Killer Physique

by G. A. McKevett

  “Thanks,” Ryan said. “Ordinarily John and I, we’d be better at handling something like this. But when it’s someone you know, somebody you care about. . . . It’s really hard to think at a time like this.”

  “You don’t have to explain anything to us,” Savannah said, as she gave him a comforting pat on the back; then she left him to join Dirk.

  “That’s for sure,” Dirk added. “When Savannah got hurt so bad, you should’ve seen me. I was a basket case.”

  Savannah looked down at her newlywed husband, kneeling beside the body on the floor. She remembered all too well what a rock he had been the night she had been shot and nearly killed. Were it not for him and his ability to function in terrible circumstances, she would be as dead as poor Jason here.

  She knelt next to Dirk and, along with him, began to give the body a cursory inspection.

  Jason Tyrone, superhero to the masses, the brightest star in Hollywood’s sky, was dead all right. His beautiful, blue eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling. That famous, masculine jaw sagged downward toward his chest. And it occurred to Savannah, not for the first time, that the Grim Reaper was particularly unkind in the way he robbed elegant and graceful people of their basic dignity in the end.

  It seemed terribly unfair, especially since human beings place such importance on the first time they meet someone and the last time they see them.

  She knew this terrible vision would be the one Ryan and John would see in their mind’s eye every time they remembered their dear friend in the years to come.

  Instinctively, she reached over, closed his eyes, and gently eased his mouth closed.

  Of course, the county coroner, Dr. Jennifer Liu, would have objected to any manipulation of the body she had yet to examine. But the Crime Scene Investigation team wasn’t there yet, and Savannah figured that what Dr. Jen didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. And, more important, it wouldn’t hurt Savannah.

  Having done the “decent, humanitarian” deed, Savannah made the conscious effort to turn off her emotions and flip the switch into inspector mode.

  A quick, overall appraisal told her little. She saw no fatal wound. No wound of any kind, for that matter. Nothing amiss. Nothing to indicate any type of violence, foul play, egregious accident, or obvious illness.

  The body on the floor was the picture of robust, masculine health. The golden skin and well-defined musculature exemplified raw, male power—Adonis in the flesh.

  Except for one thing.

  Unlike the perfect, blemish-free pectorals that she and the rest of the audience had gaped at for two hours in the theater, the real Jason Tyrone’s chest had an all too human malady—acne.

  Terrible, deep, red, and raw . . . the skin even looked infected in places.

  “Wow,” Dirk whispered to her. “Get a load of those pimples. Have you ever seen zits like that in your life?”

  “Can’t say that I have,” Savannah replied, keeping her voice low, for fear Ryan would hear.

  And he did.

  “The steroids will do that to you,” Ryan said, a sad note in his voice. “That and a lot of other bad stuff, too.”

  She looked up at him as he walked over and stood at his friend’s feet. “Jason took steroids?” she asked, somehow knowing the answer. Perfection, like that stretched out on the carpet before her, seldom came naturally.

  “Sure he did,” Ryan replied. “To get a body like that, you have to do more than just lift weights and eat a ton a steak every day.”

  “I wondered about that,” Dirk said, “when we were watching the movie. There’s muscle, and then there’s . . . this. A guy like me could work out twenty-four hours a day for a year and not even come close to this.”

  Savannah got up from her kneeling position and began to walk slowly around the room. On the nightstand next to the bed, she saw at least a dozen bottles of various sizes and colors. As she read the labels, she recognized a few as nutritional supplements that she had seen in her own local health food store. But most of them she had never heard of, and some of them had no label at all, which piqued her curiosity.

  Among the bottles was a small, cardboard box with the word “Lido-Morphone” printed on the side. The lid was open, and inside she could see numerous blue envelopes, each about four inches square.

  Beside the box was a plastic container filled with empty syringes.

  Savannah couldn’t help flashing back on numerous death scenes she had examined as a police officer where syringes were customary, an all-too-frequent component of a drug overdose.

