Festive in Death

by J. D. Robb

  “If it’s going to be this cold, it should snow.” Peabody jumped into Eve’s car, shivered. “It’s almost Christmas so we should have snow anyway. Snow’s pretty.”

  “Then we could creep behind the plows that shove it against the curbs where it turns to black sludge, wind our way through all the vehicles that spun out because people don’t know how the hell to drive in the snow, or step over all the pedestrians who slip on the snowy sidewalks.”

  “You need a good dose of holiday spirit.” Peabody wriggled down into her seat, grateful and happy with the automatic seat warmers. She thought, at that moment, a warm ass was a happy one. “We should get some hot chocolate.”

  Eve didn’t spare Peabody a glance. “We’re going to the gym.”

  “If we got hot chocolate first, we could work it off at the gym.” Peabody tried a winsome smile, gave it up with a shrug. “I’ll run the supervisor.”

  “What a fine idea.”

  Eve navigated the streets, still quiet in the weak winter dawn. Streetlights fizzed off, leaving the air cold and gray with puffs of steam rising intermittently through the subway vents. She passed one half-empty maxibus where the passengers all looked dazed and palely green in its flickering security lights.

  Even at the early hour, she had to wrangle a parking spot in a loading zone, half a block from Buff Bodies.

  She flipped on her On Duty light.

  “Lill Byers,” Peabody began as they got out into the frigid swirl of wind. “Age thirty-eight, divorced, one offspring, male, age seven. Employed with Buff Bodies for twelve years, currently as manager. Little bump here—arrested for destruction of property, disturbing the peace, six years back. She took a tire iron to her ex-husband’s vehicle. I guess it wasn’t an amicable divorce.”

  “There’s no such thing as an amicable divorce.”

  The lights of the gym shone bright against the wide front windows. The glass rose high, to expose three spacious floors. Through the first level Eve saw several bodies—appropriately buff—running, lunging, lifting, climbing.

  While the maxibus passengers had looked stunned and weary, the dawn workout brigade appeared terrifyingly alert.

  “I hate them all,” Peabody muttered. “Every one of them. Just look. All perfectly packed in frosty outfits designed to show off every cut, rip, and ripple. Smug looks on their faces, a sheen of sweat on their skin. And zero percent body fat among the whole buff bunch. How am I supposed to enjoy my frothy hot chocolate now?”

  “You don’t have a frothy hot chocolate.”

  “In my mind I did. Now even its imaginary frothy goodness is spoiled.”

  “Buck up,” Eve suggested, swiped her master over the members’ entrance pad, and walked inside.

  Straight into a wall of noise.

  Screaming, pounding, throbbing music blasted out of the speakers and banged against her eardrums. She saw a woman on a cycle crouched over, face fierce as she sang along, presumably at the top of her lungs.

  Her eyes looked just a little insane.

  Machines whooshed and whirled, feet slapped on treads, weights clinked and thumped. The open three-story space boasted a juice bar—currently unoccupied—on the second level, and what looked to be classrooms, glassed in, on the third.

  She could see more buff bodies performing graceful yoga sun salutations behind the glass of one of the rooms.

  “Must have amazing soundproofing,” Eve decided.

  The check-in desk—a semicircle of glossy white—was currently unmanned, but Eve spotted a woman in snug shorts and an equally snug tee sporting the gym’s double B logo whipping a client through a series of punishing squats and lunges on a teeterboard while he curled twenty-pound free weights.

  “Come on, Zeke! Quads of steel! Get low. Push off. Squeeze!”

  “Excuse me,” Eve began.

  “One sec. Dig for it, Zeke. Five more!”

  “I hate you, Flora.”

  She absolutely beamed at him. “That’s the spirit, that’s what I want to hear. Four more.”

  “Lill Byers?” Eve said.

  “Should be here, should be in her office. Don’t you quit on me, Zeke. Don’t you quit. Three. Squeeze it, pump it, form, form, form. Two more. Just past check-in,” she added for Eve. “You got it, you got it, last one. Finish strong.”

