Page 39 of Liar's Point

“Here.” Ryan dug into the pocket of his coveralls and pulled out a pair of tweezers. He reached in and lifted a tiny blue thread about the size of an eyelash.

“I don’t know how y’all find this stuff,” Nicole said as Ryan placed the thread on Miranda’s outstretched palm.

“We collected numerous samples and sent them to the state lab for analysis. At a glance, David thinks these are the same type of fibers he recovered from the body.”

“So... you’re thinking she was wrapped in a blanket or maybe, what? A tarp?” Nicole glanced at Adam.

“Could be a rug?” Adam ventured.

“My guess would be a duffel bag,” Miranda said.

Nicole’s stomach knotted. “Really?”

She nodded.

“So, maybe he killed her at her apartment and loaded her in here?” Adam asked.

Miranda nodded again. “It’s possible. Of course, the lab will have to confirm the type of fibers we’re dealing with, but that would be my best guess. If he didn’t have the body contained in a bag or something like that, we would expect to find more evidence in the trunk. Hair, skin cells, maybe bodily fluids.”

Nicole stared into the trunk. A chill came over her as she visualized Aubrey’s killer zipping her into a duffel bag and stashing her back there like luggage.

“This dude’s sick,” Ryan said.

Nicole looked at him. The CSI had seen a lot—they all had—but this crime was particularly callous.

“Okay, let’s move on to the front,” Miranda said, lowering the trunk lid.

They walked around to the driver’s side. The door stood open, and a box of plastic numbers sat on the concrete floor nearby, along with a metal ruler. The markers would have been used when Miranda photographed whatever evidence she’d found, and the ruler provided scale.

“We recovered the pill bottle on the passenger seat, as you know,” Miranda said. “Along with twelve loose pills scattered on the seat and floor.”

“Do we know how many were in the bottle originally?” Adam asked.

“The label said thirty,” Nicole said. “But who knows if she had taken any before that day?”

“The toxicology report should help you with whatever was in her system,” Miranda said. “I’m just telling you what we found in the car. Which could have been staged, of course.”

Nicole glanced at Adam. Her working theory was that the scene was staged, and she knew he and Emmet and Owen were all coming around to that.

Ryan crouched down and aimed his flashlight through the windshield. “Then you’ve got the writing,” he said.

His light illuminated the word Goodbye written across the inside of the windshield in—what appeared to be—a woman’s loopy handwriting.

The writing had bugged Nicole from the moment she’d seen it. It looked feminine, yes. But she had trouble picturing someone who was distraught enough to kill herself writing the word so artfully.

“Pink ChapStick,” Nicole murmured. “Did we ever find it?”

“Strawberry.” Miranda crouched down beside Ryan. “The tube was down here, just beneath the driver’s seat.”

Adam lifted an eyebrow. “Fingerprints?”

“Yes.” She looked at Nicole. “The prints come back to the victim. But, of course, if the ChapStick was hers and someone wore gloves—”

“Or if he put it in her hand and wrote it,” Adam said.

“Right.” Miranda stood up. “The lack of someone else’s prints on the tube doesn’t really tell us anything.”

Miranda seemed to be on the same page with Nicole about how everything went down.

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