Chapter 33

33

“She knew he was gonna lay into her when he got home,” Izzy murmured. “She was terrified of him.”

They sat in the same exam room where Kiki Mercier had slammed Annie into the cabinets just days before, Izzy sitting on the exam table in handcuffs while Tulsie was being tended to down the hall in the ER. Annie knew she was breaking about ten different rules bringing Izzy there, but she didn’t care.

Despite Izzy’s initial plan to run, Annie knew Izzy Guidry wasn’t a flight risk. She wasn’t going to abandon Tulsie. She wasn’t going to do anything violent. Knocking the wind out of Stokes with the handle of a scoop shovel and locking him in the feed room was the craziest thing she was going to do that night. Technically, she was a killer, yes, but with a victim pool of one, and that damage had already been done.

She was maybe going to catch hell for it, but Annie felt this was her best option for getting the whole story, and more importantly to her, it was the humane thing to do for both Izzy and Tulsie.

“I reckon I shouldn’t be talking to you,” Izzy said. She looked so sad and so alone. She was beside herself with worry for her friend. Her eyes kept going to the door, anxious for someone to come with news. She lifted both hands and tried to push her dark hair out of her eyes.

“I haven’t read you your rights yet, Izzy, and that’s for a reason,” Annie said, moving to stand between Izzy and the door, to have her attention. “Until I do that, nothing you say to me is ever gonna make it into a courtroom. So, we’re just two women having a conversation here. And nobody needs to know anything about it. You understand me?”

Izzy gave her a long, skeptical look. “Why should I trust you?”

“I want the best outcome. For Tulsie. For you,” Annie said. “This is a shitty situation caused by a man who thought his wife was a piece of property for him to do with what he would. If I could have done anything within the parameters of my job to stop him, I would have. Our system let Tulsie down. It lets women down every day, and that’s not right. If I can at least do something now to help, I’m going to.”

Izzy took in her answer and sat with it for a minute, weighing the pros and cons of accepting her explanation at face value. Annie had a feeling Izzy Guidry hadn’t had much call to trust anyone in her life.

“This wasn’t the first time, you know,” Izzy said. “This wasn’t the first time he blew up on her in public, humiliated her, sent her home like a child. She knew he was coming and what would happen. And then he’d go sit somewhere and drink, and stew, and work himself up into it, knowing she was home waiting, sick with fear, afraid to do anything.

“He texted her that night when he was on his way home,” she said. “Just to scare her. It made him feel like a big man, the fucker. I’ll never understand guys like him or why women put up with them. Someone should’a kicked him in the balls until he was dead years ago. That’s what he deserved.”

“Did Tulsie call you?” Annie asked. “Or were you already there?”

“She called me. I told her the last time it happened to call me, and I’d come. I got there before he did. I thought if I was there, he’d leave her alone, but he didn’t care. He was drunk. He said nobody would listen to me anyway, ’cause I’m just a piece of trailer trash from Eunice.”

“Why didn’t you call nine-one-one when you knew he was coming?” Annie asked.

Izzy looked at her like she was stupid. “Why? You never helped before. He hadn’t committed a crime yet. Y’all would never have bothered to even show up.”

Annie didn’t bother to argue. She couldn’t say for a fact Izzy wasn’t right, and that truth made her feel sick.

“We locked the doors,” Izzy said. “Hoping he maybe didn’t have his key, and he didn’t, but that didn’t stop him. He was at the kitchen door, yelling, I’ll fucking kill you, you fucking bitch! And he busted the glass with the butt of the shotgun.

“I thought he’d kill us both,” she said. “He came in, yelling, waving that gun around. He used the barrel to knock everything off her dresser, then he left it there and started in with his fists.”

“He started hitting her right in front of you?”

“I got between them, so he punched me first. Punched me in the stomach as hard as he could and knocked the wind out of me. Then he started in on her.”

Tears filled her dark eyes at the memory, but she wiped them away and set her jaw, stubborn and defiant.

“My stepdad used to beat us,” she said. “He beat my mother something fierce. Over and over. Years of that abuse. When I was sixteen and I finally got out of there, I said I would never put up with that shit from a man again.”

She leaned over and put her face in her hands and breathed in and out, trying to steady herself.

“He was gonna rape her, too. Right in front of me!” she said, astonished still, days later. “I was laying on the floor, trying to get my breath, and he’s taking his clothes off, pulling off his shirt, kicking off his boots. I remember thinking, thank God he’s not gonna take to kicking her with those boots on at least…Tulsie was begging him not to. He just wanted to hurt her every way he could.”

“Just because she was dancing with Marc Mercier?” Annie asked. “Or was there something more to that?”

“She never cheated on him,” Izzy said. “Tulsie ain’t that girl. She likes to flirt a little. Why wouldn’t she? She’s sweet and cute, and that’s the only way she ever got any attention.”

She covered her face again and fought hard not to start crying outright. Annie doubted many people ever saw Izzy Guidry cry. She was tough because she’d had to be, but she had a soft heart for helpless things.

“What happened next?” she asked, hating having to make the girl relive such a horrific event.

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 and Fanchon. 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.

Annie slipped an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Just know you’re not alone in this, Izzy. People will help you. I’ll help you.”

She just wished she could have helped before it was too late.