  Eve heard the guy collapse, gasping, when Flora whistled her approval on the last set.

  “Thirty-second water break,” Flora announced as Eve headed toward the office. “Then it’s time for crunches.”

  “You’re a monster, Flora.”

  “That’s what you love about me.”

  “Maybe I should get a personal trainer,” Peabody speculated. “If I had someone like that hammering at me, I’d have a perfect heart-shaped, drum-tight ass in no time.”

  “You’d blast her with your stunner before the end of the first session.”

  “Other than that.”

  Through the narrow glass of the office door Eve saw a woman with a skullcap of orange hair and a body honed scalpel sharp sitting at a comp with two screens running.

  One showed the CGI image of a woman carrying maybe twenty-five to thirty extra pounds struggling through a session of core work—crunches, leg lifts, crisscross—while the other ran a spreadsheet of names and figures in various columns.

  Eve knocked briskly.

  The woman tweaked one screen so the figure pushed through some single leg stretches.

  Rather than bang on the glass again, Eve pushed in, said, “Hey!”

  “Let’s add five full roll-ups,” the woman said, and the figure on the screen moaned and began them.

  Eve tapped the woman on the shoulder. She squealed and jumped as if she’d been scalded, spun around to goggle, then to laugh. And finally removed earplugs.

  “Sorry, so sorry, I didn’t hear you come in. The first shift wants the music up to scream, so I use these. What can I do for you?”

  “Lill Byers?”

  “That’s right. I’m the manager.”

  Eve pulled out her badge. “Lieutenant Dallas, Detective Peabody. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  The healthy color in Lill’s face dropped to gray. “My kid. Is my kid okay? Is Evan okay?”

  “It’s nothing to do with your son. It’s one of your employees.”

  “Oh Jesus.” She ran a hand over her bright cap of hair. “Sorry. My kid’s with his father for a few days—a pre-Christmas deal as the asshole’s going to Belize with his current slut over the actual holiday, so too bad for his son. Anyway.” She let out a long breath. “Something’s up with one of my gang?”

  “Is there somewhere quieter we can talk?” Eve asked.

  “Sure. Relaxation room, this way.” She led the way out of the office, across the workout area, passed a mini self-serve juice bar, up the curl of steps to the second level and into a room with soft gray walls, two long benches and a half dozen padded sleep chairs.

  The door closed, brought silence.

  “We offer clients a meditative space to balance things. Yin and yang. Somebody’s in trouble?”

  “Trey Ziegler.”

  “Crap.” Lill dropped onto a bench, gestured for Eve and Peabody to have a seat. “He swore he’d behave in AC. Do I have to post bond?”

  “He never got to AC. I regret to inform you Trey Ziegler’s dead.”

  “Dead?” She didn’t go gray again, but stiffened, toe to crown. “What do you mean dead? Like dead?”

  “Exactly like dead.”

  “Oh my God.” She shoved up, holding her hands on either side of her head as she walked up and down the room. “Oh my God. Was there an accident?”

  “No. We’re Homicide.”

  “You’re . . .” Lill stopped, dropped down again. “Homicide. Murder? Somebody killed him? How? When?”

 
“He was killed yesterday evening. When did you last see or speak with him?”

  “Yesterday. About two—no, closer to one. I let him go early so he could finish getting his shit together and get to AC in time for the mixer, get familiar with the facilities. I sent Gwen, too. Is Gwen okay?”

  “Gwen?”

  “Gwen Rollins, one of our instructors.”

  “Were they traveling together?”

  “No, no.” She paused, nearly did an eye roll before she caught herself. “No.”

  “Didn’t get along?”

  “Didn’t not get along. Jesus, what happened to Trey?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out. Did anyone have a problem with him?”

  “Not a murder problem. Give me a sec, okay?”

  She sat there, pressed her fingers to her eyes, took long slow breaths. “He’s somebody I worked with, saw every workday, and sometimes off days if he came in. You get to be part of each other’s lives, you know, in a way. We weren’t tight outside the work, but he was part of my life. Now he’s dead.”

