Murder by the Slice (15 page)

“Yes, we were about to get the cake auction under way when everybody heard the screams. Does that count as an alibi?” Before the sheriff could answer, she went on, “I don’t guess it does, does it? You need to know where I was before that.”

Haney shrugged. “Just as a matter of routine.”

Frances frowned in thought for a moment, then said, “I was outside part of the time, and I was in the gym part of the time. Some activities were set up in there, you know. I’m sure a lot of people saw me, but I couldn’t tell you who. About four o’clock I was in here with Marie Tyler.”

“Here in your office, you mean?”

“Well, in the outer office, to be exact. Marie had collected some more money from the ticket booth and the concession stand, and she wanted to lock it up in Katherine’s desk.”

“Katherine?”

“Katherine Felton, the school secretary. There’s a big drawer in her desk. Marie put the PTO cash box in it and locked it up, so it would be safe. You can’t be too careful when there are a lot of people milling around.” Frances laughed. It had a hollow sound. “I guess that’s been proven this afternoon, hasn’t it?”

“Is the money still there?” Mike asked curiously.

“It should be.”

“How much are we talking about?” Haney asked.

“Goodness, I don’t know. Around ten thousand dollars, maybe more.”

The sheriff rubbed his chin for a second and then said, “How about if we take a look, just to be sure.”

“All right.” Frances stood up and took a ring of keys from the pocket of her jeans. She and the two lawmen went back into the outer office, where a deputy was still answering the phone and assuring worried parents that their children were all right.

The bottom drawer on the right-hand side of the desk was larger than the others. Frances leaned over to unlock it and pull it open. Then she stared down into the drawer and frowned as she said, “That’s odd. Where … ?”

Haney and Mike moved quickly to her side. “What is it?” the sheriff asked.

Mike had a feeling he already knew the answer.

Frances Hickson lifted worried eyes to meet their intent gazes. “It’s gone,” she said, gesturing toward the drawer that held only some manila files and a box of CD-Rs. “The PTO cash box is gone.”

Chapter 14

Phyllis, Carolyn, and Sam all got back to the house within a minute of each other. Eve had ridden in Sam’s pickup. Normally the thought that Eve was alone with Sam like that might have bothered Phyllis a little, whether she wanted it to or not, but today Phyllis’s mind was too full of other things to worry about something like Eve’s tendency to flirt. Anyway, Sam was a grown man. He could fend her off, or choose not to, depending on what he wanted to do.

Phyllis drove into the double garage first, followed a moment later by Carolyn, and Sam pulled his pickup to a stop at the curb in front of the house. Not much was said as they all went inside. They were still too shocked by what had happened at the school.

Although maybe they shouldn’t have been shocked, Phyllis thought. Sudden, unexpected death was an all-toocommon thing in life. The events not only of today but also those in recent months had proven that. Phyllis had never really believed that people should live each day as if it were their last … but it didn’t hurt anything to keep the possibility in mind.

She didn’t feel like preparing a big meal for supper, so she made sandwiches instead, and everyone took their plates and glasses of iced tea out onto the porch to eat as the light of day faded. Carolyn and Eve took the swing, while Phyllis and Sam sat in two of the three metal chairs that had been on the porch for decades. Sam had repainted them during the summer, and they looked practically as good as new.

“We might as well talk about it,” Carolyn said after they had eaten in relative silence for a few minutes. “We’re all thinking about it, anyway. Who do you think killed Shannon?”

“Don’t reckon I’d have any idea,” Sam said. “I didn’t know the lady.”

“Neither did I,” Eve said, “but from what little I saw of her today, I sort of feel sorry for her. She didn’t look happy when she was arguing with her son.”

Phyllis said, “She wasn’t happy. No one who’s that angry all the time could be.” She hesitated, pondering whether she ought to say anything about seeing Shannon and Russ Tyler in Fort Worth. Finally she decided that she shouldn’t. It was bad enough that she hadn’t told Mike about what she had seen. She didn’t want to put her friends in a position where they might have to withhold evidence, too.

She needed to talk to Russ, she thought, and find out exactly what was going on between him and Shannon. If it was really more innocent than it appeared, then there would be no reason the authorities had to know about it.

