Page 13 of 44.1644° North
“Then you know they’re trained specifically to find human remains. The dog teams went into the woods and combed different grids on both sides of Route 112 within a half-mile radius for any sign, any clue that Deirdre had passed that way. There was nothing.”
I said, “And afterthat, Fish and Game conducted three more searches, one of them with a seven-dog team. They searched a total of twelve miles of roadway, at various points as far as one to two miles into the woods. They even took the dogs to areas fifty miles away that Deirdre had visited with her family.”
Simon nodded, “That’s right. But they were never able to find a single trace of her.”
“And after six months, the official search was called off.”
“Correct.”
I said, “Since then, people have continued to search the area. Her friends and family and boyfriend all continued to search. For years.”
Pat O’Donnell had come up every weekend for the first five years to hunt for her. To me, that right there was reason to dismiss the theory that Deirdre had taken off of her own volition. By all accounts she was kind and she was responsible. It would take a heart of stone to let your grieving father search for you for years when a phone call could reassure them you were still alive even if you didn’t want to see them ever again.
“And then came the amateur sleuths,” Rory said in the tone I figured local law enforcement probably used when referring to those of us trying to help with no official status to do so.
“Which is why the theory of the tandem driver makes the most sense.” Blake threw a challenging look my way.
I sighed inwardly. These peoplereallyloved their tandem-driver theory.
The blonde YouTuber from the porch (Iliana fromMurder, Makeup, and Moscato, according to Hailey) said, “A lot of people, local people, say it would be impossible to find a body in these woods because they’re so thick. They ought to know.”
“I’ve lived here all my life,” Simon said, “and sure, there’s some truth to that. But she’d have to walk into the woods to begin with, which, again, would leave tracks. Unless you believe in people levitating over long distances, it’s not possible. For her to get lost in the woods, she’d have had to leave the road, and she never left the road.”
“That’s one opinion.”
“It’s a fact,” Simon insisted.
“It’s an alternative fact,” Iliana countered.
“Oh myGod,” Rory muttered. I swallowed a laugh, but I felt his pain.
“It’s not a fact becauseyousay it’s a fact,” Iliana said hotly.
Hailey said, “It’s a fact because it’s afact!”
“Oh,that’sconvincing.”
“There’s the crash site,” Simon announced with relief.
If he thought they were going to stop arguing and lapse into respectful silence, he had another think coming. But the group did quiet for a minute or two as they observed the frozen stand of oak trees.
The largest and oldest of trees was wound with a large, tattered ribbon, hueless in the moonlight, though everyone present knew the ribbon was blue, Deirdre’s favorite color. Though the road itself had been snowplowed, snowbanks covered the brush and shrubs so that the entire landscape looked as blank and bare as the surface of the moon.
“If she’d just made that curve,” someone finally broke the silence.
Someone else said, “If she just hadn’t been drinking.”
“It’s not for sure she was,” someone else returned. “The deputy sniffed the coke bottle and assumed she’d had alcohol in there. That’s not exactly science.”
Blake said, “Unless the whole thing was staged, which is what Weber thinks.”
“True.”
“People go off the road here in the winter all the time,” Simon said. “She didn’t have to be drunk to miss that curve.”
Rory said suddenly, “Butyoudon’t think she missed the curve. You think her car stalled out.”
It took a second to realize Rory was speaking to me. I glanced at him. “Correct. According to one of the EMTs at the scene, if she’d lost control of the car as she came around the corner, she’d have impacted the north side of the curve. But she didn’t. She clipped the corner. She sheared off the snowbank and skidded to the other side, which turned the car in the opposite direction. He thought the car stalled and she was fighting to regain control when she came into the curve.”
