Cereal Killer

greeting.
    “You done with Connor?” he asked with an equal lack of social grace.
    “Yes, I’m done with Connor,” she replied as she motioned for them to take seats and returned to her own behind her desk. “How many times do I have to tell you that I’ll call you when I’m ready to discuss my findings with you on a case, Coulter?”
    “We were in the neighborhood.” Dirk cleared his throat and shuffled his feet. “Savannah here asked me to drop by. She wanted to see you. Huh, Van?”
    “Sure.”
    Savannah gave Dr. Liu her brightest smile, and Jennifer pretended to buy it. “Well, since you’re here...” She picked up a stack of papers on her desk. Savannah and Dirk sat to attention in their chairs.
    “The bottom line is,” Dr. Liu began, “she died of hyperthermia.”
    “Hypothermia?” Dirk shook his head in disbelief. “How could that be? It was over eighty degrees yesterday, for Pete’s sake. How do you die from getting too cold in your own house in Southern California on a summer day? It’s not like she fell through the ice, skating in her backyard.”
    “Hy- per -thermia,” Dr. Liu replied. “Heat stroke. Dehydration. Heat exhaustion.”
    “Oh. That’s more like it.”
    Savannah felt her heart sink. It was true then. Cait Connor had foolishly killed herself.
    What a terrible waste.
    “When you spoke to the husband yesterday,” Dr. Liu said, shuffling through her papers, “did he say anything about her being on some sort of crash diet and exercise program?”
    Savannah and Dirk answered together, ‘Yes.”
    “That’s what I figured.” She slipped on a pair of designer tortoise-rim glasses and read from one of her forms. “Systemic hyperthermia with extreme generalized dilation of capillaries and cerebral edema.”
    “English, please,” Dirk said.
    “She died of cardiovascular shock and brain swelling. I suspect she hadn’t eaten for days, hadn’t drunk anything for hours, and was exercising like a maniac. I found damage to her dental enamel and her esophagus consistent with bulimia. Why the hell do women torture and destroy themselves like this?”
    Savannah was a bit surprised to see the anger in Dr. Liu’s eyes and to hear it in her voice. The ME was usually quite detached and clinical about her findings. Apparently the needless loss of young life affected her, too.
    “She was under contract with an ad agency to lose a ridiculous amount of weight in a short time to promote a diet cereal,” Savannah replied.
    “And her husband said she’d had problems with bulimia for years,” Dirk added.
    “Well, that explains it.” Dr. Liu picked up another paper and glanced over it. “Except for the highly elevated body temperature. From my calculations, she was probably up around a hundred and eight degrees when she died. Usually you only see temperatures like that when people are exercising strenuously in very hot environs. It wasn’t that hot yesterday. Where was she doing her workout?”
    “There in the house, I guess,” Dirk said. “They’d turned one of the extra bedrooms upstairs into an exercise room.”
    “Was there any reason to think it was especially hot in there when she was working out?”
    Dirk shook his head. “Not really.”
    “The bathroom was unusually hot,” Savannah interjected. “I remember when I knelt beside her and put my hand on the tiles, they felt warm, even through my glove. Normally bathroom tiles would be cool. And the air was hot in there, too.”
    “That was because of the skylight,” Dirk said. “Those things look good, but they let a lot of heat in, especially when the sun’s coming straight through them. I wouldn’t have one myself.”
    Savannah chuckled. “A skylight in a trailer. I think that’s called a sunroof.”
    He shot her a look and grunted. “Anyway.”
    “Yes, anyway...” Dr. Liu reached for a stapler and fastened several sheets of paper together before placing them in a green folder on her desk. “Ms. Connor accidentally killed herself with harsh dieting and strenuous exercise. Let it be a lesson to society.”
    Savannah and Dirk stood and headed for the door. Dirk murmured a half-hearted, “Thank you.”
    As they were leaving, Savannah turned back to the doctor and said, “I always wondered how you do it. Stay slim and trim, that is.”
    Dr. Jennifer shrugged and grinned. “I do it the healthy, all-American way,” she said. “I smoke three packs a day.”
     

Chapter
    6
     
    S avannah and Dirk were