they’ve got nothing on me.”
I said, “Nicole Worley, you’re under arrest on suspicion of murder.”
I stepped behind Janet, told her to put her hands behind her back. I cuffed and arrested her too, read both of them their rights.
I said, “Mrs. Worley, we’ve got plenty of murder charges to go around. So no fighting for credit, okay?”
Nicole was laughing, but I didn’t find her amusing. She was one of the scariest people I’d met in my life.
Conklin took charge of Janet, and I gave Nicole a shove toward the door.
I was desperate to get her alone in the box.
Chapter 111
Claire was in the basement of number 2, standing with Clapper in front of the chest-type freezer. They’d been staring at it for at least a full minute. She said, “What are you waiting for, Charlie? Christmas?”
“It was Christmas for someone. See how nicely the presents are wrapped?”
When the condensation blew off, Claire could clearly see that the freezer was packed to the brim with body parts. There was no order, no organization. Parts had been loaded into the chest helter-skelter, all loosely wrapped in plastic.
Clapper said, “I’m going to be the first to state the obvious. This killer had no respect for the dead.”
“What brass to leave all of this right here in an unlocked chest. I just hope we’ve got proof positive of whodunit in here. I’m praying.”
“We’re going over this freezer for prints as soon as you’re done here. There will be prints. I can almost see them with my naked eyes. We’ll swab for DNA too.
“And listen, Claire,” Clapper added, “you’re not going to like this, but we need to know how many bodies we’ve got here. So can you go through it here? Count the pieces?”
It was better to load the freezer onto a flatbed truck and then take it and its contents back to the lab. But if counting pieces was a priority, it had to be done.
Claire turned to her assistant and said, “Bunny. We’re going to do a five hundred series.”
“Like this was a plane crash or something like that,” Bunny said.
“Right. Disaster numbering system. You know how it goes?”
“Sequential numbers from five hundred up.”
“Right. So that all of these individual parts are logged in one file.”
Bunny laid a sheet down on the floor. It was blindingly bright in the gloom. Clapper placed a wrapped body part on the sheet, and Claire took photos.
Bunny unwrapped the plastic, tagged the arm with the number 501, and Claire put it back on the sheet; she took a couple of pictures before she wrapped the sheet around the limb. A CSI zipped the arm into a body bag.
A new sheet went down and Clapper lifted another part out of the freezer, and once again they tagged and bagged. There were dozens of parts, and Claire saw that processing this chop shop would take many long hours; first here, then a repeat of every step in the lab.
Clapper lowered a body part to the sheet. It was half a chest, sawed lengthwise between the breasts.
Bunny moaned. “I’m going to pass out,” she said. “Excuse me.”
“No, no, don’t — ”
But the girl scrambled to her feet, found a corner of the basement, and heaved.
And then she started to cry.
Claire went over and put her arm around her assistant. “It’s okay, Bunny.”
“No, it’s not. I contaminated the crime scene.”
“Everyone does it at one time or another. I threw up on a body once. Go upstairs. Take a break.”
“I’m okay,” Bunny said. “I’m here for the duration.”
“That’s good, because I need you. Go upstairs and wash your face. Then please call our husbands. We’re not going home tonight.”
Chapter 112
Nicole Worley and I were facing off in Interview 1 while Conklin interviewed Janet in the room next door.
Our suspects were in custody and our forensic team was awash in grisly artifacts, but we were still waiting for solid evidence that conclusively tied Janet or Nicole to the human remains.
Nicole hadn’t asked for a lawyer, but psychopathic serial murderers don’t always want lawyers. Some like to talk to the police for days on end, a cat-and-mouse game in which they believe themselves to be the cats.
I wasn’t sure what Nicole was up to, but I was willing to play along. A CSI was dusting surfaces, searching her room for evidence. And for the past couple of hours, Claire had been processing body parts taken from the basement freezer.
Nicole denied any knowledge of murders at the Ellsworth compound other than what she had learned since the police answered her mother’s 911 call.
But she did like to talk about Harry Chandler.
She told me how she’d seen all of Harry’s pictures dozens of times. How people she knew couldn’t believe that she knew him personally. That he had been a friend of her childhood. She knew special things about him, what he liked to eat, funny things he had said.
Nicole Worley was just wild about Harry.
Or you could say she was obsessed with him.
It was time to get to the point.
“We opened the freezer,” I said.
“What? The one in my basement? I haven’t used that freezer in years. I can’t remember the last time.”
“We lifted fingerprints from the inside of the lid,” I lied. “And as we speak, body parts are being cataloged.”
“That’s terrible. Just terrible,” she said with a tone and an expression that showed me that she didn’t care at all.
I said, “I’m going to check on how things are going at the morgue.”
I called Claire and she picked up on the first ring. I said, “Have you got a progress report?”
Then I turned to Nicole and said, “Sit tight. I’ll be back in a while.”
“I’ve got a headache,” she said.
I left Nicole in handcuffs and went down the stairs to the lobby and out the back door, then took a brisk and chilly walk to the Medical Examiner’s Office.
Claire came to the door and I followed her through to the autopsy suite.
Claire had a chunk of meat on the table in front of her. She pulled down her mask, said to me, “See, I’ve got to treat each part like an individual specimen. I’m x-raying each part, looking for anything that will help ID this person. Metal plates or bullets or old fractures.”
“Have you found anything like that?” I asked.
The chunk of meat looked like a haunch that had belonged to a small white person, probably female.
Claire was saying, “I’ve got to use a clean scalpel for each part, do a unique description of each part, weigh each, look for GSR and wounds. I’ve taken fingerprints from a couple of hands, found one that matches our girl Marilyn Varick.”
“Got anything solid that connects body parts to our killer?”
“I pulled blood whenever I could. And I made some muscle-tissue samples for DNA testing…”
“Claire. Claire. Have you got something for me? I’ve got two suspects in custody. Give me something.”
Claire picked up the block of flesh on the table and turned it around. She pointed to a bloody line. I followed her finger as she showed me several other identical lines.
