“I can rest in the car,” I said. I felt like a rabbit one jump ahead of the greyhounds.

“Okay,” Tolliver said. He looked at me doubtfully. But he was picking up on my almost frantic anxiety to leave Doraville.

“Good,” said the sheriff. She still sounded faintly surprised at our agreement. “I’m sure Twyla will want to give you a check and talk to you again.”

“We’ll talk to her before we leave the area for good. How’s the work at the scene going?” he asked as the sheriff pulled herself wearily from the chair and walked to the door.

She had mentally shoved us aside, so she turned back with reluctance. “We’ve dug just enough at all the spots to confirm that there are remains there,” she said. “Tomorrow morning, when the light is good, the forensic guys will be here to supervise the digging. I’m guessing my deputies will do most of the preliminary heavy work. Klavin and Stuart are supposed to keep me in the loop.” She seemed pretty dubious about that.

“That’s a good thing, right?” I said, almost babbling in my rush of relief. “Having the forensic guys in? They’ll know how to dig the bodies up without losing any evidence that’s there to be found.”

“Yeah, we don’t like admitting we need help, but we do.” Sandra Rockwell looked down at her hands for a minute, as if making sure they were her own. “I’ve personally gotten phone calls from CNN and two other networks. So you should leave really early in the morning, or take off right now. And call me when you check into another motel. Don’t leave the state or anything. Don’t forget that you’ll have to talk to the SBI guys.”

“We’ll do that,” Tolliver said.

She left without further advice, and I grabbed my suitcase. It would take me less than ten minutes to be out of there.

Tolliver got up, too, and began sticking his razor and shaving cream into his valet kit. “Why are you so anxious to go?” he asked. “I think you need to sleep.”

“It was so bad, what I saw,” I said. I paused in my packing, a folded sweater in my hands. “The last thing in the world I want to do is get sucked into this investigation. I’ll get the atlas. We better decide which way we want to go.”