Free A Body to Die For by Kate White Page A

accountant source of mine said we should consider if anyone
     on staff has had a big improvement in lifestyle lately. Are you aware of anything like that?”
    She shook her head. “As I mentioned before, a lot of the spa staff live in the barn,” she said. “Josh lives in a town house—rented—not
     far from here. He’s been living a
bit
more extravagantly lately—he just bought a new car—but then I’m paying him more.”
    “Because he’s doing such a good job?” I asked.
    “Well, he works partly on a bonus basis. And since he’s done such a marvelous job of growing the business, his bonuses have
     been very nice.”
    She spent the next few minutes gathering files for me, during which time she mentioned that she’d arranged for me to have
     a hot stone massage with Cordelia at six-thirty. She’d also set up a tennis lesson for me with Rich at eleven tomorrow. As
     for Eric, she was still working on it—he’d had nothing free, and she was afraid if she asked Josh to rearrange his schedule,
     it might look suspicious. My meeting with Josh would be at four in the solarium.
    Since it was almost two and I hadn’t eaten, I stopped off at the restaurant for a salad. The whole time I ate, I thought of
     Beck. I’ve met plenty of cops reporting the kinds of stories I do, and I’d found some of them hunky. But I’d never had one
     send me into a tizzy like this. I was feeling that ridiculous urge I used to get in high school when I was infatuated with
     someone—I wanted to get in my car and drive by his house four or five hundred times or call him on the phone and hang up after
     he answered. Maybe my crazy feelings had to do with the intensity of the situation in which I’d met him. Dead body, over-the-top
     lust. It could be a bizarre permutation of the Stockholm syndrome—in which hostages bond with their captors.
    Back in my room, I spread Danny’s folders on my desk. There weren’t many. I knew from previous conversations with Danny that
     the core staff of the spa numbered about twenty: Josh, about a dozen full-time therapists, three receptionists to cover every
     hour of the week, two women who did the wraps and baths, and several coordinators who showed people to their rooms and kept
     the place tidy as appointments came and went. During the summer and over the holidays, the spa beefed up with a handful of
     freelancers.
    Danny was right. The folders for each staff member held next to nothing: an employment application, a résumé, and, in some
     cases, reference letters. A few contained a sheet on some issue that had arisen at work. One therapist, for instance, had
     accused a desk clerk last year of stealing tips.
    There was nothing of significance in Piper’s file, or in Josh’s, though I was intrigued to learn that prior to getting into
     the spa scene five years ago, he’d been working in Los Angeles as a so-called model/actor.
    Finally I got to Anna’s file. As Danny had pointed out, she’d lived all over the place, trying her hand at a variety of different
     jobs, including tour guide, restaurant hostess, and real estate agent. Until she’d landed in the world of massage, she’d averaged
     about a year’s stay in each job. There were small gaps in the résumé, and a line at the bottom attempted to explain them by
     stating that she had taken time off here and there to travel. I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that many of those
     gaps reflected jobs of even shorter duration.
    In New York City, she had been employed at the Paradise Spa, no address given. The name didn’t ring a bell with me. It’s not
     that I had the money to drop regularly at day spas around Manhattan, but my boss at
Gloss,
Cat Jones, did. She preferred not to let a week go by without having some portion of her body scrubbed with sea salt or blasted
     with oxygen, and I’d heard the names of most of the trendy places from her.
    Anna’s letter of reference had come from a woman named Nina Lyle, manager