“This is so much better,” he said. “This is better than anything.”

I agreed that it was. In the spirit of welcoming him back to the nonhospital world, I unzipped his pants and gave him some physical therapy he hadn’t expected, which pleased him so much that after kissing me, he fell asleep, and so did I.

We were wakened by a knock at the door. I found myself wishing for a door that I could lock, a door no one could knock on. I should have put out a Do Not Disturb sign. Tolliver stirred, and his eyes opened. I rolled off the bed, straightened myself up and ran a hand through my hair, and went out of the bedroom and through the living room to see who was there. This time, I mustered up my courage and looked through the peephole.

To my astonishment, since I hadn’t told anyone in the police department where we were staying now, Rudy Flemmons was outside the door.

“It’s the detective,” I said. I’d gone back to the doorway into the bedroom. I was stupid with sleep. “Rudy Flemmons, not the one that got shot.”

“I’d assumed that,” Tolliver said and yawned. “I guess you better let him in.” He zipped his jeans and I buttoned them, and we smiled at each other.

I let Detective Flemmons in, and then I helped Tolliver out to the living room to share in the conversation. Tolliver sat carefully on the couch, and Flemmons took the armchair.

“How long have you two been here?” he asked.

I looked at my watch. “Well, we checked out of the hospital about an hour and a half ago,” I said. “We came right here and took a nap.”

Tolliver nodded.

Rudy Flemmons said, “Have you seen your friend Victoria Flores in the past two days?”

“Yes,” Tolliver said right away. “She came by the hospital last night. Harper wasn’t there, she’d already left. I guess Victoria stayed for about forty-five minutes, and then she took off. That must have been about… man, I don’t know, I was taking a lot of stuff for pain. I think around eight o’clock. I haven’t seen her since then.”

“She never came home last night. She’d left her daughter, MariCarmen, with her mother, and her mother called the police when Victoria was late picking the child up. Normally, the police wouldn’t really think much of that, an adult woman being late picking up her kid, but Victoria used to be on the Texarkana force and some of us know her. She was never late to anything involving her kid, not without calling and explaining. Victoria is a good mother.”

I could tell from his face that he was one of the Garland cops who knew her well. I thought maybe he knew her very well. “Have you found anyone who saw her later than my brother?”

“No,” he said, his voice heavy and depressed. “I haven’t.”

At least no one could imagine that Tolliver had leaped from his hospital bed, subdued Victoria, and stowed her under the bed until he could bribe the janitor to dispose of her body.

“Her mom hasn’t heard from her at all?”

The detective shook his head.

“That’s awful,” I said. “I… That’s awful.”

I remembered Tolliver had been about to tell me a story involving Victoria when we’d gotten to the hotel. I was sitting on the couch beside him, and I turned my head to catch his eyes. I raised my eyebrows in query. Would he bring it up?

He gave an infinitesimal shake of his head. No.

All right.

“What did you two talk about? Did Victoria give any indication of what she was working on, or where she planned to go after she left the hospital?”

“I’m afraid we mostly talked about me,” Tolliver admitted. “She asked questions about the bullet, about whether the place where the shooter had fired from had been found, if there’d been any other random shootings that night-you-all told Harper there’d been one real close to the motel, right?-how long I was going to have to stay in the hospital, stuff like that.”

“Did she say anything personal?”

“Yes. She said that she’d dated a guy for a while, a guy on the force, and they’d recently broken up. She said she’d reconsidered, and she was going to call him last night.”

I hadn’t expected such a dramatic reaction. Detective Flemmons turned white as a sheet. I thought he was going to pass out. “She said that?” he said, and almost choked on the words.

“Yeah,” Tolliver said, as startled as I was. “That’s almost word for word. I was surprised, because we’d never talked about her love life before. We weren’t that close, and she didn’t like to talk about personal stuff, either. You know the cop she was seeing?”

“Yes,” Flemmons said. “It was me.”

Neither of us had anything to say, or any idea how to respond, when we heard that.

Flemmons was there for at least another quarter hour, and he asked Tolliver about twenty more questions, getting every detail of the conversation he’d had with Victoria, but Tolliver never elaborated on what Victoria had told him. I was surprised-and not a little worried-that Tolliver was playing the situation so close to the vest.

I told Rudy Flemmons about the mysterious person at my door the night before, the person who’d knocked before room service came. I didn’t really think that person had been Victoria Flores, but I wanted to tell someone that the little incident had occurred.

At last, Detective Flemmons got up to leave. I felt incredibly relieved when I’d shut the door behind him. I waited, listening, and after a moment I heard him go down the hall to the elevators. I heard the ping of the arriving elevator, and then the whoosh of the doors as they opened and shut. I even opened our door and looked around to make sure no one was there.

I was getting paranoid as hell, but I thought I had good reason.

“Tell me,” I said. Though Tolliver was looking very tired and got up laboriously so I could help him back to the bed, I was determined to hear what he’d been about to say when Rudy Flemmons had come to our door.

When he was flat on his back, Tolliver said, “She asked me if I believed the Joyces really wanted to find the baby Mariah Parish carried, or if I thought they wanted to kill the child.”

“Kill the child,” I said, stunned. Of course, I got the idea right away. “A Joyce baby would inherit at least a fourth of the estate, I guess. An heir of the body, isn’t that the phrase? If the lawyer who drew it up used that phrase, the kid would inherit whether it’s legitimate or not. I don’t suppose there’s any question of Rich Joyce marrying Mariah on the sly?”

Tolliver shook his head. “No, he would have married her legally, not in some made-up ceremony. He was a four-square kind of guy, according to Victoria. And if the baby was his, he’d own up to it. If he’d known about it.”

“She was sure about that?”

“She was sure because she’d interviewed a lot of people who’d known Rich Joyce, people who’d been close to him. They all told Victoria that Lizzie Joyce is like her granddad, no-nonsense and basically honest, but Kate and Drex are all about the money.”

“What about Chip, the boyfriend?”

“She didn’t mention him.”

“ Victoria ’d found all of this out already?”

“Yeah, she’d been busy.”

“Why’d she tell you all this? I’m guessing it wasn’t because she thought you were cute, since she was thinking about getting back together with Rudy Flemmons.”

“Because she thought one of the Joyces had shot me. That’s why she told me.”

“Okay, I’m still not following.”

“They all think you know more about Rich Joyce’s death than you said at the graveside. They’re upset because you identified Mariah’s cause of death and raised the question of the existence of a baby at all. They’re afraid, I guess, that you’ll find the baby’s body.”

“ Victoria didn’t think the baby was alive? She thought someone had killed the baby?”

I felt sick inside. I’ve seen and heard of bad things, evil things, because of this “gift” the lightning left me. In the past, so many babies died; so many things could go wrong, things that are rare now. I’d stood on many tiny graves and seen the still, white faces, and it never failed to be a sad moment. The murder of a child was the worst of crimes, in my book, the absolute rock bottom of evil.