Killer Physique Read online

  She had no particular victim in mind. She just hated the world in general.

  Someone out there was conspiring to ruin her life and doing a darn good job of it. They were preventing her from sleeping, eating a decent meal, and taking a much beloved rose-scented bubble bath, and on a more practical note, they were keeping her from scrubbing her house from top to bottom in preparation for her in-laws’ visit.

  “I know what we promised Dr. Liu,” she told Dirk, as they trudged across the parking lot to the little white door with its county seal, “and of course, we’ll keep our word and follow through. But frankly, I don’t have time to conduct any kind of serious, full-fledged homicide investigation right now. I need to be painting the downstairs bathroom, washing and ironing the kitchen curtains, and scrubbing the grout on the backsplash tile.”

  Dirk shot her a worried scowl. She had seen a lot of that particular grimace lately. He donned it any time the topic of home improvement came up.

  Too bad, she thought. Wait till he gets a load of his honey-do list. Then he’ll have something to frown about.

  “I doubt my parents are going to notice your backsplash grout,” he said, as he punched the doorbell button and rang the obnoxious buzzer.

  “Your mom’s a retired nurse,” she replied. “They’re very clean, nurses. I’ll betcha her house is spotless. You could probably eat right off her kitchen floor.”

  “Fortunately, we have plates, so you don’t have to sterilize your kitchen floor.”

  “But this is the first time I’ve ever had in-laws. The first time I’ve ever met my in-laws. I want to make a good impression.”

  He sighed, and for a moment she could see traces of fear, maybe even a bit of terror, in his eyes. “You want to make a good impression? How do you think I feel? Meeting your parents for the first time in your life when you’re in your forties? No stress there.”

  She shifted the plastic container containing the cookies to one arm, and with her free hand she reached up to stroke his cheek. “You’re gonna do just fine, sugar. Just fine. They’re gonna be so proud when they see what a big, strong, good man you’ve turned out to be.”

  He grinned, a tremulous little smile, then chuckled nervously. “I hope you’re right.”

  “I’m always right.” She gave him a wink. “And if we could just start every argument with that as a given, think of all the time we’d save.”

  This time Eileen didn’t bother to interrogate them over the speaker before opening the door. She even had a bit of a smile—or at least her perpetual frown was less pronounced—when she looked down and saw the container of cookies under Savannah’s arm.

  “Do come in,” she told them, reaching for the goodies. “It’s hot out there, and I wouldn’t want you to melt.”

  “Since when did you worry about us melting?” Dirk asked.

  “She always worries about me,” Savannah said, giving him a nudge. “And she wouldn’t want the chocolate chips to get all runny.”

  “Like either one of you gals would turn up your noses at any kind of chocolate, runny or otherwise,” Dirk said, as he followed Savannah inside the air-conditioned laboratory.

  Even on Southern California’s hottest, summer day—when the dry Santa Ana winds swept in from the east, replacing the usually cool ocean breezes—the lab was kept at a constant 77°F and 50 percent humidity. And on more than one Fourth of July Savannah had invented reasons to visit Eileen in her perfectly controlled environment.

  Chocolate chips were safe from melting within its comfortable confines. . . . And so were perimenopausal Southern belles.

  Plus Savannah found the laboratory, Eileen, and her assorted CSI techs fascinating. While she would never have wanted to trade jobs with them, they had her undying admiration for their scientific expertise, and her deep appreciation for all the times they had helped her solve a case.

  She harbored no misconception that she could perform their duties. They were a strange and wonderful combination of law enforcement officers and scientists rolled into one.

  And although Savannah could interrogate a perp and squeeze a confession out of him as efficiently, or more so, than anyone on any police force, she would have never made it as a lab tech. The math and chemistry alone would’ve been her downfall, had she even started down that path.

  Any dreams she might have harbored of becoming a woman of science had perished in the third grade with the introduction of long division.

