Murder by the Slice (12 page)

Becca shook her head. “No, he doesn’t like to do all that little kid stuff. He can stand it for a while, but not all day. He told me to go on and have fun, so I did.”

“What about your mom? When was the last time you saw her?”

“I don’t know. She and my dad had that fight in here, right after my dad and I got here. Then I saw her again out on the playground after that. She asked if I was having a good time.” Becca sniffled. “I told her I was.”

“Where did she go then?” Phyllis wanted to bite her lip. She hadn’t brought the little girl in here to interrogate her, but that seemed to be the way it was turning out.

“I don’t know. She went back into the school. She said she had to go see about some money.”

Phyllis frowned. “What money?”

Becca shook her head and said, “I don’t know. Just some money. That’s all she said.”

Marie Tyler had been collecting the cash from the concession stand and putting it somewhere safe. Phyllis supposed she had done the same with the money taken in by Eve and the other volunteers who were selling tickets. But as the PTO president, Shannon could have been doing the same thing. Phyllis found herself wondering just how much cash was generated by an event like this. The carnival was a fund-raiser, after all. The goal was to raise as much money as possible. She supposed the total could be well up in the thousands of dollars.

Stop thinking about possible motives,
she told herself. It wasn’t up to her to solve Shannon’s murder. That would be the responsibility of Mike and the other members of the sheriff’s department.

Marie Tyler came into the cafeteria with her kids in tow. She looked around, spotted Phyllis, and started toward her.

“Have you seen Russ?” she asked as she came up to the table. Her face was pale and drawn, and Phyllis was pretty sure she had heard by now what had happened to Shannon. She might have even seen the body, although Phyllis hadn’t noticed her among the crowd at the far end of the hallway.

Phyllis shook her head and said, “I’m sorry. I haven’t.”
Not since I saw him following Shannon,
she added silently.

“I have to find him,” Marie said. She looked around a little wide-eyed, then returned her gaze to Phyllis and said, “Would you mind keeping an eye on my kids for a minute? Thanks.”

Then, without waiting for an answer, as usual, she hurried off, leaving Amber and Aaron standing there beside the table, looking a little confused and scared.

“Sit down, you two,” Phyllis said, since there was really nothing else she could do. “Would you like something to eat?”

“I’m hungry,” Amber said, and her little brother nodded.

Phyllis looked at Becca and said, “Are you sure you don’t want something?”

The little girl shrugged. “I guess I could eat something.”

“Fine. All of you stay right here. I’ll be right back.”

Phyllis stood up and went toward the tables at the front of the room where the auction goods and the snack competition had been set up. With all the commotion going on, everybody had forgotten about the auction. Some of the items were gone, though. Either the people who had donated them had come by to reclaim them, figuring that under the circumstances the auction was off, or else some sticky-fingered youngsters had simply carried them off.

That was certainly the case on the snack table, which was practically empty by now. With Phyllis and Carolyn gone and all the confusion filling the school, kids had simply helped themselves to the goodies. Phyllis felt a flare of anger at such behavior, but she told herself to forget about it. There were much more important things going on.

Her jack-o’-lantern cake was still on the auction table. It would have been difficult to carry off without somebody noticing. If anyone had a right to cut it, she did, she decided, so she looked around for the knife she and Carolyn had used earlier and spotted it lying on the table. She planned to cut three small pieces off the cake, one each for Becca, Amber, and Aaron.

She had just picked up the knife and had it poised over the rounded edge of the jack-o’-lantern cake when Mike hurried into the cafeteria and said, “Mom, no! Don’t use that knife!”

Chapter 11

Phyllis froze and stared silently at her son, startled into speechlessness by Mike’s words and actions. He came toward her, one hand outstretched, and went on, “Just put the knife down now. Please, Mom.”

Phyllis finally got her tongue back. She said, “Michael Newsom, what in the world is wrong with you?”

“I just need you to put the knife down.”

She waved it. “This knife?”

Mike winced. “Yes. Please.”

“Well, just what do you think I’m going to do with it?” Phyllis demanded. “Do you think I’m about to go berserk or something?”

