LAST APRIL 11, members of the Breedlove family, including Gretchen, Bill, Bill's wife, LaJean, and Bob's 26-year-old daughter, Ann, along with attorney Shawn Gillum and Tony Becker, met with officials in Trinidad, hoping to get the case reopened. Bill expected the troopers to be defensive, but their intransigence in the face of the family's material was, in his view, shocking.

He asked Sergeant Armstrong if he'd read the autopsy report. Armstrong told him he didn't need to read it, that the accident reconstruction and the determination of cause of death were entirely separate functions. "He almost got mad at me," Breedlove recalls. "That guy looked me in the eye and told me he didn't need that information."

Becker got a chillier reception when he asked for documentation to establish that the skid marks had been matched to the truck. "I got the impression I might as well pack my bags and go," he says. "They each gave a five-minute spiel about how they got it all right: 'This is the way it happened, and you people need to deal with it.'"

Mattie and Armstrong

Just taking part in RAAM is risky—racers cover some 3,ooo miles in eight or nine days, and sleep deprivation is a serious problem. Despite Breedlove's long record as "an annoyingly safe rider," his wife wasn't thrilled to discover he was racing again in 2005.

were adamant. Whatever the investigation's flaws—not that they were admitting any—the skid marks indicated the accident occurred in Rael's lane, and they didn't see any evidence to the contrary. District Attorney Lee Hawke declined to reopen the case.

Hawke tells Outside he would have handled the case differently from the way his assistant did and would have told the judge that a fatality was involved. But he's satisfied that justice was served. "No one has suggested anything inappropriate about the 15-year-old's driving from day one," he says. "I thought it was an open-and-shut deal. But I'm not an accident reconstructionist."

Mattie thinks the Breedloves are making too much out of the more cryptic phrases in the troopers' interviews with Rael and Ross. "I think it's just a misunderstanding," he says. "What the kids meant when they said 'He crossed in front of us' is that he came from his assigned lane. That's all."

It's a curious line of reasoning. Here's the chief investigator of the accident telling us what the witnesses really meant, when he barely questioned them himself. The written statement of Joseph Rael amounts to 100 words; there's no formal statement by Michael Ross.

Like Joseph Rael, Ross declined to be interviewed by Outside. Among the people living along the river, there's a weariness with further questions about the matter, which many consider closed. Rael paid his fine. What more do the Breedloves want?

"We want people to recognize that there are big holes in this investigation," Bill says. "I still have people coming to see me, over a year later, asking, 'What ever happened to that case?' It's embarrassing to have to say, 'Nothing, really.' "

The Breedloves have discussed an ever-dwindling pool of options, including offering a reward for new witnesses to come forward. Civil suits sometimes serve to leverage information, but Bill says his family won't consider that. "We're not after this kid," he says. "The world's going to be uphill most of his life anyway. We want the biking world to know the truth, or at least something closer to it than what the police came up with."

If Bill could, he'd take anyone interested out to where his brother died, so they could draw their own conclusions. Highway 12 is tattooed with skid marks, thanks to the kind of heavy braking that occurs when a pickup doing 60 or 70 whips around a curve and almost parks in the back of a dump truck doing 35. Most of the heavy truck traffic is several miles east of where Breedlove died, but this stretch has its dangers, too. The curve Rael took just before spotting the bike banks slightly, and fast-moving westbound vehicles have a tendency to drift toward the center of the road. One clear spring afternoon, I watched as roughly every third car rode on or crossed the double yellow.

Fewer than 50 yards from where the body was found, two black stripes scar the north-facing wall of a farmhouse. According to the homeowner, they mark the spot where a Toyota truck came to rest after the driver lost control going around the curve. The truck slid across the road, rumbled through the ditch, and literally tried to climb up the side of the house.

Gretchen Breedlove has driven that curve and felt her car tug to the left. "In my mind, I know what happened," she says. "When you're going fast, you pull to the center. I will stick by that until the day I meet Bob in heaven and he tells me different."