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“What’d he say?”
“Just dumb stuff. Dumb stuff boys say trying to sound tough.”
“Like what?”
She hesitated, clearly not comfortable with repeating the words.
“We’ll be interviewing other people who were there, Tulsie,” Annie said. “You might as well tell us.”
The girl swiped a tear from her cheek. “He told Marc if he ever caught him messing around with me again he’d kill him. He didn’t mean it,” she hastened to add. “He would never do that.”
The guy who had beaten the shit out of her on more than one occasion would never be violent. Annie couldn’t stop herself from shaking her head a little.
“Marc just walked away and left.”
“And what did you and Cody do?” Annie asked.
“I went home,” she said simply, though Annie was willing to bet there had been nothing simple about it. When they interviewed other bar patrons who had been there, they were going to say the couple had fought. Cody had probably ordered her to go home, and she had gone, knowing full well he wasn’t done taking his anger out on her.
“And Cody?” Stokes asked. “Did he go home, too?”
“No. Not right away.”
“What time did he get home?”
“Around two, two thirty.”
Ample time for him to have gone after Marc Mercier to settle the demented jealous score in his head.
“Mrs. Parcelle, does your husband own a shotgun?” Stokes asked.
Tulsie pressed her hand across her mouth as if to keep from crying out and squeezed her eyes closed tight. She nodded.
“Do you know where it is?”
“In his truck,” she said, her breath hitching unevenly. She pulledher feet up on the couch, tucking herself into a ball, making herself as small as possible.
“Have you talked to your husband today?” Stokes asked.
She shook her head. “He doesn’t want me to bother him when he’s away.”
“We’ll need his cell number,” Stokes said.
Annie moved from the chair to the couch, to be a little nearer, a silent show of support. “We just need to talk to him,” she said. “He’ll need to fill in that timeline. If he hasn’t done anything, it won’t be a problem.”
Tulsie started to cry in earnest, as if her world was ending right then and there. Annie slipped an arm around her shoulders.
“It’ll be all right,” she said quietly, though that seemed unlikely.
“Tulsie,” she asked, knowing this was the moment to press, but hating doing it, just the same, “when Cody got home that night, did he hurt you?”
Nodding, the girl turned into her, buried her face in Annie’s shoulder, and sobbed her heart out.
—
Dozer Cormier lived in a single-wide trailer in the Country Estates mobile home park halfway between Bayou Breaux and Luck. It was definitely in the country, but there was nothing estate-like about it. The collection of old mobile homes squatted over five acres like so many rusty metal toadstools. The most impressive thing about the place was that it had somehow managed not to be swept away by a tornado or a flood in forty-odd years.
Lights were on in Dozer’s place. Nick pulled in alongside a nice tricked-out white Chevy Silverado pickup truck that was easily worth more than the house it was parked in front of. Good ol’ boy priorities.
