it would look callous," I said. He glowered at me. "Well, you asked me," I said. We sat in dreary silence for a minute or two.
"I wonder if we'll have to see the Morgensterns again?" I said.
"You know we will," he said. "I bet they've already called them, and they're driving over from Nashville right now."
His cell phone rang.
He checked who was calling, looked as blank as a man can look, and answered it. "Hey," he said. "Yeah, it's true. Yes, we're here in Memphis. I was going to call you tonight. I'm sure we'll see each other. Yes. Yes. All right, goodbye."
He didn't look happy as he snapped the phone shut. Of course I wanted to know who his caller had been, but I didn't say anything. If anything could have made me gloomier, it was the idea that sooner or later we'd have to see Joel and Diane Morgenstern again.
When I'd realized whom the bones belonged to, my dismay was more overwhelming than my feeling of triumph. I'd failed the Morgensterns eighteen months ago, though I'd tried as hard as I could to find their daughter. Now I'd finally come through for them, but the success was bitter.
"How'd she die?" Tolliver asked very quietly. You never knew who was listening, in a police station. I guess we're the suspicious sort.
"Suffocated," I said. Another silence. "With a blue pillow." We'd seen so many pictures of Tabitha alive: on the news broadcasts, pinned to the walls of her room, in her parents' hands, blown up to illustrate the fliers they'd given us. She'd been a very average girl of eleven, to everyone but her parents. Tabitha had had bushy reddish-brown hair she hadn't yet learned to deal with. She'd had big brown eyes, and braces, and she hadn't begun to mature physically. She'd liked gymnastics, and art lessons, and she'd hated making her bed and taking out the trash. I remembered all this from talking to her parents; or more accurately, listening to their monologues. Joel and Diane had seemed to believe that if they made Tabitha real to me, I would work harder at finding her.
"You think she's been down there since she was missing?" Tolliver asked, finally.
It had been the spring of the preceding year when we'd been summoned to Nashville by the Morgenstern family. By then, Tabitha had been gone a month. The police had just cut back on their search, since they'd looked everywhere they could. The FBI had scaled back its presence, also. The extra equipment that had been installed to trace phone calls had been removed, because there hadn't been any ransom demands. By then, no one was expecting such a demand.
"No," I said. "The ground was too freshly disturbed. But I think she's been dead the whole time. I really hope so." The only thing more awful than a murdered child was a murdered child who'd been subjected to prolonged torture or sexual abuse.
"There was no way you could have found her," Tolliver said. "Back then."
"No," I agreed. "There wasn't."
But it hadn't been for lack of trying. The Morgensterns had called me when they'd exhausted all the traditional methods of finding their lost child.
Yes, I had failed; but I had given it my all. I'd been over the house, the yard, the neighborhood, into the yards of anyone with a police record who lived in the surrounding area. Some I'd done at night because the homeowner wouldn't consent. Not only was I risking arrest, but injury. A dog had almost gotten me the second night.
I'd toured nearby junkyards, ponds, parks, landfills, and cemeteries, in the process finding one other murder victim in the trunk of a junked car (a freebie for the Nashville police--they'd been so pleased to have another murder victim on the books), and one natural death, a homeless man in a park. But I hadn't found any eleven-year-old girls. For nine days I'd searched, until the time came when I'd had to tell Diane and Joel Morgenstern that I could not find their child.
Tabitha had been snatched from her yard in an upscale Nashville suburb while she was watering the flowers in the beds around the front door of the house on a warm morning during spring break. When Diane had come out to go to the grocery, she'd discovered Tabitha was nowhere to be found. The hose was still running.
Daughter of a senior accountant with a firm that handled lots of Nashville singers and record people, Tabitha had had