What would I do if I knew I was being followed and I had a cell phone on me that could incriminate me? I’m sure he knows the law as well as we do. A phone would be easy to spot if he tossed it. A SIM card would be almost impossible to find. We might have to do a ground search for several miles to try to find it. Without either, the best we can hope to do is hold him for seventy-two hours, and that’s kind of iffy at best. After that, we’ll have to let him go if the Georgia license holds up and we can’t find any proof of identity fraud.

Knoll shakes his head as he examines the license again. “It just had to be Georgia.”

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“They stopped using fingerprints in their driver’s licenses ten years ago and purged the database.”

Proving he’s using a fake license would be an immediate bust. An agent is using a mobile fingerprint scanner to run his prints against known felons and other records we have on file. We’ve yet to find even a partial print at the other crime scenes or the warehouse, but anything that attaches him to another crime would still be helpful. The DEA will also start circulating his photograph to see if any of its informants know who he is. Anything would be something right now.

Knoll has a pained expression. We might have to let him go right here. We’d pulled him over expecting the cell phone to be a quick match. It wasn’t.

I walk over to the driver’s side door. A tech in rubber gloves is doing a careful sweep of the inside edges where the carpet meets the plastic paneling. She looks up at me and shakes her head. If he tossed the SIM on the floorboards or under the seat, they would have found it by now.

The highway is lined with miles of grassy fields. It’s an impossible search grid. Maybe Ailes and his genies can come up with some kind of magic by triangulating the point the SIM card was yanked and compare it with his speed, but that’s just wishful thinking.

A tech does a second search, pouring the suspect’s coffee through a sieve to see if anything is at the bottom of the cup. Nothing. She bags the coffee cup.

The only thing left in the front seat is a water bottle. It looks empty, but she takes it out anyway and pours the contents into a plastic bucket. The bottle and cap are set aside on a table they’ve set next to his SUV with the rest of the evidence.

Our agents have moved the suspect out of the sun and to the back of a van so he can’t watch as we search his vehicle. He’s got a smug look on his face. He knows he’s fooled us.

I look back in his truck and try to think of what I’d do if I wanted to have something small like a SIM card close by, but I didn’t want to be caught with it.