Liam stopped halfway to the bathroom door and turned toward the kitchen. He came out a moment later with a plastic grocery bag. He came toward her and put the bag down on the floor near the door. “These go home with us.”
“The vitamins? Ew, why? I’ll buy you new vitamins if you want them.”
Liam leveled his stare on her. “Natalie.”
“What?”
“It’s not just vitamins. There are prescription bottles in there too. You can’t just toss medicine in the trash. It has to be disposed of properly, for one. And two, I’d like to make note of what the man was taking. Aside from the rest of the circus surrounding Graves, his cadaver is first and foremost in my lab for research purposes.”
“Oh. Yeah. I forgot.”
Shaking his head, he smiled and moved closer. Palming her head, he pressed a kiss to her mouth. “I do love you.”
“I love you too. And Ralph is still here.”
“Oh. Right.” He took a step back. “You find anything out here?”
“Not really. The place is pretty sparse. He had no television. There’s a clock radio. And a clunker of an old printer. But what’s weird is I haven’t found a computer. Not a desktop. Not a laptop. Nothing.”
“Is it possible he left it in his office on campus? Or maybe it was university property,” Liam suggested.
“Maybe.” Natalie spun to look for Ralph, who was currently poking around in the kitchen. “Ralph, did you ever see Lionel working on a computer in here?”
Ralph wandered out. “Yeah. Sure. He had a big set up. That’s why I remember it. The man seemed cheap as hell in all other things, except for that.”
“Did Lionel use a laptop?” she asked Ralph. He easily could have carried that to his office on campus and left it there.
“You mean one of those thin ones you can carry around with you? No.” Ralph shook his head. “It was over there on the desk. And it had a big TV screen on the shelf and a separate typewriter thing. And there was a big box on the floor under there with all these wires and flashing lights.”
Natalie spun to face the desk. There was a power strip underneath with a dozen or so outlets. As if there were indeed more electronics to plug in. The problem was there was only one thing plugged in there now. The printer.
She turned back to Liam. “So if Lionel had a monitor, a keyboard and a CPU all set up over there, where is it all now?”
Switching her gaze to Ralph she asked, “When was the last time you saw the computer here?”
“I mean I don’t make a habit of spying on our tenants?—”
“Ralph,” Natalie said in a low tone.
“Okay fine. I came in here and saw it probably a week or so before he died. He was on there on that Face page?—”
“Facebook,” she corrected.
“Yeah. That. He was grumbling and cussing and typing away. I had to come in and see what was up.”
“And then? When did you notice the computer missing?” Natalie asked.
“Just now. When you asked me about it.”
“Didn’t you come upstairs when they found Lionel dead?”
“Yeah, but you know there were a bunch of people in here. And I don’t like being around dead bodies since, you know.” He indicated his own ghostly body. “I stayed in the hallway.”
Natalie drew in a breath and glanced at Liam, remembering he’d only heard half of her conversation with Ralph. “So the computer disappeared sometime between when Lionel was fighting with me on Facebook and now.”
“That doesn’t exactly pin down the time it went missing,” Liam said.
“No, it doesn’t.” And she didn’t know what to do about that.
