In her initial version of what took place that night, Sarah said that after Elisa and Larry went into the house, she next checked her cell phone for messages. Her boyfriend Jason had called. Sarah called him back. Jason told her that Sarah’s mother and father had come over to Sarah’s apartment, and had taken her new puppy, Ralph, a Maltese terrier about the size of a shoebox. They’d also taken her recently acquired BMW.

Sarah was furious. She called her parents. Elisa by this point had come out of the house and was listening to Sarah as she made the call. Sarah let Mark and Karen know that she was unhappy, and said she’d be over to pick the dog up as soon as she could get there. She didn’t understand why they had taken the dog to begin with, since Jason had agreed to take care of it while Sarah was away. She hung up. Elisa told her to use the truck to drive to Vacaville to pick up Ralph, then to come back to Lodi—about a ninety-minute round trip. Sarah had to come back that night because Elisa needed the truck in the morning—she’d already decided to sell it back in Los Angeles.

Which certainly seemed to indicate that whatever was ailing Larry, it might be permanent.

For Mark and Karen Dutra in Vacaville, the day had begun in terror and ended in recrimination.

Not long after the planes hit the World Trade Center, Karen remembered that her son, a student at Georgetown Law, had a job interview scheduled for that day in New York City. She worried that he might have been in one of the towers, or on one of the planes that had been hijacked. When she couldn’t immediately reach him, she called Sarah. She guessed that Sarah would also be worried, since the whole country was seeing the devastation in New York City. A little after 7 in the morning, she called Sarah and left a message at her Sacramento apartment. Sarah retrieved the message and called Karen back while she and Elise were still in the Whalens’ hotel room at the City of Industry.

Karen thought Sarah sounded strange, even distant. She’d had no idea she had returned to southern California to be with Elisa. When Karen said she’d been worried about her son, Sarah’s older brother, Sarah sounded “robotic,” as Karen put it later—very preoccupied. In fact, she didn’t sound at all concerned about him. Karen was at first mystified as to why Sarah would be in Los Angeles on a school day, and then a little miffed that Sarah was being so blasé about the disasters. “Pray for your brother,” Karen told Sarah.

“I will, Mom,” Sarah said.

Sarah ended the call fairly quickly, and Karen got ready to go to her job, part of her thinking that Sarah had been acting strangely distant for weeks—ever since she had returned from Italy, in fact.

That afternoon, after the Dutras had determined that their son was safe, they’d received a call from a Texas car dealer. The dealer told the Dutras that a BMW he’d sold to Sarah had been paid for by a worthless check from Larry McNabney. If the Dutras could get the car back, the dealer said, he wouldn’t charge Sarah with auto theft.

Auto theft! After all that had happened to the Dutras with Mark’s own trouble over the embezzlement charge, that was the last thing they needed. Around 4 in the afternoon, Mark and Karen drove to Sacramento, having only a vague idea of where Sarah’s apartment was. Eventually they found the place, and knocked on the door. Jason answered, and the Dutras told him the story about the Texas car dealer. Jason gave Mark the keys and Karen the dog. Then they drove back to Vacaville. Mark called the Texas dealer and told him he’d recovered the car, and asked what the dealer wanted him to do with it. The dealer told him to hang on to it—he’d send a car carrier to pick it up. Of course, Mark would have to pay $600 to transport the car back to Texas, the dealer said.

So both Dutras were somewhat perturbed when Sarah called later that night to berate them for taking the dog.

About 10 that night, Sarah drove into the Dutra driveway in the red dually.

“Where’s my dog?” she asked. Both Dutras thought Sarah was very upset, but weren’t sure why—whether it was because of the BMW, or because they had taken Ralph, the Maltese terrier. They tried to talk to Sarah about the BMW and the Texas dealer’s allegations, but she wouldn’t listen. She took Ralphie and drove away—all the way back to Lodi, in fact.

When Sarah got back to the Woodbridge house it was about 1:30 in the morning. Elisa was by herself, waiting up for her, Sarah said.

“I said, ‘Where’s Larry?’” Sarah recounted later. “She just looks at me … and said, ‘Don’t worry about it—just don’t worry about it.’ I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, oh my God …’

“And I wish I knew more, but I don’t. I really … don’t,” Sarah concluded. And with that, she burst into tears.

But Sarah did know more—a lot more.