Cereal Killer

installed, but the paint job had been her big splurge of the decade. Besides, by the time she could afford a new CD player, they would be obsolete and there would be some other newfangled gadget that she couldn’t afford either.
    She was singing along to “Lyin’ Eyes” when she saw a black Mercedes limo pull into the parking lot. Having lived for years in Southern California, the sight of a limousine had ceased to cause an elevation in her heart rate long ago. Every Billy Bob and his cousin’s uncle’s dog had one. Although, even with her jaded eye, she had to admit that this one was a beauty.
    Long, sleek, and polished like an ebony grand piano, the automobile looked out of place in the dusty alley parking lot. She would have been happy to ride in such a vehicle to her own funeral, let alone to a simple doctor’s visit.
    The limo stopped directly behind the back door of the clinic and a driver dressed in formal livery got out. He went inside and only a few moments later returned with a gray-haired man wearing a white smock and navy slacks. He didn’t have a stethoscope hanging around his neck, but he didn’t need one for Savannah to know he was a doctor. He had way too much self-important swagger for a nurse or physician’s assistant.
    When the driver opened the rear door of the limo and directed the doctor inside, Savannah sat up to attention and turned off her tape player.
    “Must be nice,” she said, “having a house call in the back of your Mercedes.”
    The windows were darkly tinted, and she couldn’t see anything going on inside, but there was something about the worried look on the doctor’s face just before he entered the car that caught her attention.
    She slid lower in the seat until she could just peek over the dash. Trouble—like burned coffee—had a distinctive odor to it, and she could swear that she could smell some sort of trouble brewing inside that limousine, whether she could see through the windows or not.
    She waited, keeping an eye on her watch. Three minutes. Five. Seven minutes.
    Seven minutes worth of any doctor’s time was a precious commodity. She couldn’t help wondering who rated so much personal attention—limo or no limo.
    Eight minutes. Then she saw the door open and the doctor get out. This time his walk and general body language lacked its previous confidence. His head down, he trudged back to the office as though he were walking through wet cement.
    No sooner had he gone back inside the building than the limo pulled away. As it left the lot, Savannah caught a good look at the rear of the car, and she quickly jotted down the license plate. It probably wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans, as Gran would say, but she’d still have Dirk run the number.
    As she was tucking her notebook back into her purse, he arrived. Seeing her at the rear of the lot, he drove back to her and parked beside the Mustang.
    “Sorry I’m late,” he said as they got out of their cars and started walking across the lot. “I decided to go by the hospital where Cait Connor’s husband works and talk to him again.”
    “Oh, yeah? Did he tell you that his wife had been fooling around with that photographer, Matt Slater?” Savannah couldn’t help grinning. She loved trumping Dirk, telling Mr. Know-It-All something he didn’t know.
    “No,” he said. “He didn’t mention it.”
    “I thought so.”
    “One of his fellow nurses told me. Said it wasn’t the first time the wife had played around either.”
    “Oh.” She cleared her throat. “Well, what did Kevin Connor have to say?”
    “He’s hot to trot to sue Wentworth Industries and this Dr. Pappas, too.”
    They paused outside the clinic’s door and lowered their voices. “Why Pappas?” she asked.
    “He was the physician in charge of overseeing the models’ weight loss.”
    “Both Caitlin and Kameeka?”
    “And Tesla and Desiree. He says that his wife was threatening to sue the good doctor here a couple of weeks before she died... said the doc was jeopardizing her health by expecting her to lose so much so fast.”
    “Sounds like a possible motive to me.”
    “Yep, me too.”
    When they went inside, they found the waiting room packed again. Apparently Dr. Pappas’s weight-loss practice was thriving, whether Cait Connor had approved of his methods or not.
    This time, as they approached the receptionist’s window, the woman on the other side of the glass didn’t even bother to feign friendliness. She rose from her