Killer Calories

gauzy togas that barely covered their assets. The girl was attractive with lots of curly chestnut hair, and the guy looked like a beach bum or lifeguard moonlighting as a Grecian god.
    “Brett, Karen, what happened?” Tammy asked them in a tense whisper, even though there was no one nearby.
    “We don’t know.” The pretty brunette looked scared and more than a little shaken. “Mr. Hanks found her this morning in one of the herbal mud baths. She was already... you know...”
    “The cops are here, going over everything and everybody,” Brett said. “They won’t let anyone in the bathhouses. Not that I’d want to go in. She’s still there in one of them. They haven’t taken her out yet.”
    Good, Savannah thought. Maybe she could get a look at the scene before everything was broken down. Of course, she had no official interest in the case, but she couldn’t help being curious. Besides, in some probably misguided way, she felt she owed it to Tammy at least to look into the situation.
    “How’s Mr. Hanks taking it?” Tammy asked. “He must be devastated.”
    Brett and Karen shared a look that Savannah had to file away as “knowing.”
    “Not so’s you’d notice,” Brett whispered. “Mostly, he just seems mad that the detective grilled him for half an hour. The cops are acting like it was murder.”
    “They have to assume it’s murder,” Savannah added, “until they prove it wasn’t. I’m sure they’re just doing their job by questioning him.”
    Karen waggled one eyebrow. “Maybe, but this detective is a real slob and an asshole to boot. Not exactly Mr. Hanks’s type.”
    A slob and an asshole, Savannah thought as she headed for the bathhouses, Tammy in tow.
    She just had a feeling.

    Yep. It was Dirk, all right, who was in charge of the scene. He stood outside in the open yard behind the main building, directing traffic, barking questions and orders to the forensic team that was working the area.
    Even under the best of circumstances, Dirk made no fashion statement. But he had been up all night, as she well knew, and the lack of sleep hadn’t improved his perpetually disheveled appearance. Although he had changed from his wino costume, there wasn’t much discernible difference.
    The battered, once-white sneakers were the same. His khakis were just as wrinkled, and his token necktie was askew. What little hair he had stood almost on end. That was unusual. Slovenly though he might be with the rest of his grooming, Dirk generally made certain that his few remaining hairs were neatly combed across his bald spot.
    Long ago, Savannah had theorized: Everyone had his or her point of vanity. Even a guy like Dirk.
    Sleep deprivation hadn’t sharpened his social skills either, she noticed.
    “Get the hell outta here!” she heard him yell at several toga-wearing employees who had crossed the yellow tape that cordoned off the area around one of the bathhouses. The scene of the crime—if, indeed, there had been a crime—was the last in a row of a dozen tiny cottagelike cubicles with white stucco walls and bright blue tiled roofs.
    “Each house has its own private tub,” Tammy explained. “Some of them are just regular hot tubs, and some have herbal mud baths.”
    Savannah resisted the urge to tell her that she was quite familiar with the place. Years ago, when she had first arrived in San Carmelita and had pulled a graveyard patrol shift, she had often been called to the club to quell the occasional drunken brawl. At least back then, those cubicles had been used for a lot more private goings-on than just mud baths.
    While orgies might be out of vogue, because of fear of social diseases, she imagined that some of the enclosures were still being used for more earthy pastimes than meditation and soul-searching.
    “You should probably wait here,” Savannah told Tammy before she approached the cordon tape. “He shouldn’t even let me cross, let alone both of us. We don’t want to push him when he’s obviously in ‘grouch’ mode.”
    Tammy hesitated only a moment, then her eyes searched Savannah ’s, asking the silent question.
    “Yes, that, too,” Savannah admitted. “It’s bad enough when it’s a stranger. But if it’s someone you knew... you’ll never be able to forget it.”
    Blinking back tears, Tammy turned and walked over to the tennis courts, where more onlookers congregated and stared, shock and disbelief written on their faces.
    Savannah got Dirk’s attention. He gave her