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

“Any of them wealthy?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

I try again. “So no reason to think that Lisa Yates had a relationship with any of them?”

Sam shrugs. “I can’t really say that. I can say that there is no obvious connection that exists online. But I can dive a lot deeper; I just did a surface search. They could have been pen pals for all I know.”

Sam’s comment gives me an idea. “Can we get access to Lisa Yates’s emails? Maybe she communicated with them that way.”

“Do you have her computer? Or phone?”

“No and no. I assume the police have them.”

“Can you get me her email address? If not, I’m sure I can get it. So the answer to your original question is yes.”

“I’m sure I can get her email address from her sister. I was going to contact her anyway.”

“Okay, let me know when you have it, and I’ll get her emails. Last three months good enough?”

“Plenty good enough.”

When I get home, I call Denise Yates, Lisa’s sister. “Sorry to bother you. I’m calling to ask you a few more questions, and to see how you are doing.”

She sounds tired. “Getting by. One day at a time; isn’t that how you’re supposed to do it?”

“So I’m told. I’m lucky that I haven’t had to go through something so awful.” I’m a bit relieved; if Denise is aware that I have recently been charged with murder, she isn’t acting like it.

“I hope you don’t have to. Any progress on the case?”

“Some, but that’s what I wanted to ask you about. Do these names mean anything to you, and do you know if Lisa had any connection to them? Samuel Devers, of Springfield, Massachusetts; Doris Landry, of Somers Point, New Jersey; and Eric Seaver of Brunswick, Maine.”

She thinks for a few moments. “Not off the top of my head. Can you tell me them again? I want to write them down. Maybe something will come to me.”

I tell her the names again, and I assume she’s writing them down. “I also wanted to ask you for Lisa’s email address.”

“That’s one I can answer. She had two; one for personal and one for work.”

She gives me the addresses and I thank her. “I’ll be in touch when I come up with something.”

I get off the phone frustrated that we can’t yet find a connection between Lisa Yates and the three people in the obituaries. Their deaths were in some way meaningful to her. They all died shortly before Lisa rented the motel room in what looks like a plan to hide, if she needed to run.

She packed bags to keep there, and those obituaries did not print and pack themselves. She did both, and she wouldn’t have done those things without a reason. That motel room was going to be her safe place, where she felt she could hide and not be harmed. She wanted those three pieces of paper with her.

I just wish I knew why.

MY father, if he was alive, would have described Don Crystal as a “character.”

Most people of my father’s generation would have said it as a negative, but not him. If he encountered someone like Crystal, he would have been sort of bewildered and sort of amused, but he wouldn’t have been critical. He was a live-and-let-live guy, even if he couldn’t identify with certain offbeat kinds of “living.”

Crystal certainly has an interesting look about him. His hair is long; if it were combed down, it would probably not reach his shoulders, but would come pretty close. But that is a moot point; his hair does not look like it’s been combed or brushed since the Mets last won a World Series.

When I get to his house, he greets me at the front door in pajamas … with feet on them. They’re not bunny feet, so that’s a plus. But I haven’t seen an adult in pajama feet in a while; it takes a major effort not to stare.

He lives in what seems like a fairly large, and quite old, house in Tenafly. When I walk in from the front door directly into the den, I am struck that, besides a couch, there is no other furniture at all. No chairs, tables, television, nothing. I can’t speak to what might be in the bedroom or kitchen, or in what I assume are quite a few other rooms, judging from the outside, but I’ve got a hunch that this house is not home to many book- or bridge-club gatherings.

Crystal practically jumped at the chance to talk to me when I called him. All he had to hear was that I wanted to talk about Ardmore Medical Systems, and I thought he was going to send a limo to my house to bring me here. That he referred to Ardmore as “that cesspool” leads me to believe his assessment is not going to be all positive.

When I interviewed Susan Redick at Ardmore about Lisa and her work there, Susan had said that if I talked to Don Crystal, I’d learn about the “nitty-gritty” of the place. Based on this house, I definitely think she was right about at least the “gritty” part.

“You want something to drink?” Crystal asks. “I’ve got water and Tang.”

“Tang? The stuff the astronauts used to drink?”

He nods. “They probably still do; it’s good stuff.”

“I didn’t know that it was still around.”

He gives me a look. “Oh, sure. You just have to know where to find it.”

I decline the Tang, and he sits on the couch. I sit on the arm of the couch farthest from him; it seems to be the cleanest available spot. I tell him I’m looking into the death of Lisa Yates.

“She’s dead?”

“Yes, murdered in a drive-by shooting.”

“Wow. I don’t spend much time with the mainstream media. The kind of things I read, unless there was a wild conspiracy theory about her, or she was killed by aliens, I wouldn’t have seen it.”

“How long did you work at Ardmore?”

“Way