tell him that we’re going
ahead since you’ve made the trip.”
“Good idea. Now tell me about security at the spa. What’s the general procedure when it comes to locking up?”
“The back door of the spa is
always
locked—or at least it’s supposed to be,” she explained. “The front door is locked after the last local guest arrives, and
the door that goes directly to the inn gets locked last, usually after the last inn guest arrives.”
“Who has keys?”
“I have a set, and so does George. Josh. Piper and Anna, since they’re assistant managers. And the manager of the inn has
one—he’s out of town this weekend for a wedding, by the way.”
I stood up from the couch and walked the short distance toward the fireplace. I wanted to feel the warmth of it on my body,
but the gas flame gave off so little heat, it was like holding a votive candle to my butt.
“Of course, the killer didn’t necessarily have a key,” I said. “Anna could have let him in after all the guests had gone.
What do you know about her as a person?”
It turned out not to be a great deal. Anna, Danny reported, had been in her late thirties, attractive, single, and extremely
aloof. Like Piper, she lived on-site. She had moved here a year ago from Manhattan, where she’d done her massage training,
and prior to that she had lived all over. Her file had listed one emergency contact: a sister in Florida.
While I waited, Danny went back to her office and returned with a group shot that included Anna. She was not only attractive,
but there was something tantalizingly sexy about her. Dark eyes and dark hair—worn short and provocatively shaggy—and she
stared at the camera as if she had decided to seduce the person taking the picture. She was about five four or five five,
I guessed, from eyeballing the various people in the picture. Her body was curvy and sensuous. A killer body, I thought as
I stared at her image, and then groaned to myself over the words I’d chosen.
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“A while back something was apparently going on with her and Eric, the therapist, but it supposedly fizzled. He’s second-generation
Indian and fairly quiet. It’s hard to imagine him holding his own against Anna.”
“Oh boy, the police are going to focus on him big-time since he was there on duty with her tonight. Anyone new on the scene?”
“We got a new tennis pro this past summer and lately I’ve noticed him buzzing around her a bit, but I have no idea if there
was anything going on between them. You know me, I like to reach out to people, but Anna was not receptive to that. She liked
to keep to herself.”
I asked if that was fairly typical of women in her line of work, and Danny explained that in her experience, massage attracted
several different kinds of women. There were the earth mothers, for whom massage was just another way to connect with people.
There were what she called the yoga types, free spirits who were into taking care of their bodies and couldn’t bear to set
foot in an office or be pinned down in any way. And there were the odd birds, women searching for something, anything, to
make them happy. Anna, she felt, had been sort of a combination of the last two.
“How did she get along with the people she worked with at the spa?”
“I know most people found her distant, too. She made one friend when she first came here, but that woman moved last winter—she
left the field entirely. There was—No, that’s meaningless.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, it’s just there was a little rivalry among the female therapists over the number of clients they each had. Anna—and
Piper, too—got more repeat business than the other girls, and there was some resentment, especially about Anna, because she’d
been here for just a year. It’s partly because of all her business that Josh made her an assistant manager after just nine
months.”
“Anyone more resentful than