“That’s what she was assuming. She couldn’t find any birth record. So maybe Mariah had the child by herself.”

“Oh, what kind of woman doesn’t go to the hospital when she feels her time’s there?”

“Maybe one who can’t,” Tolliver said.

I felt my lips compress with disgust and horror. “You mean someone wouldn’t let her go to the hospital? Or simply allowed her to die of neglect?” I didn’t need to say that was cruel and inhuman. Tolliver shared my feelings.

“It’s possible. That’s the best explanation for her having died after childbirth, and there being no record of the child or a hospital stay for her.”

“And if it wasn’t for me…”

“No one would ever have known any of this.”

Put that way, I guess it was no surprise that someone wanted me dead.

Thirteen

I ran in place on the treadmill in the “exercise room,” the hotel’s token nod to fitness. At least it was in an enclosed area, which right now meant “safe.” I’d woken up early, and I could tell by his breathing that Tolliver was deep in dreamland.

I had a better picture of why all these awful things were happening around me, but I didn’t have any idea what to do about it. I had nothing to take to the police, nothing, and the Joyces were rich and connected. I didn’t know if all of them were involved, or if the shooter and the murderer (I considered both the deaths of Mariah Parish and Rich Joyce to be murders) were one and the same and acting alone. The three Joyces and the Joyce boyfriend were all capable people with guns, almost undoubtedly. Maybe I was stereotyping, but I didn’t think a western rancher like Rich Joyce would teach his granddaughters how to ride rodeo and neglect to teach them how to shoot, and Drex would have to learn as a matter of course. The boyfriend, too. I knew the least about Chip Moseley. He looked like a good match for Lizzie; he was just as lean and weather-beaten, and he looked competent and down-to-earth. He was skeptical of my claims, but he could join most of the people I met in that respect.

I was drenched with sweat when I began my cooldown. I walked for ten more minutes, then I dried my face with a towel and went back to the room. I was beginning to hate hotel rooms. I wouldn’t have thought there was much of a domestic gene in me, but I wanted a home, a real home. I wanted a bedspread that wasn’t synthetic. I wanted sheets that only I had slept on. I wanted to keep my clothes folded in a drawer; I didn’t want to fish them out of a suitcase. I wanted a bookcase, not a cardboard box. We had those things in our apartment, but even the apartment didn’t have any air of permanency. It was just a nicer rental than the hotel rooms.

In the elevator, I took a deep breath and shoved all those thoughts into a bucket in the corner of my mind. I put a heavy lid on the bucket and weighted that lid down with a rock. Lots of imagery, but I wanted to be sure I wasn’t distracted at this crucial time when someone was gunning for us. I had to be extra strong with Tolliver sidelined.

Rudy Flemmons was standing outside the room, raising his hand to knock.

“Detective,” I called, “hold on a minute.”

He stayed in position, one hand raised in a fist, and I knew from the way he was standing that something was very wrong.

I came up to him and examined his face, or at least his profile. He didn’t turn to look at me.

“Oh, no,” I breathed. “Listen, let’s go in the room.” I reached past him to unlock the door, and we entered. I flicked on the light, hoping I wasn’t waking Tolliver, but then I saw that the light was on in the bathroom and I knew he was up. I knocked on the door. “Hey, you okay in there? We’ve got company.”

“This early?” he asked, and I knew he’d had a bad night.

“Honey, just get out here,” I said, and hoped he got the message.

He did, and in thirty seconds he’d come out and made his way over to the seating area. I could tell by the way he was moving that he wasn’t feeling good. I hurried to bring him some orange juice from the little refrigerator. There wasn’t any point in offering some to Rudy Flemmons, who was sunk in a state that I assumed to be misery or extreme apprehension. I didn’t know him well enough to tell exactly; I just knew it was bad.

It must have been an unpleasant way for Tolliver to start the day, but he eased back on the couch.

“Tell us why you’re here,” Tolliver said.

“I think Victoria ’s dead,” Rudy Flemmons said. “Her car was found this morning, in a cemetery in Garland. Her purse was in it.”

“But you haven’t found her body?” I said.

“No. I was wondering if you would come take a look.”

This was sad, and it was also professionally awkward. In view of his obvious misery and our friendship with Victoria, I wasn’t even thinking about money. I was thinking about the rest of the cops out there who would decide that my arrival on the scene was Rudy Flemmon’s anxiety taking an extreme form.

But there wasn’t much I could say except, “Give me ten minutes.”

I jumped into the shower, soaped up and rinsed off, brushed my teeth, and pulled on my clothes. I put on boots; not high-heeled fashion boots, but flat, waterproof Uggs. The weather had been intermittently rainy, and I didn’t want to get caught by surprise. Though I hadn’t watched the forecast that morning or checked the paper, I noticed Rudy was wearing a heavy jacket, and I bundled up accordingly.

There was no question of Tolliver coming. That idea suddenly hit me in the face when I was ready to go out the door. Sloppy weather, cemetery conditions: not ideal for someone recovering from a gunshot wound.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said, with a terrible pang of anxiety. “You don’t do anything. I mean, get back in bed and watch TV. I’ll call you if anything happens, all right?”

Tolliver was as stricken by the belated realization that I was going out on a work call alone as I was. “Get some candy out of my jacket pocket,” he said, and I did. “Don’t do anything that’s going to hurt you,” he said severely.

“Don’t worry,” I said, and then I told Rudy Flemmons I was ready to go, though that was far from the truth.

On the ride through the misty rain, in the heavy morning traffic, we were silent. Rudy called someone on the radio to tell them we were on the way, and those were the only words spoken in fifteen minutes.

“I know you charge for this,” he said suddenly, as he pulled in behind a long line of cars on a road through a huge cemetery, the modern kind that forbids headstones. I was being bombarded by the vibrations of the corpses, coming from all directions. They were all intense, since this was a relatively new burial ground. I thought the oldest was maybe twenty years in the ground.

“Not an issue. Please don’t mention it again,” I said, and got out of the car. The last thing I wanted to do was debate prices while I was looking for this sad man’s girlfriend.

You would think that if I knew the person it would be easier, but it isn’t. Otherwise, I would have found my sister long ago. The dead clamor for attention with equal intensity, and if Victoria was out here somewhere, she was simply part of the chorus. It was hard to avoid the graves that called for my attention, and it was incredibly painful to be here without Tolliver. I had no anchor.

Common sense, I told myself. I went as close to the abandoned car as I could. One technician was peering at the tire treads, in a desultory way that told me the major work had been done. There were cops searching the landscaped graveyard, which was on rolling ground. It was a common layout for a modern place: there were areas defined by the tall statue in the middle, like an angel garden or a cross area, to help visitors navigate to the correct gravesite. I had no idea what method was used, whether the plots radiated out from the central sculpture or if you got to pick your site within that area. The place was looking pretty full-lying room only. There was a care-taker’s shed in the distance and a chapel in the middle, a sizable marble structure that probably held a mausoleum and a columbarium. Across the width of the grounds I could see a funeral taking place as the search for Victoria Flores went on around me.