The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 207

The Rental Car

ELIJAH’S POV:

“A fake name with a decent fake document. Not amateur work. Someone who knew what they were doing or had access to someone who did.”

“And the car itself. Where did it go after?”

“Returned to the airport branch,” Bates said. “Two days after the fire. Which tells us whoever it was either flew out of the city or wanted it to look like they did.”

“Can you get me the airport security footage from around the time of the return?”

Another pause. “Give me until tonight.”

“Tonight is fine. Thank you, Bates.”

“You owe me lunch,” he said, and hung up.

I put the phone down on my desk and sat there for a moment. Rental car. Cash payment. Fake name. The trail had gone cold on the surface exactly the way a careful person would want it to. But careful people still leave edges. They always leave edges. You just have to find the right one to pull.

I called my head of corporate intelligence next. His name was Kojo and he had been with Martinez Holdings for six years and was, without any exaggeration, one of the sharpest people I had ever worked with. He thought sideways about problems. When everyone else was looking at the obvious angle, Kojo was already standing somewhere else looking at the angle nobody had considered yet.

“I need you on something personal,” I told him. “Completely off the main books. Just you, me, and complete discretion.”

“Understood,” he said immediately, which was one of the things I valued about Kojo. He did not ask unnecessary questions before he had the information. “Tell me what we have.”

I walked him through everything. The fire. The archive room. The CCTV footage. The rental car and the fake name. By the time I finished he was quiet for a moment in the particular way that meant he was already thinking.

“The rental agency,” he said. “Even when someone pays cash and uses a fake name for the agreement, the internal systems at these places log other things. The time of pickup. The branch staff who processed it. Sometimes a loyalty programme scan that happens automatically before the person realizes what it is scanning. Sometimes a phone number given for contact purposes that someone later forgets they gave. I want to look at the agency’s internal records directly rather than going through official channels.”

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