My Spy 3: Murder Mayhem

Pins & Needles

After the paramedics clear me and offer up some pain meds, Ryan ushers me into a holding room where Mason is waiting for me. Ryan helps me into the chair and sits down next to me. Mason glances to his choice of seats but doesn't say anything. He looks to me and says, "I hear this is not your first time giving a statement."

"Getting rather good at it I must say."

Ryan glances to me and I lose my grin. Mason pulls a pen out and I recap everything that happened with Lucy. He was hoping she had confessed to me but I shake my head.

"Not to killing Poppy or to any of it really. She only admitted to trying to hide the clubs."

Mason nods as he jots down the last of his notes. He snaps his attention to Ryan and says, "I'm going to make sure we don't need anything else. Hang around here until I give you the go-ahead to take her home."

"Sure," Ryan responds. I wait until Mason closes the door behind him and then look back to Ryan, "Okay, can I get answers now?"

"You're on pins and needles I'm sure," he says with a smirk. He knows I can't wait to put it all together. He adds, "You know, I had wondered if you were going to figure it out. As soon as I said it might not be Arthur, I thought maybe you'd start casting suspicion elsewhere but you never did. You were adamant that it was Arthur and Arthur alone."

"Well, how did you figure out it was Lucy too? What do you know that I don't?" I ask.

"Well to be fair, a lot more than you did," he smiles to me and I roll my eyes. I would have been pretty impressed with myself if I had figured it out without all the evidence he had access to. He continues, "As soon as we found the club, we didn't think it was Arthur. We knew Arthur was guilty of embezzlement but not of actually killing Poppy."

"What did the club prove?" I ask.

"That the killer may have been left-handed," he answers. My eyes go wide and I ask, "Well how did you figure out Lucy was left-handed?"

"Oh, I'll get to that part," he says wickedly and I can't help but laugh. I turn in my chair so I am directly facing him and let him spill the beans.

"After we found the club, we started doing research as to where the club could have come from. It was a pretty unique club. It was from a rare, antique left-handed set. Turns out we found a posting of the same brand of clubs on an auction site posted a little over a month ago. We traced the auction back to an estate sale that happened in Sommerville and the host of the sale remembered a husband who had purchased the clubs for his wife's birthday at the end of the month because she was left-handed. By then we knew it was a left-handed female who at one point owned the clubs. After we got statements from everyone in the society, we saw that Lucy's birthday was at the end of September."

My eyes widen and he nods.

"I started looking into Lucy and we discovered that Arthur's last client the night Poppy died was none other than Lucy Breeland. They were each other's alibi's that night. They said after he closed up the club, they went and had dinner."

"They were in cahoots this whole time!" I say in shock.

He nods.

"My guess is they have been in this together since Poppy took over. We think Lucy figured it out and wanted in on it."

"Well, we picked up on Arthur's clues almost immediately. What else did you get on Lucy?" I ask.

"Actually, thanks to you we were able to solidify our theory."

"Really? How?" I ask.

"When you noticed the fingerprint on the envelope. We ran it and discovered it was Lucy's left thumb. Which means she had been the one upstairs to tuck the checks into the envelope. Then you discovered the safe and we were hoping the accounting documents would be in there. We got a warrant and were planning on breaking into the safe at the end of the party tomorrow."