The Candy Cane Cupcake Killer (10 page)

“I think so,” Nate said. “It's pretty obvious, though. He hitched up the team and drove that carriage from the ranch down to town for the parade.”

“He did?” D'Angelo said with a surprised frown. “He didn't, like, put it on a truck or something and bring it in that way?”

“No,” Nate replied with a smile. “Barney was the old-fashioned sort. He drove the team in.”

“We ought to be able to check on that, too,” D'Angelo said. He turned back to Phyllis. “That's good thinking, though, covering that window of time. Now, about the conversation that the two of you had with Mr. McCrory . . .”

For the next few minutes, Phyllis and Sam went over everything that had happened. D'Angelo had said that such sessions sometimes prompted witnesses to remember things they hadn't recalled before, but Phyllis knew that wasn't going to be the case here. All the details were clear in her mind, and nothing new was going to emerge.

However, she did bring up the possibility she had raised with Sam earlier, saying, “We were wondering whether the killer might have fired more than one shot.”

She saw Allyson wince slightly at the word
killer
and wished she had phrased things a bit more considerately. They were talking about cold-blooded murder, though, and it was hard to put any sort of pretty face on that.

“If he did, the other bullets had to go somewhere,” D'Angelo mused. “I wish I could get a look at that carriage. The cops won't let me anywhere near it, though, unless they charge Nate. Even then they'll stonewall. Anything I get out of them, I'll have to force it.”

“What difference does it make whether there was one shot or several?” Nate asked.

“It helps us know just how good a shot the guy really is.
One shot, in a crowd like that, he's got to be a real sharpshooter.”

A frown creased Phyllis's forehead as something occurred to her. She leaned forward and said, “Unless he's really not a good shot at all.”

“How can you say that?” Sam asked. “He hit what he was aimin' at, and no matter how you look at it, it was a hard shot.”

“Unless,” Phyllis said, “he wasn't aiming at Mr. McCrory at all.”

S
ilence reigned around the table for a long moment. Then Allyson said, “You're saying you think . . . whoever it was . . .
didn't
mean to kill my father?”

“I'm not saying I think that, no,” Phyllis replied. “We don't have anything to make us believe that Mr. McCrory wasn't the target. But it's
possible
that whoever fired that shot meant it for someone else. There were a lot of people around, after all, as we've mentioned several times.”

D'Angelo leaned back in his chair and looked intently at her.

“That's right,” he said. “With a crowd of people like that, until we know who pulled the trigger, we can't be sure who they were aiming at. There was even a politician right behind McCrory. Maybe
he
was the intended victim.”

“Wait a minute,” Allyson said. “You mean my father may have died by
accident
?”

Her voice had a ragged edge of hysteria in it.

“It's just a possibility,” Phyllis said, keeping her own voice level and calm. “Something else that could be a good idea to investigate.”

“I agree,” D'Angelo said. “Let's face it—the cops aren't going to think that far outside the box. They're only going to concentrate on the obvious, and that means finding out who had a motive for wanting Barney McCrory dead, which brings them right back to Nate.”

Allyson shuddered.

Nate squeezed her shoulder again and said, “If the man was really after somebody else, why did he stop shooting?”

“Because he realized he missed,” Sam said. “That could've shaken him up some. And once those horses took off like they did, there was no way he could take another shot, no matter how good a marksman he was.”

Phyllis nodded and said, “As a theory, it holds together. But that's all it is: a theory.”

“We'll start with the guy in the sleigh,” D'Angelo said. “The . . . county judge?”

“County commissioner,” Phyllis said. “Clay Loomis.”

“Not exactly a real big shot, is he?”

“You'd be surprised how hot and heavy some of those election campaigns get, even on the county level,” Sam said. “To some people, bein' a big fish in a small pond is still worth fightin' over.”

“Not to mention sometimes there's a considerable amount of money in play when it comes to county contracts,” Phyllis added. “I'm not saying it's a motive for murder . . .”

“But sometimes it doesn't take much,” D'Angelo finished for her. “How about those girls? Santa's slutty little elves?”

“They were high school girls,” Phyllis said, a little sharper now.

D'Angelo shrugged and spread his hands.

“Passions sometimes run pretty high at that age,” he said.

