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Izzy pulled in a shaky breath. “I managed to crawl away. He wasn’t paying any attention to me then. Tulsie was screaming and crying…I finally got my feet under me, and I grabbed that shotgun. I managed to get pretty close to him before he turned around. I said something to him. I don’t remember exactly what. And he turned around with that fucking smirk on his face…And for just a split second, he knew I was gonna do it, and it was his turn to be afraid. And I thought, now you know, you son of a bitch. Now you know what it’s like to fear for your life. I could see it in his eyes. I could see it on his face. And then I pulled the trigger, and he didn’t have a face no more.”
She was breathing hard, sucking in deep breaths through her mouth and blowing them out like she’d just run a race. Annie came around to stand beside her and put a hand on her back, just to offer her some comfort, some support. She rubbed her back, the same as she did with Justin when he was upset at some injustice in his little world. She wondered if anyone had ever done that for Izzy, locked in a nightmare home life, her mother a victim over and over. What a horrible existence for a child.
Annie had her own unhappy memories from a childhood with a mother plagued by depression, but she had always had Sos andFanchon. She had always had people who loved her and valued her. She had never known what it was to feel unsafe or uncertain about her future. Even after her mother’s suicide, she had never worried about where she would go or what would happen to her. She had never had to escape a nightmare or scratch out a living on her own.
“I need to call someone to take care of the horses,” Izzy said, pulling herself out of the terrible memories to focus on something mundane, chores that needed to be done, animals that needed to be cared for. “They never even got their hay tonight. That’s not right. Can we go back and feed them?”
“I’ll have the deputies do it tonight,” Annie said. “A couple of those boys have horses. They’ll be fine.”
“There’s a chart in the feed room showing who gets what,” Izzy said. “And they need to feed the dogs, too. And the barn cats.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Annie assured her again.
Izzy looked up toward the door, the worry for her friend returning. “What’s gonna happen to Tulsie?”
“I expect they’ll keep her here for a few days,” Annie said. “We’ll stay and find out.”
“Will she go to jail?” Izzy asked. “None of this was her fault. None of it.”
“After you shot him, why didn’t you call nine-one-one that night?” Annie asked.
It would have been a whole lot easier to sell a self-defense case if they hadn’t disposed of Cody Parcelle’s body. Looking at the case as it had happened, and trying to think like a prosecutor, Annie knew that Tulsie was an accessory after the fact, at the very least. Coming up with a scheme to get rid of her dead husband’s body could have hinted at premeditation on his death.
“We were scared,” Izzy admitted. “It was so horrible, and…Tulsie was hysterical. I kept thinking if Cody could just disappear, we could say he left for Houston and we just never saw him again.”
“But you didn’t move the body until Sunday night,” Annie said. “Why?”
“I had to think it through. Saturday night there’s always people out, even late. I was afraid someone would see us. And then the sun was coming up…We had to wait.
“And then it was so hard to move him! It was like trying to move a dead horse. I thought we were gonna have to cut him up, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. I had to go get a dolly from the barn. We managed to get him loaded into the back of his truck and we waited until late, really late, and drove him down that road. Ain’t nobody out that time Sunday night.
“I thought if we could get him in the water…There’s usually gators around there. People feed them. Kids chuck hamburgers out there just to watch them eat. Idiots. But it had rained and I almost got stuck backing in, and then Tulsie hurt her shoulder worse trying to help me move him. And she was crying and throwing up…Everything went wrong. It took too long. It was getting on toward dawn, and then we heard a boat coming, and we just left him and took off.”
“Why did you take two vehicles?” Annie asked. “We have the two trucks on a security camera—Cody’s truck and that white truck in the driveway.”
“We had to get rid of his truck,” Izzy said. “We couldn’t say he left and have his truck still sitting there. We drove to that big Love’s truck stop outside of Lake Charles and left it there.”
Annie refrained from heaving a big sigh, thinking this was going to be some heavy lifting for a defense attorney.
“What’s gonna happen to me?” Izzy asked, her expression bleak.
It was the first time she had expressed any concern at all for herself in this mess.
“I’m gonna give you the name and number of an attorney.”
The girl shook her head. “I can’t afford an attorney!”
“Don’t worry about it,” Annie said. “She’ll take your case, and she’ll fight like hell for you. She’ll work something out with you for payment. And I have a connection in the DA’s office. I’ll have a conversation with him.”
Izzy’s brow furrowed. “You’re a cop. I thought you just arrested people.”
“I want justice done,” Annie said. “That doesn’t always look the same.”
She wished she could have done something before this train wreck had ended in death. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen the disaster coming a mile away. She just hadn’t envisioned it ending the way it had. She had worried Tulsie would be the one lying on a stainless steel table in the morgue, not Cody. She wasn’t supposed to be relieved that it was Tulsie’s husband who had ended up on the wrong end of a shotgun, but she was.
“Thank you,” Izzy said. Tears rose in her eyes again. She was trembling like she was freezing. “I’m really scared.”
Izzy suddenly looked like all the fear, all the horror of what she’d had to do, had risen up in a huge wave, and she buried her face in her hands and finally broke down sobbing.
