on appeal because she claimed she never got her rights. Even though she had been read them three times previously, four with her arrest, it was standard procedure to read them to her every time she was questioned.

After Carol admitted that she understood her rights, she also admitted that Tim was the driving force behind Jessie’s murder.

Tim kept cajoling her, urging her on, insisting she kill her husband and end her misery. Finally, Tim supplied her with heroin. He told her to mix it in with her husband’s insulin and inject it.

She had and it had worked. Jessie died. Because of his past medical history, the coroner ruled it natural causes.

“Did you leave anything out, Carol?” Messina asked.

“No, this time I told you everything,” she answered.

“What can you do to assure us that you told me everything this time?”

“I don’t know what I can do, but I can’t get out of one without taking the blame for both of them because they coincided with each other.”

“Would you pass a polygraph on the story you told me today?”

“On this story, I would, yeah.”

“Any doubt in your mind, Carol?”

“No, no doubt at all.”

“Was what you told me tonight [about] Tim’s participation in the death of Jessie, was that true?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“No.”

“Did I promise you anything, Carol?”

“No.”

Until that moment of her true confession, Carol and Tim had done something to which every criminal aspires.

They had committed the perfect crime.

They had gotten away with murder.





Eleven

Tim Collier was so anxious to implicate Carol Giles that before Messina could even get to him, Collier told Helton the following: