Stride took a sip of cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup. His impatience was growing.
He stared through the floor-length windows and watched tourists wilting in the heat as they scurried between rows of rental cars. The thunder of another plane landing at McCarran rumbled overhead, rattling the walls. He saw the early evening shadows lengthening minute by minute.
The glass door banged. One of the rental agents waddled in, sweating, from the huge parking lot. Her thick fingers clutched a plastic clipboard.
“How long?” Stride called.
The agent stopped and propped her hands on her hips. Her bare ebony midriff ballooned from between powder blue sweatpants and a white concert T-shirt. “Do I look psychic to you? I told you, they were due in two hours ago.”
“Do the guys outside know to hold it?” Stride asked. “I don’t want them cleaning the car before we get to it.”
“Tan Cavalier, Texas plates.” She rattled off the license number. “Soon as it comes in, you get first crack at it, honey. So sit tight.”
She disappeared into the back office behind the counter.
Serena sat nearby on a metal chair, her elbows propped on her knees. Her black hair fell messily across her face. She pushed herself up wearily and came up behind Stride, kneading the knotted muscles in his neck.
She leaned forward and whispered, “We don’t have to do this.”
“I do. I need to know.”
Serena sighed. “Whatever you want.”
Stride knew she was right. It was better to walk away. He knew what they would find when the car came in, and when he had the truth, he would wish he had left the mystery back in the desert to die with Bob.
But he couldn’t stop. The photograph had led him here. From the desert to the airport to the rental agency, following the trail that had been left for him. It was so obvious that he wondered if it had all been laid out that way for him to find.
Serena borrowed his cup of coffee, took a drink, and made a face. “Oh, man. Two words for you, Jonny. Star. Bucks.”
Stride couldn’t help but smile.
“That’s better,” she said.
“Look, you don’t need to worry about me,” Stride told her. “I’ll be fine. You’ve got your own shit to deal with.”
“You mean, because I killed a guy? Because I just spent six hours reliving it five hundred times with IA? Just a day in the life.”
“Ha.”
Serena shrugged. “They’ll make me talk to a shrink. It’ll be like old times. I’ll cry later.” She looked down at her shoes, which were still dirty with dust and blood. “You want the truth, Jonny? It was easy. Too easy.”
Stride didn’t need to say anything.
The plus-sized agent emerged from the office with a walkie-talkie at her ear. “Your car just came in, honey. One of my boys is driving it over here.”
Stride felt his insides seize with tension. “What’s the routine when a car comes back? Vacuum the interior? Wash the mats?”
“You got it,” she said.
“Trunk, too?”
She shrugged. “If someone barfs in it. Which happens, honey.”
“And you’re sure this is the first rental since it came back last weekend? No one else had it in between?”
“Nobody.”
An attendant parked the Cavalier near the rental building a few minutes later, leaving the driver’s door open and the engine running. Stride and Serena both put on gloves and went outside. He carried a halogen flashlight from Serena’s car, which he directed into the backseat of the Cavalier.
It was clean, no trash, no stray papers. Stride got down on his knees and shined the flashlight carefully under both seats, examining the floor. Then he and Serena spent half an hour studying the fabric on the rear seats, going square inch by square inch, finding nothing.
Stride straightened up. “Let’s do the trunk.”
“She was probably wrapped in a blanket,” Serena reminded him. “It was missing from the bed.”
“Blankets leave tracks,” Stride said.
It didn’t take them long. When they popped the trunk, Stride lit up the interior, and almost immediately he zeroed in on a dime-sized brownish stain on the carpeted fringe. He kept the light on the stain while Serena leaned in and took a closer look.
“Could be blood,” she said quietly. Then she added, “I’ve got something more here.”
He watched her reach into a pocket and slide out a tweezers. She extracted something trapped in the metal edge of the trunk, then backed out and held the tweezers in the beam of the flashlight. Stride leaned closer and saw a wispy strand of blonde hair that spiraled down to a jet black root.
“It might be nothing,” Serena said. “Lots of dye jobs in this town.”
But they both knew what it meant.
“I have to go back,” Stride said.
The rental agent waved her clipboard at them from the doorway. “Hey, officers, what’s the word? Am I getting my tan Cav back? Otherwise, I need to find another car, or someone’s going to be walking, know what I mean?”
Stride and Serena exchanged a long, sober look. It was her call, but Stride knew there was only one decision she could make. Impound it, call for forensics, bag the evidence, and bring his whole world crashing down.
Serena tore her eyes away. She slammed the trunk and waved at the agent.
“Take it,” she said.