  She glanced back at the corpse on the floor and wondered if Jason Tyrone had gone down that road himself. He wouldn’t have been the first Hollywood star to tumble from the sky following a particularly decadent bout of self-indulgence.

  He hadn’t exhibited any telltale evidence of drug addiction at the premiere. But experience had taught Savannah that you couldn’t always see the signs. She had certainly been fooled before. A heroin-addicted district attorney had taught her that lesson. And he hadn’t been the last.

  But as she wandered around the room, studying every bit of personal property Jason had scattered about, she saw no signs of any illegal drugs or paraphernalia. Judging from the dirty clothes tossed onto the dresser and the empty cans of energy drinks on the floor next to the bed, Jason might have been accused of being a messy guy. But she could find no solid evidence that he abused drugs or alcohol.

  She did another quick scan among the supplements to check for insulin. Nothing.

  “Was Jason diabetic?” she asked Ryan.

  “Not to my knowledge,” he replied, joining her by the nightstand. “Why?”

  She pointed to the syringes.

  “Oh, those,” he said. “He injected his steroids.”

  “Wow. Really?”

  Ryan nodded. “Some say if you inject steroids, you’ll have fewer side effects than if you take them orally.” He shrugged. “At least, that’s what he told me when I saw him doing it once and asked him why.”

  Dirk left the body and walked over to them. He squatted down next to the nightstand and squinted at the labels on the assorted bottles and boxes. “Is there any chance that this junk,” he said, as he waved a hand, indicating the plentiful stash, “might have contributed to that over there?” He nodded toward the body on the floor.

  “It’s certainly possible,” Ryan replied. “We all warned him—all of his nonbodybuilding buddies, that is—that he could ruin his health with this stuff. But, of course, for every one of us, he had ten friends at the gym telling him it was okay. You’d be surprised how many guys pop this stuff like candy.”

  “They aren’t worried about the dangers?” Savannah asked. “This junk can’t be good for you.”

  Ryan sighed and ran his fingers wearily through his hair. “What they’re worried about is not being big enough.”

  “Big enough?” Dirk asked, as he pulled a surgical glove from his inside jacket pocket and put it on. “Big enough for what?” He lifted the box marked “Lido-Morphone” and looked it over carefully before setting it down and picking up one of the bottles.

  “Big enough to be considered ‘manly,’ ” Ryan replied. “It’s a major thing now—guys thinking they’ll never be large enough, muscular enough. For some of them, it’s like a mental illness. And because of it, they do things that endanger their health to beef up.”

  “That’s so weird,” Savannah said. “I thought it was just us women who got hung up on stupid stuff like that. It just doesn’t seem possible that a man who looks like that could be unhappy with his body.”

  Ryan knelt beside his friend, then reached over and lightly touched Jason’s hand. “It is strange, almost impossible for the rest of us to understa—”

  His voice caught in his throat, as tears began to roll down his face.

  In a gesture that both surprised and touched Savannah’s heart, Dirk walked over to Ryan and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, man,” he said softly. “This really suck
s, for you and for John. And of course, for him. If that turns out to be the cause of death—wow, what a waste.”

  Ryan took a linen handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. He stood, looking down at his once vibrant, much beloved friend. “You know, Jason had a body that women swooned over. He was the envy of every man in that theater audience tonight. And yet I’ve watched him work out in the gym and obsess about every tiny muscle. Everyone else thought he was the perfect he-man. But when Jason looked at himself, all he saw were imperfections. He thought of himself as an object, something that was flawed. And no matter how hard he tried, he’d never be able to fix it.”

  Savannah thought of all the women she’d known who saw themselves that way, and it broke her heart. But she had always considered body dissatisfaction to be a female affliction.

  No, she thought. Now it seems that hating the flesh you live in is an equal-opportunity torment.

  “You said he asked you and John to come here because he had something he wanted to talk to you about,” Savannah said. “Do you have any idea what it was?”

