She laughed, a hysterical yip.
“So you can do what? Shoot me. I’ll put the knife down when you back out of my room.”
With that, Nicole lunged.
Conklin sidestepped and stood between me and Nicole. I didn’t have a shot. I didn’t have a shot.
Conklin reached across the bed and grabbed Nicole by her thick dark hair; he pulled her across the bed and onto the floor. He stepped on her right hand and yelled, “Drop it!” until the knife was lying on the ground.
He kicked the knife away, and then, Nicole’s hair still wrapped around his hand, he forced the woman to her feet.
Janet was screaming, “Stop! Nicole didn’t do anything. It was me. I killed all those women. It was me. It was me.”
The shrieking was about to take off the top of my head. I cuffed Nicole as her mother pleaded, “You have got this wrong. I’m the one. It’s me.”
Nicole was regaining her equanimity. She said, “Mom, stop the hysterics. They’ve got nothing on you, and 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…”
“C
laire. 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.
“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 actually she was protecting her entire family.
“According to Nicole, that was the only time she involved her mother.”
“Meanwhile, Harry went on trial for Cecily’s murder,” Yuki said.
“Right,” I said, “and with the spotlight on him and her own involvement in this crime Harry didn’t commit, Nicole fixated on Harry.
“Janet and Nigel stayed on as caretakers and lived in the main house ‘so the place wouldn’t go cold,’ as Janet said, and Nicole eventually took up residence in number two.
“By then, she had a degree in biology, a driver’s license, unrequited love for Harry, and recurring fantasies about killing again.”
Cindy told me to hang on a minute, which I did, and then she said, “So, the victims come from many parts of the world. They w
ere all on a house tour, maybe self-guided tours.”
“Exactly. Every now and then a tourist, a Harry Chandler fan, presented Nicole with an opportunity to relive her first murder,” I said. “She knew which ones were unlikely to be reported missing right away, and Nicole told us that she liked petite dark-haired women who reminded her of Cecily.”
Claire said, “What she’d do is take them down to the basement on a pretext of showing them some of Harry’s personal trophies, and they were easy enough to kill. A zap with a stun gun from behind, then a knife across the throat.”
Yuki said, “She got the disposal part down to near perfection. Then, thank God, she got lazy.”
“Lazy, but not crazy,” I said. “Nicole knows right from wrong. You know what she said to me when I took her to jail? ‘Tell my mom to be happy for me. I retired at the top of my game.’”
Chapter 115
The Women’s Murder Club was going for a ride in my Explorer on our way to a long overdue reckoning. I was behind the wheel and Cindy was behind me, leaning over the seat divider, breathing down my neck.
We headed up Seventh at a good clip, crossed Market, passed the Civic Center BART, then turned left on McAllister.
I slowed the car and stopped at the light. There was a pack of unmarked cars parked in front of the Asian Art Museum, across the street from the Abby Hotel. Just as promised.
The Abby Hotel was a peach-colored six-story Victorian building with white trim, a brown awning over the entrance, and a fire escape zigzagging up the front of the building.
It stood in all its shabby elegance across the street from the Asian Art Museum, two blocks from City Hall. The homeless roamed this part of McAllister freely, but it was also the hub of government and legal activity.
Now, at noon, the streets and sidewalks were filled with suited men and women from the courts carrying briefcases or pulling luggage trolleys, their heads bent to their iPhones.
I parked in front of the hotel, and the girls and I got out of my car. I showed my badge to the doorman, a gnarled-looking boozer somewhere between his late fifties and early seventies. It looked to me as though the last time he’d had his uniform cleaned was — never.
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