“See these knife wounds? Could be they’re going to match that knife of Nicole’s. And look at this,” Claire said.
She took a sheet off the top of a metal basin, showed me the section of shoulder in there.
She said, “Consistent with stun-gun burns. I’m guessing that’s how she knocked her victims down.”
“I need pictures,” I said.
Chapter 113
It was two in the morning when I got back upstairs to Homicide. Conklin met me in the squad room. He said, “Harry Chandler is in Brady’s office. He’s waiting for you.”
“Good. I asked him to come down. We can use his help. Where’s Janet?”
“She’s in a holding cell. I’m not getting anything believable out of her. I’ll try her again in the morning.”
I went into Brady’s office, said hello to Harry Chandler, and thanked him for coming in at that hour.
“Happy to do it,” he said. “Have you learned anything about what happened to Cecily?”
“Janet is taking responsibility for the seven women whose heads were buried in the garden, but she can’t give us any details on the murders. Nicole maintains that she’s innocent. So far, nothing about your wife.”
Harry nodded, then said, “Has Janet or Nicole asked for a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Lindsay, I need to know what happened to Cecily. Ten years after her death, even after I was acquitted, the public still believes I killed my wife. And now people are coming up to me in restaurants calling me a murderer. They think I killed those other women too.
“I can’t keep living this way. I’ve got an offer for Janet or Nicole, whichever one of them can name the killer and give you enough evidence to prove it.”
Chandler and I discussed his offer for another minute or two, and then I asked him to stand by.
Conklin and I found Nicole napping in the interview room, cheek down on the old gray metal table. I kicked the chair and it scraped across the floor. She lifted her head and Conklin and I took chairs on either side of her.
“How’s it going, Nicole?” the good cop asked her.
“It’s late. I want to go home now.”
I slapped morgue photos down on the table one after the other, close-up shots of arms, legs, thighs, buttocks with knife wounds, and a right shoulder blemished by burns from a stun gun.
“Do you recognize these body parts, Nicole?”
“Oh. Gross.”
I pointed to the knife cuts in the quartered haunch of human flesh.
“See these? These are stab wounds. And I’m betting they’re going to perfectly match the knife you were waving around a few hours ago. The lab is doing the workup now.”
“Well, you gotta do what you gotta do,” Nicole said.
Her words were flippant, but her expression had changed. She was starting to believe that we had evidence to indict and convict. Her eyes flicked from the photos to me and then back.
“We’re only hours away from nailing you to the wall, Nicole. But if you confess before we lock this case up, you could avoid the death penalty.”
“Really.”
Her voice was resigned. She twisted up her hair, kept her hands on her head, leaned back in the chair, and looked at the ceiling. She was beat. And so were we.
I got up, righted Nicole’s chair so that the force of the legs hitting the floor made her head jounce. I sat back down across from her.
“Look at me, Nicole.”
She shook her head.
“Then listen to me. Harry Chandler wants to know what happened to his wife and to the seven other women you killed. He’ll pay your attorney’s fees if you confess to all of it. There is no limit to how much he’ll spend on an attorney to represent you.”
I got up, opened the door, and Harry Chandler came in. He was big, imposing, and he looked straight at Nicole.
He said, “It’s a good deal and it’s your choice. Top-dog attorney, top-drawer law firm to negotiate your sentence — or you can deny everything and get whatever kind of lawyer you can afford.”
Nicole said, “Do you care about me, Harry?” She lifted her arms up to Chandler, but he backed away and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Nicole wailed, a wordless, keening cry.
Then she wiped her face with the sleeves of her turtleneck and said in an uninflected voice, “I need aspirin. I want to make a statement.”
Chapter 114
It was a new day, a Friday to be exact, and Yuki, Claire, Cindy, and I were all gathered in Jackson Brady’s office.
Cindy plugged in her laptop, checked the power light, got ready for her just deserts.
“Start talking, Lindsay,” she said as she opened a new file. “What happened after Nicole spoke to Harry Chandler?”
“Well, she got a great lawyer, Francine Bloom, beautiful woman. Wore a three-thousand-dollar Armani suit, Ferragamos — ”
“Lindsay! Stop fooling around.”
Claire, Yuki, and I laughed. It was a nervous, almost giddy reaction to enormous relief.
The bloody fingerprints under the freezer lid had been smudged. The stab wounds in the body parts and the stun-gun wounds were inconclusive. And Janet Worley wouldn’t turn on her daughter.
Maybe Nicole would have been convicted anyway, but it wouldn’t have been a sure thing. Nicole’s confession slammed the house-of-heads case closed.
Yuki and Claire knew it all, and now Cindy deserved the whole scoop and nothing but the scoop.
I told Cindy that we weren’t laughing at her; we were just relieved. “Nicole confessed to killing the seven women whose heads were buried at the Ellsworth compound. And she confessed to killing Cecily Chandler too.”
“Oh. My. God. But why?”
“Because Harry Chandler gave her a good deal. And because she believed we had incontrovertible evidence.”
Cindy said, “I meant why did she kill Cecily? ”
“This is Nicole’s story, you understand. She was only sixteen when Janet and Harry got involved. Harry dumped Janet, and Nicole wanted to avenge her mother. Her idea of justice was to strangle Cecily one dark night in the garden. Take that, Harry.”
“And what did she do with the body?”
“Dragged Cecily into the basement and then went to her mother for help.”
“So Janet was part of this?” Cindy asked, fingers doing the cha-cha on her keyboard.
“Janet and Nicole sawed Cecily’s body into pieces, bagged and froze the parts. Then they drove up north to Modoc National Forest.”
“That’s, what? A six-hour drive? They buried her body in the wilderness?”
“Nicole says that they put the wrapped parts in the backseat under a tarp. When they got to a good deserted section of road, they stopped the car every hundred yards and walked into the woods with a package for the animals to eat,” I told my friend. “So Janet was involved in covering up Cecily’s murder. She did it for Nicole, but
