Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(60)

“It was in this special Prestige row, over three hundred dollars daily.”

“That was smart of Karen,” I said. “I was watching the pace of the rentals while I waited. The regular cars are going in and out constantly, but nobody went near the Mercedes or Range Rovers in that row. Way more car than most people need for a family vacation or business rental. The more expensive the car, the less likely someone rents it.”

Jess nodded, understanding. “So the better the chance it’s sitting right there when Karen was ready to go back for it.”

“Exactly.”

“Now what?”

“Now we look.”

A few exits down, we got off the freeway and followed signs to a Home Depot. We drove to the back of the big parking lot. A few Hispanic men leaned against a wall, watching us hopefully. I wasn’t worried about drawing attention. They were day laborers. Almost definitely undocumented. Groups like this congregated at Home Depots all over California. Work was their only concern. Work, and not attracting the attention of law enforcement. We could have set our SUV on fire and they wouldn’t have called the cops.

We went through the Range Rover from end to end. I barely bothered to check the obvious places. We ignored the glove compartment and center console after a cursory look. Whatever Karen Li had wanted to hide, it wasn’t going to be anywhere a cleaning crew or customer would accidentally find it. We spent about a half hour going through every part of the vehicle, inside and out.

Nothing.

Jess stepped back in frustration. “Remind me again how we know there’s even something here?”

“It’s here,” I said, trying to sound confident. Maybe there was a perfectly good reason to rent a car for a day. Or maybe this wasn’t the car. Or maybe Care4 had found whatever Karen had hidden and they were letting me chase my tail. So many possibilities. I was thinking again of Mr. Berkovich. Not what was hidden but who had hidden it. Karen Li. I added up what I knew. She wasn’t a drug smuggler. She wasn’t going to chainsaw a fake compartment into the trunk or solder hollow metal tubing onto the chassis. And it was a rental. She couldn’t go cutting the seats up or drilling into the door panels. But, more importantly, she was a computer scientist. A software engineer, not hardware. An electrical or mechanical engineer might pride himself on his mastery of the physical world. He might take great pains to create a hiding place that would put a smuggler’s best idea to shame. As much out of intellectual pride as a desire to conceal. Taken to an extreme, a mechanical engineer might end up caring less about what he was hiding and more about how well he was hiding it. Like greyhounds chasing a rail-mounted wind sock around a track.

But not Karen. She wouldn’t try to switch out one of the tires or build a compartment between the interior ceiling and the roof. That wasn’t how she thought. Not how she’d hide something. Her greatest creativity had been exercised outside of the physical world. Besides, code was complicated enough. I’d been around software engineers enough to know that they didn’t seek out needless complexity. To them, that was inefficiency. Nothing drove them crazy like having to untangle extra lines of code that didn’t need to be there. From that first Java course, they were trained to look for the simplest solution that worked.

Karen was smart. Resourceful. And she had gone through the trouble to rent a car she didn’t need at an airport she hadn’t flown into. She would have been aware that a rental car wasn’t exactly private property. A driver might run over a nail. Maybe a kid would drop a soda onto the backseat. Something could happen necessitating a mechanic or detailing. She needed a hiding place accessible but not accidentally accessible. Invisible but basically in plain sight.

I borrowed Jess’s phone, turned the light on, and got down on the ground to check every square inch of the chassis. I rechecked the tires and doors and trunk and the backsides of the accelerator and brake pedals and between the sunroof glass. I popped the hood to check the windshield wiper fluid.

Nothing.

“That’s it, then,” Jess said. “Unless she dropped it in the gas tank.”

I shook my head. “It would corrode, or be discovered.”

“So what do we do?”

“I’m not sure.”

One of the day laborers approached. He wore a workman’s belt with a hammer and wrench hanging off. “Do you need any help, miss? Is your car broken?”

“No, thanks,” Jess said. “We’re okay.”

“Sure,” he said. “Let me know if you need help.”

Jess laughed as he walked away. “If only he knew.”

I watched the man walk back toward his friends, his tools swinging against his narrow hips. Jess was right. We did need help. Just not the kind of help he was thinking of. We didn’t have a flat tire or overheated radiator. Nothing that needed a tool kit or auto expertise. Because Karen Li hadn’t been a mechanical engineer. She wouldn’t have approached the problem with a carbide-grade cutting wheel or a 5000°F oxyacetylene welding torch and a desire to create the world’s best hiding spot. Chances were, she had been like 99 percent of the population, comfortable with little more than a hammer or screwdriver.

I thought of something. “Wait a second,” I called out. “Do you have a screwdriver?”

The man looked back, puzzled. “A screwdriver? Sure.”