“Of course not. But that might be the murder weapon.”

Phyllis’s eyes widened. She tore her gaze away from her son’s intent face and turned her head to stare at the knife in her hand. Then she said quietly, “Oh,” and her fingers opened involuntarily. The knife clattered to the table.

Mike rushed forward, taking a plastic evidence bag from his pocket. He turned it inside out, used it to pick up the knife, and then pulled the bag right side out again. He blew his breath out in relief as he ran his thumb and forefinger along the bag’s opening, sealing it.

“There,” he said. “Now the evidence won’t be contaminated any more than it already is.”

“Mike, what are you talking about?” Phyllis cast a worried glance toward the table where Becca Dunston and the two Tyler youngsters were sitting. She didn’t want them overhearing anything they shouldn’t, but she had to know what was going on. “What makes you think that knife is”— she lowered her voice—”the murder weapon?”

“The ambulance and the paramedics got here right after the other deputies and I did,” Mike explained. “Calvin noticed something on Mrs.—”

Phyllis lifted a hand to stop him from saying the name.

“On the victim’s blouse,” Mike went on. “The medical examiner and the crime scene guys aren’t here yet, but it’s pretty obvious that the cause of death was a knife wound. And on the edge of the hole in the blouse that the knife made, Calvin found something.”

Phyllis knew her son was talking about Calvin Holloway, an emergency medical technician who was one of Mike’s best friends. She said, “What was it?”

Mike looked down at the bagged knife in his hands. “Calvin said he thought it was cake frosting.”

Phyllis stared at the knife, too. She and Carolyn had used it quite a bit during the afternoon to cut samples from the various snacks, including a carrot cake with sugar-free icing. She saw some of that frosting dried on the blade. “Oh, my God,” she said softly. “My God. You mean we used it to cut … and somebody used … Oh, no.” She suddenly felt sick to her stomach.

Mike put a hand on her arm. “Take it easy, Mom,” he said. “We don’t know anything for sure yet. Anyway, there’s a good chance that even if this is the murder weapon, the killer lifted it from here not long before he used it, then put it back during the confusion after the body was discovered. I don’t imagine it was used for anything after the murder.”

“But I was about to—”

“That’s why I stopped you. When Calvin said that about the cake frosting, something clicked in my brain, and I realized that this was the most likely place anybody could find a knife with frosting on it. So I came to see if it was still here.”

“Thank goodness you got here when you did,” Phyllis said fervently. The idea that she could have used the knife to cut a piece of cake for the murdered woman’s daughter was grotesque. Just thinking about it made her stomach even more queasy.

“I’ll turn this over to the lab and let our forensics experts decide whether or not it’s the murder weapon. I’ve got a hunch it is, though.”

So did Phyllis. With all the people going in and out of the cafeteria all afternoon, anyone could have picked up the knife without her noticing and slipped it back onto the table after all the commotion broke out.

She stiffened as she remembered that Joel Dunston had been standing beside the table not long before Shannon was killed. And since she hadn’t noticed him leaving the cafeteria, it went without saying that he could have pocketed the knife and carried it off with him.

And he had said that he was looking for Shannon… .

Phyllis’s eyes went to Becca again. How terrible it would be for the little girl to not only lose her mother to a killer but also to have her father convicted of the murder.

She was getting way ahead of herself, and she knew it. There could be dozens of other explanations. Phyllis was glad it would be up to Mike and the other deputies, instead of her, to figure out what had really happened.

People began coming back into the cafeteria, among them Sam, Carolyn, and Eve. They walked over to Phyllis and Mike, and Sam said, “The medical examiner is here, and he’s got that whole wing of the school blocked off now.”

Mike nodded. “I’d better take this knife and get back to the investigation.”

Eve looked at the knife and said, “Oh, dear. Is that what I think it is?”

“Could be, Mrs. Turner,” Mike told her. He nodded politely to the four retired teachers—Phyllis had raised him too well for him to do otherwise—and hurried out of the cafeteria.

Phyllis asked Sam, “Did you overhear anything while you were down there?”

