One might think $1 million in confiscated drug money would not be difficult to track down. One would be wrong.

This story starts with a telephone call in June 2009. A state police trooper and union representative I had never met dialed me up to let me in on a drug bust on Interstate 91.

My source told me two guys had been stopped after their car was spotted by a trooper on a road construction job who had picked up an alert with a description of the vehicle. My source said police found $1 million in drug money in the car.

At the time, there was some public discussion about having civilian flag personnel monitor highway construction jobs, a less expensive alternative to uniformed police officers. The moral of his story was that having state police on road construction duty was a good thing.

If I hadn’t been given a heads-up, the stop would probably have passed under my radar.

Instead, I checked court and found that indeed two men named Mathieu Nantais and Michael Masse had been stopped and arrested on I-91. According to court documents, police found secret, battery-operated compartments in the car that contained an estimated $500,000 to $1 million in cash. Police believed Nantais and Masse were running marijuana between Canada and the U.S. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had its eye on them and put out the alert that day in June.

Masse was arraigned in Northampton District Court for operating without a license, but that charge was dropped so that the two men could be transported to New Hampshire to face federal drug charges. It was no longer our story, and I forgot about it until about six months later when I started wondering: Whatever happened to that $1 million?

Northampton police were not involved in the stop, but I called Police Chief Russ Sienkiewicz to ask about the protocol in drug-money seizures. He told me such money is normally divided among the agencies involved in the arrest, according to a complicated formula.

The Northampton Police Department folds its confiscated drug money back into training for officers assigned to drug cases. We’re usually talking less than $10,000 here. The addition of $1 million is a lot of training.

I called the Northwestern district attorney’s office, thinking it might be due a cut of the money because the arrests were made within its jurisdiction. Elizabeth Scheibel’s office never saw a dime, however.

I called the DEA in Boston several months ago. They were going to look into it and get back to me. I’m still waiting. I called the state police. They told me to call the DEA.

A local prosecutor told me she thought a drug task force under the New Hampshire attorney general’s office was involved in the investigation that led to the bust. I called that office as well as the U.S. attorney’s office in New Hampshire numerous times but never got a live person.

After a half dozen phone calls, a woman from the attorney general’s office called back to say she had run the names I left by the drug task force and no one had ever heard of them.

The U.S. attorney’s office in New Hampshire has not returned my calls, the latest of which I made just before writing this.

I believe the money is being appropriately stored or has been divided according to formula. It’s too bad I can’t get anyone to verify this.

I’d also like to know why New Hampshire law enforcement was in on the case since the alleged drug runners could have made it to Canada quite nicely without going through that state.

If I find any of this out, I will share it with my readers. Maybe today the phone will ring, and someone will explain it all to me. Maybe tomorrow.