"I wish you were the murderer." I flipped the legal pad to the coffee table. It held only doodles. "It would simplify my life considerably."
Mike Paycik, slumped so low on my couch that his very nice butt barely clung to the seat cushion and his legs stretched halfway to the kitchen door, did not look particularly willing to simplify my life. We'd been talking in circles for two hours.
"You just want me to be the murderer because you know I want to ask you out. And if I'm in jail, I can't. That would make your life simpler, wouldn't it?"
Oh, shit.
Had I known? I didn't know any more because now I did know and it colored my view of everything I'd thought before. If I had sensed something beyond ambition and professional regard, wasn't it telling that I hadn't let it come to the surface? God knows I could use some ego boosters, yet had something in me held off the recognition?
And what did it say about my frame of mind that I considered having a funny, intelligent, hot guy, ten years younger asking me out an oh, shit?
If that didn't make it clear I wasn't ready for this, I don't know what could.
"Mike, I could give you the bad-to-mix-professional-and-personal speech, and after my experience I'd mean every damned word of it. But the truth is, it's more than that. I don't know where my life is going right now. I don't know where my career is going. Until I get those things straight, I couldn't even think about-what's so funny?"
"Sorry, Elizabeth. It's just that I've given that speech so many times. First it was because I was building my football career, and then the need to stay on top. No time to even consider a serious relationship. Then my knees went, and the speech changed to needing to put everything into figuring out what I was going to do in the next phase of my life." His smile faded. "It's strange to be on the other end of it."
I didn't know what to say.
"I'll give you time, Elizabeth. But I won't give up. That's one of the things you don't know about me . . . yet." He looked at me intently a long moment. Abruptly, he sat up. "Okay, so . . . I still think the Johnsons are the most likely candidates."
He'd been saying that with some regularity since I'd reported on my meeting with Myrna Johnson, as per our agreement. With only slightly less regularity, he'd been saying I'd been damn stupid to meet her alone.
"Everybody had the means and opportunity to kill Redus," he added, "but the Johnsons have the strongest motive-wanting revenge on the man they blame for their son's death. Otherwise, why would Myrna clam up on you?"
"Because if Claustel killed Redus to keep him quiet, why Claustel wanted him quiet would be sure to come out, and then the secret Rog died for would come out. She couldn't stand that. Besides, can you see one or both of them shooting Mona in the face with a shotgun?"
"Self-preservation is a powerful motivator," Paycik said.
"Yeah, but-" I started, also not for the first time, when a knock at the front door interrupted me.
It was Jenny, the assistant from KWMT.
"Hi. I thought you might want the stuff from your inbox at the station. It's just awful what they're doing to you. Hey, Mike. Everybody's up in arms. Well, not everybody. They know Thurston's just scared of you. Because you have so much more experience . . ." She looked in my general direction for a split second as her gaze bounced around my living room with the speed, intensity and randomness of a strobe. ". . . and because you . . ." A nanosecond of attention to Paycik. ". . . are an up-and-comer, and he's afraid you'll get to a Top Ten market before him, as if he has a chance," she added with a snort.
"And, of course, everybody knows Haeburn is pissed as hell that the owners said he had to take you . . ." A glance at me again. ". . . and even more pissed that he's been told to give you a free rein."
"What do you mean-"
If I'd ever had her attention, it was gone now. "Hey, neat set-up," she squealed as she spotted computer components huddled on the big walnut desk in one corner of the living room. "But you don't have it plugged in. Here . . ." I'd trailed her across the living room, and now she capitalized on my proximity by dumping two fat manila envelopes into my arms. She turned with relish to the computer. "Your cords look like spaghetti."
"That's why it's not plugged in," I muttered, tossing the envelope with his name on it in Paycik's general direction. "The laptop does what I've needed."
From the way she was slinging cords, plugs and steel gray rectangles, Jenny had trained on Bill Gates' assembly line.
"What do you mean, Haeburn's been told to give me free rein?" My ex had finagled to have my contract assigned to KWMT as the smallest speck on the map he could find, so there was no way he would have lobbied for me to be given freedom. "Who told him that?"
"Mmm. Heathertons, I guess. Here, hold this." I took the disentangled cord she handed me. "Or maybe Craig Morningside."
The Heathertons owned the station. Or, more accurately, their matriarch, Val Heatherton, owned it. I'd never met them. "Who's Craig Morningside?"
"Now if I could just . . ." Jenny dove under the desk trailing a length of black electrical cord behind her like a spelunker's safety line.
"Station manager," Paycik said.
I should have known there was one lurking somewhere. Was this part of Haeburn's they whose rules he was flouting by suspending us?
"Son-in-law," Paycik continued elliptically as he leafed through pink message forms from his envelope. "Val gave him a cushy job to keep him out of trouble. She's the real power. She . . ." He stood, leaving all but one pink slip on the coffee table. "I'm gonna use your phone, okay?"
Not waiting for an answer, he headed for the kitchen. I started after him to ask about the station hierarchy, but just then Jenny emerged from the nether regions of the desk. "You shouldn't let these things get so dusty." She sneezed reproachfully.
