She shook her head, nose wrinkled. “Old K-cups and moldy takeout leftovers. No address to a secret cabin in the woods where he meets his cult buddies for a full moon ritual.”
Burt found two bowls on the floor and wolfed down the kibble before slurping up the water.
“Guy’s got a cat,” Nick observed, nudging the pantry door open wider to find a bag of cat food sitting on top of a litter box.
“Here kitty kitty,” Riley called. Burt’s ears perked up, but no feline appeared.
“Looks like he was on the TV dinner and beer diet.” She held up a frozen entree. “Guy goes from a wife and four kids to living alone and eating Dr. Diet Salisbury Steak.”
“No pictures. No effort to make ‘Dad’s place’ homey for the kids. Pants dropped at the door. Maybe he liked it better this way?” Nick guessed.
He returned to the living room and peered inside the coat closet. There was a sweatshirt and three coats hanging up. Beneath them were two pairs of loafers and an empty space.
“See anything suspicious, yet?”
He shook his head. “No packing lists or plane tickets. No suspicious pools of blood. No ransom notes. Let’s check upstairs.”
Burt bounded up the carpeted stairs in front of them.
“I swear he understands English,” she said, following the dog up to the second floor.
Upstairs they found two bedrooms of equal size and a small bathroom. One bedroom had two sets of bunkbeds crammed against the walls. There were no sheets on the mattresses.
Larry’s bedroom had a full-sized bed with no headboard, one pillow, and bedding that looked as though he’d picked it up from a discount bin. The closet held no secrets and very few clothes. A few t-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a couple pairs of athletic shorts and tank tops crumpled on the floor. There was a phone charger plugged into the wall under the window, the smallest flat screen Nick had ever seen perched on the rickety, nearly empty dresser, and a bottle of lotion on the floor next to the bed.
Larry Rupley’s life was depressing as fuck.
He followed Riley into the bathroom.
“Hmm,” she said, looking at the pile of dirty underwear on the linoleum floor.
“Bring back memories?” he asked. Her former neighbor Dickie had a history of dropping his underwear in the shared bathroom. At least, he had before he’d gotten himself murdered.
“I’m betting Larry doesn’t have a pair of salad tongs and a disgruntled woman to pick them up,” she joked.
Nick eyed the empty roll of toilet paper on the floor and opened the linen closet. No wife to buy Larry toilet paper or more than one towel. He wondered how much effort Larry would have had to make to avoid the divorce. And how much of a lazy son of bitch the guy had to be to not be willing to make it.
“This place is depressing me,” Riley said with a sigh as she popped open the medicine cabinet. “And apparently Larry.” She tossed a bottle of prescription pills at him. Anti-depressants. He emptied it on the off-white vanity top and counted the pills, checking the refill date on the bottle.
“Here’s one for cholesterol,” she said, handing him another.
He did the same with the second bottle.
“If he’s good about taking his pills, he’s about five days behind on both. They were both filled on the same day.”
“Five days fits the timeline of when Shelley said he stopped responding to the kids’ texts and calls.”
Nick snapped pictures of the pills, the bathroom, and the rest of the upstairs, and then they returned to the first floor. Burt was lounging on the couch.
His long tail whipped against the cushion when he saw them.
“So, what are we seeing or not seeing?” Nick prompted.
“He left his wallet and car keys,” Riley said. “But I don’t see a phone or a house key. So it looks like he was only planning on being gone for a short time. Or maybe that’s how he wanted it to look.”
“Shelley said he owed her child support, and there’s a couple of past due notices in that stack of mail. Maybe Larry got too far behind and decided to skip out on everything. People of the deadbeat variety do it all the time.”
She frowned. “Yeah, but he’s got two race bibs on the fridge for 5ks, and there was a space in the coat closet between his work shoes. It kind of looks like he went for a run and never came back.”
