Young.
'You seem so normal, and then you say something just totally nuts,' Young muttered, and her older partner gave her a stare that snapped her into the here-and-now.
'I beg your pardon,' she said formally. 'This is a subject I don't believe I've ever discussed with anyone, and it… strikes me as peculiar, I guess.'
'It's not the first time I've heard that, Detective,' I said matter-of-factly.
'No, I guess not.'
'We'll be going now,' said Detective Lacey, running his hand over his short hair in an absent gesture, as if he were polishing a favorite ornament. 'Oh, wait, I have one more question.'
Tolliver and I looked up at him. Tolliver put his hand on my shoulder and exerted a slight pressure. But it wasn't necessary; I knew this was the crucial question.
'Have you talked to any family member since you were in Nashville to search for the Morgenstern girl? Any phone conversations?'
I didn't even have to think about it. 'Not me,' I said, and turned to look at Tolliver, fully expecting him to echo my words.
'Yeah, I talked to Felicia Hart a couple of times,' he said, and I used all my self-control to keep my face and body still.
'So, you had conversations with Felicia Hart besides the initial one when she asked you to come to Nashville to look for her niece.'
'Yes, I did.'
I was going to kill him.
'What was the nature of these calls?'
'Personal,' Tolliver said calmly.
'Is it true that you and Felicia Hart had a relationship?'
'No,' Tolliver said.
'Then why the phone calls?'
'We'd had sex,' he said. 'She's called a couple of times after that, while my sister and I were on the road.'
I could feel my fingers curl into fists, and I made them straighten out, made my face remain calm. If it was also sort of fixed and rigid, well, I couldn't help that. I was doing my best.
Tolliver had a lot of appeal, and though we hadn't ever discussed it, he obviously enjoyed sex, judging from the way he tracked down opportunities to do it. I did, too, but I was way pickier than Tolliver when it came to selecting a partner. Tolliver viewed sex, as far as I could tell, as a sport he could play well, with any number of the people on his team. I thought of sex a little more personally. You revealed a lot of yourself during sex. I wasn't willing to let many people see that much of me, literally and figuratively.
Maybe these were typical male-versus-female attitudes about sex.
'So what did she want to talk about?' Detective Young asked. She had a narrow-eyed look that I didn't like, as if she felt she'd caught Tolliver out in a guilty secret.
'She wanted to blow off steam about the family situation, about Tabitha's being missing for so long, about how the stress was affecting Victor,' Tolliver said easily, and I thought, You're lying. I looked down so my face wouldn't be so easy to read.
I thought of acting strange and making the detectives so nervous that they would leave, but I was really angry with Tolliver. He could make his way out of the tangle as best he could.
'What did she say in these conversations?'
He shrugged. 'I don't recall specifics. After all, it's been months, and it wasn't that memorable.' Aware he sounded less than gallant, Tolliver amended that to, 'I didn't know I'd have to be telling anyone what she'd said. She was worried, of course, and not just about Victor. She was concerned about Diane and Joel, and about her own parents. After all, they're Victor's grandparents, even if they're not Joel's in-laws anymore. And—let's see—she said kids at school were accusing Victor of having something to do with Tabitha's disappearance, because a couple of times he'd mouthed off to his friends about his dad preferring Tabitha to him because Tabitha was Diane's daughter, and he wasn't Diane's son.'
'What was your response?'
'I didn't have much of a response,' Tolliver said. 'I wasn't on the spot, and I didn't know the people involved that well. I felt she mainly wanted to vent to someone who didn't have a vested interest, and I happened to come along at the right time.'
'Did she want you to return to Nashville?'
'We couldn't,' Tolliver said. 'We had a schedule to stick to, and any downtime we have we spend at our apartment in St. Louis. We're on the road pretty much year-round.'
'You have that much business?' Detective Young said. He seemed startled.
I nodded. 'We stay pretty busy,' I said. I noticed that Tolliver had dodged answering their original question, but I sure wasn't going to point that out. I was ready for them to be on their way.
Lacey and Young gave each other a look, and a communication seemed to pass between them. The middle- aged man and the younger woman made good partners, somehow. They'd had a meeting of the minds somewhere back in their professional history, and they'd made it work for them. Until this moment, I'd thought Tolliver and I had had the same thing working for us.
