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Laney’s vague forebodings weren’t my only motivation for heading west. Tracking down relatives was a priority; the last thing Roger and I wanted was for the victims’ surviving family members to learn the fate of loved ones on the news. Of course, we didn’t yet have identities for the bodies—we didn’t even have bodies. But I’d begun compiling a list of the likely deceased from lawsuits and news reports.
It was a multistep process, identifying potential victims, then naming possible family members and tracing where those family members might be. I’d been running relatives’ names through an online tracking service as I got them rather than batching, so I already had a dozen or so potential addresses in that area of the Panhandle. Meeting Laney would give me an opportunity to do some grou
