Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [56]
“Thanks,” he said, his voice lightening in a conscious attempt to brighten the dark conversation. “She liked you, too. She liked you a lot.”
We were silent for the rest of the ride.
While I showered and changed, Manfred walked down to the place where Parker Powers had been shot the night before. He wanted to see if he could pick up anything there, and he knew I’d be more comfortable if he wasn’t in the room while I was cleaning up. I appreciated both ideas. When he knocked on the door, I was dressed, as made up as my healing face would permit, and braced for our next stop. Manfred set his GPS so we could get to the hospital where Parker Powers was a patient. It was called Christian Memorial. I didn’t understand why he’d been taken there instead of God’s Mercy, where Tolliver was. Tolliver and Parker had both had gunshot wounds, so it couldn’t be the level of trauma the emergency room could handle.
I was impressed with Manfred’s GPS, and I’d been thinking of getting Tolliver one for his birthday, so we talked about that on the way to Christian Memorial. I didn’t want to think about the visit I was about to pay. Fortunately, we had to watch out for everyone else on the road, and that distracted me.
Every city in the world thinks it has the worst traffic. Dallas has grown in such a hurry, and so many people who move to the city haven’t driven in an urban area before, that I think Dallas may be right when it claims its traffic is pretty awful. This congestion extends to the dozens of towns that cluster right around Dallas’s outskirts. We were maneuvering among those towns now.
When we’d exhausted small talk about the GPS, Manfred asked me about the case we’d been on before we’d come to Dallas. “Fill me in on your last few days” was the way he put it. “You know this shooting is related to something you’ve done recently. I don’t see how the Carolina case can be related.”
I agreed with him. Since Manfred was a colleague, I explained to him about what had happened at Pioneer Rest Cemetery. I wouldn’t have broken my unwritten bond with the Joyces, but I’d come to believe they were probably involved in what was happening. More importantly, I knew Manfred would keep it to himself.
“So there are two ways you can go with that,” he said. “You can pursue the missing baby, which one of the men you met may have fathered—though I guess that kid isn’t a baby anymore, it’d be in school—or you can pursue the possibility one of them threw the rattlesnake at Rich Joyce, startling him into a heart attack.”
“There are those two possibilities,” I said, relieved to be talking about the whole situation. “And there’s the fact that Tolliver’s father has shown back up, and he’s trying to reconnect with Tolliver. And the girls. And there’s the weird thing that after all these years, someone’s reported a Cameron sighting.”
I filled Manfred in on our family business.
“So this might have to do with your little sisters, somehow. Or with your missing sister. What if this has something to do with Cameron?”
I was startled. “Why would it?”
“There’s a caller claiming to have seen Cameron. Then another caller threatens you. Two anonymous phone calls. Those sure might be linked, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, considering it for the first time. “Yes, of course they could.” If I hadn’t put this together before, blame it on the fact that people near me kept getting shot. “So this might have to do with Cameron.”
“Or with the caller knowing this was the surest way to get you away from Tolliver. Maybe he thought you would leave, go to Texarkana. He couldn’t have counted on the police being willing to show you the tape at the police station.” There was silence for a long minute. “Uh, Harper,” Manfred said. “You sure—for real—that the woman you saw in the tape wasn’t your sister?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Her jaw was different, and the way she walked was different. True, she was blond and she seemed the right height. True, I don’t know why anyone would claim to have seen her when the case is cold and no one’s looking anymore.”
“You’re