Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [64]
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