  But in the end, she had decided that was okay with her. When all was said and done, she preferred to stare straight into the bad guy’s weaselly, evasive, ugly little eyes until he squirmed like the gooey little worm he was, rather than study his blood-spattered shirt under a microscope for hours.

  Fate had arranged everything, just as it should be.

  She and Dirk followed Eileen through the lab’s office area, which included four utilitarian, gray cubicles with gray desks, gray file cabinets, and black leatherette desk chairs. Apparently the “decorator” had decided to take a chance and be daring with the chair color.

  Eileen’s cubicle was slightly larger than the other three. Over her desk hung an Elvis calendar.

  Long ago, Dirk and Eileen had bonded over that calendar, as both were ardent fans of the King. The bond had held until Dirk’s next abrasive comment—ten seconds later.

  Theirs was a short-lived friendship.

  “I suppose you came by to see what we’ve got,” Eileen said, as she pulled the lid off the container of cookies and dove into the contents.

  Sensing that a sarcastic reply from Dirk was forthcoming, Savannah gave him a warning look and said, “No, we just came by to give you the cookies. But, of course, if you want to share what you’ve got, we’d be mighty keen to hear all about it.”

  Dirk eyed the cookies. “And if you wanna share a few of those chocolate chippers—”

  “Get real,” Eileen said around a half cookie that was in her mouth. “You’re married to this woman now. Which means you have access to food like this twenty-four/seven. Whereas I, on the other hand, have to wait for somebody to get murdered before I get a Savannah-made treat.”

  Savannah’s ears perked up, like Granny Reid’s bloodhound, Beauregard, when he heard a squirrel rustling around in the henhouse. “Murdered? You think somebody got murdered?”

  “I think it’s a possibility, and so do you two, or you wouldn’t be here.” She gave them a wry smile. “I don’t believe for a moment you’re here just to poke cookies into my pretty face.”

  “You’re a suspicious old broad,” Dirk told her with a wink.

  “Watch who you’re calling ‘old,’ you half-baked cracker,” Eileen said with a sniff.

  “Half-baked cracker?” Savannah said, chuckling. “Sometimes, girl, I wonder if you’ve got a down-in-Dixie rebel or two on your family tree.”

  Eileen smiled. “Yes. There’s a Confederate or two lurking in my pedigree. Why do you think I appreciate your good Southern cooking the way I do?”

  “You can’t go by that,” Dirk said. “Everybody who sits down to Savannah’s table becomes a son or daughter of the old South—at least for the time they’re sitting there.”

  “I believe it.”

  Eileen led them to the back of the building and into the laboratory. Much larger than the office area, it was a wide, open space with numerous examination tables upon which lay copious files and folders, boxes, and evidence bags.

  Against the walls were more tables, desks, filing cabinets, and countertops covered with beakers, microscopes, meters, and measurers of all sorts that Savannah had never seen outside of this room.

  The place looked and smelled a lot like her high school chemistry room, where she had slaved so hard for that measly C–. Only the lab was much larger. And Eileen was far more intimidating than her teacher, Mr. Dorsch, had ever been.

  “We’ve already finished processing the evidence from Tyrone’s hotel room,” Eileen said. “And, of course, we’ve already put everything away. Which m
akes your visit here all the more annoying,” she added, shooting Dirk a nasty look.

  “Hence the cookies,” he replied.

  “Exactly.” She walked to a counter in the back of the room and picked up a cardboard box with a chain-of-custody label on it.

  She carried it to a table in the center of the room, took a pen from her pocket, and scribbled her name, the date, and the time on the label before opening the box.

  Well-trained in crime lab protocol, Savannah and Dirk had already fished pairs of surgical gloves out of their pockets and donned them.

  “Here it is,” Eileen said. “Not that there’s anything new here that you hadn’t already seen at the hotel.”

  Savannah heard the accusation in her voice but decided to ignore it. Eileen habitually complained about anyone examining a crime scene before she and her team arrived.

  “We didn’t touch anything,” Dirk told her, his tone more than a little defensive.

