Brown made a promise to keep Philip in the loop. And Philip appreciated it, knowing that when a Southern man—especially a lawman—gave his hand to shake on and his word, he damn well meant it.

The families had not yet come out and said to one another that Jessica did this. “But,” Kevin commented later, “we knew the chances of it being a random act of violence kept diminishing. . . . Jessica was the only enemy Alan had in the world, and she was, after all, the last person he was meant to go see before he and Terra vanished.”

Among them all was the sinking, sick feeling—like some sort of virus they couldn’t see, touch or get rid of—that Jessica resorted to murder to solve her problems. And then the confusing questions: Why would she do such a thing? How in the world could she do such a thing?

From where the Bateses stood, the scenario was clear and plausible. Alan and Terra were supposed to pick up the kids somewhere near 6:00 or 6:30 P.M. Jessica said they never showed up. She called Alan and left a message on his cell phone. Alan and Terra were found in the trunk of their rental car along the I-20, past Atlanta—heading in the opposite direction of his parents’ home, near three-thirty that next morning.

When you stepped back and thought about it, what else could have happened?

As the days passed, Kevin and Robert Bates, along with members of Terra’s family, converged at the Bates home, waiting for calls to come in. As they did this, the focus was put on the children. Number one, where were they? Two, had anyone told them what had happened to Alan and Terra?

Neighbors and friends sent food and flowers, cards and condolences, to the Bates home. The days became a foggy haze of puzzlement and melancholy. Some sort of dreamlike reality. It was as if they were all living someone else’s life, just going through the motions of the day. You do things and later wonder how they got done. You don’t recall conversations. Driving places. Eating or cooking meals. The body and mind seem to work together in unison, while the soul weeps.

Making funeral arrangements kept everyone busy for a few days. It was agreed that Alan and Terra would be cremated and memorialized together.

“As they would have wanted,” said one family member.

“Everyone realized,” Kevin added, “that no matter who killed Alan and Terra, they were gone, regardless. We were focused on what we needed to do. What we could do. How do we honor them? We don’t even have their bodies yet.”

The idea that closure was going to come sooner rather than later was not a certainty anyone could take comfort in just yet. They all knew, understood and accepted that Alan and Terra were dead. Yet, officially, they were still waiting for “positive confirmation” that those two terribly burned bodies in the trunk of that rental car were actually Alan and Terra. Death’s limbo. You know in your heart, but you still cannot stop holding out hope. Dental records were one thing. DNA another. Until then, that hidden optimism—a single strand of subtle brightness—hangs out there in the open, and you don’t want to turn your back on it.

With the media stirring in Birmingham, waiting on the HPD’s next move, reporting on the case, play by play, the families decided the best place to have the memorial service was Georgia.

The Birmingham News put one of its more esteemed, prized reporters, Carol Robinson, on the case. Carol had over a decade-and-a-half ’s worth of experience working the Birmingham crime beat. Most Hoover cops knew Carol. Appreciated her work. Valued her tenacity for printing the truth. “That is rare,” one cop told me, “in newspaper reporting around here.” If nothing else, investigators from the HPD knew that Carol would cover the story with a deference to the families and set her sights on facts. Carol had a reputation for not focusing on sensationalism but instead keeping her eye on what made the story important in the fabric of the local, social landscape. She was a reporter’s reporter.

Carol was home, sick, on Monday. A source close to the HPD called her. “Stand by, something big is coming your way.”

She was interested, obviously, and the tip had a quick-recovery effect on the illness she was battling.

The attractive blond reporter, a native Southerner, was born and raised in Dixie. Carol and her family moved to Avon, Connecticut, for four years—from five to nine years old—but they had lived in the “Yellowhammer State” ever since. A graduate of Vestavia Hills High School in Birmingham, Carol went to Auburn University and started working for Alabama’s largest newspaper, the Birmingham News, three months out of college, in 1986. It was her first and only full-time newspaper job. Heading into the McCord case, some sixteen years later, Carol was now the senior reporter, leading the newspaper’s crime coverage. She had an understanding of covering high-profile murder cases: the slayings of three Birmingham police officers, the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing and the subsequent five-year hunt for fugitive Eric Robert Rudolph, as well as the reopening of the case of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.

Getting out of bed and heading into work, Carol realized she had not even heard that two bodies with Birmingham ties had been found in Georgia. Still, she dragged herself into the office and wrote what would be the first of several stories the Birmingham News devoted to the case: KILLINGS FOLLOW CUSTODY FIGHT: PELHAM OFFICER, WIFE SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING.

“As you can tell,” Carol later told me, “it was made clear quickly that the McCords were suspects. . . . [The case] was a talker, but not, say, to the level of Natalee Holloway. That is, because there was not time for it to build as a mystery. . . . There was not much made about Jeff being a police officer because he was not much of a police officer, in that he was not some big, bad cop with a list of awards or disciplinary actions against him. He was just vanilla. Jessica became a popular villain as time wore on because she was trashy, crazy—and nobody could understand what she had that would attract so many men. . . .”

Carol’s first story detailed the case up to the point of which it had been reported publicly, focusing on bare facts. It was enough to get the ball rolling so Carol could call on her sources and dig in.

“Had we been in Birmingham,” Kevin commented, referring to the families, “we would have been right in the middle of the fire.”

There was a lot brewing around town as Jessica and Jeff planned their next move. Part of the speculation was that Jessica fled—took off somewhere and could not be found. Investigators knew she and Jeff had driven to Florida to avoid the media and, presumably, the police, as well as to drop the children off at her sister’s house. It was not uncommon for Jessica to head to Florida to visit her sister and, one former family member noted, “run away from her problems.”

Jessica was an expert at avoiding accountability.

Word soon spread, however, that Jeff and Jessica had dropped the children off in Florida and had turned around and headed back to Alabama. One comfort to the Bateses in knowing this was that the kids were going to be spared all that was blowing up back home. The kids surely didn’t need pressure of any sort. No good could come out of them seeing their dad’s picture on the local nightly news, or their mother’s name in the newspapers. The impact of the deaths alone was going to be hard enough. To think that their mother was being viewed as a suspect would be devastating.

Philip Bates called Jessica’s sister’s house in Florida numerous times. He wanted to speak with the kids. Then ask her to make sure they were sent to Atlanta in time for the memorial services. The funeral was planned for Saturday, three days away.