Identity Crisis (Sam McRae Mystery #1)

Chapter 11

I lay back on the bed with a groan, stared at the pebbled plaster ceiling of our motel room, and prayed for the day to end quickly.

Melanie sat cross-legged on the other bed, watching some show about young female lawyers in microminis and "fuck me" Manolo Blahniks, who couldn't understand why the senior partners at their firm weren't taking them seriously.

Sending the car off behind a tow truck left us little choice but to walk to a nearby motel. The price was right, and a woman at the front desk with a broad smile and a mole of unique proportions on her nose assured us the ice machine was probably working.

Sudlerville, Pennsylvania, was a small town with few diversions. It had an auto repair shop and a motel, both AAA-approved. It also had a shopping center, a church, a Moose Lodge, and an old movie theater that showed retrospective films on weekends. It was a place of stone houses built close together, tucked behind gnarly oaks, and no doubt owned by the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters of the city founders.

All I really cared about was that the bed was comfortable, the room was clean, and my car would be ready the next day.

Melanie yawned and stretched. She got up and walked to the dresser, where she'd put her leftover sandwich.

I wondered if the dresser had held anyone's clothes since its arrival at the motel.

"Now, I'm hungry," she said, returning to the bed with the box and plopping down. Those were the first words she'd spoken since we checked in.

"I think there's a McDonald's down the road, if you want more."

She thought about it. "Maybe. I almost feel too tired to bother, you know?"

On screen, one of the high-fashion lawyers was going to court with a thin file tucked under one arm and a determined pout on her collagen-enhanced lips.

I wondered if Melanie liked baseball. I didn't know if there was a game on. Would they watch the Orioles here or the Pittsburgh Pirates?

"I didn't try to steal from you."

I looked at Melanie. She kept her eyes on the tube.

"OK," I said.

"I don't know anything about identity theft or where those papers came from." She paused. "But Tom might have."

I rolled onto my side and perched my head on one hand. "Tom?"

"He was a computer expert, you know?"

"I didn't know. Who did he work for?"

"He had his own business. Computer consulting and web hosting. In fact, he did some work for the bank. That's how we met."

"I've read a little about those cases," I said. "There've been some big ones, where employees get personal data from their employers' databases and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars. A bank would be a great place to get that kind of data."

Melanie grimaced. "If he was making big money from identity theft, he never told me. He was always trying to borrow from me."

It seemed inconsistent, but there could have been an explanation. "Maybe he kept the money hidden, the way regular thieves will hide a stash until the heat's off, as they say in the movies."

"You'd still think he could have risked using a couple of hundred, now and then."

"True."

Melanie chewed her sandwich. In silence, we watched a commercial featuring a grinning woman who wore Depends and whose days were apparently spent in a nonstop series of tennis games and deck parties.