“You’d think people would rather steal Ferraris,” Bert said.

“There’s more demand for Toyota parts,” Duncan said. “Please tell me you have a shot of the car’s license plate.”

Bert paused on the image of the Corolla leaving the frame. It was a bird’s-eye view of the top of the car. “That’s all we have.”

“Damn,” Duncan said. “We’re going to need you to knock off a copy of that video. Can you print out a screen grab of your best shot of that guy’s face?”

“Sure,” Bert said. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

Eve and Duncan walked out of the room and out onto the sales floor to wait. She hated the lighting in Walmarts. It made everything and everyone look like they’d walked through a downpour of urine.

“You came up with a great lead, Eve, and I’m sure that’s our guy, but we’re screwed.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If we ask the DMV to spit out a list of every Corolla registered within, say, a five-mile radius of the crime scene, and if we check on every Corolla that’s been stolen or recovered in LA in the last week, we’ll still have to go through a thousand-plus hits,” Duncan said. “Even if we draft everyone in the station and bring in reserve deputies to help us, it could take us weeks to find this guy. And what if the car is registered elsewhere in California or in another state? That’s tens of thousands of white Toyota Corollas. We might never find him.”

“We could release his picture to the media.”

“That would be an absolute last resort. It would tell the guy that we are onto him and send him into hiding. It could also put the people around him in immediate danger. He might kill more people to cover his tracks. Right now, he probably thinks he’s safe in plain sight, going about his business.”

“He’s not wearing gloves in those surveillance videos,” Eve said. “Maybe we can pull his prints off the items in the shopping bag or from the basket of DVDs he sorted through.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. This isn’t a TV cop show, where forensics solves everything in ten seconds using technology out of Star Trek and instant access to databases that don’t actually exist. Lots of people have touched the products he bought along the supply chain, including whoever stocks the shelves here and the cashiers. We might get prints and we might not. This guy proved at the crime scene that he’s forensically aware, thanks to those same fucking TV shows, by the way, so he probably wiped the stuff that he bought before he brought it in the house. As far as the DVDs go, hundreds of people have gone through that bargain bin. Even in the best of circumstances, we get usable prints maybe thirty percent of the time and only five percent of those end up identifying someone. The odds of us getting usable prints from this are about the same as aliens coming to Earth and making first contact with me.”