“How carefully did the church vet Mr. Lightfoot’s credentials before hiring him?” I asked.
She blinked and frowned slightly before answering.
“Not carefully enough, by a long shot,” she said finally. “Although if you ask me the problem’s with the man, not the credentials. We should have paid a lot less attention to the fancy school he went to and a lot more to what a miserable human being he is. Why—do you know something we don’t?”
“No,” I said. “But someone was suspicious enough of Lightfoot to start checking him out.” I explained what I’d seen on Riddick’s computer, and what I’d heard from Michael’s friend the college registrar.
“Now that’s interesting,” she said. “And I purely don’t know if the search committee did the kind of check you’re talking about. In fact, knowing who was on the committee, I’d be surprised if they did. They spent a lot of time interviewing him, and a lot more time praying for guidance.”
“Both very good things to do,” I said.
“But we fell down on the practical part,” she said. “Although I do know they called all his references, and they all gave him a glowing report.”
“Which is why he picked them,” I said.
“And of course we only have his word for it that they’re really people from his old church,” she said. “I will certainly have a thing or two to say when we start forming the committee to find Mr. Lightfoot’s replacement. Right now we’re arguing over how soon to tell him. Some people think we should wait till August, when his contract’s up, but I think we need to start a lot sooner than that. And yes, we should check out his credentials—properly, this time. Won’t do us any good now, of course, but if we were bamboozled, I’d like to know the whole of it.”
“Better yet, if he got the job with false credentials, you might be able to get rid of him a lot sooner than August,” I said. “Most contracts have escape clauses in case one party’s committing fraud.”
She blinked for a few moments, and then a smile slowly crept across her face.
“So how do we go about vetting his files?” she asked.
I was about to fish in my pocket for the slip of paper Charles Gardner had given me. Then a thought hit me.
“You know,” I said. “I bet the chief could find out today. Seeing as how this could be related to a homicide.”
Her face fell.
“It’s an interesting theory,” she said. “But I’m not sure I see Lightfoot as a killer. He’s a blowhard.”
“He didn’t dislocate your arm,” I said, glancing down at my sling.
She flinched slightly, and nodded.
“Look, I agree,” I said. “I can’t see Lightfoot carefully plotting something and flawlessly executing it. But losing his temper?”
She nodded.
“And lashing out at Vess?” I went on. “Striking him down in the heat of anger and then, when he realized what he’d done, starting that fire in the furnace room as a clumsy attempt to make the whole thing look like a prank?”
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s a possibility. I’ll call Henry.” She pulled out her phone but remained pensive, looking at it.
“But?” I asked.
“Obviously you think Barliman Vess is the one who was looking up Lightfoot on the computer.”
“You don’t think so?” I asked. “Why not? Was he not very computer savvy?”
“Oh, he was savvy enough,” she said. “Surprisingly so for such an old … old-fashioned person.”
I suspect she’d been about to say “old codger,” or possibly “old coot.”
“According to Henry, he was always sending things he’d printed out from the Internet to justify all his suggestions and complaints,” she said. “But I can’t imagine why he would care that much about Lightfoot.”
“I suppose it could have been Riddick, since it was his computer, but I think he’d gone home by then,” I said.
“Or it could have been one of those Shiffleys,” she said. “The two who were hanging around after the construction finished. Cleaning up, they said. Seemed to take them a right long time for a simple cleanup job.”
“Perhaps they had to move slowly to keep the noise level down when the choir was singing,” I suggested. “Mr. Lightfoot doesn’t like noise during his rehearsals.”
“I caught one of them coming out of that hallway where your office was,” she said. “Duane Shiffley, I think it was. Maybe it wasn’t my place to say anything, but he looked a little furtive, so I asked him what he was looking for, and he said the bathroom. I pointed it out to him and kept an eye on him till he went in.”