  “None at all,” Ryan replied. “He said it was important—that he had a problem, and we were the only ones he could trust with it.”

  “Sounds ominous,” Dirk added.

  “No kidding,” Savannah said. “So you came here and found him. . . . How did you get into the room?”

  “That was the first sign that something might be wrong.” Ryan walked into the adjacent bathroom and took a clean towel from a shelf near the sink. Walking back to the body on the floor, he said, “The door was ajar. And Jason was very security-conscious. With his level of celebrity, he had to be. He never would have left it open like that when he was in the bedroom.”

  He knelt beside his friend and reverently covered his face with the towel. As he rose, he said, “I know, you aren’t supposed to do that—cross-contamination and all.”

  “I understand,” Savannah said. “It’ll be okay.”

  But she wasn’t thinking about the towel or worrying about how Dr. Liu would react to having her scene “compromised.”

  She was wondering what Jason had needed to discuss with Ryan and John. And she was thinking that it was a terrible shame that he died before sharing his secret.

  Because, regardless of overdose or steroids or whatever evidence there might be that suggested this was an accidental death, she didn’t believe it. Her instinct told her there was foul play.

  Homicide had a certain feel, a distinct, dark energy about it that Savannah could sense a mile away.

  And to her, this particular death stank. It smelled like murder.

  Chapter 5

  Hours later, after Dr. Jennifer Liu and her forensics team had removed the body and processed the room, Savannah and Dirk exited the hotel to find that it was fully daylight. Night had come and gone, and Savannah could feel the missed hours of rest and rejuvenation in every cell of her body.

  Years ago, she would have sprung back from a sleep-free night. She would have hardly even felt it.

  But not now.

  “I’ll be ruined for days over this,” she said, as they made their way across the parking lot to Dirk’s ancient Buick. “Plum worthless. You wait and see. And I’ve got a ton of work to do with your parents comin’ and all.”

  He slipped his arm around her shoulders and gave her a hearty, sideways hug. “Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head about that. You know I’m gonna help you out with the house and the yard and all that. We’ll have everything shipshape before they arrive. You wait and see.”

  Help me out with the house? she thought. Get everything shipshape? Yeah, like that’s going to happen. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t track mud all over the freshly shampooed front-room rug and doesn’t throw his dirty underwear on the kitchen counter.

  “How’s about you and me go grab some coffee and donuts over at the Patty Cake Bakery?”

  Ah, she told herself. See there. I judged him too harshly. He can be a real sweetie pie when he’s a mind to be.

  And she was pretty proud of herself that she had followed Granny Reid’s advice and not gone to bed mad at her husband. Of course, she lost a few “Wife Points” since they hadn’t actually been in bed more than a minute or two. But she still felt pretty proud of herself. Maybe she’d be able to get the hang of this marriage thing, after all.

  Dirk looked down at his watch, smiled, and nodded. “Yep, this is the perfect time to drop by Patty’s. She’ll be gettin’ ready to toss last night’s coffee and startin’ to box up the day-old donuts for the homeless shelter. With any luck we can score some of both. Won’t cost us a plug nickel.”

  He gave Savannah an extra squeeze and a kiss on the top of her head.

  Yes, there was nothing in the world that made Dirk Coulter happier than free food. And when her husband was happy, Savannah was happy, and all was right with the world.

  More or less.

  “I hope Dr. Liu rules this death an accident,” she said, as he opened the car door for her.

  “Hope all you want,” he replied dryly. “You and me both know it wasn’t no accident. It’s got ‘hinky’ written all over it.”

  As Savannah got into the Buick and Dirk closed the door, she wondered: What could be worse than accidentally killing yourself for pure old vanity?

  She closed her eyes and, for the sake of her dear friends and all of Jason’s adoring fans, wished with all her might that this situation was as bad as it was going to get.

  Because, sad as an accidental death might be, it was a heck of a lot better than murder.

  Anything was.

  When Dirk drove the Buick up to the front of their house, Savannah saw a hot pink, vintage Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway, next to a pre-restored 1969 Dodge Charger.

