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?"