Eyes haunted, she swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “Not kill you,” she sniffled. “You were always so nice to me. I didn’t want to even hurt you, but I didn’t know what else to do. I just needed you to stay home so I could make things right.”
“You took the money from evidence, didn’t you? This was all about trying to hide what you did.”
She closed her eyes at the accusation and he knew his guess had found its target.
“I knew you suspected me. I knew it, especially when you came into the office last week, even though the doctors told you not to.”
“Why? How did you think you’d get away with it? You know the procedures as well as anybody. You knew we would eventually find it missing.”
She rose and began to pace around the kitchen in a haphazard way. “It was supposed to be only for a few weeks. That’s all. I just needed cash until the divorce settlement came through, so I...borrowed it. I thought I could pay it back. I was supposed to get a check this week, and then I could make everything right.”
“Why? If you needed a loan, I could have helped you.”
“They didn’t give me a choice,” she sobbed again, and his mind raced, trying to figure out who they were. Was somebody blackmailing her? Was she hiding gambling debts?
Suddenly he knew the answer before her next words even confirmed it.
“The rehab center wouldn’t take Jeremy unless I paid up front and he needed help,” she said. “My boy needed help and I didn’t have the money and I couldn’t wait for the attorneys to hash out the divorce settlement, so I...borrowed it from evidence.”
“Oh, Jackie.”
“I only took the cash retrieved from that meth bust over the summer. It was only right, wasn’t it? They stole my sweet boy from me, so I stole some of their dirty money to help him get clean again. Don’t you think that was only fair?”
Her voice had lost some of the hysteria. Now it sounded tired.
“How much have you had to drink today, Jackie?”
She rubbed at her eyes. “Nothing. Not to drink. Pills.”
Damn it. He should have called 911 the moment she’d shown up on the doorstep, when he saw she was acting irrational and out of control.
He dialed the number now, hoping to hell he wasn’t too late.
“This is Sheriff Bailey. I have an urgent medical emergency at my house on Riverbend Road. I need an ambulance. Possible overdose.” He turned to her. “How many and what kind of medication? We need to get you to the hospital.”
“It’s too late,” she whispered. “Put your phone down, Sheriff. Tell them not to come. It’s too late.”
She gave a tired-looking smile that chilled him to the bone. “I didn’t take that many, anyway. Not enough to do anything. Just enough so maybe it won’t hurt as much.”
His insides clenched as a dark suspicion bloomed. “So what won’t hurt as much?”
In answer, she reached into her purse, pulled out a small black .38 Special and held it to her temple. Though her hands trembled, she still managed to work the safety.
“Women don’t kill themselves with guns nearly as often as men. Did you know that?”
Yeah. He knew. The ratio was about two men to one woman—but in this case, once was more than enough, especially when that particular one was someone he knew, standing in his kitchen.
This was surreal, that she could cite statistics to him while holding a loaded handgun to her own head.
“There are a lot of reasons,” she said, her voice dreamy now. “Some say it’s because women don’t like guns and don’t have access to them as often. Or maybe it’s because women don’t want to leave a big mess behind. Men don’t care about the messes they leave behind. Just ask my son of a bitch ex-husband. They say women don’t use guns as often because it’s final. Sometimes they just want the drama. They don’t really want to go, right? You can have your stomach pumped after taking pills, but you can’t rewind once you’ve blown the top of your head off.”
Now she held the gun under her chin, where they both knew it could do maximum damage. “I don’t want to rewind,” she said, the words full of a desolate pain. “I can’t go to jail. I can’t.”
“We can work this out, Jackie. You don’t have to go to jail. Come on. Give me the gun.” He said the word clearly and firmly, hoping the dispatcher could hear it over the line and relay that to the responding officers.
She shook her head. “I stole evidence in a drug case and I can’t pay it back. My divorce attorney called this morning and said the money’s gone. My settlement. That rat bastard hid it somewhere and we can’t find it. He won’t pay for our son to go to rehab, but he can take his whore to the Caymans so he can hide everything we built together for twenty years.”