  “Yeah, sure,” Eileen shot back. “That’ll be the day, when Dirk Coulter leaves the crime scene untouched.”

  Savannah couldn’t resist jumping into the affray. “We were wearing our gloves. And we left everything exactly where we found it. Really. What do you think we are? A couple of country bumpkins?”

  Eileen gave Dirk a contemptuous look and opened her mouth to reply. But Savannah beat her to it. “Don’t answer that. Have another cookie.”

  Dirk reached into the box and began to take out various items. All were tagged with identifying numbers and letters. Some things were in brown paper evidence bags—like the amber prescription medicine bottles.

  “You guys checked all this stuff already?” Dirk asked.

  Savannah could practically see the feathers on the back of Eileen’s head ruffle.

  “I’m sure they did, Dirk,” Savannah said gently.

  “Process evidence? Us?” Eileen said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Of course not. The only reason we come to work every day is so that we can soak in the charming ambiance of this place. Lovely, isn’t it?”

  She waved a hand, indicating the vast room in all its steel-gray, industrial splendor. “After all, who wouldn’t want to spend sixteen hours a day in a joint like this?”

  Dirk held up his hands in surrender. “All right, all right. You processed everything in your usual thorough, professional manner. What did you find, if anything?”

  Eileen sobered, her eyes traveling from one item on the table to the next. She sighed and said with a somewhat defeated tone, “Nothing. That’s what we found. Nothing out of the ordinary. Except for an unusual amount of pharmaceuticals and vitamin supplements, it was just your usual guy’s hotel room.”

  One by one, she pointed to the various items. “You’ve got your standard toiletries, three or four changes of clothing, a best-selling novel, a couple of bodybuilding magazines—one of them had him on the cover—a cell phone, an electronic tablet. And surprisingly enough, the tablet isn’t even top-of-the-line. You’d think a rich movie star, like him, could afford the best.”

  Dirk took offense. “Hey, some people just don’t want to waste a ton of money, upgrading all the time.”

  “Let me guess,” Eileen said with a snicker. “You’ve got the same phone you’ve had for ten years.”

  “And there’s not a damned thing wrong with it either,” was Dirk’s retort.

  Savannah laughed. “Hey, I had to twist his arm to get him to buy that one. Had to pry him away from his soup cans with the string attached.”

  “Speaking of electronics,” Dirk said, “did you get anything off his cell phone or that tablet thing?”

  “We scanned through his calls and texts,” Eileen replied. “Only one thing stood out.”

  Savannah asked, “What’s that?”

  “He got a bunch of texts yesterday from somebody named Thomas Owen.”

  “How much is a bunch?” Dirk wanted to know.

  “Enough to be considered harassment, if you ask me. I think there were between fifty and sixty in the afternoon alone. For a while, he was sending one per minute.”

  “That’d be enough to get my dander up, for sure,” Savannah said, as she picked up the phone and turned it on.

  She brought up one text after another and read the short, unfriendly messages aloud. “Call me. Dammit, call me. I can’t believe you’re doing this. You can’t go without me. I’m sitting here all ready to go. You better send somebody for me. Jason, do the right thing. You’ll be sorry for treating me like this. I’m not going to forget this.”

  Savannah turned off the phone and replaced it in its evidence bag. “Sounds like a pissed-off, stood-up lover to me.”

  “No kidding,” Dirk replied. “That’s the kind of messages a husband would get if he forgot to take his wife out for their anniversary. And heaven help him when he got home.”

  “Exactly.” Savannah thought hard, trying to remember something she had heard about Jason and his partner breaking up. Had Ryan and John mentioned it, or had she read it on the front of a tabloid cover while waiting in line at the grocery store?

  She made a mental note to call Ryan the moment they left the lab.

  “Since you probably don’t want me to take that phone with me,” Dirk said, “I need a list of all the calls on it.”

  “Can’t you subpoena the phone company for that?” Eileen said. “We’ve got two robberies and a domestic assault to process before the day’s over. And thanks to the chief and the mayor leaning on us about this case, it’s the only thing we’ve accomplished in the last twelve hours.”

