Grave Secret Page 0,37

why she hadn't called me or written me in all those years.

At first, I'd been convinced my sister had been abducted by a gang or sold into slavery, something violent and horrible. Later it had occurred to me that maybe she'd simply been fed up with her life: the tawdry parents and the tacky trailer, the sister who limped and looked abstracted, the baby sisters who never seemed to stay clean.

Most days, though, I was sure Cameron was dead.

I was yanked out of my unhappy reverie by the sudden appearance of one of the detectives from the night before. He came into the hospital room very quietly and stood looking down at my brother. Then he said, "How are you today, Miss Connelly?" in a voice that barely moved the air in the room, it was so hushed and even.

I stood up, because he made me nervous, with his silent entrance and hushed voice. He wasn't especially tall, maybe five foot nine, and he was thickset and had a heavy mustache flecked with gray. He wasn't anything like his partner, Parker Powers. This detective looked like a million other men. I tried to remember his name. Rudy something. Rudy Flemmons.

"I'm fine compared to my brother," I said, nodding down at the figure on the bed. "Have you got any ideas about who did this to him?"

"We found some cigarette butts in the parking lot, but they could have come from anyone. However, we bagged them just in case we ever get someone to compare the DNA to. Assuming the lab guys can get DNA." We did some more looking at the patient. Tolliver opened his eyes, smiled at me very slightly, and went back to sleep.

"Do you think they were really shooting at him?" the detective asked.

"They hit him," I said, a little confused at the question. Of course the shooter had been aiming at Tolliver.

"You think they might have been shooting at you?" Rudy Flemmons asked.

"Why?" That sounded stupid the minute it was out of my lips. "I mean, why shoot at me? You're saying you think the bullet hitting Tolliver was an accident, that it should have been me?"

"It might have been you," Flemmons said, "not should have been you."

"You're basing that on... what?"

"You're the dominant one in your little group of two," Flemmons said. "And your brother is strictly your support staff. You're the talent of the outfit. The chances are much higher of someone taking issue with you, rather than with Mr. Lang, here. I understand he doesn't have a girlfriend?"

This was the strangest policeman I'd ever talked to.

I sighed. Here it came again. "He does," I said.

"Who is she?" He'd even gotten out his little notebook.

"Me." Flemmons looked up, his eyes quizzical.

"Come again?" he said.

"He's not my brother by blood, you know." I was very tired of explaining our relationship.

"Right, you don't share parents," he said. He'd been doing his research.

"No, we don't. We're partners, in every sense of the word."

"Okeydokey. I got an interesting phone call this morning," Flemmons said, throwing the line away. I immediately became more alert.

"Yes? From whom?"

"From a detective on the Texarkana police force. Name of Peter Gresham. He's a friend of mine."

"What did he tell you?" I said and sighed. I really didn't want to hear yet another rehashing of my sister's disappearance. It had already been a "grieved about Cameron" day.

"He said there'd been a phone call about your sister."

"What kind of phone call?" There are more crackpots in the world than you can shake a stick at.

"Someone spotted her at the Texarkana mall."

I stopped breathing for a second. Then the air surged into my lungs in a choked gasp. "Cameron? Who saw her? Someone who used to know her?"

"It was an anonymous call. A male, calling from a pay phone."

"Oh," I said, feeling as though someone had punched me in the stomach. "But... how can I find out if that's true? Get that person to come forward? Is there any way?"

"You remember Pete Gresham? He was the primary on your sister's case."

I nodded. I did recall him, but not with much clarity. When I looked back on the bad, bad days immediately following Cameron's vanishing, they seemed like one big blur of anxiety to me. "He was a big guy," I said. I added, less certainly, "Wears cowboy boots all the time? He was losing his hair. He was young to be balding."

"Yeah, that's him. Pete's bald now. I think he shaves the little he has left