Phyllis couldn't argue with that statement. She had taught at the junior-high level, where hormones first started really affecting students, and she had seen how much havoc those runaway emotions could wreak. In her more cynical moments, she had believed there might be some basis in fact to the theory that all seventh – and eighth-graders were clinically insane.

Still, she thought it made more sense to start with Clay Loomis, and she said as much.

D'Angelo nodded and said, “I agree. Look into his background and see if there's anything that would make somebody want to shoot him. If there's not, we can always move on to the other people who were right around there.”

There didn't seem to be anything left to say. Phyllis was glad they'd had this meeting. She knew it had been difficult, especially for Allyson, but now she had a better picture of what had happened before the parade.

She also had a hunch that by now the police would have been out to Barney McCrory's ranch to talk to those two men who had overheard the argument the day before.

That and the fact that Nate doesn't have an alibi are enough to make the police consider him the primary suspect, she thought.

She was afraid it was only a matter of time before Nate was arrested.

As they all stood up to leave, D'Angelo said, “Phyllis, Sam, if you guys could wait a minute so we can talk some more . . .”

“Of course,” Phyllis said.

D'Angelo shook hands with Nate and said, “We'll be in touch. In the meantime, go on about your business and keep your head down, kid. And if any cops show up to talk to you, don't say a word. Even if they take you in, don't say anything except that you want to talk to me. As long as you stick to your guns, they can't do a blasted thing about it.”

“All right.” Nate sighed. “It's hard, though. I was raised to respect and cooperate with the police.”

“Yeah, that's fine . . . except when it's your head on the line.”

Both Nate and Allyson looked worried as they left the conference room. Once the door was closed, D'Angelo waved Phyllis and Sam back into their seats.

“What do you think?” he asked them. “Any chance the kid did it?”

“Not a chance in the world,” Sam answered without hesitation. “He idolized Barney McCrory, over and above Barney bein' his father-in-law.”

“Didn't sound much like it, from the description of that argument.”

“Shoot, everybody gets hot under the collar now and then, even with folks they love and respect. It doesn't mean you're ready to go and shoot somebody.”

“What do you think, Phyllis?”

She took her time about answering, then said, “I never knew any of these people until yesterday, so maybe I'm a little more objective about the situation than Sam is.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam objected. “Are you sayin' you think Nate is guilty?”

“Not at all. You didn't let me finish. I'm saying that even looking at it objectively, I don't think Nate shot Mr. McCrory. Yes, he might have motive, but I don't think it's strong enough. And he seems genuinely upset about his father-in-law's death. He seems like a young man who's lost a loved one.”

“I hope you're both right,” D'Angelo said.

Phyllis's eyes narrowed. She said, “You sound like you have some doubts.”

The lawyer grimaced. He reached inside his coat and took out a folded piece of paper.

“I didn't want to bring this up, especially in front of Allyson,” he said. “I got to thinking about something and looked into it a little while ago. I've got a buddy in the ATF who does me a favor now and then. I asked him to check on something for me. I got this e-mail from him just before Nate and Allyson got here.”

He unfolded the paper, which was a printout of an e-mail, and slid it in front of Phyllis and Sam. Phyllis leaned forward to read it, her frown deepening.

“This doesn't really prove anything,” Sam said.

“It's a gun registration,” D'Angelo said, even though both of them could see that for themselves. “It proves that Nate Hollingsworth owns a high-powered hunting rifle . . . just the sort of thing you'd use if you wanted to put a scope on it and shoot somebody several blocks away.”

•   •   •

Sam had a disheartened look on his face as he and Phyllis left the lawyer's office a short time later.

“This doesn't mean Nate's guilty, you know,” she told him.
“There are probably hundreds of people in the county who own hunting rifles like that one. Maybe thousands.”

“Yeah, but why didn't he come clean about it?” Sam said. “He knows something like that could be important. He should know, anyway.”

“I imagine he's scared. With everything else already weighing against him the way it is, he might think that if he admitted owning such a rifle, it would be the last nail in his coffin.”

“Yeah, but if D'Angelo knows about it, you can bet the cops do, too. Isn't it better to be prepared for something like that that they could use against you?”

Phyllis couldn't argue with that logic. Sam was right. Nate should have told D'Angelo about the rifle.

