I ran the plates at the office and contacted the owner. Female.Twenty-nineyears old. Recently took awork-from-homejob in data entry, so she loans out the car to make extra money. The app she uses is a direct rental service—owner to renter. It operates similar to Craigslist. No middleman. Waivers of all liability required. Everyone on their own to work out insurance and payment, pick up and drop off. But unlike the transaction with the kid who drove the blue truck through the lot that day, this one required the exchange of the keys to the car—which meant the owner met him,face-to-face.
We spoke briefly on the phone. She said he paid cash. She said he wore a baseball cap, jeans,T-shirt, and a red jacket. Casual but neat. Nothing to raise suspicion. He arrived on foot, which meant he must have parked his truck somewhere in the neighborhood and walked to meet her. I asked her if she thought it was strange that she hadn’t noticed how he’d gotten to the house she shared with her mother. She said the renters always came alone and without a vehicle. They usually got a ride or took an Uber. She rented the car out for days at a time.
Wade had her car for the afternoon. That was all. But he paid her for thetwenty-four-hourminimum without any attempt to talk her down.
She lives twenty miles away. I imagine he chose her because of this. She lives outside the reach of our local paper and her age is well below the demographic that would pay attention to news about a tall man wanted for questioning.
I leave the burner phone under the stairs of the porch in case it has a tracker. Then I make my next move. I arrive by midmorning, and we sit in her living room. She doesn’t offer me coffee or water or anything because she’stwenty-nineand still lives with her mother. She is still the receiver of caretaking, not the giver. I don’t give this a second thought. I am irrelevant to her, and she is irrelevant to me beyond what information she has to offer about Wade, so I get right to the point.
I hand her the sketch. “Is this the guy?”
She squirms a little because I’m a cop and now I’ve just asked her something official. “Is this about the insurance?” she wants to know.
I imagine now that someone has warned her about using that app to lease her car. The little research I’ve done revealed issues with theft and damage to the vehicle, parking tickets, speeding violations, and in the end, no recourse against the renters who leave no credit card or license number. The average age of the car owners istwenty-six—kids, really, who overextended themselves and were now using every resource they had to make ends meet.
“No,” I assure her. “It’s nothing like that. It’s not about the car, but about the man who rented it. We’re looking to question him about another matter.”
Her eyes widen. She still hasn’t looked properly at the sketch, and my patience is running out. I don’t have much time.
“What did he do?”
“Nothing for you to worry about.”
“But he knows where I live. He’s been in my car...”
“Really,” I tell her again. “You aren’t in any trouble, and I doubt very much you will ever see him again.”
She stares at me blankly, and I think for a moment she might recognize me from the coverage of the Nichols shooting. But, of course, it’s not that at all. She can’t get off the concerns about herself. She can’t comprehend the world beyond her own, and it makes me wonder how I’m going to survive parenting my girls in this day and age.
A flash runs through my head, about how I have Mitch so I won’t be alone, and then to the video clip Wade sent me—Mitch and Briana together within the past few weeks—and the flash ignites, goes up in flames. Will I have Mitch? Do I still have him?
“Look—I really just need you to tell me if this is the man who rented your car.”
Something in my voice must have changed because she quickly looks down at the paper in her hands and studies it intently. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m pretty sure.”
“Just pretty sure?” I ask.
She looks up, nervous. “Was he really tall?”
“Yes. Over six four. Maybe six five or taller.”
“Then yeah. I think that’s him.”
“And did he ever rent your car before?”
“No.”
I ask her about the cash he handed her—fourtwenty-dollarbills. She tells me it’s gone, that she gave it to her mother, who used it for groceries.
“Most people Venmo,” she explains. “I don’t really use cash. But I didn’t mind.”
We go over the entire exchange a second time. How she was in her room upstairs when the doorbell rang. Her mother works during the day at a dry cleaner, so she was home alone. She came to the door and walked outside with him to the car parked on the street.
“I never let them come inside,” she said.
She gave him the keys, and he got in, turned the ignition to make sure it started.
“He checked the gas gauge and the mileage. I charge extra if they use more than half a tank or a hundred miles.”