But if their relationship
hadn’t
been innocent … if Russ had somehow been involved in Shannon’s death … then to approach him might put her in danger, Phyllis realized. She would have to be careful—very careful—and doing so might involve letting one other person in on what she knew.

Her gaze turned toward Sam. He had helped her look into those other murders. She trusted him, and knew she could count on him. Talking to him about this would have to wait until they were alone, though.

As those thoughts were going through Phyllis’s head, Carolyn was saying, “It wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out to be one of those PTO ladies who killed her, the way she treated all of them.”

Phyllis forced her mind back to the conversation and said, “None of them really struck me as murderers.”

“You never can tell about people,” Carolyn insisted. “You don’t know what’s going on inside their heads. That’s why when someone finally snaps and commits some act of violence, everyone around them is usually surprised. I think anyone is capable of almost anything if they’re pushed far enough. At least that way when something bad happens,
I’m
not surprised. Take Lindsey Gonzales. Shannon was terrible to her. I’m sure there have been plenty of times when Lindsey would have liked to pick up a knife and stab her.”

That same thought had occurred to Phyllis, and the fact that Lindsey had been right there when Shannon’s body was discovered had to be considered, too. But Lindsey didn’t really seem coolheaded enough to have carried the murder weapon away with her and then surreptitiously returned it to the cafeteria. Not to mention that she would have had to be planning Shannon’s murder ahead of time in order to have taken the knife in the first place. Phyllis might have believed that Lindsey could lash out at someone in the heat of the moment, but was she capable of carrying out a cold-blooded, calculated murder? Phyllis really didn’t think so.

“And what about Irene Vernon?” Carolyn went on.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say more than a dozen words,” Phyllis said.

“Exactly. You know what they say about the quiet ones.”

Phyllis’s first instinct was to think that was ridiculous, but she realized she couldn’t rule anything out. Truly, she didn’t know any of the PTO board members well enough to say that they could or couldn’t commit murder.

A few minutes later a sheriff’s department cruiser pulled up at the curb behind Sam’s pickup. Mike got out, came around the front of the car, and up the walk to the porch. He took off his Stetson, nodded politely, and said, “I thought I’d come by and let you know what’s going on with the investigation.”

“Are you allowed to do that?” Phyllis asked. “I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble with Sheriff Haney.”

“Well, he did make a point of telling me that we wouldn’t need your help with this one, Mom,” Mike said with a smile, “but I don’t figure he’d mind me talking about it. Anyway, I have some more questions, so I guess you could consider this a follow-up interview.”

“Well, then, sit down and go ahead.”

Mike took a seat on the empty metal chair. He said, “First of all, we’re pretty sure now that the knife from the cafeteria is the murder weapon. Our lab found traces of blood on it, and the frosting on Mrs. Dunston’s blouse seems to match the frosting from that carrot cake.”

“It was definitely frosting that was found on her blouse, then?”

Mike nodded. “Yep.”

Sam asked, “What about DNA from the blood?”

“We sent samples over to the medical examiner’s office in Fort Worth. They’ll have to run the DNA test; we don’t have the facilities for that. And it’ll be a couple of weeks, maybe longer, before we get any results. But that brings me to one of the questions I need to ask you. Did anybody happen to cut their finger or anything like that this afternoon?”

“While we were using that knife, you mean?” Phyllis shook her head. “I didn’t.”

“Neither did I,” Carolyn said. “And neither did anyone else. I’m sure we would have known about it if one of the children had picked it up and nicked themselves. For one thing, the parents would have been screaming about filing a lawsuit.”

“More than likely,” Mike said with a nod.

“But you have to remember, that knife was used in the school cafeteria,” Phyllis reminded him. “One of the ladies who works there could have cut herself yesterday or something like that. That could explain how the blood got on it.”

“Was the knife clean when you got it out of the kitchen today?”

Phyllis looked at Carolyn, who said, “I’m the one who took it out of a drawer in there, and yes, it appeared to be clean. A utensil like that should have been washed yesterday afternoon after lunch was finished for the day. I would think that the dishwasher in the kitchen would have sterilized it and gotten any blood off of it. Health department rules cover school kitchens, too, just like restaurants.”