“I wonder where it is now,” she said as they walked toward the spot on the square where she had left the Lincoln.

“Well, let's say Nate used it last night to shoot Barney. I don't believe that for a second, mind you, but let's just say that. What would he do with it afterward?”

“He couldn't carry it out of the building,” Phyllis said. “There were too many people around for that. Someone would have noticed. It might have even caused an uproar, someone walking around in a crowd like that, carrying a rifle.”

“So he would've had to leave it in his office, or at least somewhere in the building.”

“Chief Whitmire probably wouldn't have been able to get
a search warrant until this morning,” Phyllis said. “That would have given Nate time to go back last night, after the parade and tree lighting were canceled and everyone was gone, to get the rifle and dispose of it somehow.”

Sam shook his head and said, “I sure don't like talkin' like this. I know we're just speculatin', but somehow it feels like we're bein' disloyal to Nate.”

Phyllis didn't feel any particular loyalty to Nate Hollingsworth, other than the fact that Sam liked and trusted him, but she knew what he meant. She had felt the same way whenever one of her friends was suspected of murder. She didn't like to even consider the possibility that they might be guilty.

“Right now, let's devote our efforts to that other theory,” she suggested.

“That the killer really meant to shoot somebody else?” Sam nodded. “I like that idea.”

Before they had a chance to discuss it more, however, they came in sight of Phyllis's car.

And waiting beside it, microphone in hand, was Felicity Prosper.

Phyllis stopped short. She felt the impulse to turn around and go the other way, but it was too late. Felicity had seen them and started striding toward them, moving fast for someone wearing high heels. Josh Green and the other man—Nick, Phyllis recalled—trailed her. Nick, a stocky, red-haired man, had the video camera perched on his shoulder.

“Mrs. Newsom,” Felicity said. “If I could just have a word with you?”

“The young fella ratted us out,” Sam said under his breath.

“He didn't know where we were going,” Phyllis pointed
out. “All he could have done was tell her which direction we went. She must have figured out the destination herself.”

“Mrs. Newsom,” Felicity said as she came up to them, “I take it you've been conferring with noted defense attorney Jimmy D'Angelo on how to proceed with the Nate Hollingsworth case.”

Phyllis tried to hide how surprised she was by the fact that Felicity knew they were connected to D'Angelo and also that Nate was a suspect in Barney McCrory's murder. She wasn't sure how the reporter could have discovered either of those things.

Of course, Phyllis's involvement with the case where they had first met D'Angelo was no secret, and it had happened fairly recently. Felicity could have dug that out of newspaper and Internet accounts of the case.

As for Nate's involvement, maybe that was sheer speculation on Felicity's part, or maybe she had a source in the Weatherford police department. It wasn't hard to imagine someone who looked like her being able to persuade some male cop to divulge information he shouldn't.

It didn't really matter how Felicity got any of her information. What was important was that they didn't give her any more, Phyllis reminded herself. She said, “No comment.”

“That goes for me, too,” Sam added.

Felicity pouted a little and said, “You don't want to do that. When you say
no comment
it looks like you're trying to cover something up. You don't want our millions of viewers to think that you have something to hide, do you?”

Phyllis wasn't sure a syndicated tabloid show like
Inside Beat
had millions of viewers. Hundreds of thousands, though,
more than likely. But right now their opinions didn't really matter.

“Your viewers can think whatever they like,” she said. “I still have no comment.”

“I got a question for you,” Sam said. “How'd you find us?”

Felicity smiled and said, “A good reporter always knows how to sniff out a story.”

“Or snoop around where she ain't wanted.”

Sam was letting the annoyance he felt make him talk too much. Phyllis put a hand on his arm and said, “Let's go.”

She urged him around the three TV people. Felicity kept yammering questions at them, but Phyllis ignored the young woman. As they passed Josh, Phyllis glanced at him and saw him mouth the word
Sorry
.

She wasn't the only one who saw that. Felicity noticed, too, because she exclaimed, “Sorry? Why are you telling them you're sorry, you little weasel? Are you sorry you have a glamorous job working in television?”

From what Phyllis had seen, Josh's job wasn't even remotely glamorous, and since he was an intern, it certainly wasn't high-paying.