Page 22 of Done Dirty

“Class is going to end in the next twenty minutes. I’ll send out a mass text to cancel the rest of the day. You can follow me back to his office.”

“One more thing,” Jack said as she stood. “Did you ever see Wade act inappropriate with any members or staff? Or did he have any sexual relationships with them that you were aware of?”

She hesitated for a moment. “About a year ago we had an instructor, Sheri Downs. She was really great. And things got pretty hot and heavy between her and Wade for a while. At least a couple of months. Then all of a sudden she calls in her resignation and we never see her again. I just figured they broke up and she didn’t want to work with him anymore.” Her Botoxed face was as expressive as it could be. “Which is why it’s not good to sleep with your employees. I told him so too.”

She led us back inside and past the bamboo partition and a room full of women with their legs in straps above their head. Wade’s office door was a thick frosted glass so you couldn’t see inside, and she unlocked it with a key from a ring that she’d picked up from behind the front counter.

“It’s not much,” she said, flipping on the lights. “I’ll print the membership roll while you look around. It’ll take a few minutes.” She stepped out and pulled the door closed behind her.

The desk was white oak with a matte finish, clean lined and spare, the same natural aesthetic as the rest of the studio. Nothing on the surface except a monitor, a desk organizer, and a small framed photograph of the studio’s exterior taken at what looked like opening day. Wade was standing in front of the door in a navy polo, arms crossed, looking like a man who had exactly what he wanted.

I handed Jack a pair of gloves from my bag and then took some for myself.

“Over four hundred members,” I said. “That’s a lot of people who had access to Wade Rivers.”

Jack surveyed the room. “You take the walls and the shelves. I’ll start on the file cabinet.”

The office wasn’t big. There was a desk, a two-drawer filing cabinet against the far wall, a small bookshelf with training manuals stacked on it, three framed certifications on the wall, and a narrow closet in the corner. I started with the certifications.

“Check the backs of those frames,” Jack said without looking up from the filing cabinet. “People hide things in weird places sometimes.”

“Like where?”

“Besides various body cavities?” he asked.

I could hear the smile in his voice.

“I worked a homicide in DC once. Eighty-year-old woman in a bad neighborhood got robbed and murdered by a junkie. When I worked the scene we found ten thousand dollars in the urn of her dead husband beneath his ashes.”

“That’s a good hiding spot,” I said. “I just keep extra cash in my underwear drawer.”

“I know,” he said.

“You can’t trust the banks,” I told him.

I lifted each of the frames off the wall and turned them over. There was nothing taped to the backs. I rehung each one and moved to the bookshelf. I ran my hand along the underside of each shelf, checked between the manuals, opened books upside down, and looked at the shelf wall behind them.

“Anything?” Jack asked.

“Nothing.”

“I’m not finding anything either,” he said. “Wade’s filing system is much like his home organization. Everything has a place and is in alphabetical order with a coinciding color. The IRS would love this man.”

I moved to the closet next. It was narrow, but obsessively arranged. A rod on one side held four spare Form and Flow Pilates polos, evenly spaced, and below them was a pair of clean trainers in a plastic box. On an upper shelf sat a stack of folded grip socks and three pairs of athletic pants. On another shelf sat a small mirror propped against the back and a brown leather toiletry bag. I unzipped it and found cologne, travel-sized mouthwash, toothpaste and toothbrush, a tin of breath mints, and a strip of condoms.

“Wade was a real Boy Scout,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s always prepared,” I said, holding up the condoms. “And worried about bad breath apparently.”

“We’ll have CSI sweep for any DNA in here.”

“Well that’s a gross thought.”

I set the toiletry bag aside and pushed the polos to one end of the rod to get a look at the back corner of the closet. A small black fireproof safe with a combination dial on the front sat on the floor.

“Jack.”