Dead end. I hung up and shook my head. “No luck. It’s confidential.”

Turning on the computer, I Googled license plate websites that claimed free access to vehicle owner information. After the third scam, I realized it was a lost cause. There went that unfettered hope.

“Any other brilliant ideas for how to trace this back to a vehicle owner from over a decade ago?”

I wanted to shove Oliver Naysayer’s snide words right back down his throat.

“If you’d stop being such a jerk about this, I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it.”

“Have I liked any of this so far?” he retorted.

He had no idea how bad it could get, because it was going to require him to do something he hated more than anything. In fact, Oliver probably would have preferred jail to what I was about to ask him to do.

Chapter 35

Chapter 35

Felicity

Dickhead Daniel was the only person in the world who Oliver hated. Truly loathed. Daniel was a one-upper. A name-dropper. The kind of person who would ask how you’re doing, then talk over you about how he spent the weekend picking up college chicks on his new yacht.

He always cajoled his way to the front of the buffet line at company picnics and then complained about the subpar food, insisted he was best qualified to umpire the traditional softball game (so he could ogle and rate the female batters’ “juiciest asses”), and once got so stinking drunk he peed into the lake in full view of a horrified Brownie troupe. Around the office his gossipmongering and brown-nosing and goldbricking were legendary. And a talker—he was one of those guys in love with the sound of his voice, and while he had absolutely nothing worthwhile to say, he could ramble on for hours about politics (don’t get him started on conspiracy theories), his sexual prowess (a highly inflated view), or how much money he made (too much). If you wanted to keep your job, and Oliver did, you tolerated Dickhead Daniel’s boorish behavior. You see, he was related to one of the directors.

But Dickhead Daniel had one thing I needed, and thus I begged Oliver to suffer the fool…for me. For Vera.

It was at an after-work get-together when Dickhead Daniel’s name-dropping came in handy as he held court at a neighborhood bar. Three sheets to the wind, he bragged that he’d worked undercover with the private investigator who worked a huge national child trafficking case and put the ringleader behind bars. Everybody knew this was pure bull, and several challenged him on it, but he really knew the woman and flashed a business card from his wallet to prove it. At the time, pre-Vera’s disappearance, Daniel’s spurious claim to fame didn’t mean much to me. But now it meant everything.