“It’s nine feet. Plenty deep enough for a car.”

He said it like he was talking about a swimming pool, not a brown canal that ran beside an ordinary New Orleans road like it had always been there and would always be there. Wind scraped over the water and chopped it into nervous little fists. The sky had that winter-bright Louisiana look—blue, loud, indifferent—and the air felt colder than the temperature claimed it was.

A remote-control sonar boat bumped against the bank, black plastic against mud and trash, and Jeremy Sides watched his screen the way people watch a heart monitor in an ER waiting room: not breathing until it tells them something.

“My goal is literally to search the canals all around the route he would have taken,” he said, voice clipped by wind.

Somewhere inside all that water sat a question that hadn’t stopped echoing since 1989.

And on the edge of that question, like a small metal prayer, was a license plate number: 816B554.

They called them scuba—blank—the new hobby, like it was a punchline. Like it was just two guys with cameras, a boat, and too much time. But the hobby had quietly changed shape: it went from cleaning up waterways to solving mysteries, from pulling trash to pulling answers. Jeremy Sides and Adam Brown traveled the country searching for closure in cold cases, the kind that stayed cold because the last known moment was too ordinary to grab onto.

“Amazing,” someone said in a clip Jeremy had heard a hundred times. “The gift of closure to grieving families is absolutely priceless.”

Today he was back in New Orleans, Louisiana, continuing a search in an area where there were, depending on who was counting and when, around thirteen missing people believed to still be inside vehicles somewhere in the maze of canals and drainage ways. Last episode, he’d found a couple vehicles out west of the city. Now he was in town, trying to cover more.

“There’s so many canals everywhere,” he said, looking down an endless ribbon of brown water bordered by grass and a narrow shoulder. “It’s a really windy day, so I don’t know how good the audio is gonna be. The water’s also really choppy looking.”

He started with a canal he’d never scanned in that section before. He’d scanned up there and farther up toward the mall, but he wanted to finish down here, to close a gap on his map like closing a wound. He was kind of searching for Adrien Planells—sometimes people said it like Plen’s, sometimes like Plan-ells—a Kenner man who went missing back in ’89. The name had weight now, not because it was famous, but because it was stubborn.

Twenty-eight years. That’s how long the family of Adrien Planells had wondered what happened to their son and brother. He seemed to disappear after going to work. Still hard, still raw even though almost twenty-eight years had gone by.

Wiping away tears in an old interview, Barbara Planells remembered the day her older brother Adrien Juan Planells vanished.

“What I want is closure,” she said. “I want closure for my family.”

Barbara said Adrien left the bar in his 1968 Chevy Camaro heading toward home, but he never made it. She’d been a young girl then, but she remembered the search teams, her dad doing everything to keep his name out there, to keep the question alive.

“They saw him cross the street, get back in his vehicle, and they seen him drive off,” she said. “After a while, when there was no leads, it just went cold.”

Jeremy kept thinking about that sentence—cross the street, get back in his vehicle, drive off—as if the whole life could be reduced to three simple movements and a blank space after.

He walked the bank, watching the sonar numbers flicker. “C’mon,” he muttered. “Some canals are just really shallow and some canals have deep spots. About to find out, though. Oh, it’s chilly and windy.”

He eased the boat forward, keeping it close enough to the edge to maintain a decent scan. “Yeah, like look at this. It’s like eight, ten feet right here. I don’t think we can really go past this bridge. This is pretty much the end of this one.”

He checked again. “It’s nine feet. Plenty deep enough for a car, you know. And I think a Camaro sits pretty low in the water too.”

Then the depth dropped as if the canal itself had stepped back. “Yeah—see, now it’s five feet.” He frowned at the screen. These canals were so narrow that if you went over anything, you were going to see it. That was the theory, anyway.

He crossed a little bridge. “It’s only three feet over here,” he said, and the wind hit him full in an open field so flat it felt like the weather had nowhere else to go. He drove all the way down and didn’t see a thing. Too shallow. A couple random deeper spots, but mostly too shallow.

“All right,” he said, swallowing frustration like it was part of the job. “Next stretch.”

The map in his head had become a kind of promise. Not a romantic one—a practical one. Search the canals around the route. Clear them. Then branch out. Because if Adrien wasn’t in one of these canals, Jeremy kept telling himself, he must have gone to a friend’s house or somewhere else. There was nowhere else he could go, not logically, not with his house only about two miles down the way.

“He’s not the type of person to leave,” Barbara’s voice echoed in his memory.

Jeremy sent the boat out again. Geese watched like suspicious locals. A plastic bag snagged the prop. He pulled it free. “There’s just a lot of trash out here,” he said. “Shopping carts and all sorts of trash. Plastic.”

