First, the raw facts.
A week into his senior year, my son failed to come home after football practice. When he hadn’t appeared by morning, I called Daniel’s mother, Katherine. She walked off her nursing shift, drove six hours from Spokane and boarded a ferry to Port Furlong. By the time she was pulling up my drive, Gary Barton, the sheriff, was pulling out. I had contacted him when calls to friends and relations turned up nothing. Gary, a gruff, efficient man, had, in the span of a few hours, recruited and organized two dozen people to start a search.
In the days that followed, Katherine and I devoted ourselves to finding our son. Students and teachers and family friends, even strangers, joined us, scouring alleys and parks and the woods that surround our small town. Seven days in we had yet to discover a clue.
On the morning of the eighth day, Daniel’s childhood friend Jonah was found dead. In a suicide note, he confessed to Daniel’s murder. While the note provided careful directions to our son’s remains, it gave no explanation or other details. Jonah—who had been nearly a second child to us, who had appeared each day pretending to search with the others—had likely witnessed our suffering and chosen to spare us further agonies of hope.
Daniel was found then, his body slashed to pieces, dragged from brambles and partially claimed by scavengers that populate our woods—likely crows and coyotes according to the autopsy report. The weapon that executed the savagery was a 4.2-inch fixed-blade hunting knife, also used to gut a large buck whose tattered carcass lay nearby.
These are the facts. They reveal only that the greatest mysteries lie hidden in what we believe we already know.