Animal Instinct by Rosenfelt, David (novels for students TXT) 📕

look at my watch to demonstrate my focus on time. “I’m here to get Lisa Yates’s things.”

“Who is she?”

I feign increased annoyance, leaning toward anger. “Who is she? Is this your first goddamn day? She was here for a month and then had to leave town. She sent me to get her stuff. Look it up.”

He sits up straighter. “Okay … okay…” He looks her up on the computer and says, “Here she is. She owes two weeks’ rent.”

“I know. I already had this damn conversation with the manager. Now how much does she owe, I’ll pay it. Then you take me to her room, I’ll get her stuff, and get out of this dump.”

He looks at the computer again. “Three hundred forty dollars.”

“What a damn rip-off,” I say, but I count out the cash and give it to him. Maybe I can fill out an expense form and get Andy to reimburse me. “Let’s go.”

He gets the key and takes me to her room and opens it. “See you later,” I say at the open door, to make sure he leaves.

I go inside. Gathering her stuff is pretty easy; there are two suitcases, still closed and filled. There are no clothes in the closet or the drawers, no toiletries in the bathroom, nothing to show that she stayed here. Actually, it’s obvious that there is no way that she did stay here; I’d bet she was keeping this room as a potential place to hide. At least that’s how I see it.

I take the two suitcases, make one more check to see that nothing else is in the room, and leave. I walk around to my car, which is near the motel entrance, and load them into the trunk.

Obviously the police never became aware that Lisa was renting the room or they would have come and confiscated her stuff. I suppose at some point it could come back to haunt me that my GPS monitor will show that I was here, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

In the meantime, I head home to look through the stuff I’ve just stolen.

“YOU moving in, or moving out?” Dani asks, when she sees me come in with the suitcases.

“I stole these from Lisa Yates’s motel room.”

“You know, it’s possible that you’re a career criminal.”

“And a damn good one.” I bring her up-to-date on the circumstances behind my theft.

“What are you hoping to find?”

“A clue, maybe. I have no idea. You want to help me look through all of this? In case there’s female stuff I shouldn’t see?”

“Sure; I certainly wouldn’t want you to see female stuff. But if I help, will that make me an accomplice?”

“Absolutely.”

“Can I be a sidekick instead? I’ve always wanted to be a sidekick.”

“I can’t think of a better sidekick to have.” I point to the suitcases. “You take that one and I’ll take this one.”

We open both of them on the living room floor; they seem to be filled with clothing. I take the items out of my assigned bag, and at the bottom there is a toiletry case. I open it, but there doesn’t seem to be anything unusual in it.

“Just clothing and stuff in here,” I say.

“Same here.” But Dani’s going through her bag more slowly than I am. “Wait a minute.…”

“What is it?”

“An envelope.” She takes out an eight-and-a half-by-eleven-inch manila envelope, which looks thin. If anything is inside, it couldn’t be more than a few sheets of paper. She hands it to me to open, which I do, being careful not to tear anything inside.

It is, in fact, three sheets of paper. They are three newspaper obituaries, which appear to be printed from the internet. I look through them quickly, and they seem not to be out of the ordinary in any way.

One is for a Mr. Samuel Devers, 71, of Springfield, Massachusetts. Another is Ms. Doris Landry, 73, of Somers Point, New Jersey. The third is Mr. Eric Seaver of Brunswick, Maine. The dates that they died are listed and are all about seven weeks ago. These three people died within five days of each other.

The obituaries themselves are boilerplate; they don’t do much more than announce the deaths. There are no mentions of planned services, though in two cases the families recommend donations to specific disease charities in lieu of flowers. I assume those are the diseases they died of.

In two cases the people are survived by their spouses; Ms. Landry is survived by her son, Steven.

I call Andy and tell him what I’ve done and about the discovery of the obituaries. I tell him I’ll scan and email them to Laurie, and he says that Dani should do it on her computer, in case the authorities issue a subpoena to go through my emails.

Andy puts Laurie on the phone, and I suggest that she give this information to Sam, to see what he can find out about the three deceased people. “The obituaries were hidden at the bottom of a suitcase. They weren’t there by accident.”

When I get off the phone, I ask Dani to scan and send them to Laurie.

“No problem,” she says. “That’s the kind of stuff that sidekicks do.”

“I just don’t see anything unusual about these people. They basically lived normal, uncontroversial lives.”

Sam has done a quick background check on the three deceased people whose obituaries Lisa had in her suitcase. I was hoping he’d come up with some case-breaking clue, but he obviously has not.

“Did they have anything in common?” I ask.

“Well, they’ve all kicked off, so there’s that. And while I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, none of them seem to have made much of an impact on the world. They lived pretty long lives, and then sayonara.”

“That’s beautiful, Sam,” Laurie says. “You have the heart of a poet. No criminal records for any of them?”

“No. Not so much as an unpaid traffic ticket. I’m getting copies of the death certificates, so maybe you’ll see something unusual in