Festive in Death (In Death #39)(7)

“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.