Oh, right! Are those one part like for the floor in the back seat or two? And now your insightful comment made me think about whether it was a car mat for a larger area in the Suburban, like part of the very back, where you can lay the seats down, and where it may be flat just as part of the Suburban function. I had a Suburban years ago and it was like that but, again, that was long ago. MOO.
I think it makes a lot of difference to the story, what size this mat/carpet is.
If it’s like a smaller front or back seat floor mat and he leaned it up against the building, it was really an invitation for someone to take it, since something that size would have fit in the dumpster just to the left of the restaurant, or even stuffed in the trash bin itself, if he really was determined to get rid of it. In this case he was kind of advertising for someone to take it and get set up to be a suspect in the crime. That would make us think it has something incriminating on it, JDs blood, that he would want someone else to be caught with (otherwise why dispose of it, when there’s so much other stuff like mops etc to get rid of).
On the other hand, if the mat/carpet is much larger, and he leaned it up against the building because it would not have fit in the dumpster or bin, then it could have been one of those truck bed mats, like the larger carpet from the back of the suburban, or perhaps a small home rug from JDs. Possibly something he could have rolled a body up in, etc. In this case, also much more obvious and risky, to be hauling a larger mat out of the back of the truck. (Term used in article was “grabbed” the mat from the truck, making me think it’s not all that huge, but hard to know). In this case, we also know that it would have had her blood on it, because getting rid of a bulky item like that would impose high risk, so he’d only do it if he had to. In this case, he’d also be thinking that by “decorating” Albany Avenue with all this incriminating evidence, he was throwing LE off his trail, and onto “just another crime” committed by someone in this neighborhood.
And I still do think the original plan was to suggest that JD had a drug habit, etc that might have brought her in contact with people from this neighborhood, we saw NP pull this out quite early in the story, but then it disappeared when it was actually FD who was closely tied to Albany Ave.
It looks like FD tried to build in multiple misleads (the Suburban at Waveny, the Albany Ave connection) and that was a mistake, as they don’t cohere and now point back to him.
MOO.
