Detective Lacey had a chaperone this time, another detective named Brittany Young. Detective Young was in her thirties, and she was a narrow-faced woman with short tousled brown hair and glasses. She had a huge handbag and comfortable shoes, clothes that were no higher-end than Sears, and a gold band on her left hand. She looked around the hotel room curiously, and then she examined me with even more curiosity.

"Do you always travel in this kind of style?" she asked, while Detective Lacey was talking to Tolliver. I sensed they had a plan. Why, gee, what could it be?

"Not hardly," I said. "We're more Holiday Inn or Motel 6 people. But we had to have the security."

She nodded, as if she really understood that and didn't think we were pretentious. Detective Brittany Young was establishing a rapport with me. She grinned at me. I grinned back. I'd done this dance before with other partners.

"We really need all the information you can give us," she said earnestly, still with the smile. "It's very important to our investigation to figure out how the body got here and how you came to find it."

No shit. I tried not to look like I thought she was an idiot. I said, "Well, I'll be glad to tell you everything I know. But I believe I covered it all yesterday." I added more sincerely, "I'm really sorry for the Morgensterns."

"Would you consider, say, that you and your brother are religious?"

Now she had actually surprised me. "That's a very personal question, and one I can't answer for my brother," I said.

"But you would describe yourself as Christians?"

"We were raised Christian." Cameron and I had been, at least; I didn't know what kind of faith education had taken place in the Lang household. Certainly by the time Tolliver 's dad had married my mother, religious training for their children had not been a high priority. In fact, toward the end of our life as a family, my mother hardly knew when it was Sunday. While we'd thought of taking Gracie and Mariella to Sunday school—though they were very young—the thought of what the sharp-eyed church ladies might be able to tell about our home life had stopped us.

We tried so hard to stay together. It had all been for nothing.

"Did your parents have some reason to be prejudiced against Jews?"

"What?" Where had that come from?

"Some Christians don't like Jews," Brittany Young said, as if that would be news to me. But she was making a huge effort to keep her voice neutral. She didn't want to scare me off from offering her my true opinion, just in case I was a closet anti-Semite.