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.