Spin a Wicked Web

by Cricket McRae

  Ariel. Sex. Gabi. Ruth. Anger. Love. Chris. Jealousy. Scott. Hate. Daphne. Jake. Rocky. Irene. Fear. Zak. Lindsey. Barr. Thaddeus. Felicia. Robin.

  Death.

  Each person involved with this case, all those emotions, tumbled through my thoughts like stones being polished. The rough edges smoothed, allowing the truth to begin shimmering through.

  The yarn grew on the spool. Soft and gray. Tidy.

  All the strands coming together.

  And my gray matter tidied what I knew. Categorized. Theorized. Motivations combined with circumstances, opportunities juxtaposed with temperaments.

  An hour and a half later, when the alpaca wool was gone, I had two spools of single spun yarn, ready to ply and set the twist. And I'd figured out a few twists of my own.

  This time all the puzzle pieces fit perfectly together. I knew who had killed Ariel Skylark.

  ***

  Detective Lane had gathered her abundant mane into a sleek, practical bun. She wore black slacks and a white shirt with a minimum of jewelry. Instead of coming across as utilitarian, though, she looked like she was ready to walk down a red carpet to a chorus of oohs and aahs.

  It had taken a day for Robin to obtain the arrest warrant for Zak Nelson. This was, she assured us, less due to a lack of evidence than bureaucratic doings. She was convinced he had killed Ariel, and once he was in custody for that crime, she would further investigate Scott Popper's death. She was obviously delighted to be able to close a murder case so quickly, yet another feather in her cap. Despite her lack of interviewing and social skills, she had quickly developed a reputation with her superiors for the ability to efficiently solve any crime that came her way. This reputation meant a lot to her.

  Perhaps too much.

  Barr had arranged for me to be there when they arrested Zak after I'd laid my theory out to him. I don't know how he did it, and counted myself among the luckiest of women that he would even consider including me, especially as I could tell he had a few reservations. But despite Robin being the lead detective on Ariel's murder case, he was still senior in the department, and they had to work together every day. In any case, she'd acquiesced, however much it went against her grain.

  But she didn't exactly welcome me with open arms.

  We were alone in the parking lot of the cop shop, waiting for Barr to join us. Robin opened the back door of the patrol car she and Barr were using for this trip and gestured for me to get in. The undercover Impala they usually used didn't have the wire screen to separate the slick, one-piece vinyl backseat (easier to hose out, I'd been told) from the law enforcement up front. This one did.

  "Um," I said, craning my neck to see if Barr was coming. "I'm not that excited about small spaces."

  Her eyes narrowed. "You know, everything you've done regarding this investigation has caused me grief."

  I bristled. "That's not true! What about-"

  "Neither of us are riding in the back, so if you're coming, that's where you get to sit. Your choice."

  The note of finality in her voice sealed the deal. I slid onto the seat, and she slammed the door. The sensation of being in a cage combined with the lack of interior door handles made my mild claustrophobia flare. Within moments, I found it hard to breathe.

  Luckily, Barr joined us then. It was a short trip to the Nelson home, so I did my best to distract myself from the sure knowledge my throat was closing by worrying about the gamble I was about to take. At least, I told myself, I wasn't the reason they were arresting Zak. If anything, I was there to help him as best as I could.

  I only hoped my best was good enough.

  "You okay?" Barr asked as he opened the door, and I barreled out of the back seat. "You look a little pale. Are you nervous?"

  "I'm fine," I said, keeping my tone bright. "Don't worry about me.

  Robin gave me a look. "I'm still not sure why you're here, but if you have any ideas about interfering, you'd better think again."

  "Yes, ma'am." I saluted.

  She rolled her eyes and turned toward the house. Either Irene and Zak hadn't noticed that we'd arrived, or they were inside, waiting to see why we were there. Then I saw a curtain in the front window twitch. That answered that.

  Together, we trooped to the front step.

  Irene answered immediately, confirming my suspicion that she'd been watching us.

  "Officers? What can I do for you?" Her voice shook a little.

