Killer Physique

by G. A. McKevett

  “But those patches were checked. Dr. Liu or Eileen or somebody told us they checked them and all the rest of the medications there in his room. There was nothing in them except what was supposed to be.”

  He punched his pillow a couple of times, fluffing it, then snuggled into it. “Seriously, Van, I’m startin’ to think he really did die of an accident, and we just won’t accept it because that means he died because of his own foolishness. Now, if you don’t mind, I wanna catch a few more winks before I rise and shine. Go back to sleep.”

  “You go ahead,” she said, crawling out of bed. “I’m gonna get up and make some coffee and think about this grand revelation of mine. I’m telling you, it’s gonna turn this case around.”

  When he didn’t reply, she knew he had already slipped back into Dreamland.

  She shook her head as she pulled on her robe and slipped into her house shoes. How lovely it would be to be able to fall asleep so easily.

  Dirk had two things down pat—eating and sleeping.

  Then she flashed back on the previous night’s activities. Okay, three things.

  She plucked Diamante off the foot of the bed and tucked her under her arm. There was no point in reaching for Cleopatra. Cleo was snuggled against Dirk’s ribs and would have fought tooth and nail if Savannah had tried to remove her.

  Yes, Cleo had turned into a bona fide daddy’s girl.

  Savannah tiptoed out of the room and quietly closed the door behind her. And as she and Diamante passed the door to the much-disputed man cave, Savannah told the cat, “We’ll just let those two sleep their lives away, while we solve the problems of the world. And while those two snooze, you and I are gonna have first dibs on the coffee and the Kitty Vittles.”

  As they descended the stairs, Savannah chuckled and added, “You know, if I remember right, the two of them slept right through the Northridge Earthquake. Dirk said he didn’t even wake up. But I was screaming my head off, and you were running around the house like a chicken with your head cut off, while your sister . . .”

  By the time Dirk and Cleopatra joined the land of the living downstairs, Savannah and Tammy had been on the computer for more than an hour, panning for the gold nuggets of knowledge to be found on the Internet.

  “She’s right!” Tammy announced, as he shuffled into the living room, wearing a pair of black pajama bottoms spangled with Harley-Davidson logos and a rumpled tee-shirt.

  Originally, probably sometime back in the early seventies, the shirt had also been black. Then it had morphed into a strange, unappealing shade of brown. Now it was a weird, muddy green most commonly seen on Halloween costumes. And the sage quote that had been printed on the front was now illegible—its wisdom forever lost to the world. All that remained of the faded letters was “Mustache” and “50 cents.”

  “We’ve been researching those medicine patches that people wear,” Tammy fairly shouted, “and it looks like they could be lethal if—”

  He held up one hand in a gesture that was reminiscent of his traffic cop days. “No! I don’t care if you’ve found Jimmy Hoffa and he was hanging out with Jack the Ripper. I need coffee.”

  As he passed by them and made his way to the kitchen, Savannah said to Tammy, “Boy, what a grump he can be first thing in the morning. Imagine somebody being that grouchy just because they haven’t had their coffee yet.”

  Tammy turned in her chair and stared at Savannah. “Are you serious?” she asked, an incredulous look on her face. “I mean, really? Are you kidding me?”

  “What?” Savannah asked, clueless.

  Tammy shook her head and returned to the monitor. “Oh, to see ourselves as others see us,” she mumbled under her breath.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Oh, look what I found here . . .”

  As Savannah tossed her kitchen curtains and her best bath towels into the washing machine with one hand, she called Ryan on her cell phone with the other.

  He answered quickly. “Good morning, Savannah. This is a bit early for you.”

  “I know,” she replied, as she chose the “warm” setting and added the detergent. “I’ve got a lot going on.”

  “I can only imagine.”

  “But I woke up this morning with one of those flashes of insight that I get during the night.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. Then, “You mean, like when you woke up after sleeping on the Stevenson case and thought she had put antifreeze in his sports drink?”

  “Well, that wasn’t one of my best ones, but—”

  “And it turned out to be carbon monoxide poisoning?”

  She closed the washing machine lid with a loud bang. “Do you want to hear what I’ve got to say or not, boy?”

  She heard a soft chuckle, then he said, “Sure. Let’s hear what you’ve got. Lay it on me.”

  She paused, her hand on the detergent bottle. There had been a time, not that long ago, when hearing Ryan Stone use the phrase “Lay it on me” would have set her fantasies and hormones racing.

  But now she was a married woman, and she firmly believed that marital fidelity began in the mind.

  So she set the hotsy-totsy fantasies she might have otherwise entertained on the top shelf over the washing machine, along with the detergent bottle.

  “Okay,” she said. “I need to ask you a couple more questions about the night of the premiere.”

  “Ask away.”

  As she left her garage–utility room combo and walked back to the house, she noticed that a batch of weeds had taken up residence in her daylily bed.

  She didn’t tolerate weeds among her lilies at any time. But with a mother-in-law on her way to visit, an untidy garden was unthinkable. She bent over and yanked out the offenders as she continued her conversation.

