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She had left just enough clues, just enough information to create a maddening wealth of possible, even contradictory, scenarios.
“These hick cops weren’t experienced,” Blake fromDisappearing Deirdrepanted somewhere to my right. I had the impression he was a New Englander, but he sure didn’t have suitable shoes for this terrain. “They made all these dumbass assumptions about her.”
This was met with murmurs of agreement.
There were twenty of us, mostly men, making the pilgrimage to the crash site. Blue T-Shirt was not present or accounted for. I didn’t know over half of our group, neither by sight nor name. Our guide—Simon Overhiser, the editor of theWoodlark Weekly—kept us moving at a brisk pace down the narrow, mostly unlit road.
“They probably trampled over whatever clues were there,” Tony agreed. No surprise there. His role onDisappearing Deirdreseemed mostly to be agreeing with everything Blake said.
Overhiser, who would have been a teen around the time of Deirdre’s disappearance, said, “The rangers were. Experienced. The lead guy was a twenty-four-year veteran with Fish and Game. He’d led hundreds of search-and-rescues.”
Hailey, walking beside me, chimed in. “But he wasn’t brought in until thirty-six hours after Deirdre disappeared.”
Overhiser admitted, “Yeah, the delay wasn’t good. But even so. It hadn’t snowed overnight. The ground was unchanged since Deirdre had left her car. There was no more than two feet of snow with a very thin crust on top, so anyone who left the road would have left distinct footprints. There were no footprints. No indication she ever left the asphalt.”
I said, “So the terrain would have been very much as it is tonight?”
Overhiser glanced at me, nodded. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“Déjà vu,” someone said from the rear.
“Poor kid. It’s creepy as hell along here,” Hailey muttered.
I nodded. Deirdre was comfortable with the outdoors. She regularly went camping with her family, she was an experienced cross-country runner, and she’d attended a military academy for a time before transferring to UMass. This was a kid confident in her ability to manage an evening hike through the woods. Sure, she would have been shaken from the accident; maybe she had been more badly injured than was immediately apparent to Rusty Bailey—or even herself—but she had probably been less creeped out than we were now as we followed in her footsteps.
From right behind me, a male voice remarked conversationally, “New Hampshire has one of the lowest missing persons rates in the country. It’s around 2.6 per one hundred thousand people.”
This was greeted with silence.
I glanced over my shoulder. “You just happen to know that number off the top of your head?”
Rory shrugged. He’d joined our little expedition at the last minute, and I was acutely aware of him. No wonder, since he was keeping pace practically on my heels.
Hailey said, “Since Deirdreismissing, I’m not sure how that’s relevant.”
To which Rory didn’t seem to have an answer. I felt another flicker of amusement.Welcome to the wild, wild West of online investigation.
But seriously, what in the hell was Rory doing here?
From the front of the group someone called, “Don’t forget about the helicopters.”
Tony said, “Yeah, but what could you really see in forestland this thick?”
Once again, Simon was the guy with the answers. “The helicopter was equipped with a FLIR unit. That’s forward looking infrared. If Deirdre had been around here, giving off any heat signal, they’d have picked that up.”
“But how far did they actually look?”
“According to Search and Rescue, they covered a ten-mile radius around Highway 112 as well as the outlying roads, and they couldn’t find any human tracks leaving the road and going into the woodlands that were not cleared or otherwise accounted for.”
It seemed that outsiders weren’t the only ones consumed with the disappearance of Deirdre O’Donnell.
“By the end of the day, the consensus of everyone looking for her was that she hadn’t left the roadway.”
“By the end of the day, she’d have frozen to death,” Hailey said grimly.
Overhiser said, “I mean, that’s not impossible, but nobody gave up trying to find her. Ten days later, a second search was organized to comb the woods with three cadaver dogs. If you know about cadaver dogs—”
“We know,” we chorused.
