Page 44 of The Girl and the Lies

“So essentially, you allow people to rent cars without knowing who they are and without any guarantee that they will return them, much less that they have the proper licensing and insurance to operate a motor vehicle,” I say.

“The cars are all outfitted with GPS, so if I need to track one down after it’s been rented, I can,” he says.

I’m trying to keep my emotions in and not show just how frustrated I am by what he’s telling me. Obviously, whoever rented the car—and I have no doubt their name is not Nicholas Beamer—knew about these policies and rented the car with them in mind.

“How did the renter pay for the rental?” I ask.

“It looks like a prepaid debit card,” he says.

I take a breath and let it out slowly.

“Has the car been cleaned since it was returned?” I ask.

“Not yet,” he says.

“I need to see it,” I tell him.

“No problem. I can bring it around to you.”

“Has it been moved since it was returned?” I ask.

“No, it’s still in the same spot,” he says.

“Then I’d rather see it there,” I tell him. “The police will need to thoroughly examine it, and I would rather it not be compromised.”

Kemp leads me outside and around to the back of the building where there are several parking spots with signs indicating they are for the online rental option. A couple of them look like they are in distinctly worse shape than some of the other vehicles at the front of the lot, but I’m not thinking about those. I zero in on the navy blue four-door in the fourth spot with the license plate that matches the partial tag I saw on the footage. The sticker on the back window is just what Bellamy pointed out to me.

I take out my phone and call Detective Fuller.

“Hey, I’m going to need a team to come out to the Rent-a-Heap car rental lot,” I tell him. “The footage that Ander gave me showed a car dropping off a note at his house last night, and I was able to track it down.”

“It was a rental?” he asks.

“Yeah. I’m assuming they didn’t want their vehicle to be recognized or identified by neighbors, so they rented from here. They have a policy not requiring any form of photo identification or anything for certain cars, and this is one of them. So we can’t conclusively identify the renter, but the car hasn’t been cleaned, so we might be able to find something. I want it to be searched and fingerprinted and any evidence collected,” I say.

“Be there as soon as we can,” he says.

I hang up and look over at Boris Kemp again. His face is sullen, and he looks like he might be reconsidering everything about his brilliant business approach. I can appreciate that he recognized a niche in the market for people who need to rent cars but don’t have a credit card to use or don’t want to go through the hassle of going into the office to fill out the paperwork, but his approach just begs for shady abuse of the system.

I’m eager to open the car and see what might be inside, but I know I have to hold back. Just opening the door could smear fingerprints, and leaning my head inside to see anything could compromise fiber evidence. I have to resign myself to waiting for the team to get here with the proper equipment.

It doesn’t take long for them to arrive, and I meet Detective Fuller out front. He looks exhausted. I imagine he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and has been going steadfastly on the Sabrina Ward investigation since this morning. Since the heat and the intense pressure of the case are starting to drag on me, I know he’s feeling it. He wipes his brow as he walks up to me.

“I found a neighbor behind the Ward house who was up early with their new baby. They say they saw someone walking out from between two houses and then going down the sidewalk away from her house early this morning. She was looking through an upstairs bedroom window, so she couldn’t see anything, but she thinks it was a man with long blond hair, and she noticed he was carrying a bundle that looked like clothing,” he says. “We’re trying to find other neighbors with doorbell cameras or anything that might have captured him.”

“Long blond hair,” I say. “Just like the description Jesse Kristoff gave of the person who killed Gideon Bell and attacked him. If it was same the person who killed Sabrina Ward, that bundle he was carrying was likely the overclothes, mask, and gloves he was wearing. He would have taken them off to walk through the neighborhood because that would have caught the attention of anyone who saw him. As it is, he was seen, but if he was wearing all that, it would have been much more of a cause for concern.”

“Exactly,” Detective Fuller says. “The neighbor didn’t really think much of it. She just figured someone was taking a shortcut through the houses. She said they didn’t look like they were rushing or anything, just walking down the sidewalk. It didn’t occur to her that anything might be off until she heard the sirens and then the officers went to talk to her.”

“I hope we can get some clear images of him from something,” I say. “Let’s take a look at this car.”

The team follows me around to the back of the building, and I point out the vehicle. I show Detective Fuller the still from the camera footage and instruct the photographer to take a few shots of the vehicle before they go inside. Boris provided me with the keys to the car, so the first thing we do is have a gloved officer open the trunk. There’s nothing inside, and the strong smell of chemical cleaners tells me it’s unlikely the trunk has been used in a while.

The officers search for fingerprints on the door handle before opening the car and looking inside. I stand back with the detective while they search, wanting to get in there myself but knowing they need to be allowed to do their job. They process the inside of the car for fingerprints and search for any evidence that might have been left behind. It takes a while, but finally, one of them emerges and comes over to me.

“Everything has been wiped clean. No fingerprints. Not on the steering wheel, the controls for the air-conditioning, the radio, anywhere. Whoever did this was really careful to make sure that they weren’t leaving anything identifying. But we did find this.”

She displays a pair of tweezers, and in it is a single long fiber. It’s thicker than natural hair, and I immediately recognize it.

---