Clapper gave the door a shove and it slid open, revealing the entrance to another basement room, this one running southwest to northeast, parallel to Ellsworth Place.
There was free access between the basement of the main house and the one in 2 Ellsworth Place.
A person could move from one to the other without being seen.
Chapter 108
I HIT THE light switch in the connecting basement room and took in the surroundings as CSIs shot pictures.
The basement under number 2 was about forty feet across, thirty feet deep, with a dirt floor and a brick ceiling. To my immediate left was a large, sunken cistern about ten feet wide, no doubt used by previous owners of this house to collect rainwater through downspouts from the roof.
To my right was the furnace and the pump, and on the far side of the room, against the eastern wall, were modern appliances: a freezer, a washer, and a clothes dryer. Shelving banked the walls and held a typical assortment of basement junk, paint cans, and tools.
Charlie Clapper examined the cistern and after a moment said, “There’s a ladder going down about seven feet and there’s a drain in the bottom of this thing. Turn off the lights, if you would, Lindsay.”
I flipped the switch and Clapper sprayed the inside of the cistern with luminol, then turned on his ALS wand.
He whistled through his teeth and said, “You should see this.”
When Charlie said you should see something, it usually meant You should see something awful.
The interior of the cistern was bright with a phosphorescent glow, the effect of black light on blood. A great amount of blood had been spilled in that well, probably washed down with the hose hanging over the lip of the cistern. But the evidence of a bloodbath remained high on the walls and ringed the bottom drain.
Images came to me, the faces of the seven women who might have been murdered and dismembered in this vat.
I turned to Clapper, but he had started working the walls, spraying luminol as his assistant followed him with the ALS wand. There was so much blood evidence, spatter and splash and handprints on everything.
Clapper turned the lights back on and as I looked around, I saw something on one of the shelves that dropped another piece of the puzzle into place.
I crossed the floor and took a good close look at a cordless ripsaw resting next to a carton of old medicine bottles. I called to the CSI with a camera and asked him to take shots of the saw.
Claire had told me that the victims had been decapitated with a ripsaw, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to think the saw on the shelf had been used in those procedures. No black light was needed. I could see darkened blood on the blade and reddish smears on the handle.
Clapper rummaged in the box of medicine bottles.
“Lindsay, here’s something you should see.”
Another something I should see. I felt the floor roll. Clapper said, “You okay?”
I was okay. But my baby onboard was having some trouble with this crime scene.
“What have you got?”
He called over the tech to shoot pictures of the contents of the box, then pulled out two items that were photographed as well.
The first item was a stun gun.
The second was a sixteen-ounce brown bottle labeled SODIUM PENTOBARBITAL.
“This is a barbiturate,” he said. “Vets use it to euthanize large animals.”
I grabbed Clapper’s arm to steady myself.
The vivacious and compassionate Nicole Worley worked with wildlife rescue. She could have swiped a bottle of this stuff if she wanted to. And I was pretty sure she’d know how to put animals down.
Chapter 109
I CALLED CONKLIN and filled him in as I raced up the stairs to the main floor of the house. I found my partner sitting with Janet Worley at the round table in the kitchen, empty teacups and a plate of crumbs in front of them. Janet’s face was pale and pinched.
Nigel Worley was missing.
“Nigel took a swing at me. Any other day, I would have clocked him,” Conklin said.
“He’s under arrest?”
“For his own good.”
I said to Janet, “Where’s Nicole?”
“You don’t have the right —”
“I don’t need your permission, Mrs. Worley. Where is she?”
Conklin and I followed Janet up the main stairs of the house, boards creaking under our feet. I was thinking about Nicole Worley, the self-possessed young woman who worked for the good of animals and lectured to tourists about the history of the Ellsworth compound.
When we reached the sixth floor, Janet opened the first door on the left, the door closest to the back of the house.
The room smelled of floral sachet, an old-lady smell. I flipped on the light switches, expecting to see Nicole in the bed or in a chair. But the room was empty, and it looked like it had been empty for years. The bed was crisply made. There were no personal items on the dresser or on the nightstand.
“What’s this room, Janet?”
“Follow me. It’s this way,” she said, throwing a lightning bolt of a stare in my direction.
She turned and headed toward a small closet door in the corner of the bedroom where the ceiling slanted under the eaves. Janet opened the door, pushed aside clothing on a rod, then stooped to enter a hidden Alice-in-Wonderland doorway.
The door led to a tunnel that ran under the eaves. I turned on my flashlight and continued behind Janet Worley’s crouched form until the tunnel opened into another hallway, one with a staircase leading down and three doors off the landing.
I knew where we were.
This was the top floor of 2 Ellsworth Place, another concealed access point between the main house and the servants’ quarters around the corner.
Janet pointed to the door and said, “This is Nicole’s room. I doubt that she’s here.”
I pulled my gun as Janet knocked.
“Nicole. Are you here, darling?”
No sound came from within.
I reached around Janet Worley and tried the knob. The door was locked from the inside. I said, “Rich. Give it a try.”
I pulled Janet Worley aside and said, “Stay here in the hallway.”
Then Conklin kicked in the door.
Chapter 110
NICOLE WAS WEARING black up to her chin.
She had wedged herself between her bed and the window, propped her elbows up on the mattress, and was holding a large kitchen knife in front of her with both hands.
She was pointing that knife at us.
Her heart-shaped face no longer looked angelic. Her features were locked in a crazy stare and her hair was damp with sweat. Her green eyes were blank as stagnant pools.
She looked absolutely feral.
Nicole was twenty-six, but her room had gotten stuck in a teen-theme time warp. The walls were painted with vertical stripes in three shades of green. The spread and curtains were the same colors in a polka-dot print.
There were pictures of Harry Chandler all around the room, including a life-size cutout on the wall and a black-and-white headshot on the dresser mirror inscribed To Nicole, XOXO, Harry.
Nicole said in a deep voice, almost a growl, “Don’t come any closer, you bitches. I’m not afraid to use this. And I’m not afraid to jump.”
The room had two exits: the door behind me and the window behind Nicole. From what I could see, Nicole didn’t have a direct view of the house and garden. But the oblique view took in the back of the Ellsworth house, the brick patio, and a wedge of the garden where heads had been buried.
My eyes went back to Nicole, who was still facing us down from behind her mattress. She seemed irrational. And I didn’t like the options she had given us.
My partner stepped forward.
He wasn’t holding a weapon and his left arm was strapped across his chest. If there’d ever been a time for the Conklin charm factor, this was it.
“Nobody wants to hurt you, Nicole. We don’t want any trouble. None
at all.”
“I’m in charge here,” Nicole said. “I make all the decisions.”
“You’re only in charge of what you do,” Conklin said. “So I want you to move very slowly. Put the knife down.”
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 t
hat 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.
“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.
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