He tried again. The end he hoped might be deeper wasn’t. He looked at fences and banks and tried to imagine what it was like in ’89, what was here then, what wasn’t. He kept scanning, mostly leaning out the window because the wind made everything feel sharper.

“It says fifty degrees out, but it feels a lot colder,” he said. “Wind chill is what makes it bad.”

Then the sonar showed something. Not a clear shape, but a shape with intent. “All right, I just went over something in the water,” he said. “It’s the first thing I’ve seen that kinda looks bigger. You know—actually kinda looks like a manatee. I don’t know if that’s crazy. I really don’t know what I’m looking at.”

A shape that could be anything was still better than nothing. It meant the water could still hide secrets without apologizing.

And the older the question, the more any shadow starts to look like an answer.

The next day he showed up with what he called a crazy plan. He pointed the camera at his setup like he was daring the universe to laugh. An e-bike stood on the shoulder, and strapped onto it—rigged up in a way that looked half-engineering, half-determination—was the sonar boat. It did look ridiculous. It also looked like the only way to do this without a full-sized boat and a miracle.

“There’s not really a good way to search,” Jeremy said. “There’s so many canals and there’s enough room for a bike path. You could ride your bike all along down them.”

It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The road was busy enough to remind him he wasn’t in a documentary bubble. He pulled up a map on screen and traced what he’d already covered. “Here’s where he left,” he said. “Here’s the house he was going to—his parents’ house. And you can see the canals I’ve searched. I’m trying to do a complete circle. It’s like a big square.”

He’d checked one closer to the parents’ place—too shallow. Another looked wider. He wanted to start there, cover the whole canal, slowly ride the bike down and sonar it.

“The bad news is this whole canal is really brown water,” he said. “So if we find a car, it’s poor visibility.”

He dropped the boat in. The depth readout blinked. “Three feet right now. It’s not good,” he said. “But we got a long way to go.”

Then the readout jumped near bridges. “See, it’s five. They’re like four, five-foot holes by the bridges.”

He started pedaling, eyes flicking between road and water, between the boat and the numbers. “We’re starting our journey and it’s—three, four feet. Not looking good,” he said, then admitted the truth he didn’t like saying out loud. “I just can’t get out of my head that there might be that sweet spot and there might be a car sitting in that perfect hole.”

Cars didn’t just disappear. They didn’t evaporate. They went somewhere. And in a city built around water management, “somewhere” had an annoying tendency to look like “under.”

“This probably looks so insane to most locals,” he said as trucks passed, but he shrugged it off like he’d stopped caring about looking normal a long time ago. “I don’t know anything. I could be crazy. Probably a little bit crazy. But it takes being a little bit crazy to find people.”

People loved to say there’s no reason to search that pond or that lake. Then you search it, and that’s where they are.

He watched the depth spike. “Yeah. See right here—there’s a seven-foot hole. It’s always right by the pipelines,” he said, and you could hear the thought he couldn’t stop chewing on. “What if there’s a car sitting in one of these seven-foot holes?”

He crossed his first bridge, took the boat out, walked it across the street, put it back in. The routine was awkward and relentless. A man fishing stopped him.

“What you got there, bro?”

“How’s it going?” Jeremy said, friendly, still scanning.

“That’s all your fishing stuff?”

“Scanning the water. Yeah. Running sonar.”

“Oh, cool, man. Have fun, brother.”

“Appreciate it.”

Jeremy watched the screen again. “Second object that’s kind of bigger. I think it’s a couch,” he said. The shape was rectangle, big enough to make his pulse rise, but not car-enough to change his day. Four to six feet there. Not a car. Maybe a couch or a boat or concrete something.

He made it to the end of one canal section, then turned around. “Keep grinding,” he said, because that’s what this was: a grind against geography and time.

On the other side, he kept scanning. “This is the reality of this,” he said. “This is a little bit crazy.”

He talked about New Orleans like he was explaining it to someone who’d never seen water used as infrastructure. “I’m fascinated with New Orleans because there’s so much water and so many canals. It’s kind of designed for a sonar boat—remote-control boat. A little more inconspicuous, too.”

Then he got to a bridge section and the depth jumped in a way that made his shoulders tighten. “It has nine. It’s a big hole right here,” he said. “This would be a good spot for a vehicle to hide. Ten feet. That’s more what we’re looking for depthwise.”

Bridge pillars. Drop-offs. Places where a wrong turn could become a final turn.

“Oh—” he said, and his voice changed. “I think we have a car. I think I just went over a vehicle.”

His scan glitched right when he was staring at it. He cursed under his breath, tried to line it up again.

“This is the right area too,” he said. “Let’s see. I think that’s a vehicle.”

The shape sharpened. Tires. An outline that didn’t belong in a canal.

“Yep,” he said. “That’s a car. One hundred percent. We have a vehicle, and it’s pretty close to the area we’re looking for.”

