“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

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.”