When she called me, frantic, she hadn’t yet been there three hours. “Someone broke into my car!” She’d arrived to LGA without incident, much like every other weekly trip, gotten her rental car, and gone to the Brooklyn store, the busiest in the country. Because her company recommends leaving everything not absolutely needed in the store behind in the car while working, the miscreants got away with a nice pile of loot: computer, camera, phone, iPod, wallet and its contents.

And, lip gloss! Bastards!

So, there she stood, in another state, not planning to leave for another two days, without money, identification, or personal belongings aside from a suitcase of clothes. I overnighted her some cash, her passport, a phone charger, and a book, which made her home away from home a little more homey, homes. Luckily, there were acquaintances there too who took her out for meals and paid for her hotel room, into which she had not yet checked which she hadn’t yet checked into, an understandably difficult task without money or personal identification.

Anyway, here’s the weird part. Yesterday, she received a package. In it was her purse, mostly intact; her phone, now inert; her wallet, complete with credit cards and lacking only the $12 cash it once kept; glass shards from the ruptured car window; and the lip gloss! Also occupying the package were a pointed steel file, presumably used for window-breakage-innage, and a random Hispanic dude’s ID card, in Spanish and with his fingerprint on the back. So weird.

This brings up a lot of questions: Who would steal a purse, only to send it back with the unusable contents? Who would do this, and include the weapon of choice? Who would also throw in someone’s ID card just for good measure? If this were a gesture of good Samaritanism, who would send this package in the absence of an accompanying note of explanation?

The most likely scenario we can see is this: Dude (or dudette) breaks into car, steals stuff. Goes through stuff, picks out most valuable and/or least girly stuff, and discards other stuff. Feels bad, considers sending back discarded stuff. Thinks twice about this consideration, realizing it may implicate him (or her) as the thief. Being a thief, and presumably having broken into many cars in Brooklyn, decides to include previous victim’s ID card to hinder self-implication while still maintaining degree of human decency, figuring the pre-fingerprinted evidence is perfect fodder for accomplishing this.

So, that’s where we stand right now. We’re considering sending the steel file to the NY police for fingerprinting, as that would easily rule out the Hispanic dude from having done it, and possibly link the two cases, if the Hispanic dude were in fact robbed, to the same miscreant. On the other hand, we’re considering not sending the steel file to the NY police, since they probably don’t give a shit.