You may have. People can call me a liar, whatever, I wouldn' t believe myself had I not shot a doe with scars to prove it. If you hit just under the spine, and forward enough to hug or just hit the thin flat part of the shoulderblades, you may have hit the dead spot.

Just one more thing to add. With a hit that high, whether you hit anything vital or not, a sparse blood trail is likely, just because the deer could do a lot of internal bleeding, but due to the location of the hit, not much gets to the ground.