  "Detectives" Robin barked out the correction.

  Irene's pale face lost another shade of color. "I'm sorry. Detectives."

  "May we come in?" Barr asked.

  Irene's tongue flicked out and ran over her lower lip. "Can you tell me what this is about?" My presence must have registered then. "Sophie Mae? What's going on?"

  Barr stepped to the screen door. "Please. We should do this inside."

  Wordlessly, she stepped back. The poor woman looked terrified. Single file, the three of us entered her home.

  Robin brushed past Irene and strode into the nondescript living room. "Where's your son?"

  The fear on Irene's face intensified. "Zak? What do you want with Zak?"

  "Ms. Nelson, is he here?" Robin sounded like a drill sergeant.

  "Please," Barr said. The one word softened the tension in the room.

  Irene turned to me. "Sophie Mae? What-?"

  I opened my mouth to speak. Robin sent me a look that would have stopped a rhino. My jaw snapped shut.

  "Ms. Nelson," Barr prompted gently. "Where is he?"

  This time the look Irene directed at me was on par with Robin's. I seemed to be on everyone's shitlist.

  "He's in the basement," she said. "He has a separate apartment down there."

  "Show us," Robin said.

  Slowly, Irene led us to a door and opened it. "Zak?" she called.

  Robin pushed her aside and ran down the stairs. Barr was right behind her. For all they knew, Zak was waiting for them with an Uzi or running out the back door. Theirs was a serious, deadly business. Better safe than sorry.

  Irene and I followed. She grabbed my arm. "What do they want?"

  "They want to arrest your son," I said, and watched the enormity of those words sink in. I pulled my arm out of her grasp and went downstairs. After a brief hesitation, she followed me.

  Zak was sitting on a battered recliner in the main room of the basement. It looked like part living room, with a slumping sofa and the recliner situated in front of a big television screen, and part garage with the half-built motorcycle on a tarp in one corner. A laugh track emanated from the TV. Two guitars and a myriad of concert posters punctuated the pumpkin-colored walls. At least he hadn't inherited his mother's sense of design.

  "Stand up, please." Robin's use of the word didn't sound nearly as nice as when Barr said it.

  "Uh, sure," Zak said easily, though he looked a little bewildered as he stood and clicked the Off button on the remote.

  Robin walked behind him, neatly clasping handcuffs around his wrists before anyone realized what she was doing. Beside me, Irene's gasp caught in her throat.

  "Zak Nelson, you are under arrest for the murder of Ariel Skylark," Robin intoned.

  She continued on, reading him his Miranda rights. My gaze slid to Irene. Her hands were clamped over her mouth, the whites of her eyes visible all around the pupils above her fingers.

  "Are you going to let this happen?" I asked in a low tone.

  Zak blinked, confusion coming off him like a scent. Mother and son stared at one another. Robin droned on.

  "You can stop this," I whispered. "They have a lot of evidence. He's going to jail, Irene. Zak's going to jail unless you tell them the truth."

  I could sense the intensity of Barr's gaze as he watched us from across the room.

  Robin finished her recitation and put her hand on Zak's arm. He still looked bewildered, the fact that he was being arrested for murder seeming to elude his comprehension.

  "No!" Irene said in a loud voice. Then in a lower to
ne. "He didn't do it." She was shaking all over now.

  "We'll let the courts decide that," Robin said.

  Irene looked at me then. Understanding passed between us. I nodded.

  She turned back to the detectives about to march her son out to the patrol car. "But I know he didn't do it." She licked her lips. "Because I did."

  Robin glared at me. She began to push Zak toward the stairway.

  "Wait!" Irene moved in front of the door to the stairs. "What are you doing? Didn't you hear me?"

  "You killed the Skylark girl?" Robin shook her head. "Right. Just like you were at Chris Popper's house that night. And then you were with Zak here. Lady, you need to make up your mind. But I can tell you that providing so many different stories is going to make it a lot easier on the prosecutor when this case gets to court."

  Red fury swept up Irene's face. The fear still shone there, too. How had she managed to get through the days since the murder? She must have been barely holding her life together.