  “Gee, Tammy’s here, and so is Waycross. I’m positively shocked.”

  Dirk chuckled. “Every time we leave home, your baby brother makes up some flimsy excuse to park his butt over here.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he needs an excuse, flimsy or otherwise. I reckon before we even clear the driveway, she’s on the phone, inviting him over.”

  “And how does Big Sister Savannah feel about having Baby Brother Waycross cavorting with the help?”

  Savannah smiled. “Two of my favorite people in the world finding happiness together—that’s like a double-dark fudge brownie with a big ol’ scoop of Granny’s homemade vanilla ice cream on top. What’s not to love about it?”

  As they got out of the Buick and walked past the Charger, Savannah noticed a new coat of gray primer on the front right fender.

  “Hey, look at that. He got the front end all straightened out,” she said.

  “You know, when he first bought this old pile of junk, I thought he was nuts,” Dirk replied. “But it’s comin’ along.”

  “Never underestimate Waycross. He’s always been a hard worker—an ambitious kid. He’ll turn that ‘old pile of junk,’ as you call it, into a General Lee before you know it.”

  “Rebel flag and all?”

  She laughed. “Honk the horn and it’ll play ‘Dixie.’ You can take the boy out of Georgia, but—”

  “But his neck’s still gonna be red?”

  “Something like that.”

  When they reached the front door, Savannah took her time and made quite a lot of noise as she unlocked it and stepped inside. Dirk followed, just as noisily.

  But even with all of their precautions, it was a red-faced, breathless, and embarrassed couple they found snuggling on the sofa.

  Giggling and trying to smooth her beautiful, long blonde hair back into place, Savannah’s assistant, Tammy Hart, looked like a kid who had gotten nailed with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar.

  Though one look at her younger brother’s half-opened shirt told Savannah that it probably wasn’t a cookie jar that Tammy was exploring.

  Waycross’s cheeks were flushed, nearly the same ginger color as his thick, curly hair. “Hey there, Sis! Brother Dirk!” h
e said, far too cheerfully.

  They both jumped up from the sofa in unison, like a pair of synchronized jack-in-the-boxes.

  “Wow, you two were out and about early!” Tammy exclaimed. “I couldn’t believe you guys were already up and gone when I got here.”

  Tammy scurried to the rolltop desk in the corner of the room and flipped on the computer. “I paid some bills,” she said, “and answered a few of your e-mails for you.”

  “Thank you, darlin’,” Savannah replied, grinning.

  “That’s the least you could do,” Dirk added, “considering the big bucks she pays you.”

  Tammy looked surprised. “She pays me big bucks?”

  “I pay her bucks?” Savannah raised one eyebrow. “And here I thought she did it all for the betterment of mankind.”

  “I do it,” Tammy said, as she sat at the desk and began to play with the computer, “because I’m a natural-born sleuth. I can’t help myself. Detecting is in my blood.”

  “In other words, she read too many Nancy Drew books when she was a kid,” Savannah said, as she sank into her comfy rose-chintz chair, propped her feet on the ottoman, and cuddled the cats who immediately jumped onto her lap.

  “How was that movie thing y’all went to last night?” Waycross asked, discreetly rebuttoning his shirt.

  Savannah glanced over at Dirk and saw her own sad, dark emotions registered on his face.

  “The premiere was great,” she said. “Unfortunately, the night went downhill after that. Way, way downhill.”

  “Oh! Oh, no way!” Tammy was staring, wide-eyed, at the computer screen. “Oh, this is awful! You’re not going to believe this but—”

  “Jason Tyrone is dead,” Dirk said, as he walked past the desk and toward the kitchen. “Yeah, we know.”

  Tammy spun around in her chair to face Savannah. “Is that where you guys were?”

  Savannah sighed and nodded, stroking Cleopatra’s silky head. The cat’s affectionate nuzzling of her hand somehow touched an aching spot in Savannah’s heart and brought tears to her eyes.