Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(38)

The jury could believe Carol and convict Tim, giving her a reduced sentence because they sympathized with her “plight” as a woman psychologically and physically abused by her husband, then psychologically used by her boyfriend for his own nefarious ends. Or, they could look at Carol as a “black widow,” an awful woman who killed her husband, lied about it, and was really the mastermind behind Nancy’s death.

In that scenario, Carol gets convicted and Tim gets the reduced sentence. In the worst case scenario, the jury believes Tim and sets him free while Carol takes the fall.

Messina saw Carol as someone who, “because of her lousy experiences in life, could shut out everything. Nothing mattered. Tomorrow is tomorrow; today is today. She didn’t have to plan on anything long distance. You do what you have to in order to survive.”

He may have appealed to her conscience to get her to talk, but the detective sergeant didn’t believe Carol had a conscience—at least not in the way most people do. In his opinion, Carol was a master of rationalization. It was like Carol was saying, “Yeah, I killed my husband, but it was something that just had to be done”; that was her attitude. As for Nancy: “Yeah, she was my friend, but what could I do?”

What could she do?

How about not pumping acid into the poor woman’s veins?

In all his years in police work, Messina doubted he had seen a more painful way to die. It was torture, plain and simple. In Carol’s mind, she wasn’t thinking about how much she hurt Nancy. Carol was thinking about the end product.

The end product was Nancy’s death, but what was the goal of the torture? Bad guys tortured for one of two reasons. Either they enjoyed inflicting pain before the victim was killed, or they were trying to elicit important information before the victim succumbed.

Nancy could have been shot, nice and neat, with one through the head. If they’d done it someplace secluded, like the park in Flint, there would have been no mess and no one the wiser. It might even have been chalked up to a problem Nancy had with some drug dealer.

No, they didn’t have to torture her. Messina was convinced that Carol hadn’t told the whole truth. He believed that the reason for the torture was that Tim, and maybe Carol, too, was trying to elicit information from Nancy. But what?

Someplace, in his heart of hearts, Messina wanted to believe that this was a sadistic crime that made sense. To believe otherwise meant Tim Collier was a true monster—and true monsters made even experienced cops shiver.

Monster or not, a criminal’s motives are complex. No one ever knows the whole truth. It’s a goal to aspire to, but it’s just that, a goal. Motive, though, wasn’t necessary for a conviction. Just facts that a jury believed.

Problem was, while Carol Giles’s second statement seemed reliable in terms of means and opportunity, her first was inconsistent. If Collier had a good defense attorney, he would pounce on those inconsistencies to try and show that his client was the victim of an affair gone wrong.

No, they needed a stronger case to guarantee both convictions.

A child’s toy, a piggy bank in the shape of a Coke bottle, had started it all. Carol stated she swung and hit Nancy with it. Where was it? It had not shown up in any of the Dumpster searches; yet it, too, was a murder weapon. Tom Helton kept wondering where it was.

With Carol’s help, they had recovered the syringes used to kill Nancy, and they had the acid she was carrying out of the house and the stuff she put in the Dumpsters, including the bleachladen towel Tim had used to smother Nancy. But what about the piggy bank? Helton went over Carol’s statements again.

In one of them, Carol said that the piggy bank had originally been on a shelf, where she and Tim placed it in advance of the murder. She had then taken it off the shelf and confronted Nancy with it. Soon after, she struck her. Helton reasoned that if they had not gotten rid of it, and there was nothing in any of their statements to indicate that, it should still be someplace at the crime scene.

On top of his desk, on a large pile of papers, was a thick manila folder. The words on it read BILLITER HOMICIDE. Helton opened the folder and pulled out a bunch of photographs. He laid them flat on his desktop. He spread them out so he could see better.

They were crime photographs. He shuffled them, until he found the ones he wanted.

Helton looked down at shots of the basement, where Carol and Tim killed Nancy. There were all kinds of shots of the Ping-Pong table, the walls, the floor the mattress and box springs had lain on before they were moved to the garage’s rafters. There was the bookcase.…

The bookcase!

In one of the bookcase’s lower shelves, Helton spotted a large object, apparently plastic, shaped like a soda bottle with the Coke logo. Helton rifled some papers from underneath his pile and came up with the statement Carol had given to Shanlian in which she said that she struck Nancy with a piggy bank “shaped like a Coke bottle.”

Helton immediately notified Messina and then called Assistant District Attorney McNamara to obtain a search warrant. He took the warrant to the 48th District Court and swore to it before Magistrate B. Smith. With the warrant thus authorized, he and Messina drove down Walnut Lake Road to Carol Giles’s house.

Inside, the place was empty. Carol and Tim were in jail; the kids were with Jessie’s sister. They really would have been surprised if anyone was there.

In the basement, they found the Coke bottle piggy bank on the shelf, exactly as it had been in the photo. To preserve the evidence, Helton pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and picked it up. The base of the bank was cracked and broken, probably from the impact with Nancy’s face.