Living Witness(148)
“It won’t kill her to sit in jail for a few hours,” Gregor told Gary, Eddie, and Tom, as he spread papers out across Gary’s desk. He’d given up on using his own desk. The space was too cramped, and he needed room. “My guess is that she has a picture of the building launch. Would there have been any reason for her to go to that?”
“Sure,” Gary said. “She was president of the PTA when that happened. Say what you want about Alice, she’s very concerned about her kid’s education. Why would she think it would be important to see a picture of the launch?”
“Because there’s somebody who’s not in it,” Gregor said.
“Who’s not in it?” Eddie asked.
“Catherine Marbledale,” Gregor said. “She should be in it. She’s the principal of the high school. But my guess is that she’s not in it.”
“And that’s important?” Gary asked.
“In a peripheral way, yes,” Gregor said, “but not in the way Alice thinks it is. You’ve got to understand that all of this, from the very beginning, was about money. And if Annie-Vic Hadley hadn’t been elected to the school board, nobody would ever have gotten hurt. Except the taxpayers of the town, of course. They’d have been out several million dollars with nothing to show for it. But there’d have been no reason to go running around town, bashing people on the head with baseball bats. Note I said bats, plural. I’m fairly sure they were each of them disposed of as soon as possible after the event. There’d be no point in keeping them around.”
“I want a case like on CSI,” Eddie Block said. “You know, there’s a forensics lab, and they take a hair, and they get everything, name, rank, serial number, DNA, phone number, last known location—”
“Why was it Annie-Vic who had to be elected to the school board?” Gary asked. “Wasn’t it the case that anybody new who was elected to the school board would cause the same problem? I mean, just because you have one group of people hoodwinked doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the new ones who come along.”
“I wish they’d call in and tell me that they’ve found it,” Gregor said, looking at his cell phone as if it were personally responsible for the delay. “And I wish they’d find that woman, just in case. Never mind. No, it couldn’t have been just anybody. Look who else was elected to that school board. There was you, Gary. Was there ever any danger of you pulling out the files on that construction project and looking them over?”
Gary Albright considered this. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t really have that kind of time, and I explained that to Franklin when he asked me to run. I could come to meetings. I could do a reasonable amount of homework. But I couldn’t take on a major project. I’ve got work here. I’ve got my family.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “And you would have had the brains. But you know, even if you did decide to get involved, my guess would be that it would have taken a long time before you figured out anything was wrong, and even longer before you figured out what. You’re not a trained accountant, or anything close.”
“Annie Vic isn’t a trained accountant,” Eddie Block said.
“No, she isn’t,” Gregor said. “But she manages her own investments. I don’t know how many times people told me that. She manages her own investments, and she’s good at it. So she must have at least a rudimentary idea of how deals are done, and what disclosure forms mean.”
“I know what a disclosure form means,” Gary said.
“You might, but I’ll bet you don’t know how to read one,” Gregor said. “And then who do you have? Alice McGuffie and Franklin Hale. Franklin Hale runs a business, so there should be some expertise there. And there probably is. It’s just that Franklin Hale doesn’t seem much interested in looking into the practical aspects of running the schools in Snow Hill. There’s no sign in any of these papers I have that he’s ever so much as asked to see the operating budget. I called the secretaries down at the high school. Not a single one of them has ever had a request for any information from him, except for information about the biology curriculum. He wanted to see lesson plans. He wanted to see textbooks. He did not want to see budgets and disclosure forms.”
“None of us realized he was so single-minded about the evolution thing,” Gary said. “When he ran for the board, his campaign was all about competence, not evolution. He talked a lot about the construction project then.”