Festive in Death (In Death #39)(9)

“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 ass**le’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 ass**le’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 f**king 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.”