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 righthanded.”
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 k
now 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 fundraising 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.
“Was Marie’s husband with her?” she asked.
“Tall guy, dark hair? Yeah, he was with her. I figured he must be her husband, the way he was trying to comfort her when she got upset.”
So Marie had found Russ, Phyllis thought. He had still been in the school somewhere when Marie was looking for him.
“Do you think there’s any connection between the missing money and Mrs. Dunston’s murder?” Sam asked.
Mike shook his head, sighed, and shrugged. “We just don’t know. There could be. Maybe she happened to go into the school office just as somebody was taking the cash box, and the thief forced her down the hall and killed her to keep her from implicating him. People have been murdered before for a lot less.”
Phyllis remembered something she had heard that afternoon and leaned forward in her chair. “Mike, Becca Dunston, Shannon’s daughter, told me that the last time she saw her mother, Shannon said she was going to check on some money.”
Mike looked intrigued and excited by that news. “That would possibly put Mrs. Dunston at the scene of the theft and tie her murder in with it. That’s good information to have, Mom.”
“But what about the knife?” Phyllis asked as she thought more about what might have happened. “If the person who stole the money is also the killer, why would he have taken the knife from the cafeteria earlier?”
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Mike said. “We have to figure that when he took the knife, he intended to use it to kill Mrs. Dunston. That would make the theft and the murder two separate crimes and probably two separate criminals.”
“But you can’t assume that,” Sam pointed out.
“No, we sure can’t. At this point we can’t assume anything for certain.”
Sam shook his head. “I’m mighty glad it’s up to you folks to figure out this mess and not me. I’d never make a hand as a detective.”
“Mess is the right word. Not only do we have the murder and the missing cash to contend with, we haven’t made any progress on finding out who burglarized the school a week or so ago. We don’t know whether what happened today is connected to that or not. The sheriff seemed to think it might be, though, because the drawer in the secretary’s desk where the cash box was kept hadn’t been broken into. Somebody had to have unlocked it, just like somebody got into the school earlier without actually breaking in.”
“Maybe somebody picked the lock on the desk,” Sam suggested. “It can’t have been a very complicated one.”
“No, but it was locked when Mrs. Hickson went to open it and check on the cash box. That suggests a key was used to open it and then relock it.”
“Boy, this stuff just goes ‘round and ‘round, doesn’t it?”
Mike nodded glumly. Phyllis didn’t like to see him looking so defeated. The case seemed overwhelming now, but she was sure that as the law continued to sift through all the possibilities and talk to all the people who might have been involved, sooner or later answers to all the questions would emerge.
And once again she felt a pang of guilt about not telling him what she knew about Shannon Dunston and Russ Tyler. But she didn’t actually know anything, she reminded herself. She liked Marie Tyler, despite the young woman’s tendency toward rather colorful language, and she didn’t want to ruin Marie’s marriage if there was no real reason to do so. That’s what would happen if she told Mike that Shannon might have been having an affair with Russ. Even if Russ was cleared of the murder, the damage to his marriage would already be done.
So, even though she was uncomfortable about doing so, she would keep quiet about what she knew for now, until she had a chance to find out exactly what had been going on. Then if she could help Mike, she would.
If that made her a meddling old woman, then so be it.
Sometimes in life it took a little meddling to set things right.
Chapter 15
Mike was off duty on Sunday, the day after the carnival, so he tried to concentrate on his time with Sarah and Bobby and enjoy the chance to be with his family. He had learned early on that when you worked in law enforcement, you had to be able to leave the job behind as much as possible when you weren’t on duty. Otherwise it would consume you.
But he couldn’t avoid the stories about the murder in both the Weatherford and Fort Worth papers and on the newscasts from the Fort Worth/Dallas TV stations. When he noticed that there was no mention of the missing money in any of the news reports, he knew the sheriff was deliberately holding back that part of the story. That made sense. For one thing, they didn’t know for sure that the murder and the theft were connected, and for another, it was always wise to keep something in reserve in case it was needed to trip up a suspect or weed out false confessions.
Monday morning when he reported for his shift, the dispatcher told him that the sheriff wanted to see him. Mike walked down the hall to Haney’s office. The door was open, but he rapped lightly on it anyway.
“Come in, Mike,” Haney said from behind his desk. His swivel chair was turned so that he was facing a computer and monitor set up on a portable computer table next to the desk. He gestured toward the screen and said, “Take a look at this.”
Mike leaned over the desk, resting his hands on its top to balance himself as he studied the monitor. A pair of standard mug shots were displayed on the left-hand side of the screen, complete with the usual identifying numbers across the bottom of them. They showed a balding, sandy-haired man. Information about his arrest record was on the righthand side of the screen.
“Gary Oakley,” Mike read. “Why is that name familiar to me?”
“Because he works as a custodian at Loving Elementary,” Haney said.
Mike’s eyebrows rose. “What was he arrested for in the past?”
“Burglary,” the sheriff said. “He served three years in the penitentiary at Huntsville.”
Mike straightened and drew in a deep breath. “They hired a convicted felon to work around little kids?”
Haney leaned back in his chair and said, “That doesn’t surprise me. There are stories on the news all the time about convicted sex offenders getting hired to work in schools. They lie about it on their employment applications, and the school district doesn’t take the time and trouble to check them out thoroughly enough to catch the lie.” The sheriff shrugged. “It’s hard to blame the school districts too much. They get hit by funding and personnel cuts, just like we do, and things start to fall through the cracks.”
Mike thought about the f
act that Bobby would be starting school in a few years and said, “Yeah, but when you’re talking about the safety of children, you’ve got to be more careful than that.”
Haney leaned his head toward the computer. “What else do you think about this?”
“Oakley has to be the leading suspect in the earlier burglary of the school and the theft of that cash box. He’d have keys to get into the building and maybe even into the secre tary’s desk. That would explain why there were no signs of forced entry either time.”
“What about the murder?”
“We don’t know all those things are connected, do we?” Mike said. “But yeah, I guess if he’s a suspect in the other cases, he’s got to be a suspect in the murder, too.” The wheels of Mike’s brain turned over rapidly as he put together a theory. “Say Oakley was taking the cash box out of the drawer when Mrs. Dunston walked into the office. She told her daughter, the last time the little girl saw her, that she was going to check on some money.”
“How do you know that?” Haney asked sharply.
“My mother talked to the little girl after Mrs. Dunston’s body was found.”
The sheriff grunted. “Your mother, eh?”
“It’s not what you think, Sheriff,” Mike said. “She was just talking to the little girl, trying to keep her calm. She wasn’t actually questioning her or anything like that.”
Although now that Mike thought about it, he recalled how his mother had started poking around during the investigation of those murders a few months back… . She had taken to detective work so well, in fact, that she had solved those crimes.
He put his mind back on the current case and said, “If Oakley took the cash box and was discovered by Mrs. Dunston, he could have forced her down the hall and killed her to keep her from telling anybody what she’d seen.”
There was a problem with that, however. Mike remembered what his mother had pointed out as they all sat on the porch of her house on Saturday evening. If Oakley had killed Mrs. Dunston on the spur of the moment to cover up his other crimes, why had he taken the knife from the cafeteria earlier in the day?
Murder by the Slice Page 12