T HE EMT was doing painful things to my cheek. She was getting the slivers of glass out, and it was hurting, but not as much as getting shot would have hurt. She had pointed that out several times, and I had agreed each time, though with less enthusiasm on every repetition.

The Germantown police had kindly let Detectives Lacey and Young come to the scene of the crime, and they were all listening to Tolliver's story. He'd covered the part about Fred Hart visiting us that morning, and Fred's inebriation.

Then he talked about Felicia's phone call.

"She said she wanted to talk to me here, that she wanted to know all the details about her dad's visit, and so on. I thought she wanted to see me again, because we'd had a… we'd hooked up a couple of times. She'd been calling me pretty steadily since. I think she was trying to keep tabs on Harper and me, to know where we were in case she needed us again. Which she did."

"What did she need you for?" Brittany Young asked. She'd been pulled away from some home activity. Her hair needed a brushing, and she was wearing a sweatsuit and Reeboks.

"She needed us to find Tabitha." Tolliver took my hand, and I tried to smile.

"You're saying she confessed to taking her," Detective Lacey said.

"Yes, she did. She knew Tabitha would get in the car with her. She borrowed her father's Lexus, so no one would see her own car. She thought that someone might see the Lexus and report it, and that Joel might be suspected; but she knew he would have an airtight alibi because she called him at work that morning and made sure he was staying put. She thought if Diane suspected Joel, she'd divorce him; or maybe Joel would suspect Diane, and he would divorce her. Felicia thought maybe the stress of the whole thing would rip the marriage apart, even if mutual suspicion didn't. Plus, she didn't like Tabitha. She thought the girl was getting preferential treatment over her own nephew, Victor. And she couldn't just kill Diane, to make way for herself. That hadn't worked when her own sister died."

"You're saying she had something to do with Whitney's death?"

"I don't see how she could have caused Whitney's cancer. But that kind of opened the door for her, she thought. She made her best play for Joel after her sister died. She came over from Memphis to Nashville a lot, she was as good to Victor as a mother could be, she offered to move in for a while to help Joel out."

"And he wouldn't bite," Young said.

"He wouldn't bite," my brother agreed. "So Felicia worked on this plan, worked on it for a long time. She took Tabitha back to this house, smothered her there on the couch."