  She lowered her hands, met Eve’s gaze directly. “He’s—was—a good trainer. He tapped into the client really well, knew how to motivate. Better at the one-on-one than group—he couldn’t spread his attention out to a group very well, so I didn’t use him as a Group-X instructor unless I was squeezed. Damn good massage therapist. I used him a few times myself for that.”

  She pushed her hands through her hair again, huffed out a breath. “And he was kind of an asshole.”

  “Which kind?”

  “With women. He was a user. Didn’t see any problem juggling them. Liked the attention, and he bragged about his sex life. I had to tell him to chill there more than once.”

  “Did he hit on clients?”

  “Sure, and vice versa. But he was careful there, I mean careful not to screw it up. Lose a client, lose money, and he liked money as much as sex. So he’d keep it light with the clients if it went in that direction. He’d been living with somebody for a few weeks, but that broke off. Sima Murtagh—but she wouldn’t hurt anybody. Best thing that happened for her when he cut her loose. He’d been playing around on her the whole time.”

  “Did she know?”

  “I don’t think so.” Lill sighed. “She’s a sweet kid. She works at the salon just down the block. Ultra You. I know he was tapping a couple clients when they were together. He leaned toward older women there with disposable scratch. The kind who’d book a hotel suite for a few hours or a night, buy him dinner or gifts and not get emotional about the whole thing. And, shit, he was rolling with Alla again, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Alla Coburn?”

  “Yeah, yeah. She owns Natural Way—it’s local, too. They were a thing for a while, then he ditched her, or she ditched him depending on who’s telling it, and he went for Sima. Alla’s a member, and I walked in on her and Trey in a clutch just the other day. He got a big laugh out of it.”

  She looked down at her hands, miserably. “You’ve got to understand. The guy had the looks, the body, the charm when he wanted to use it, and from the reports, knew what to do in bed.”

  “Did you ever test that one out for yourself?”

  Lill’s head came up again, and again her eyes were direct. “No, and two reasons: I’m his supervisor, and I like my job. I’ve got a kid to think about—which actually makes it three reasons and Evan’s number one. And the last? I was married to a Trey Ziegler–type for four years. I don’t repeat myself.”

  “But I bet you could put together a list of names who tried him out.”

  “Yeah.” Lill huffed out a breath, pressed her fingers to her eyes again. “Yeah, I could. You think it was a jealous thing or sex thing that did him? I get that. I wanted to drop-kick my ex out a twelve-story window plenty before we were done. Still do now and then.”

  “But you took a tire iron to his car instead.”

  Lill winced. “Yeah, I did. Look, I come home sick one afternoon—crappy cold. Things weren’t great, but we had a kid and I wanted to try to stick it out. He’s supposed to be writing some freelance travel article, watching Evan, and I come home. Evan’s in his crib, crying, soaking wet, and the asshole’s in bed, banging our next-door neighbor. I took Evan straight to my mother’s, got him changed, fed, settled, then I went back, gathered up all of Evan’s stuff, my stuff, I could carry while the asshole’s saying, Hey, don’t get so wound up. She’d come on to him. I haven’t been putting out much anyway. He needed to relax, and he wasn’t a fucking nursemaid.”

  “He’s lucky you didn’t hit him with the tire iron,” Peabody commented.

  “Oh yeah, he is. Me, too, I guess, but I had a kid to think of first. I was going to take the car—hell, it was half mine—and he’s yelling out the window how if I’m going I’m going on foot with what’s on my back. If I take the car, he’s calling the cops saying it was stolen. So I lost it. I got out the tire iron, beat the living crap out of the car. Ended up getting arrested. It was worth it.”

  “It’s got to be irritating, having someone like your ex on staff.”

