“We were here all night,” Tolliver said. “We got a phone call at—what time did Manfred call us, Harper?”

“Oh, about three,” I said.

“What evidence is a phone call on a cell phone?” Rockwell asked. “And did Manfred talk to you?” She was looking at Tolliver with no friendly face.

“He talked to me, but Tolliver was here.”

“He won’t say he talked to Tolliver, then.”

“Well, he may have heard him in the background. But he didn’t talk to him directly, no.” Calling our lawyer in Atlanta was beginning to seem like a possibility we should bear in mind. Art Barfield had made a mint off us lately, and I was sure he wouldn’t mind making a little more.

“I’m not in the habit of abducting boys,” Tolliver said. “But of course there’s someone here in town who is. Why are you looking at me instead of trying to find out who took all the other boys? Isn’t it far more likely that that’s who’s got Chuck Almand? And if that’s so, isn’t the boy running out of time?”

I figured Sheriff Rockwell was grinding her teeth together in frustration, from the tensed look of her face.

“Do you think we’re not looking?” she said, almost biting the words out. “Now that he doesn’t have the use of his usual killing ground, where would he have taken the boy? We’re searching every shed and barn in the county, but we have to check out all other possibilities. You were one of them, and a pretty likely one at that.”

I didn’t think we were so damn likely, but then, we’d had the run-in with Chuck and his dad. There was something more I could tell the law.

“He told me he was sorry,” I said to the sheriff.

“What?”

“The boy said he was sorry. For hitting me. He told me to find him later.”

“Why? Why do you think that was? What sense does that make?” The tall deputy was looking over Rockwell’s shoulder at me as though I’d started barking.

“At the time I just thought—I have to say, I thought it was just some kind of mental illness talking. He looked so strange when he said it.”

“And what do you think now?”

“I think…I don’t know what I think.”

“That’s not a hell of a lot of help.”

“I’m not a psychologist, or a profiler, or any kind of law enforcement person,” I said. “I just find dead people.” I just find dead people. Chuck knew that. And he’d said, “Come find me.”

“Then we should get you out searching, too,” Sandra Rockwell was saying.