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“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.