  “God.” She rubbed her hands over her short crop of hair again. “Okay. It makes me jittery, but I get where you’re coming from so I’ll tell you straight. The first couple of times I saw him playing one of the instructors, I gave them the word. You know, you want to be careful. And got told to mind my own. So I minded my own, even when I lost a few instructors. I laid it out to Trey. I lose another, I’m going to find a way to lose you. He didn’t like it, but I’m the freaking manager, and I’d have gotten rid of him—professionally,” she added. “He stopped hitting on coworkers because he knew I could and would cut him loose. What he did outside BB? It’s not for me to say.”

  “Rumor is he was thinking about starting his own place.”

  Lill laughed. “He wouldn’t be the first to have the dream. Trey got pretty grand recently from what I heard. But it was just talk. Look, he targeted women like Sima and Alla because they were hard workers, because they’d pay the rent or the bulk of it. He could live off them and blow his pay on clothes and sports equipment. He’d never have put enough scratch together to finance a place like this.”

  “I’m told he was doing some after-hours work around here.”

  “I work days—I’ve got Evan—but yeah, he’d been coming in off-hours. Staff’s allowed to use the facilities off their shift, or adjust their schedule to suit a client. We run six A.M. to ten P.M., and I noticed him swiping in pretty regularly after ten on the log. He said he was using the comps to program some new training sessions, getting a late workout in when the place was quiet. He brought in the clients, earned his pay and commission. I didn’t make a thing of it.”

  “Okay. He has a locker here.”

  “All the staff have lockers.”

  “We’d like to get into it. I can get a warrant.”

  “No need for it. If he doesn’t want the cops to have all the information they can get on finding out who killed him, he’s too stupid to live anyway.”

  Intrigued, Eve nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  Lill took them down to the staff lockers—a tight little room with wall units, two narrow benches, a toilet stall and a skinny shower.

  “We have another staff locker room on the third floor. Mostly the guys use this one, the women use that, but they’re coed. He put a second lock on his a couple weeks ago. People do, sometimes—clients and staff. Which is why I have a universal master because half the time people forget their codes.”

  Lill ran it under the first lock once, then twice. Frowned, ran it under the main lock.

  “It’s not reading.”

  “Let me try mine.” Eve stepped in, repeated the process with the same results. “He’s gone to some trouble here. That’s interesting.” She glanced at Peabody. “McNab.”

  “On it.” />
  “I’m calling in someone from our Electronics Detective Division. He’ll access and confiscate anything in the locker. You can be present if you want.”

  With her hands on her hips, Lill frowned at the locker. “I kind of do just because I want to know what the hell he’s got in there.”

  “Meanwhile, why don’t you give me a list of names. People, you know, who might have wanted to take a tire iron to his car.”

  Lill laughed weakly, said, “Crap.”

  While they waited for McNab, Eve had Peabody do a run on Alla Coburn and the names Lill listed while Eve talked to the instructors and trainers on duty.

  She broke off when she spotted McNab.

  He stood out among the hard bodies, the six-packs, the oiled guns.

  Then again, he stood out anywhere.

  In his long red coat and bright green watch cap he looked like a skinny twig in a forest of sequoias. The long tail of his hair bounced sunnily at his back as he pranced in on gel boots the same color as the cap. A line of silver rings glittered on the curve of his ear.

  She watched his pretty face light up, followed the direction of his gaze to Peabody.

  Love, Eve thought, came in all colors, shapes, and sizes.

  She cut across his path before the EDD ace and her partner did something embarrassing like lock lips on duty.

  “Double locks,” she said without preamble. “One factory installed, one add-on, both reprogrammed to block master access.”

  “Got your bypass right here.” He patted one of the half dozen pockets of his coat. “Some sweatbox,” he added with a glance around. “Your DB work here?”

  “He did.”

  “Guess he died fit. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Eat rabbit food, sweat daily, die anyhow. Hey, She-Body. You forgot your toe warmers this morning.” He pulled a pair of thin gels out of one of his pockets.

  “Thanks. Aw, you activated them.”

  “Can’t have my girl’s tootsies cold.”

  “Don’t say aw again,” Eve ordered, anticipating. “And never say tootsies. You’re wearing badges, for God’s sake. This way.”