He let the possibility hang there like a held breath. “This could be his. This could be Adrien’s car. Could be another car.”

He stared down the canal as if the water was a hallway and the past was waiting at the far end. “If there’s a bunch more that way, it might be a dumping ground,” he said, then admitted the truth that always lived under these searches: “That’s what I’m saying. You just never know. And there’s too much water. You have to check all of it.”

He saw it again. “There it is. It’s upside down.”

Upside down meant impact, speed, surprise, physics winning.

He decided to keep scanning farther first. It was too much work to hopscotch the boat and bike across every bridge. He could park his truck somewhere nearby later, even if he had to pull off in the grass. One vehicle found. That was the headline in his head.

He scanned down the long stretch toward the mall to finish what he’d started earlier, but his mind kept snapping back to one detail: it was in a perfect spot.

And perfect spots are where old questions like to hide.

When he checked the road layout, he learned something that made the whole canal feel less random. “All right, here’s what I figured out,” he said, pointing to where asphalt now sat. “This road right here wasn’t here. This section—it basically came right there and then curved and went that way. So this side of the bridge was not over here. This was just a corner and dirt.”

A sharp 90-degree turn. Back then, if you kept going instead of turning, you didn’t hit a guardrail. You hit the idea that the road would continue.

“It’s a sharp ninety-degree turn and you would have kept going,” he said. “So this one’s kind of looking like it might be an accident. Which unfortunately, that is kind of what we’re looking for.”

He didn’t say it with drama. He said it with the exhausted realism of someone who has learned that “closure” doesn’t always look like relief. Sometimes it looks like confirmation.

He was about to send the drone down. Visibility was the question. The water was brown and thick with suspended silt. The canal had the look of a place no one watched because it was always there.

“All right,” he said, shifting into gear. “We’re gonna be using my Chasing M2S underwater drone. This thing is a beast.”

He said it like he needed the beast to do the emotional heavy lifting too.

He reminded himself what he was actually hunting. “We’re looking for a bluish-green ’68 Chevrolet Camaro,” he said. “License plate 816B554.”

The number sounded like a password. Like if he said it enough times, the water would open.

“It’s upside down,” he said, “which means usually the rear end is kind of up a little bit.”

He took a breath and dropped the drone into the canal.

“Okay,” he said, watching the screen. “There is some viz, so that’s good.”

The drone lights cut into the murk, a narrow cone in a wide uncertainty. The image shook. Pillars appeared, then disappeared. He guided carefully, trying not to snag on garbage.

“I think we’re at the vehicle,” he said. “What is this?”

Something sat by the pillars, a shape older than the trash around it. He tried to get his bearings. “That appears to be a vehicle,” he said. “Older-looking vehicle. It’s not great viz.”

He moved slowly. “There’s a lot of garbage,” he muttered, as if the canal was offended by his curiosity. He didn’t want to disturb anything. He wanted a badge, a mark, a clue that said yes or no.

“That looks like a light,” he said. “A light of some sort. I think this is the front.”

He followed the undercarriage. “Okay—there’s… I think that’s the drivetrain, the shaft,” he said. “So I should be going toward the rear.”

Something floated like cloth. “What is that? It’s like some blanket or something wrapped up.”

Then a tire came into view.

“There’s the tire,” he said, voice tightening. “Let’s see. If there’s a decal on it.”

This was the nerve-wracking part, the part where hope pretended to be logic. “You just never know what it is,” he whispered, as if speaking softly would keep disappointment from hearing him.

He angled the drone closer. Letters emerged through silt and rust.

“It kind of looks like a—” he started.

Then his breath hitched. “Oh, no.”

He stared.

“Oh, I think it says Toyota. Toyota. Yeah—I think that says Toyota.”

He sat back like he’d been pushed. “So that’s not— not our car,” he said, and the words sounded like the canal had answered, just not the way he wanted.

He tried to swing around to the back anyway, because the mind always bargains. The car was rusty. The trunk looked open. He hunted for a tag, but couldn’t tell.

“Well,” he said finally, “some sort of Toyota. I don’t know what.”

He pulled the drone up a little and the camera caught the surroundings, and the surroundings explained too much. “There’s like a mattress, a bike, TV,” he said. “This is a dumping ground.”

Suddenly the “perfect accident spot” also looked like a perfect place to leave things that didn’t belong. He wasn’t surprised anymore that there was a random car. He was only surprised it took this long.

But he wasn’t done scanning. “We did not finish scanning this section,” he said. “We’re gonna continue scanning down here just because I wouldn’t be surprised if we find something else.”

And then the screen gave him another shape.

“Well… like, that’s another car,” he said, half a laugh, half disbelief. “I knew I should’ve finished scanning this. It’s another car.”