  "Ms. Nelson, you need to move," Robin said.

  "No. I'm not going anywhere until you listen to me. I killed that little slut."

  "Mom, shut up," Zak said. "I didn't kill her, I swear, but you can't take the fall in order to protect me."

  Robin sighed. "You will either step aside, Ms. Nelson, or Detective Ambrose here will be forced to move you out of my way."

  "I want to confess, and damn it, you're going to listen." Irene was becoming less mousy and more like one of her female power statuettes by the second.

  "Come down to the station, then. You can make any statement you want to. But I don't want to have to say it again: get out of my way.

  My heart sank. Irene wanted to confess to a murder I was sure she had indeed committed. But who knew whether she'd change her mind, given the chance?

  "Let him go." Irene grated the words out. She was almost a foot shorter than Barr's Amazonian partner.

  Zak's jaw clenched as the seriousness of his situation sank in. "Mom?" His eyes narrowed, and he slowly shook his head. His voice was soft. "I'm not twelve. Why are you doing this?"

  Barr moved to Robin's side, looking grim. She glanced at him. "What?"

  He shook his head. "You're the lead on this. But maybe we should listen."

  The words were neutral, but I could tell he was afraid we'd lose Irene's confession, too. Robin pressed her lips together. It was not attractive, and only served to make her look petulant.

  "I have to tell you," Irene said, her eyes pleading.

  Her son blinked in confusion. Robin let out an exasperated breath, and her shoulders slumped a fraction in defeat.

  "Okay, Irene," I said. "Tell us what happened that night."

  She turned on me. "Shut up, Sophie Mae. You don't know anything."

  Well, that kind of hurt my feelings. Obviously I knew something. For example I knew she killed Ariel. And she knew I knew. Irene's constant bitchiness was really starting to get on my nerves.

  Barr sat down on the sofa. Robin locked gazes with him, then after a few moments capitulated. She guided Zak to the sofa. "Sit down."

  He did, and she slowly and deliberately perched on the cushion on the other side of him. He glanced at Barr, who met his eyes without smiling.

  "All right," I said, and reached into my tote bag. Irene's head jerked toward me. "Will you relax? I don't carry anything more lethal than lip balm in my bag."

  I fished around, found the tube and took it out. I applied the balm and dropped it back into my bag. Robin pursed those perfect lips of hers and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. But she didn't know I'd turned on the miniature cassette recorder Barr had let me borrow.

  "So let's sit down like civilized people, and you can tell us what happened. Are you game?" I asked.

  A moment of hesitation, and Irene nodded. "That's all I wanted in the first place."

  "Do you want to sit in the recliner?" Next I'd be passing around appetizers.

  "I'll stand."

  I nodded and moved to the recliner, carefully placing my tote by the coffee table. Irene began to pace back and forth in front of the television.

  And then she began to speak.

  THIRTY-TWO

  "I WENT OVER TO Chris Popper's that night," Irene said. "We were meeting about how to get rid of Ariel."

  Zak sat up. "What?"

  "Not kill her, just get her out of the co-op. She should never have been a member in the first place, not with our jury process. But Scott had convinced Chris to let Ariel in. That was, of course, before anyone knew he and Ariel were having an affair."

  She looked pensively at her son, who nodded. "Yeah, Mom. I already know that."

  "But then she started in on you, and even Jake had a crush on her. For some reason she wasn't interested in him, though."

  I knew why: Jake didn't have anything she needed. If he had, she would have made a run at him just as she had with Zak and Scott. And now I knew Scott's appeal: he'd been able to get her into CRAG, something Daphne Sparks felt Ariel desperately wanted in order to validate her talent as an artist.

  Irene continued. "Things had gotten out of control. She needed to go. But we had to figure out how to go about it."

  "What did you decide?" I asked.

  "We decided to simply refund her membership dues and ask her to leave. Jake was worried that she'd want to know why. Chris and I wanted to tell her exactly why, but he didn't like that. He was ambivalent about making her leave at all, of course. He felt we were being too hard on her. He left the house in a huff."

