Born to Die - Lisa Jackson [87]
Sister-in-law . . . oh, sure!
Ridiculously, she felt her cheeks turn hot. “Never again,” she vowed, switching lanes around a slow-moving truck hauling a load of baled Christmas trees, and a chorus of children’s voices blared from the radio:
“Ho, Ho, Ho!
Who wouldn’t go?”
She found the exit for the gym, took the corner, and eased into the near-empty parking lot.
“Up on the rooftop,
Click, click, click!”
“Oh, stop already!” Alvarez snapped off the radio as she nosed into a parking space not far from the main doors of the massive building that housed an Olympic pool, saunas, weight rooms, and several basketball courts. She signed in and grabbed a towel, then made her way to the ladies’ locker room, where she stashed her bag.
She hoped that she could exercise her muscles and relax her ever-spinning mind. Today her routine would be a cardio workout of forty-five minutes on the elliptical machine, then another half hour of weight lifting on different machines dedicated to toning and strengthening specific areas of her body.
Usually, somewhere in the middle of her routine, she would zone out, and whatever issues she was trying to work through on a case would start to unravel, but today, as she made her way through a series of arm, leg, and torso machines, no answers came on the Jocelyn Wallis murder. Alvarez had spent hours going over the woman’s phone records and through her bills, even her garbage, but nothing had leapt out at her as odd or suspicious, no blinding lightning bolt of insight had illuminated her mind. The ex-boyfriends had alibis. The paperwork was benign.
No will had been located, at least not yet, nor had any life insurance beneficiary been uncovered.
Jocelyn Wallis was a schoolteacher who didn’t have a lot of friends and had no known enemies, with no link to Shelly Bonaventure, aside from where she’d been born and her looks. The case was frustrating as hell.
Swiping her forehead with the towel, Alvarez settled into the seat of a leg press and upped the weight. Her muscles were loose now, and she was able to do three sets of fifteen reps, though she strained. When she was finished, sweat dripping from every pore in her body, she still knew no more than she had when she’d taken her first step into this two-storied, state-of-the art gymnasium.
Heading for the showers, she told herself the truth would appear. She just had to dig a little deeper. Work a little harder.
Kacey rubbed the kinks from her neck as she glanced at the clock in her office. Two fifteen in the afternoon. The day had flown by with appointment after appointment, and, again, with a few extras squeezed in. The fact that it was a holiday weekend, the shopping weekend of the year, didn’t deter flu viruses, chest colds, infections, or thumbs from being dislocated.
She’d looked down enough throats and into enough ears for a full day’s worth of work. On Saturdays the clinic was scheduled to close at three, but rarely did that happen, not when so many working parents arranged doctors’ visits around their job schedules.
Fortunately, Kacey worked only every other Saturday, while Martin took the other weekends. They also alternated on Fridays, so that they each had two consecutive days off each week, a plan that worked for the entire staff.
Now her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything since a banana at six in the morning. The three subsequent cups of coffee hadn’t been enough to sustain her. Reaching into her desk drawer, where she kept her stash of granola and candy bars, she found a Snickers and promised herself a healthy tuna salad with tons of vegetables for dinner.