He watched more shapes appear on sonar as he went farther. “All right, I’ve been going down farther and I found—so I found that second one and then I just found a third car,” he said, the words tumbling like the water was confessing.

He paused, listening to his own experience talk back at him. “In my experience, dumping grounds are all empty and stolen,” he said. “Every once in a while there will be somebody in there, but you won’t know until you send the drone down.”

He looked toward the end where the water got shallower. There was a church down there, another road section, another set of bridges to cross. As he said it might be too shallow, the sonar marked something else.

“It might be a car,” he said. “It’s got like a tall cab. It might be like an old truck.”

The battery started dying. He brought the boat back.

“Back over here where I marked my car,” he said, returning to the earlier find like it was an unfinished sentence. This one looked like a hatchback, maybe. He sat in his truck, trying to get shade, trying to keep calm. It was getting warmer. He dropped the drone again.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s throw it in, see if we can’t find this one as easy as the last one.”

The drone lights cut into brown water. Trash drifted like props in a bad set. “I think I found it,” he said. “Found something. It’s gotta be the vehicle.”

Then doubt again. “Well, I say that—there’s a lot of trash out here.”

A label drifted by. “Wind-Dixie,” he read, and shook his head. “No, I don’t think that’s it.”

He adjusted. “Here’s the car,” he said. Metal frame. A window opening. Rust like a second skin. “That’s definitely a window,” he said. “That might be the rear. Gotta find that mirror.”

He followed the frame. “All right, we got a bumper.” He searched for a tire logo. “It’s always pretty helpful.”

A symbol appeared—square or diamond. “I don’t know what that is,” he said. “Definitely older. Big old grill.”

He moved toward what he thought was the passenger side. The window was broken. He tried to read the car without being a car guy. “Don’t get mad at me in the comments,” he said automatically, because he could already hear the internet arguing.

Inside, the rear seat showed through the darkness. Something strange caught his eye for a split second and his stomach dropped. “What is that in the seat?” he said, then corrected himself, trying to keep his voice steady. “I think that’s trash. It looked really weird for a second.”

He didn’t want to go inside the seats unless he had to. The open windows made it likely it was just dumped, stripped, hollow. He looked for a tag, a decal, anything that could name it.

“I don’t see one,” he said. “I also still don’t see what this car is.”

Later, after more research, he admitted he couldn’t figure it out. So he reached out to his buddy Jason Serrato, who did what the internet loves: he identified it.

It was a Yugo.

A small automobile brand from Yugoslavia, based on older Fiat designs, that gained attention in the mid-1980s when the Yugo GV was introduced to the U.S. as the cheapest new car on the market, selling for under $4,000. Production and exports declined in the early ’90s, and eventually the brand ended entirely in 2008.

A cheap car in a forgotten canal. A whole history summarized in rust.

Jeremy went back to another one. “All right, here is the other one,” he said. Typical car shape, but it dropped off in the back in a way he recognized without being able to name.

“Oh, there it is,” he said. “All right, we found it.”

A seat appeared on screen and he realized he might be too close. “That is a seat,” he said, “which means I might be inside of this thing, which I don’t want to be.”

He backed out carefully, voice low. “This one’s a bit of a mess. It looks like I almost got my drone stuck in it earlier.”

The front grill came into view like a face underwater. “Might need y’all—car guys—help with this one,” he said. The light was fading. The image was soft. Time was running out in that quiet way it always does when you want it to hold still.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s old. I’m not getting a good image. It’s also getting dark, running out of time here.”

He hovered the drone, trying to memorize details like a witness statement. The distinct back angle. The grill. The way the shape ended.

“Leave a comment,” he said. “Let me know what you think it is. I’ll do some research myself.”

He pulled the drone up, water dripping, and looked down the canal again. The wind had eased a little. The surface still looked like it could swallow a secret and keep it warm for decades.

Adrien Planells left a bar in a bluish-green 1968 Camaro with license plate 816B554, and people saw him cross the street, get back in his vehicle, and drive off. After a while, when there were no leads, it went cold. Jeremy had found cars, plural, in a place that felt like an ending for more than one story. One upside down Toyota. A Yugo—cheap history, rusted into anonymity. Another old vehicle he couldn’t name yet.

None of them, so far, wore the plate he couldn’t stop repeating.

816B554.

He said it again in his head the way Barbara had said closure, the way a family says a name at the dinner table even when the chair is empty. The number wasn’t just a search detail anymore. It was a vow that the last ordinary moment wouldn’t be allowed to stay the last word.

Because in a city with so much water, you don’t just search for a car—you search for the line where a life went off-route, and you refuse to pretend the canal didn’t notice.

And sometimes the only way to keep a cold case from staying cold is to keep moving, even when the wind keeps telling you to go home.