I always figured them out. Because I knew how to look.
Like now. The answer lay somewhere in the papers we’d gone through, somewhere in Karen Li’s life. And her life had been here. She hadn’t gotten on a plane and deposited it thousands of miles away. I was certain. Yet Jess was right. We thought about everywhere she went. Everywhere she drove, at least. We had considered everything.
Where she drove.
Drove.
And then I knew.
“The airport,” I said.
Jess was surprised. “The airport? I thought you said she didn’t take it on a plane.”
I was thinking about the pages of timestamped locations we had pored through. “Not the airport, exactly.”
“Then where?”
“She went to the rental car center next to the airport.”
“Nikki. Not sure how long it’s been since you got on a plane? That’s kind of how things work. Take a flight, rent a car—what’s weird about that?”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “Take a flight, rent a car. Normal. But Karen Li didn’t get off a plane in some other city and rent a car. She rented a car here.”
“So?”
“She had a car. Why rent one?”
“Maybe her car broke down?”
“The woman drove a brand-new Porsche. The dealership would’ve given her a loaner. And besides, if the car had broken down I bet anything it was still under warranty, so the last address the tracker would show would be the dealership service center, or at least a mechanic. But she never brought it anywhere for service.”
“So what does that mean? If she didn’t want her car for some reason, why not just bring it into the dealership for some made-up reason and get a loaner? Or rent one in San Jose, where she lived? Why bother going through the inconvenience of renting from the airport?”
I nodded. “Exactly. The airport is the last place you rent a car if you have a choice, because it’s not only out of the way, it’s always the most expensive. Have you ever looked at one of those mile-long receipts, a dozen different fees and surcharges? Travelers don’t have the luxury of choosing. They’re rushed, they don’t know the area, so they pick the nearest option. Meaning the airport. Maximum convenience. But anyone needing to rent a car in their home city would go anywhere except an airport. Why would Karen Li rent a car here?”
“I don’t get it, then. Why?”
“For the same reason we missed it. We overlooked it just the way she planned. Maybe she thought she was being followed. Maybe she even suspected her car was on someone’s radar. She was scared. Rent a car out of the blue and it draws suspicion. People wonder why. But park at an airport, visit a rental car center? No one thinks twice. Those two actions fit together. Like getting popcorn at a movie theater. We don’t notice things that seem to add up. We notice things that don’t.”
I was already getting out of the water, reaching for my robe. “Her car was at SFO for a day. But nothing says she even got on a plane. Karen Li didn’t go to the airport to fly somewhere. She went for cover.”
31
At San Francisco Airport we followed signs to the rental car facility. Different car companies were arrayed in a line of desks: Avis, Enterprise, National, Hertz, Budget, Dollar. It was busy. Lines in front of every desk. Travelers, most looking frazzled or sleepy. People wanted very different things out of life, but they united around certain commonalities. For instance, no one wanted to be standing in line at a rental car center. Didn’t matter who you were.
“How do we know which one?” Jess asked.
I had thought about this. I remembered Karen pulling the Narwhal’s card out of her wallet. The colored edges of the credit and membership cards. The strip of yellow. “Hertz,” I said. “That’s the one.” We skipped the front desks and lines, instead heading for the elevator. I pushed the button for the Hertz floor and we rose smoothly.
“What are we going to do?”
“Now we try plan A,” I said.
“What’s plan A?”
“I am.”
“And what if plan A doesn’t work?”
“Then it gets more complicated.”
I walked into the garage alone, weaving through rows of spotlessly washed cars until I found a Hertz employee near a little booth that was set up like a makeshift office with a desk and computer and phone. The main rental desk would be downstairs, but up here was this outpost to ensure that frequent travelers and rewards members could get their cars with a minimum of hassle. The Hertz kid looked like he was just out of college. He wore a white button-down and a red tie that had the paradoxical effect of making him look younger rather than older. The knot on the tie was off a little. It was cute. I wanted to adjust it for him. Instead I silently apologized for how much of a bitch I was about to be. “My friend recently rented a car here and forgot something important in it. I need to pick it up for her.”
He looked uncertain. “Is she with you?”
“No. I have her name.”
“I’m not sure if I’m allowed to do that.”
I smiled at him. “Where I come from, not sure usually rounds to yes.”
He rubbed his nose uncomfortably. “We really can’t confirm or deny customer information. They tell us that pretty much the first day we start training.”
“It’s important,” I insisted.
“I’m not sure,” he said again. His voice was hesitant.
Feeling guiltier, I added pressure. “I don’t have time to come back.”
The pressure had been a mistake, I saw at once. He bit his lip and tugged on his name tag uneasily as he edged away. “I should get a manager.”
I had nothing else to do, so I stood there watching the cars. A tall Indian man was trying to decide between a red Ford Fusion and a black Hyundai. A family dragged suitcases toward a beige minivan. An annoyed-looking businessman in a rumpled suit and scuffed wingtips headed toward a Chrysler sedan. Meanwhile other cars were lining up behind traffic cones for the return. People getting out, attendants moving down the line swiping handheld electronic readers over the vehicles. I wondered how many cars this place rented each day. Hundreds, at least. Seven days a week.