"Sorry," I muttered. Too late to ask Paycik now. He was already on the phone. I tried to listen to his end of the conversation without getting in his line of sight. I was almost certain he was talking to his Aunt Gee.
"You need a surge protector. Better yet, a UPS."
"UPS?" The people in brown trucks?
"Uninterrupted Power Source." She wiped the desk with her sleeve and began arranging components. "Around here's it's a necessity. Gives you time to save everything if the power goes off. The better ones turn off your computer before the power runs out."
In the kitchen Mike was muttering, darn him. But then I heard clearly, "Damn! They just better run the right damn tests."
Then silence from the kitchen. Not so from the other end of the living room, with Jenny's continued commentary on dust, static and smudges. When she examined my keyboard, crumbs joined her litany. She was still complaining when Mike came back.
"Well?" I demanded.
"Sure, I can get it going," Jenny said, answering my question aimed at Mike.
"Uh . . . good. Thanks." I prodded Mike again with a sharp look.
"They've run through the contents of Redus' truck. All the keys fit what they should, nothing extra, nothing missing except-"
"The shotgun."
He nodded. "Widcuff has taken Tom's shotgun from the office to run tests. He's sure it was the murder weapon-as a club for Redus and shot for Mona."
"I thought shotguns couldn't be connected to a wound that way."
He shrugged. "Widcuff seems to think he can. Another thing. Widcuff has a witness who was passing the trailer when Mona drove up and got out of her car. Alone. Her Mustang was the only vehicle there. They're thinking from the position of her body and the safe being open and all, that the killer came in after she did."
Before I could chew on that for long, Jenny came up for air. "There. It should run now."
Sure enough, with the punch of a couple buttons, the familiar hum started and light flickered across the screen.
"That's great, Jenny. Thanks."
She dropped to the floor in a graceful fold and snagged the open bag of chips off the coffee table.
"No problem. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, the Heathertons." I wondered if she was related to Penny at the supermarket-neither dust, nor cords, nor computer disarray shall turn me from my appointed rounds of gossip. "Val told Craig, and Craig told Les that you were to be given free rein. That was about three days after you were hired. Haeburn was a real thundercloud about it, and Thurston . . . You'd think somebody had taken out all his hair with tweezers!"
"I don't know Val Heatherton." Why would she bother?
"Sheila in administration says somebody had called Val. Some guy who went to school with Honey Heatherton, who was always Val's favorite."
"Did Sheila remember a name?"
"Nah, just that he was some lawyer from Chicago."
She knew nothing more, but she'd already sent my radar for secrets into alarm mode.
The lawyer I knew best in Chicago was Mel Welch, and he was family. As in Catherine Danniher had his direct number and did not hesitate to use it.
* * * *
That night I dreamt of spiders. Spinning webs that disappeared whenever I tried to make out their pattern.
Some maddeningly motherly spiders. Some benevolent spiders with Mel's balding head. Some with big bellies. Some wearing Stetsons, along with cowboy boots on each leg. Some spinning webs like the lace doily on the tray at Gina Redus' house. Some webs catching golden sawdust that glinted in the sun for an instant before the glinting burst into something red and wet. Too heavy for the gossamer threads, dragging them down with tears of blood.
I sat up in bed, wide awake but disoriented.
The mother and Mel spiders were the most familiar.
I'd known Mel Welch since I was nine and he became my mother's cousin's oldest daughter's boyfriend. It was instant crush on my part. He showed more tolerance than most college boys would, leaving no scars. So when, in due course, he married my mother's cousin's oldest daughter-Peg by name-our relationship settled into a comfortable, trusting friendship.
That friendship had expanded recently into the professional arena as my ex-husband appropriated sole possession of the personal lawyer and the agent we'd once shared, and I had lacked any motivation to search among the usual suspects for my own.
If Mel was weaving a web that involved KWMT's owners, the chances were excellent that Catherine Danniher was behind it somewhere.
I would need to get to the bottom of that.
But not now.
Not with the bloody web of murders to deal with.
I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was very early. So early, the sheer curtains that screened the bottom half of the window by the small kitchen table allowed no light through. Sunset was a battle most nights, a clash that splattered the sky in red and orange, then purple and mauve. But this was an evolution, a gray-blue limbo before day pushed on.
Shivering, I accepted that I wasn't going to sleep with spider dreams lingering. In fact, I grabbed a can of bug spray and sprayed around the front and back door and around each window frame.
Still, spider webs remained on my mind as I sat down with a cup of coffee once the coffeemaker had finished its work. Like the web I'd seen in the trees that first day at Burrell's ranch, with sawdust caught in it. And the web at his office, so thoroughly sprayed with a mist of blood that it tinted the window beyond it.
Spiders don't want their webs to be seen, otherwise their prey avoid them. But every action produces a trace of some sort. Sawdust from chain-sawing. Blood from murder. And then the spider web was revealed.
But what trace would be left if someone had set up Tom Burrell? If I knew that, I might know how to find the pattern that would lead to the spider.
If there was one.
I'd just started to wrangle with that thought when sound shattered the stillness.