Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(57)

“No, no, my bedroom door was dosed and I wasn’t that loud. She doesn’t know; she doesn’t know. I mean, she didn’t say anything.”

Of course she didn’t, Tim reasoned. Who would? She knew and she was keeping her mouth shut.

Carol didn’t want to continue arguing about it. Maybe if they stopped fighting, Tim’s suspicions would just go away. But they didn’t. Nancy heard them talking about killing Jessie. Tim’s mom surely wouldn’t tell the police, but what about Nancy? How did they know she wouldn’t rat?

“So it’s okay that your mom knows and she’s not gonna tell the police, and Nancy knows and she’s not gonna tell the police?”

Tim could vouch for his mom. He couldn’t vouch for Nancy.

“We can’t leave any witnesses,” Tim rationalized. “We have to get rid of Nancy.”

Shortly afterward, they visited her father and that’s when Carol began talking about killing him because he’d molested her. But did she really want to kill him, or was she just fantasizing?

Tim didn’t just talk, or fantasize. He had killed seven people, or so he said. Tim took murder seriously. If he had his way, they’d kill her father and Nancy, making their total kills together three.

Could they really get away with three murders?

They went to Sacramento to vacation. While they were there, the house was burglarized. Nancy said it was Stephanie Johnson; neither one believed she was telling the truth.

Tim was figuring that he should have killed Nancy when he got home from California. But he hesitated—because if he had killed Nancy, without Carol Giles’s permission, he would have had to kill her, too. And because he loved her so much, he decided not to do it. He spared both of them. But that was then, and this was now. With the burglary, and their suspicions about Nancy, they needed to get home fast.

The fastest way to get back, of course, was by plane. On short notice, however, the plane fares were outrageous. So were the trains. Their only recourse was the buses. Those fares, at least, were reasonable.

They left Carol Giles’s truck with the balky brakes in Sacramento and took the transcontinental bus out of San Francisco. Coming out of the city, they passed through the Feather River Valley, going east. It has some of the most beautiful wooded country Carol had ever seen. It was soft and tranquil, evergreens reaching as high as the sky, broad vistas of the Feather River flowing through a valley, and glimpses of fishermen casting their lines in for trout. It was a tranquil picture, unlike her mind that was raging.

Their bus hurled through the night. They dozed and then it stopped again in another anonymous bus station. The conversation changed over to talk of killing Carol Giles’s dad.

“I have the needles at home,” she reminded Tim, “the insulin needles.”

“We can use the needles and inject acid into his system,” said Tim. Carol thought that was “gross.”

The next night, they stopped someplace in Missouri. Around them, people ate sandwiches and drank their coffee. It was a placid, ordinary scene. Carol and Tim sat off to the side in shadows.

“Acid will just eat the organs up,” Tim began.

He’d been thinking about it a lot. And then Carol realized he wasn’t talking about her father; he was talking about Nancy! He wanted her to suffer.

“Or maybe I could just shoot her,” Tim mused.

Carol jumped at this opportunity to put Nancy out of her future misery. She didn’t believe any of it anyway.

“Yeah, we can just shoot her quick, quick and over with it.”

“No, that would be too easy,” Tim replied.

That’s when Tim thought of taking her into the basement. All the way home, Tim didn’t say another word about it. Carol hoped he’d just forgotten about it.

After three days and nights on buses, they finally got home. When they got in and talked to Nancy, sure enough, Tim didn’t make a big deal about the break-in. But upstairs, in private, it was different.

More than ever, Tim was convinced Nancy knew about Jessie’s murder. They didn’t know whether she’d told anyone about what she overheard, so they needed to get rid of her before things got worse.

Besides, their failure to let him pursue his sexual threesome fantasy still rankled. Tim still thought they were lovers on the sly and nothing Carol could say or do would disabuse him of that notion. Tim reasoned that if the two women were lovers, and Carol moved with him to the Coast, then Nancy, under the spell of jealousy, would turn them in to the police.

Worse, she’d turn him in in order to get Carol. She’d tell the cops that he’d done it, leaving Carol all to herself. It was a lesbian fantasy cooked up by a homophobic man.

Tim was fixated on murdering Nancy. Carol, though, figured she could change his mind. She had to! She liked Nancy. She was her best friend. She didn’t want to see anything happen to her best friend. It was one thing killing Jessie. There was ample reason and she stood to gain from it. But Nancy …

After they had returned home, Tim and Carol left to see if they could find their stolen jewelry in local pawnshops. They had had to pay the taxi driver $20 to take them home from the bus station. That left them with $20 in their pockets. Until she could make some drug deals, Carol planned to pawn her wedding ring while they were out looking. This way they could have some money. Nancy hadn’t even bothered to buy any food for the refrigerator.