The kid was back, accompanied by an older woman. She wasn’t so cute. She had fraying, bleached hair and a set line of mouth framed with pink lipstick. She smelled like her last cigarette break had been about five minutes ago and looked like she’d been ready for the next one since getting out of bed. Her feet were squashed into stubby black pumps and her legs were stockinged. She didn’t even bother to play nice. “I understand your friend thinks she forgot something in one of our vehicles?”
I nodded. “Karin Li, L-I. She rented a car here between one and two weeks ago, I can get the exact date if you need it. She’s out of town so she asked me to check for her.”
“Your friend’s not with you?”
“No.”
“We don’t give out customer information, ever. Tell your friend to call us or come in and we’re happy to help.”
Nice clearly wasn’t going to cut it. I tried to look like the type of woman who billed six hundred dollars hourly. “I didn’t come here to waste my time. This is urgent.”
“So what are you looking for? Describe it and we’ll check.” She was tough. She could have pulled off the pumps and hit the beach at Normandy. The kid’s head was going back and forth, watching our exchange like a tennis match.
The question was the one I’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask. I had no idea what I was looking for. “It’s private,” I insisted, adding, “I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”
She didn’t even blink. “Lady, I haven’t been in trouble since the early eighties. Let’s not worry about me. No dice, good luck, and if you don’t plan to rent a car, the door’s right over there.” She was walking away before she finished the sentence.
I took the elevator back down. There was a bus stop with a bench down the street from the rental car facility. I sat on the bench and watched planes slide up
and down from the sky.
* * *
Parking shuttles seemed to stop at the bus stop every eight minutes. I counted three of them, with a fourth in sight, when a silver Range Rover pulled up to the curb. The other two people waiting at the bus stop watched me jealously as I got off the bench and climbed in. I relaxed into the comfortable seat. Whoever had built the thing had ordered extra scoops of leather with generous sides of sleek aluminum trim and wood accents. It rode smoothly, the engine quiet. Beyond that I didn’t have much of an opinion. I’d always liked to hear my engines.
“Plan B,” I said.
“Plan B,” Jess agreed from the driver’s seat.
“How did it go?”
Not taking her eyes off the road, she smiled proudly. “Just like you said. After you left, the first thing she did was go over to a computer and then to this car. She tore through it with that kid for at least ten minutes.”
“They didn’t find anything?”
“Nope. Then I waited a bit, walked up, and did my best Valley girl voice. ‘Oh my god, I love that Range Rover! My boyfriend has an orange one just like it!’”
I winced. “I’m okay with missing that part.”
She took a ramp onto the freeway. “So this is what Karen Li rented?”
“I’d bet anything,” I said. “After my little scene, there was no way the manager wasn’t going to at least check and make sure no one had dropped a diamond ring behind the seat.”
“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.”
I fumbled in my jeans and came out with a twenty. “Let me borrow it.”
The man looked at me suspiciously. “You’ll give it back?”
“Five minutes.”
It was probably the easiest money he had ever made. He handed over the screwdriver and walked back to his friends. They leaned against the wall and watched us.
“What was that about?” Jess wondered.
I kneeled down in front of the Range Rover and unscrewed the license plate. I pulled the thin metal rectangle away, thinking again of Mr. Berkovich and his flat, folded napkins.
Nothing.
I screwed the plate back on. Went to the rear bumper and did the same, prying the thin metal outward.
There was a white envelope flush against the black plastic of the license plate holder.
“Holy shit,” Jess said. “You were right.”
I reattached the plate and gave the guy back his screwdriver before we got back into the Range Rover. The white envelope had been wrapped in tight layers of plastic wrap. Waterproofing. Clever. Rental cars were washed constantly with high-pressure jets. I unpeeled the crinkled layers of plastic wrap and opened the envelope carefully. There was a stack of papers inside. Printouts done with a high-quality color printe
r. On each page was a photograph.
Faces.
The faces, both men’s and women’s, had been captured in everyday actions by what seemed a mix of security cameras and distance lenses. Most seemed on the younger side, somewhere between their twenties and forties. Nothing seemed to connect one face to the next. A range of ethnicities: white, black, South American, Middle Eastern. About thirty of them. A tall, bearded man wearing a backpack and sunglasses. A Slavic woman in her twenties, full lips and blue eyes, getting off a bus, face set watchfully. A man with a missing front tooth, sipping espresso at a sidewalk café. A college-age kid with a wispy mustache wearing aviators and a T-shirt. We flipped through more pictures. I could make out a few words in the background, signs for stores and streets and brands. Arabic, Cyrillic, and English, mostly.
“Who are they?”
We looked through more of the pictures. “I’m not sure.”
“The pictures look like law enforcement surveillance,” said Jess. “Could they be terrorists or criminals, you think? Like different cells? What do you think they’re planning?”
“I don’t know.” I checked the envelope once more and stopped, seeing ink on the inside. I pulled it apart. Two words: IN RETENTIS. Whatever e-mail Karen had gotten, whatever the FBI men had been looking for, I was holding it.
People will die. Innocent people.
Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel Page 18