  “You said he was messing with that patch on his chest there in the men’s bathroom in the theater,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Now think hard, ’cause this is real important. From that time on, was he ever out of your sight?”

  “Not until John and I and his chauffeur put him into the limousine.”

  “Are you absolutely sure? You had eyes on him that entire time?”

  “I’m one hundred percent sure. Why do you ask?”

  She felt the sweat trickling down her forehead and wiped it away with the back of her hand, before tackling the weeds again. “I’m asking because I woke up thinking about that patch.”

  “What about it?”

  “Where did it go? He was wearing it when you guys left the bathroom, right?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “Yet when you found him on the floor of the hotel room, it was gone.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Is there any chance it might have fallen off by itself?”

  “No chance. Those things stick really well. I remember he gave me one a long time ago, when I pulled a muscle in my upper back. When I peeled it off twelve hours later, it felt like it was taking a chunk of my back along with it.”

  Savannah gathered up a handful of the pulled weeds, then stood and groaned as her knees popped. She didn’t recall her knees popping when she’d been in her twenties or thirties. And she wasn’t thrilled about this new development.

  Creaky knees and crow’s-feet. What other lovely gifts did her forty-plus body have in mind for her?

  “Then he must’ve taken the patch off at some point.”

  “Okay. And your point is . . . ?”

  “Where is it? It wasn’t on his body or there in the hotel room. I didn’t see any used, loose patches among the stuff that Eileen and her techs collected.”

  “Maybe he took it off in the limo.”

  “I already thought of that,” Savannah said, as she walked to the garbage can and tossed the weeds inside. “I thought I’d ask you first. The chauffeur’s next. I think he’d been cleaning out the limo when we went by to question him. He might’ve found a patch. And with any luck, he might still have it.”
/>   “You think there might’ve been some kind of poison or something on it. Like someone tampered with it?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “But mostly in your imagination and especially when you first wake up in the morning.”

  “Now listen, boy, you could’ve talked all day and not said that.”

  She hung up on him. She had a chauffeur to question, a futon to buy, and a husband who had drunk quite enough morning coffee and needed to be roused off the sofa. He had a honey-do list the length of his arm, and he’d put off tackling it for long enough.

  “The bathroom floor? You want me to clean the bathroom floor?”

  Dirk stood in front of the refrigerator, a cold, unopened beer in his hands, a look of astonishment and horror on his face.

  Savannah’s hands were refreshment-free and propped on her hips. And her expression was one of cold, hard determination. “Seems apropos, don’t you think, considering your lousy aim?”

  “But I don’t know how.”

  She marched over to the kitchen sink, opened the cupboard beneath it, and pulled out a bottle of liquid floor polish. “Oh, please. Like I’m gonna buy that lame excuse. You were a bachelor for years. Don’t tell me you never cleaned the floor in that trailer of yours.”

  “Of course I did. I’d wet a paper towel, get down on my hands and knees, and give it a once-over. But I’ll just betcha that wouldn’t be good enough for you. No way. I know you, Savannah. You’ve got some fancy-dandy process you want me to use. And then if I don’t do it just right, I’ll hear about it for the rest of my life.”

  She placed the bottle in his free hand and gave him an “atta boy” swat on the shoulder. “You’ll figure it out,” she said. “When all else fails, read the directions on the back.”

  “And where are you going?”

  “I’m gonna go try to solve a murder.”

  “Without me?”

  “You told me you’re starting to think it didn’t even happen. How much good would you be?”

  “So you go off investigating while I stay home and do housework? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  She gave him a benevolent smile. “It’s your day off, darlin’. And that means, as a married man, you’re supposed to devote your spare time to home improvement, yard maintenance, or automobile upkeep.”

  “I never agreed to that.”

  “Yes, you did. It’s in the fine print on the back of the marriage certificate.”

  He sighed. “With the flying bullets and the experimental sex.”

  “Exactly.”

  She grabbed her purse off the counter and headed for the back door.

  “I just want you to know, I think this is messed up,” he grumbled.

  “Objection noted.”

  “Listen up, girl,” he called after her. “You and me—we’re gonna have to renegotiate that fine print crap.”

  But she was already out the door.

  “Just you alone? No Dirk?” Eileen asked when she answered the laboratory’s door.

  “Just me, myself, and I,” Savannah responded. “So I didn’t feel the need to bring cookies.”

  “Hmmm.” Eileen lifted one eyebrow and ushered her inside. “I follow your logic there, but I think cookies should be a standing order. With or without Dirk.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Eileen smiled. And Savannah realized, for the first time, that she smiled a lot more when Dirk wasn’t around.

  That was too bad.

  Dirk was such a good guy, but he was definitely an acquired taste. And too many people spit him out before taking the time to savor the flavor—a mixture of components that were somewhat bitter and more than a little salty, with a slight undertone of sweet.

  “What brings you here today, if it isn’t to bring me cookies?” Eileen said, as they made their way past the techs in their cubicles.

  “Patches.”

