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 his 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
