"DID YOU lose something?"

It's a blazing day in June 2006. I'm walking the ditch beside Highway 12, pacing off distances around the accident site, when a bearded man in jeans comes out from his yard. Pedestrians are scarce here, and a person on foot gets noticed.

We talk about the accident. The man introduces himself, and I recognize the name. Someone told me he was the first to reach the scene after the pickup rolled away, and that he voluntarily directed traffic until the police arrived. But today his story is different. No, he didn't see the crash. He was away when it happened. Maybe the people in the next house would know more.

Those people, it turns out, are his relatives. No, they didn't see anything. But the first man—maybe he did.

"He says he didn't," I reply.

"Is he fried today?" one man asks, his hand tilting back an imaginary cold one. It's a rhetorical question; the man turns back to eating a bowl of something beefy and says no more.

It's roughly 900 miles from a surgeon's life in Des Moines to the Highway of Legends,

John Smith, a veteran accident-reconstruction expert from Colorado, is withering in his criticism of the CSP report on Breedlove's death. "This was a very, very poor investigation," he says. "They were particularly careless. I'd say he got hometowned."

but the trip requires a few adjustments in psyche as well as time zone. To those just passing through—tourists, truckers, RAAM riders—the town of Trinidad, population 9,078, looms as just another pit stop. Situated halfway between Santa Fe and Denver, Trinidad took off in the late 1800s, when southern Colorado could boast some of the most productive coal mines west of the Mississippi. But the mines played out, and the past three decades have been a long twilight, as the town and surrounding Las Animas County have struggled for reinvention as a locus of tourism and small-town geniality.

Adaptability has been Trinidad's strong suit, but it's been in short supply among the scattering of communities west of town, along the river and Highway 12. What's left of Cokedale, Segundo, Weston, Vigil, and the rest of the old settlements has blurred into a procession of weathered homes and double-wides occupied by second- and third-generation descendants of the original miners. To many folks in Trinidad, these are the "river people," an insular group that shares few of the townies' concerns about civic improvement.

In recent years, big energy companies have returned to the area, drilling for methane in the coalbeds. The gas boom has brought welcome cash, but it's still a hardscrabble existence for many residents, who keep a few chickens or cows and a wary eye on the heavy-equipment trucks roaring by their front doors. Out here, almost any activity requires driving, and the surge in highway traffic has become a favorite gripe.

On the morning of the accident, Joseph Rael and Michael Ross were on their way to unload building supplies at Sandy DeNinno's place. The Chevy truck belonged to Ross's family and, according to police, was not insured. Rael told troopers he'd never driven it on the highway before, just on back roads. After the accident, Rael and Ross drove nearly five miles to DeNinno's house before calling 911. DeNinno returned them to the scene in her truck, and Sergeant Luke Armstrong, an accident-reconstruction expert for the CSP, went to her house to examine the Chevy.

John Rael rushed to the scene of the accident as soon as he heard about it. His son was "pretty shook up," he says, but from what Joseph and the troopers told him, there was nothing that could have been done. The way he heard it, his son "had pulled off the road, and the guy more or less ran into him."

End of story? Not to the Breedloves, who scoured the state patrol's reports, photos, and diagrams of the accident and decided that entire chunks of the narrative were missing. There was no statement from DeNinno or from neighbors who might have witnessed the accident. There was no explanation why neither of the guys had stayed with the body. No drug or alcohol tests were done on the driver or the passenger, despite Ross's admission about having taken pain medication.

To the state troopers, the questions seemed beside the point. They don't perform sobriety tests without probable cause, and Rael wasn't exhibiting any signs of intoxication. As for witnesses not interviewed, Sergeant Mattie says he probably should have knocked on a few more doors. But the investigators had a set of fresh 100-foot skid marks, going from the truck's lane into the grassy ditch beside the road, that matched perfectly with the driver's account of seeing the bicyclist, hitting the brakes, and steering to the right in an effort to avoid him.

"There's no point to further investigation," Mattie says. "It's not going to change things. All of the evasive action, the tire marks, the debris pattern, and such are in the westbound lane. The skid marks start near the center of the lane and continue off to the right side of the road."

To Mattie it couldn't have been clearer: "I believe the doctor, for whatever reason, was on the wrong side of the road."