"Not enough heat, and not enough time," Burris said. "A human body couldn't have been destroyed in just a few minutes, not that completely. Some of the car's metal was melted, sure; but there would have been traces of anybody who'd been in the car. Nice, big, easily seen traces. And there weren't any. No corpse, no remains, no nothing."
Malone let that stew in his mind for a few seconds. "But the cops said—"
"Whatever the cops said," Burris snapped, "there was nobody at all in that Cadillac when it went off the embankment."
"Now, wait a minute," Malone said. "Here's a car with a driver who appears and disappears practically at will. Sometimes he's there and sometimes he's not there."
"Ah," Burris said. "That's why I have another explanation."
Malone shifted his feet. Maybe there was another explanation. But, he told himself, it would have to be a good one.
"Nobody expects a car to drive itself down a highway," Burris said.
"That's right," Malone said. "That's why it's all impossible."
"So," Burris said, "it would be a natural hallucination—or illusion, anyhow—for somebody to imagine he did see a driver when there wasn't any."
"Okay," Malone said. "There wasn't any driver. So the car couldn't have gone anywhere. So the New York police force is lying to us. It's a good explanation, but it—"