Kate snorted at that and kept on going. It was good for her, but it wasn’t the fact that she got laid as much as the fact that she had connected with somebody—more than just Simon too, her whole team—and, for the first time in a very long while, she hadn’t felt quite so alone. Nothing like the responsibility of all these deaths riding on her shoulders to make her feel like it was just more than she could handle. It’s not that she would give up, but some days she wondered if keeping track of all these bad guys was even doable.
Ten minutes later, she and Rodney were at the impound lot, and, as they walked through the front and dealt with the guy attending the lot, he soon had the paperwork in hand on the vehicles they were interested in.
“Do we know what brought this blue one in?” she asked him.
“It was found parked and abandoned over on the west side.”
She perked up. “Really? That’s definitely the one I want to see first.”
As they walked over to where it sat, she stopped, stared, and said, “Huh. I’m not sure it looks like the one we’re after though.” She stared at the mock-ups she had in her hand.
“It’s amazing how hard it is to tell them apart though, isn’t it?” Moving closer, the manager said, “That’s a similar truck but definitely a different model,… a different year.”
She shook her head. “No wonder people can’t tell us very much sometimes.”
“If you saw this one driving by the one you want,” he said, with a smile, “you’d have a hard time telling me what year it was.”
She studied the one in front of her and the picture of the one she wanted and said, “I’m somewhat well versed in cars, but I’m certainly not capable of telling these apart, though I’m not sure why.”
“Because this one has some parts from the other model year added on,” he said. “It’s fairly common, especially at the pick-and-pulls, using whatever you can get to put the vehicle back on the road. If it’s not quite as pretty as it once was, well, that’s just too bad,” he said, with a laugh.
She nodded. “Let me take a look at the other two of interest here.”
“Have a go at it, as you like,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of others to keep track of. Give a shout if you need anything.”
And, with Rodney at her side, they kept going from vehicle to vehicle. “None of them had quite the right dents in the front,” she said.
He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking, but we do have the VINs, and the license plates are still on two of them, so we’ve got that for our records.”
“But we didn’t have to come down here for that,” she said. “We could have just pulled the reports.”
“Yes, but sometimes seeing this in person is just as good as being out on the streets,” he reminded her.
She nodded.
“It was picked up because it was abandoned,” he said. “Have we cross-referenced it to any records?”
The guy came back out from his small cubicle, looking for them, and said, “Hey, the one that we looked at first, it’s just come back as stolen.”
“Of course,” she said.
“Well, in this case it’s unusual. It was stolen nearly four years ago.”
She turned and looked at the manager. “From where?”
“Arbutus Street,” he said.
She shook her head, frowning. “Interesting. And no sign of it in all these years?”
“Not until just now.”
She laughed. “I wonder what the chances are it was stolen from him again.” At that, Rodney looked at her in surprise. She shrugged. “Unless he’s ditching the vehicle. What if he came back to it, thinking it would be parked where he left it, only to find out that somebody had stolen it?”
Rodney looked at her and said, “Well, it’s a reach.”
“We’re always reaching,” she said comfortably. “It’s just a matter of if we’re reaching in the right direction or not.” She looked over at the officer. “Has anybody asked about this vehicle?”
“No, not yet,” he said. “Just you.”