Wally hesitated once again. “Okay. Let’s step outside. It’s kind of noisy in here.”
They followed him out the door, making a detour past a large barrel of peanuts so Wally could grab a handful. They exited the bar and stood near the parking lot, out of earshot of a few bar patrons smoking on the sidewalk.
Lynch showed him the photo again. “Do you recognize either of these guys?”
“The shorter one with all the hair. He’s the one who rented the car from me.”
“What was his name?” Kendra asked.
Wally cracked open a few peanuts and popped them into his mouth. “Mmm. Don’t remember.”
“Maybe we have to take a ride to your office,” Lynch said.
Wally shrugged. “Maybe we would if it was 1998.” He pulled his phone from his pocket. “I keep all my docs in the cloud. Doesn’t everybody?”
Kendra smiled. “I will now.”
Wally thumbed his way through an app and drilled down to a collection of saved documents. “I do know he rented it from me about three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks? Was he with anybody?”
“Naw, he was alone. He didn’t know how long he’d be in town.”
“Did he say why he was here?” Kendra asked.
“No. He did seem kind of nervous, though. Jittery. At first, he wanted to buy an old car from me, but then he changed his mind. I don’t think he was too interested in messing with registration and all that. He seemed more comfortable staying under the radar.” Wally raised his phone. “Here he is.”
Kendra and Lynch moved closer to look at the screen, where there was a photocopied Montana driver’s license. Definitely the same man who had picked up Waldridge. She read the name. “Peter Hollister?”
“Yep.”
Lynch looked up. “The license is a fake, you know.”
“How do you figure that?”
“There should be a strip of microprint on the front right corner. It’s extremely hard to reproduce. Whoever made this license didn’t even attempt it.”
“Damn.” Wally looked at the license image. “I didn’t know that.”
“Most people wouldn’t. I’m sure that’s why he picked a license for the least populous state in the union. Did he give you a local address?”
“Yeah.” Wally swiped his finger across the screen to flip through the rental contract. On the last page, he pinched to zoom in on the signature and handwritten address. “211 Starvation Flats.”
Kendra grimaced. “Starvation Flats? That has to be a phony address.”
“No, it’s a real street. It’s just off the main road.” Wally popped some more peanuts into his mouth. “You think this guy may have done something to your friend?”
“I don’t know. I’m just hoping I can get some answers from him.”
“And I’d really like to get my car back.”
Kendra nodded. “I’m sure you’ll be hearing from the Santa Monica Police Department very soon. In any case, I’ll pass along your info to them.”
Lynch looked down the street. “Is your lot near here?”
“Yeah, just down the street. But I told you, all that info on this is-”
“That’s not what I want,” Lynch interrupted as he produced a wad of bills. “I’d like to rent one of your cars for a couple of hours. Let’s go pick one out.”
IN LESS THAN FIFTEEN MINUTES, Kendra and Lynch drove up Big Bear Boulevard in their rented Subaru Outback. Kendra sniffed the interior. “Did you have to pick a car drenched in the aroma of beef tacos?”
“I thought it was cheeseburgers.”
“Nope. Taco Bell beef tacos with maximum strength Fire Sauce.”
“I’ll take your word for it. It was one of the only vehicles with four-wheel drive. So it was either the taco odor or sliding into a ditch.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not sure which is worse.”
He glanced down at the screen of Kendra’s phone on which she was searching the Web. “Any luck finding out who this guy is?”
“No. The name pops up a few times, but it isn’t him. It looks like a fake name came with the fake ID. Waldridge was obviously comfortable with him, though. I could see it in his body language.”
“On the surveillance video?”
“Yes. Waldridge tends to stick his chest out a bit more when he’s around men he doesn’t know well.”
“Only men?”
“Yes.”
“How Cro-Magnon of him.”
“It’s not all that uncommon. Anyway, he wasn’t doing it with this guy. If we don’t find him here, a thorough search of all his friends and associates back in England would be a good place to start. But maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Lynch slowed as they turned onto a street covered with several inches of snow. “The plows haven’t been here. We were right to choose four-wheel drive, taco smell and all.”
“So you say.” She looked at the house numbers. “His place is probably at the end, near the cul-de-sac. Four houses down.”
Lynch cut the headlights and pulled to the side of the road. “Let’s walk the rest of the way. Agreed?”
“Agreed. No sense in announcing ourselves any sooner than we have to.”
They climbed out of the Outback and trudged through the snow, making their way past the mostly deserted vacation cottages. They stopped short of Hollister’s house, which was a fanciful Germanic-styled home with yellow-and-blue trim. The house was dark.
“Did we somehow stumble into a Grimm fairy tale?” Lynch asked. “I’m pretty sure this thing is made of gingerbread.”
Kendra looked at a single line that cut through the snow and moved around the house. “I don’t think this motorcycle tread belongs to Hansel or Gretel,” she said as she knelt beside it. “This is fresh.”
“How fresh?”
“Last hour or so. No snow has accumulated on top of the tread marks.” She used her camera to snap a picture of the tread in the snow.
“Well, he did let Waldridge use his car. Maybe now he’s getting around on a bike.”
“Maybe.” Kendra activated the flash on her phone and shined it up ahead. Just before the tread peeled around the house, there was a footprint on either side, as if the rider had paused for a moment. Kendra stood over the print and inspected it. “It’s a SIDI Fusion Lei riding boot, size seven or eight.” She looked up. “This was a woman.”
He raised his brows. “SIDI Fusion Lei…?”
“In my wild days, a lot of my friends were bikers. This is a hot-looking boot. It’s hard to miss.”
“Even from just a footprint in the snow?”
Kendra shrugged. “I thought about buying a pair myself once.”
Lynch looked up at the front porch. “No footprints up there. No one has come or gone in the last day or so.”
“Let’s check around back. It looks like that’s what the motorcycle rider did.”
They circled around back, following the tread to the large expanse of land behind the house. It was darker here, but the snow-covered ground reflected the half-moon with a blue, iridescent glow.
Kendra motioned toward the back of house, where the footprints told the story. “Whoever the motorcycle rider was, she checked the back door and windows. After that, she circled around…” Kendra’s eyes followed the line of footprints behind her, which appeared to circle a dark object half-covered in snow. “What’s that?”
Lynch was already heading toward it. “Wait here.”
“No way.” She half waded, half hopped, through the snow, but Lynch got there first.
He whirled sharply toward her. “Stay back!”
“What makes you think you can-”
She froze in her tracks, suddenly realizing what he’d seen, what he was trying to keep her from seeing.
A body. A dead body.
Waldridge?
“Oh, God. Is it-?”
He crouched next to the corpse. “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
She made herself walk over and kneel next to him. Someone else had already brushed some of the snow off the body’s head and chest. But not enough, she couldn’t tell-