He smiled briefly and I breathed an inward sigh of relief. Conflict with strangers is not my favorite pastime.

"No offense taken," he said.

"Please call me Abby, by the way."

"And I'd prefer Cooper." We began the short walk to the elevators. "Chief seems like a title I don't deserve. Like I should be a genius and God knows I'm not. I've only been doing this job for a year."

"What did you do before?" We entered an empty elevator and Cooper punched the button for the fourth floor.

"FBI. But not anymore."

I wonder why, I thought. "And now you work in a small town," I said.

"Very small." He crossed his hands in front of him and stared up at the indicator lights.

Once we hit the fourth floor and walked out of the elevator, he said, "This young woman was found on a county road, her car wrapped around a tree. Didn't take a mechanic to figure out her air bags had been removed. That's why she suffered the head injury."

I felt a small shiver unrelated to the AC. "And she had my card, but no purse and no insurance information?"

"That's right. They could have been stolen from the wreck immediately after she crashed or maybe she never had them with her in the first place."

"What about the vehicle identification number? Couldn't you track the car ownership that way?" I asked.

"Deliberately destroyed. Even the confidential VIN had been sanded down."

"There's more than one?"

"On this model, there were three—dash, door and the confidential one. Newer models than what she was driving also have VINs etched into the windshield. That's tough to tamper with, but I didn't get lucky there."

"And her thumbprint didn't come up when you ran it by DPS?"

He glanced my way, studying me with what I thought might be amusement. "I'm used to asking the questions, not answering them. We didn't get a match or I wouldn't be here."