“The paramedics said it looked like a stab wound to the chest. Probably got the heart. Mrs. Dunston wouldn’t have lived long after that.”

A little voice piped up, “Mrs. Dunston? You mean Becca’s mama?”

Phyllis looked around in horror and saw that Aaron Tyler had come up to the table without any of them noticing. He went on. “You said you were gonna get us somethin’ to eat.” Then he turned his head and shouted, “Hey, Becca, did you know your mama got stabbed in the heart?”

Phyllis felt like her own heart had plummeted all the way to her feet. It got even worse a second later when Becca covered her face with her hands and began to sob, great racking wails that shook her slender body.

Phyllis hurried over to the table and sat down beside the little girl. She couldn’t do anything except put her arm around Becca and say comfortingly, “It’s all right, Becca. There, there. It’ll all be all right.”

That was a lie and Phyllis knew it. For Becca Dunston, it would probably be a long, long time before everything was all right again—if it ever was.

The carnival had been almost over when Shannon’s body was found, and after that grisly discovery the festivities were definitely finished. But the deputies issued orders that no one was to leave just yet, which meant that the parking lot was full of cars with angry, impatient people sitting in them or milling around them. Sheriff’s department cruisers with their red and blue lights flashing were parked across all the exits, blocking them.

Of course, there was no way of knowing just who and how many of the people in attendance at the carnival had left before the deputies arrived. The killer could have slipped away in the confusion and been long gone by the time the law got there. But no one else could leave without at least a cursory interview with one of the deputies. Those orders had come directly from Sheriff Royce Haney when he found out that a murder had been committed at an elementary school. School violence was always a powerful magnet for the news media, and the sheriff wanted to get on top of this case as quickly as possible.

Mike couldn’t blame him for that. And he knew that Sheriff Haney was more concerned with finding the killer than he was with the impression his department would make in the media. But it never hurt to keep the uproar under control as much as possible.

Haney himself arrived shortly after the ME did, and sought Mike out immediately, since he knew that the young deputy had been one of the first on the scene. Haney took Mike over to a corner of the hallway and said, “What have we got here, Deputy? Boil it down for me.”

Mike took a deep breath before he started his report. “The victim is Mrs. Shannon Dunston, age forty-one. Pending the medical examiner’s findings, cause of death appears to be a single stab wound to the chest that probably nicked her heart. She was found lying in a short hallway at the end of the main hall that runs through this wing of the school.”

“Who found the body?” Haney interrupted.

“We don’t know yet,” Mike replied with a shake of his head. “We’re still interviewing witnesses. All we know is that someone found her and started screaming, and that brought quite a few other people on the run. According to the school principal, Frances Hickson, a woman named Lindsey Gonzales was on the scene and appeared to be very upset. It’s possible she was the one who discovered the body.”

“Has she been interviewed yet?”

Again, Mike had to shake his head. “We haven’t located her. It’s possible that any number of people could have left the school before we arrived and locked down the campus, and she must have been one of them.”

“They’re bound to have her address in the school office,” Haney said. “Get it and find her.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about the murder weapon? Was it in or near the body?”

“No, sir, but I recovered a knife from the school cafeteria that might have been used to kill Mrs. Dunston.”

“What makes you think that?”

Mike hesitated, but there was no way he could get around answering the question. “The cake frosting,” he said.

The sheriff stared at him but didn’t say anything.

Mike went on, “One of the paramedics found what appeared to be cake frosting on the dead woman’s blouse, at the point of entry. I happened to know that there were a lot of baked goods in the cafeteria, including cakes, so I thought the murder weapon might have come from there.”

“And how did you happen to know that, Deputy?”

“Because my mother and her friends were here helping out with the carnival bake sale. Well, it wasn’t a bake sale exactly… .”

“Your mother?” Haney said.

“Yes, sir.”

“She’s not conducting her own investigation, is she?” Haney asked dryly.

Mike felt a flash of irritation at the sheriff’s tone. “No, sir, she’s not involved at all,” he said. “But if you recall, she has a pretty good record at clearing homicide cases.”