  "What time was that?" Barr asked.

  "Between seven-thirty and eight."

  That jibed with what everyone else had said. He nodded. "Go on.

  Irene stopped pacing and cupped her elbows in her palms. "Well, with Jake acting like that, a united front wasn't going to be possible. Ruth and Chris and I decided we would approach Ariel in a week or so. After all, Chris owns the building and started the co-op. She has a lot of say about things, more than the rest of us, by default. But Scott's funeral was the next day, and she was grieving and exhausted. We needed to wait."

  We all nodded, even Robin.

  "So Ruth left next, and a few minutes after that I did." She passed her hand over her face. "I felt better about things at CRAC than I had in a long time, knowing that girl would be leaving." The hand dropped, and she began pacing again, back and forth in the space between the coffee table and the television. "My way home from Chris' took me by the co-op." She paced faster now. "I saw Zak's car in the parking lot, next to Ariel's little blue car. I couldn't help it. I pulled to the curb across the street and waited."

  Now she stopped in front of her son. "I hated that you were seeing her."

  "I know, Mom."

  "She was going to hurt you terribly. I knew it. She was empty inside, and she sucked the life out of the people around her like some kind of psychological vampire. I couldn't stand that you were in there with her." As she spoke, the volume of her voice increased and her words tumbled over one another.

  Her son held his hands up. "But we were breaking up that night. That's why I was there. She didn't hurt me at all. We had some fun, and then we moved on." His voice was steady, but his eyes were full of dread. I could tell he didn't want to hear any more.

  "Zak," I said. Everyone turned toward me. Okay, so I was interrupting a murder confession, but I just had to know something. "Did Ariel ever come to work with you, or visit you at the Fix-It?"

  "She came by all the time. For a chick, she knew a lot about cars.

  "Did she ever come by when you were working on the police cars?"

  "Probably. It's not like I kept track, and we usually have one or another of the city's cars in there at any given time." He glared at Barr and Robin. "You guys are rough on those vehicles, and then you don't even bother to take care of them," he spit out. The fury in his tone had nothing to do with maintaining the police department's cars; it was directed at the detectives who sat calmly on either side of him while hi
s mother led up to a horrible revelation.

  "I'm sure you're right," Barr said, and flicked a warning at me with his eyes.

  I felt sure Ariel had been the one who sabotaged Scott Popper's vehicle, and Zak had at least confirmed that she had had access. Barr and Robin could follow up with him more on that later.

  "Sorry, Irene," I said. "Please go on.,,

  The interruption seemed to have calmed her. "I waited outside the co-op for a few minutes. I just couldn't help it. All I knew was that I wanted Zak to come out of there." She took a deep breath. "And then he did. He came out and drove away."

  Her pacing resumed. "But she didn't come out. She was still in there. And I kept thinking about all the things we'd talked about at Chris', about how disruptive that girl was." Now she sent a pleading look her son's way. "I didn't know she'd broken it off with you. I didn't know." Anguish laced her tone. "Sitting there in my car in the dark, all I could think about was how she needed to go away, and not in a week or so, when Chris would be up to facing her." She stopped speaking for a few moments, but kept striding back and forth. Finally, in a quiet voice I said, "You felt threatened. She'd seduced Scott Popper, ruined the co-op for you, and then went after your son. You didn't know what she was capable of."

  Irene shook her head a couple of times, then paused, and stared at me. She slowly nodded. "Yes. That's really it, isn't it? I didn't know what she was going to do next, and I was afraid for Zak."

  A derisive noise came from her son's throat.

  "You may not have known Ariel as well as you thought," I said to him.

  "Are you going to keep interrupting?" Robin asked. "Or can we get this over with?"

  I sighed. So much for greasing the wheels of Irene's confession. "So what did you do next?"

  "I went inside. It was dark, but I could see something on the floor, to the side of the retail counter." Her eyes blazed. "It was one of my sculptures. The one I call Athena, where she's in the warrior yoga pose?"