  Dirk gave her his most “patient” look. It was a look that he frequently used to annoy slow waitresses in every cheap eatery in town.

  “And if I have to get a subpoena and go to the phone company,” he said, “that’ll take forever, and you know it. Where you, on the other hand, could ask one of those bozos out there in a cubicle to print it right out for me.”

  Eileen just stared at him for what seemed like forever, then she turned to Savannah. “You married this guy?”

  Savannah laughed and shrugged. “I did. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “You actually let him put a ring on your finger, and you promised to stay with him for the rest of your life?”

  “No, just till death do us part.”

  “Ah, gotcha.”

  Savannah glanced down at the cell phone. “So is that it?” she asked. “An avalanche of pissy texts from a disgruntled lover? Is that the most scandalous thing we have from the scene?”

  Eileen nodded. “That’s it. We analyzed everything in the medicine and supplement bottles. They contained exactly what the labels said they did.”

  “How about the pain med patches?” Savannah asked.

  “Lido-Morphone and the gel that it’s suspended in. That was all. I’m telling you, the only thing we found in any of those substances is exactly what the manufacturer says they put in them.”

  Eileen began to replace the items into the box. “And we got word, just before you two got here, that Dr. Liu is ruling it accidental. The result of him taking too many body-enhancing drugs for too long.” She shrugged. “We’ve all seen the pictures—him standing there, posing, muscles bulging everywhere. Let’s be honest, it’s no big surprise. He cheated and doped his way to that big body of his. And he paid for it. The ultimate price, as it turns out.”

  Moments later, as Dirk and Savannah left the laboratory and walked across the parking lot to her Mustang, she turned to Dirk and said, “You realize, that’s how he’s going to be known from now on. A doper and a cheater.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, glancing down at the names and numbers on the printed list he had finagled out of Eileen—with the promise of more baked goods from Savannah’s kitchen. “Unless we prove that it’s something even worse. Something . . . shall we say, more sinister?”

  She thought that over for a moment, then nodded. “True. A doper, a cheater . . . or a murder victim. What a lousy set of choices.”

 
; Chapter 11

  “Man, oh, man, this being married business has some major perks,” Dirk said, as he started up the Mustang and drove her out of the CSI lab’s parking lot.

  “Us being married has nothing to do with it,” Savannah said, as she settled into the passenger seat, a grouchy look on her face. “It has everything to do with me being a good citizen and letting you drive so that I can make a phone call.”

  “Whatever,” he said, his foot a bit heavy on the gas pedal.

  “No. There’s no ‘whatever’ about it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. So enjoy it while you can.”

  He responded by screeching around the corner and laying down a bit of rubber—rubber from her newly purchased, classic, red-wall tires.

  She growled, reached over, grabbed his knee, and gave it a painful squeeze. “Don’t enjoy it that much, boy, or you’ll be pulling her over to the shoulder and giving me back those keys, pronto.”

  He laughed, but he took the next corner a bit more slowly.

  Satisfied that neither her life nor her vehicle were in danger, she pulled her phone from her purse and called Ryan.

  He answered almost instantly, his usually relaxed, deep voice tight with tension. “Savannah, what’s up?” he said, dispensing with his normal pleasantries.

  “Nothing, honey,” she told him. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “I called you at home,” Ryan said, “and Tammy told me you’d gone to meet with Dr. Liu.”

  “Yes, we did. She’s finished the autopsy, and she’s ruling it an accident.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. Finally, he said, “An accident? But how can that be? There was no sign that he’d fallen or hurt himself.”

  Savannah swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Not that kind of an accident,” she said. “More like he accidentally took too many different kinds of medications for too long and damaged his heart.”

  “He died of a heart attack?”

  “No, I think she called it cardiovascular damage. Something like that. And the problem with his heart caused his brain not to get enough oxygen. And that caused him to . . . well, you know. That’s why.”