We had to park down the street from the station because of all the media, and we walked briskly through them, looking neither to the right nor the left. Luckily, we’d almost made it to the door by the time we were recognized. As the voices rose in questions I wouldn’t answer, I focused on the door. I hoped it would be the last time we’d ever walk into that particular building. Deputy Rob Tidmarsh was standing there ready to swing the door open. He escorted us to what had been an interrogation room. In fact, it was the same one where we’d been such unwilling guests. It was now set up with a laptop computer and a young man who was ready to extract information from us. We gave him our accounts of the happenings in the barn, and he printed them out, and we signed them. All this took about an hour and a half, maybe twice as long as we’d estimated, and we saw Sandra Rockwell pass by about six times, but she didn’t feel the need to speak to us.

There must be a lot to do, I thought as Tolliver talked to the young man, who was about our age. Chronologically. In a case of mass murder, there must be a million details to collect and put in order. I couldn’t imagine being in charge of that. And then to have other people brought in over my head, people coming into my town and in front of my own employees taking the case away from me, or at least important aspects of it…. No wonder Rockwell didn’t have time to stop to talk to us. Building a case against the man who’d killed eight boys and tried to kill another was way more important than stroking the ego of a woman who’d done her job and been paid for it.

Yes, no matter how connected I felt to the case, it was time for me to go. I’d never stayed as long, or maybe it just hadn’t felt as long. I’d never found that many bodies at one event, either. This was a first for all of us.

What I felt like doing was prying open the heads of a few people myself, prying them open and looking inside, trying to locate the guilt I knew was in one of them. My conviction that there was a second murderer remained unshaken. But I couldn’t think of a way to discover for sure who it might be, and Tolliver was right. It wasn’t my job. I wished, for one deluded minute, that I was telepathic. I could just read a man’s mind and fathom his guilt or innocence.