  “Patches?”

  “The pain patches you found at the scene.”

  “I thought you knew; we’ve already processed those. Nothing was out of the ordinary.”

  “Yes, but I was wondering if I could see them again. I’d like to look them over myself.”

  Eileen’s mouth curled up on one side. Savannah knew that expression. It wasn’t a particularly friendly one. “And you think you’re going to find something that we didn’t?”

  “I doubt it,” Savannah replied, in her finest ruffled-feather-smoothing tone. “But I’d sure like to try. Then maybe I could sleep a little better at night.”

  Eileen thought it over. “Okay. In the interest of your good health, you can have a look. But don’t expect much.”

  Savannah smiled. “I always hope for the best and prepare for the worst, ’cause that’s what you usually get.”

  “Words to live by.”

  Eileen led her to the back of the room, to the counter where Jason Tyrone’s evidence box sat.

  Savannah already had her surgical gloves on by the time Eileen had taken the box to a table and opened it.

  As Eileen once again wrote her name, the date, and the time on the chain of custody label, Savannah dug in. She headed straight for the small, blue cardboard box with the prescription label on the side that identified it as “Lido-Morphone.”

  She carefully opened the box and saw the individual envelopes inside.

  One by one, she took them out and looked them over. They were unopened and made of a thick, sturdy substance that looked like a combination of heavy paper and foil.

  “Those envelopes are waterproof,” Eileen told her, as though reading her mind. “It’s to keep the gel on the patches from drying out.”

  Savannah noted that the label said the box contained ten patches. She counted as she took out six envelopes that were unopened—still completely intact.

  But the remaining four were different; their ends had been cut off. And those ends that had been removed were also tucked into the box.

  “Why would he put the empty wrappers back in the box?” she wondered aloud.

  “They aren’t empty. Look inside,” Eileen told her.

  Savannah opened one, reached in, and pulled out a patch. It was rumpled, as though it had been worn, and it had been folded in half with the sticky, gel side inward.

  “Okay,” Savannah said. “Then why would he keep a worn patch?”

  “Apparently, he was a conscientious user. If you look on the label, that’s how it tells you to dispose of them. Fold them in half, medicine to the inside, and put them back in their waterproof wrappers before throwing them into the garbage.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they contain powerful, even deadly, medication. And if a child, a pet, or even a wild animal were to put it in their mouth, it could kill them.”

  Savannah nodded thoughtfully. “Gotcha.” She reached into the next wrapper and pulled out another used one. “That was very responsible of him.”

  “More than most people. You’d be horrified if you knew what people do with their leftover medicines. They flush them down the toilet and into the water system. Then you and I wind up drinking them in tap water and watering our plants with them.”

  Savannah had looked inside each of the open envelopes and found a patch, until she got to the last one. “Hey, this one’s empty. Did you test the packets?”

  “Not the packets. We tested all of the patches—the used ones, that is. We didn’t bother with the sealed ones. That envelope you have in your hand, it was empty.”

  “This envelope must have held the last patch he used.”

  Eileen nodded. “That would make sense. And he never got a chance to put that one back into its envelope.”

  Savannah studied the envelope carefully. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Any abnormality would do. But she didn’t see one. It was just a simple packet with one end cut off.

  It looked like it had been opened with a pair of sharp scissors. The cut was clean, not jagged, as it probably would have been
if someone had sawed it open with a knife.

  And yet the cut had not been made in one single snip. She could see where the scissors had stopped and then begun again three times.

  “Were any scissors found among his belongings?” she asked. “Small ones. Larger than nail scissors, but smaller than regular office scissors.”

  “Yes,” Eileen said, “among his toiletries.”

  She began to rifle among the items inside the box. In a moment she had found what she was looking for. She handed Savannah a pair of scissors that were about the size used by young children. But the ends were sharp, not blunted, like school scissors.

  “My granny has a pair like this,” Savannah said. “She uses them when she does her needlepoint and embroidery—to cut the threads. But I’ve seen guys use these, too, to trim their beards and mustaches.”

  “Jason Tyrone was clean-shaven.”

  “Yes, but he might’ve kept these around just for those envelopes. You can’t exactly rip them open with your teeth.”

  Savannah looked around the room. “Do you happen to have one of those big, lighted magnifying lamps? Gran uses one of those, too, for her needlework, now that her eyesight isn’t what it used to be.”

  “As a matter of fact, we do. Follow me.”

  Eileen led her to the other side of the room, where she opened a cupboard and pulled out a version of what Savannah had described. She set the lamp on the counter, plugged it in, and flipped the switch.

  The illumination was far brighter than what Savannah had even hoped for. And when she examined the empty envelope through the lens, she found the magnification much greater than she’d expected.

  Gran needed one of these gadgets.

  She held the small scissors up to the severed edge and found that the blades were the exact length of the first cut. So was the second. The third was a bit shorter.

  “Look at that,” she told Eileen. “He used the scissors. I’ll bet that if you were to swipe a swab across those blades, you’d pick up a bit of that gel and medication.”