That afternoon I drove to the Northlake Missing Persons Office, not because anyone there owed me anything anymore, but because I wanted to read the public case summary with my own eyes instead of relying on twenty years of memory doing whatever memory does when it's asked to hold a shape for that long.
The clerk at the counter, a young man who hadn't been born when Tobin Voss disappeared, pulled the file without any particular ceremony, because it was public record and I was a retired name on an old roster, not a current investigator with any standing to ask for more.
I read it standing at the counter. Tobin Voss, twenty-one, a nursing student at Eastmere University, had left campus on February twelfth, 2004, without telling anyone where he was headed, though the summary noted he'd previously attended the Federal Service College at Dunridge before transferring. An ATM camera near the highway placed him, dark jacket, jeans, sometime that afternoon. Then nothing confirmed until his sedan was found off County Road 18.
The summary put the sedan's departure from the snow-covered road at approximately 7:30 that evening. What I remembered directly began later: dispatch calling around 7:40 about a vehicle stuck past the guardrail where the shoulder drops toward the treeline. I was closer than the other available units, so I took it. The recorded crash time wasn't something I'd witnessed, any more than his departure from campus was.
When I got there, maybe twenty minutes after the call, the car was empty. Driver's door shut, no footprints I could make out in the blowing snow, no sign of which direction, if any, he'd gone. I never saw Tobin Voss. Not that night, not after. I want to be exact about that, because exactness is the only thing I have to offer anyone on this.
Grant was waiting at the kitchen table when I got home, and I put the photocopied summary pages down in front of him like evidence, because that's what they were, evidence of what I actually knew versus what the brochure implied I knew.
"I arrived after the car was already stuck and already empty," I told him. "I did not see him leave the school. I did not see him in that car. I did not see which way he walked, if he walked at all. Everything between the ATM and the car being found is a gap. I am part of the gap, Grant, not a window into it."
"But you worked the case after," he said. "You must've had an opinion on where he went."
"I had guesses, the way anybody standing at a scene develops guesses. A guess isn't a route. A guess isn't something you sell for five hundred dollars with my name under it."
He turned the pages over slowly, like he was looking for the part that would let him keep believing the brochure was basically true, just worded badly. "The lodge thing says you were first responder."
"I was the first officer there, yes. That part is true. But the vehicle was already empty. Put that title under a promise to follow his route, without explaining what I actually saw, and you've made an abandoned-car response sound like knowledge of the man."
"That's a technicality."
"It's the entire case, Grant. The whole twenty years of it is made out of exactly that kind of technicality, people filling gaps with whatever shape feels better than not knowing. I won't be the shape somebody else's gap gets filled with, and I won't let you print my name as the glue."
He didn't argue the point further, but he didn't agree to change anything either, just folded the pages closed and said he'd talk to Della about how the brochure was worded. I told him wording wasn't the problem. The problem was that eleven people had paid real money believing somebody in this family knew something nobody in this family actually knows, and until that stopped being true, there was nothing left to word correctly.