“So you were the one who stole Mrs. Crowder’s pills?”
Joy nodded. “Everybody knows I’ve been taking Vicodin for my ankle and Kevin said his mother was taking them, too, and that they seemed to be pretty strong and she was trying to do without them. I figured that meant they would be in her medicine cabinet. Our friends were all over the house, so I used the master bathroom and found them in the medicine cabinet.”
“Why?” asked Dwight.
“Because I was hurting and my doctor wouldn’t give me anything stronger. I still had five days to go before I could get a refill and I was down to just three days. So I poured Mrs. Crowder’s pills into my prescription bottle. Only I didn’t realize that hers were twice as strong as mine till after I got home and looked at them more closely.”
“And that’s what you gave Mallory?”
“I thought it was mine, but it must have been Mrs. Crowder’s. Why else would she run off the road like that?” Tears rolled down her cheeks and she fumbled in her purse for tissues so that she could blow her nose. “I mean, I heard afterwards that she was taking Benadryl for her cold, but even with that and the vodka, one of my regular pills shouldn’t have made her so groggy that she would crash. I didn’t mean for her to die, Major Bryant,” she sobbed. “Honest. I thought maybe she might sideswipe a mailbox or go in the ditch. Like being drunk or something. So that for once everyone wouldn’t think she was perfect—that she could mess up, too.”
“Is that why you’re taking yourself off the Vicodin?”
She nodded, shamefaced. “I don’t care how much it hurts anymore. At least I can still hurt and Mallory can’t. And it’s all my fault.”
“Were you jealous of her, Joy?”
“I hated her!” the girl said vehemently.
That surprised both officers. “I thought she was your best friend.”
“No. That’s what she said. That I was
Dwight glanced at Mayleen for help.
“Why did you hate her, honey?” the deputy asked.
“Stacy and Ted are dead because of her. Dana might as well be dead, and I’m going to limp the rest of my life. All because she wanted to mess up what Stacy and I had.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’d been putting the moves on him for over a week, pretending like it was all in fun, that coming on to him was just playing. I told him that, too, but he was, like, flattered. She was so pretty and so hot, he didn’t care if it was a game with her or not. I told her to quit it, but she wouldn’t. She kept texting him sexy messages. He thought she was going to put out for him when she’d never done it with anybody. That night—okay, I know he’d had a couple of beers too many and maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly, but all the same…”
She shook her head angrily. “See, she suddenly quit texting him. That was part of her game. Go after them till they respond and then quit cold like she was going to drop them. Bang! She wouldn’t answer her phone if they called and she wouldn’t text them back. It drove guys crazy. It drove Stacy crazy. He kept checking his phone even though I was sitting right there beside him. Then finally, while we were driving home after a game, she texted him. Told him that if he dropped me off early, he could call her when he was alone and they could have phone sex. Oh, that’s not what she wrote, but that’s what she meant, and he got so excited, he just stomped on the gas. Two minutes later, he was dead and my ankle was shattered in a million pieces.”
She pulled more tissues from her purse and blew her nose and wiped her eyes, but the tears kept coming.
“So, yes, I hated her for that, but I swear I never meant to kill her. I
At that, she turned to Mayleen.
“What’s going to happen to me? Will I have to go to prison? Oh, God! Mama and Daddy! This is going to wreck their lives.”
“I don’t know,” Dwight told her honestly. “It will be up to the district attorney. We still don’t have all the details of that night.” He pushed a legal pad over to her side of the desk. “For now, though, I want you to write out what you just told us about taking Mrs. Crowder’s pills and how you put a pill and some vodka in a Coke and gave it to Mallory. Then sign and date it.”
“And then I can go home?”
“And then you can go home. Just promise me you won’t do something stupid.”
“Like kill myself?” She gave a bitter laugh. “I thought about it. I felt so bad, I almost took all of Mrs. Crowder’s pills. But then I knew I couldn’t do that to my parents. Seeing how torn up Mallory’s folks are?” She shook her head. “This is going to hurt them when they find out what I’ve done, but not like it would if I killed myself.”
CHAPTER 24
—
With Christmas bearing down upon us, I could understand why the DA’s office wanted to reduce the backlog of cases that had built up under Chester Nance’s poor management, but when ADA Julie Walsh handed me yet another batch of miscellaneous add-ons that various attorneys had pushed to be heard that Tuesday afternoon, I guess I let my exasperation show.
Although it goes against my grain to badmouth a Democrat, in my heart of hearts, I really wish Nance’s moderate and extremely efficient Republican opponent had won.
“Sorry, Your Honor,” Walsh apologized. “I’m pretty sure these are the last of the day.”
Julie Walsh looks like a sweet little schoolteacher with her sandy blond hair in a loose braid, sensible pumps, and a businesslike tweed jacket over a black turtleneck and black slacks, but she has the persistence of a dog worrying a bone when she’s pushing for a conviction, so I listened to the plea bargains she had worked out with the
