Page 43 of The Girl and the Lies

“What did you find?” Bellamy asks, coming into the room.

“Ander Ward installed a camera on the front of his house after he started getting the threatening messages. It doesn’t have very much of a field, but it shows enough that he got footage of a note being left in his mailbox yesterday. A car comes up, someone reaches out and puts the note into the mailbox, and they drive away. Less than twelve hours later, his wife was dead. I’ve already looked at the footage a couple of times, and I didn’t notice anything, but I feel like there has to be something.”

Bellamy stands behind me and watches as I go through the footage again, watching the car drive up slowly to the mailbox, the arm come out of the window, and the note go into the mailbox. The camera isn’t great quality, so the footage isn’t particularly clear, and at the distance from the house, it’s impossible to get a clear view of the person in the car. I zoom in as much as I can, but the person is sitting back in the seat, almost like they are aware of the possibility of being recorded. I zoom back out, but Bellamy puts her hand on my shoulder.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“What?” I ask.

“Zoom out again. There’s something on the window.”

I move the footage in as far as I can and look at the sticker on the back driver’s side window. It looks like a logo for something. It takes me a few seconds, but recognition flashes through my head.

“I’ve seen that before,” I say. “That’s the logo for that low-cost car rental company, the one that rents old cars and ones that have been in accidents and stuff,” I say. “I saw a commercial for it.”

“Rent-a-Heap,” Bellamy says. “They aren’t too far from here.”

“Which means they aren’t too far from Ander Ward’s house,” I say.

I search for the Rent-a-Heap rental company online and find the address of the lot. It’s about twenty minutes from Bellamy and Eric’s house, putting it about fifteen from the Ward house. I isolate a few stills of the footage of the car and print them out so that I can bring them with me to show the people working at the rental company, hoping they might be able to give me some information about the car and who rented it.

The lot is loaded with vehicles that look like they might be nearing their last legs but still have a bit of good in them. Sufficient for a short-term rental or a really tight budget. The cars aren’t sparkling and impressively arranged like at other agencies, but at least they offer a variety of options, from big trucks I can see people moving with to the little four-doors like the one in the video.

I park off to the side of the customer lot and go into the small office. A man hops to his feet behind the desk he was sitting at and greets me with a broad smile.

“Hi there,” he says. “How can I help you this afternoon? What kind of car are you looking to rent?”

“I’m actually not looking to rent anything,” I tell him. “I’m Agent Emma Griffin with the FBI. I’m investigating a case, and I believe that one of your vehicles could be linked to it.”

The man’s face falls, and he glances out the window beside him like he’s wondering which of the cars lined up in the lot was used in a crime. He turns back to me and gestures at the chair across the desk from his.

“Have a seat,” he says. “My name is Boris Kemp. I’m the owner. When you say that you think one of my vehicles is linked to a case that you’re investigating, what exactly is it that we’re talking about?”

“I can’t provide all of the details since this is an active investigation, but I can tell you that an item associated with two murders was delivered to a home. The footage taken by the homeowner showed a vehicle pulling up to the mailbox and delivering the item. Inspection of the footage showed that the vehicle had what I believe is your company’s logo on the back window. I noticed all the other vehicles in the lot have stickers on the same spot.”

I take out the stills that I isolated from the footage and lay them out on the desk in front of Mr. Kemp.

“If you look closely at this image, you can see that the partial license plate is visible as they were pulling away. WD23. That’s all that I could decipher from it just looking at it. But does this vehicle look familiar to you?” I ask.

“It does,” he says. “This car was rented from the lot the day before yesterday and returned last night. It’s the only one of its kind that I have in that color, and the license plate fits, so I know it’s the same one.”

“Can you tell me who rented it?” I ask.

He turns to his computer and types in a few commands. His eyes scan over the screen.

“This says it was rented by a Nicholas Beamer,” he says. “But that’s just what’s on the registration form.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“One of the reasons my business model is so appealing to people is that I don’t make them jump through a bunch of hoops just to rent a car. In other places, you have to have a credit card and provide all sorts of identification and other information just to get behind the wheel. I understand that sometimes people don’t have all of that but still need a means of transportation. So I offer an online do-it-yourself-style rental option for a select number of my vehicles.

“Essentially, people can go online and see what’s available and sign up to take whatever they choose. They provide basic identifying information and then pay for the rental up front. Rather than having to come into the office and fill out anything, the keys to the vehicles are kept in a lockbox, and they get the code to their specific box after they make the payment,” he says.

“And you don’t require any type of proof of identification?” I ask. “No scanning their driver’s licenses or providing car insurance?”

“Again,” he says, “I understand that there are circumstances that don’t always allow for those kinds of provisions.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

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