Mike nodded. “That’s what I thought. We’ll question the ladies who work in the cafeteria, just to be sure, but I’m confident that the blood got on the knife today, and the only reasonable place it could have come from was Mrs. Dunston.”

“Whoever killed her must have wiped the blade clean,” Phyllis speculated. “I certainly never
saw
any blood on it.”

“Yes, there were only traces on the blade, down by the handle. Chances are you wouldn’t have noticed them. It took our lab guys to find them.”

“So the killer had to have been in the cafeteria before the murder to get the knife,” Sam mused, “as well as later to put it back.”

“That’s the way it looks,” Mike agreed. “Unfortunately, we’re estimating now that close to a thousand people were at the carnival at one time or another today. It’s going to be almost impossible to track down all of them. Principal Hickson says she can’t even turn over the master list of students who attend the school without us getting a court order first. She doesn’t want to violate any privacy laws.”

“You can get a court order, though, can’t you?” Phyllis asked.

“We should be able to. But even when we’ve got the list and can question all the parents, if some of them deny being there we might not be able to prove otherwise.”

Phyllis leaned forward in her chair. “This wasn’t a random killing,” she said. “Whoever murdered Shannon had what they thought was a good reason for doing it. They must have planned it out at least a little ahead of time, and they ran the risk of taking that knife from the cafeteria and then putting it back later. After Shannon was dead, the killer had to wipe the knife clean and then conceal it somehow while he took it back to the cafeteria. He couldn’t have walked around the school holding a knife in his hand. Someone would have noticed.”

“You said
he,
” Mike pointed out. “Any particular reason for that, Mom?”

Phyllis shook her head. “No, I was just thinking out loud and speaking in general. A wound like that could have been inflicted by either a man or a woman, couldn’t it?”

Mike nodded. “That was the ME’s preliminary opinion. Not only that, but the blade went just about straight in and out in a level blow. The angle of the wound doesn’t tell us much about the killer’s height or whether the person was left-handed or right-handed.”

Eve shuddered and said, “I hope the poor woman didn’t suffer too much.”

Before today, Phyllis probably wouldn’t have thought of Shannon as “the poor woman,” despite the flashes of sympathy she’d felt for her. It was a different story now. No one deserved what Shannon had gotten.

“The ME thought it probably took her a minute or so to die,” Mike said. “I guess she didn’t suffer for long … but she
did
suffer before it was over, I’ll bet.”

A somber silence descended over the group on the porch. Phyllis hadn’t quite finished her sandwich, but she didn’t have any appetite now. She set the plate aside and drank some of her iced tea.

After a couple of minutes, Mike said, “Here’s something you don’t know about yet. The cash collected by the PTO this afternoon is missing.”

“What!” Phyllis exclaimed. “Someone stole it?”

“It sure looks that way,” Mike said with a nod. “The sheriff and I were talking to Mrs. Hickson, the principal, and she mentioned that the cash box was locked up in the school secretary’s desk. We took a look, just to make sure it was still there, not really expecting that it would be gone. But sure enough, it was. There were several thousand dollars in it.”

“Did you check with Marie Tyler?” Carolyn asked. “She’s the fund-raising chairman for the PTO board, so she could have taken it to deposit it in the bank.”

“Mrs. Hickson suggested the same thing, so she and Sheriff Haney and I went looking for her. When we found her, she was just as shocked as we were that the money had disappeared. Maybe more so. She seemed to take it personal. Broke down and cried, right there in the school, because all the work everybody had done was for nothing.”

“You believed her?” Sam asked.

Mike nodded. “I did. Of course, I guess she could have been lying, but when you work in law enforcement for a while you get sort of an instinct for that.”

Carolyn said, “Like being a teacher. After you’ve been in a classroom, you
know
when your students are lying to you.”

Phyllis agreed, and she trusted Mike’s instincts. Her own feelings told her that she would sooner suspect Marie of Shannon’s murder than she would of stealing that money. Marie might kill for love, but not profit.