Living Witness(149)

“That was because he knew he couldn’t win an election in this town saying he was going to get evolution out of the schools,” Eddie Block said. “Even most of the people who’ve lived here all their lives wouldn’t have voted for that.”

“And why not?” Gary asked. “Does that make sense? I don’t mean getting evolution out of the schools. I mean not letting anything else in. We didn’t vote to remove evolution from the curriculum. We didn’t even vote to let Intelligent Design into the curriculum. We just wanted to put a book in the library—”

“All right,” Gregor said. “Enough. The fact remains that Franklin posed no danger to anybody, because he wasn’t looking into any of the financials and probably wasn’t going to. Alice McGuffie posed no danger to anybody because no matter how often she might have looked at the paperwork, she’d never have the first idea of what she was seeing. Her husband might, I admit. He runs a business. But why would she show it to him? The only reason Alice McGuffie cared about the money the Snow Hill schools were spending was that she resented any money being spent on schools at all. She would have looked at a bunch of numbers and complained that they were too high, but she’d have had no idea of what she was seeing and no interest in learning. Franklin Hale may have gotten himself elected to the school board to get evolution out of the public schools, but Alice McGuffie got herself elected to the school board so that she could stick it to all the teachers she’d hated since she was in high school.”

“Middle school, probably,” Gary Albright said.

“The thing is,” Gregor said, “the one person on that board who did care about the financials was also the one person on that board who would know what she was seeing when she saw it, and that was Annie-Vic Hadley. And there was no way to distract her. She didn’t care about the evolution and Intelligent Design debate, except that she was willing to lend her name to the lawsuit. After that, from what I can tell, she paid no attention to that at all. I looked at the papers on her dining room table three times. The first was when Judy Cornish was killed. The second was when I walked up to the house the next day and the officers offered to let me in to look around. The third was just after Shelley Niederman was killed. And in between those times, I had Annie-Vic’s grandniece Lisa look again. And all those times, all I found, all Lisa found, was financial paperwork on the Snow Hill school accounts. That was it.”

“Nothing on the lawsuit?” Eddie Block said. “That surprised me. She didn’t keep any material on the lawsuit?”

“She probably did,” Gregor said. “When Judy Cornish was killed, the papers on the table were pretty badly messed up. I think the papers on the lawsuit, whatever Annie-Vic had, were taken away in order to make it look like the killer was interested in the lawsuit. Eventually, somebody would have mentioned the fact that Annie-Vic had a lot of material on that. If we’d followed the plan, we’d have gotten suspicious and started looking into people who might hate or resent the woman because she was part of the lawsuit. In fact, everything about the way all this was set up, right from the beginning, was meant to direct our attention to that lawsuit. Because that was the one direction we could look in that our murderer was sure would not help us in any way.”

“But I still don’t see how it makes any sense,” Gary said. “How long could somebody keep this up? School boards are elected. They come and go. Eventually, there would probably be somebody with a real accounting degree on the board. Somebody from the development, maybe. And then what would happen?”

“Nothing, if that day took long enough in coming,” Gregor said. “Look, the paperwork was sloppy. It was so sloppy that Molly Trask, who’s a rookie agent, knew what was wrong with it the minute she saw it. It was a question of getting your hands on the paperwork and fixing it, or fixing some of it and making the rest of it disappear. And once it was gone it was gone, because the Dellbach Construction Company does not exist. It’s a post office box in Harrisburg. Eventually, after everything was tied up, it would just vanish, and the chances were good that unless our murderer got enormously stupid, nobody would ever be able to pin anything on anybody.”

“You’d think it would be harder to get away with than that,” Gary said. “You see all these things on Court TV—sorry, Tru TV. Anyway, you see all these things about the FBI going after fraud perps. You’d think it would be harder than that.”

“If our murderer had wanted to steal fifty million dollars instead of just five, or if there had been multiple sources for the income, it would have been harder than that. But this was a very simple case. It was like raiding a cookie jar. It was not particularly sophisticated from an accounting standpoint, and it didn’t require a lot of fancy footwork to be kept out of sight. Unless somebody went deliberately looking for it, the chances were good that nobody would ever guess.”