Winston Patrick Mystery 2-Book Bundle. David Russell W.

I admit I already had visions of tossing Carl’s alibi in Furlo’s face and watching him try to squirm out of it.

      “Well,” he began, “I had a couple of students with me for a while. The school has a budget for lab assistants, and we’re given a certain amount of time to have them help us.”

      “Who were they?” I asked, masking my disappointment. Given I was planning to stipulate that Carl had had a relationship with a student who regularly stayed after school with him, I would rather not have needed to rely on the testimony of other students alone in a science lab with Carl as his alibi. But given that they might prove to be credible witnesses, I jotted down their names just the same.

      “Does that help?” Carl wondered.

      “It may,” I offered noncommittally. “What time did these two students leave?”

      Again he paused to think. “I don’t remember exactly. It wasn’t too late. One of them had a chemistry exam the next day, and I didn’t want to take away from her study time.”

      “Think, Carl. Getting as close to the exact time is important.”

      His face brightened suddenly. “Wait a minute,” he proclaimed. “The lab assistants carry time sheets. I would have signed them with the hours they put in. We can check the exact time with the office.”

      “Good,” I told him, putting it on the side of my legal pad under the subheading “to do.”

      “But I think it was about six o’clock when they left.” That didn’t please me immensely. If my suspicions about Tricia’s time of death were correct, that would still have provided Carl with plenty of time to meet with her and kill her. It was possible the police already knew that.

      “What about other people in the building? Adults, preferably.” Carl peered off into space, no doubt conjuring up images of the night he lost Tricia. It was helpful for me to think of Carl as a grieving lover. The more sympathetic he appeared, the better. “Did you run into any other teachers working late that night?”

      He chuckled. “No. I think a lot of my colleagues think I’m some kind of a workaholic because I’m often at school so late.” Actually, a lot of his colleagues now had their own ideas about Carl’s reasons for hanging around the school so late. I was certain I was going to hear from many of them at school come Monday.

      “What about janitors? Cleaning staff? Doesn’t our school have night school classes?”

      “Tuesday and Thursday,” he replied. “They wouldn’t have been in on Wednesday night.” He thought a moment longer. “I’m sure at some point I talked to Jurgen. I always see him when I work late.”

      “Who’s Jurgen?”

      “He’s one of the night cleaning janitors. He cleans the science wing of the building. I’m sure you’ve met him at some point.” He was right. A large high school has so many staff, it’s hard to keep track. Thinking about it, although I had said hello on any number of occasions since joining the staff, I could not recall the name of the janitor who came and cleaned my classroom and wing of the building every day. I wondered if he thought I was a snob. I wondered if I was a snob.

      “Do you know what time that would have been?”

      “No. Not exactly. But he definitely came in to empty the waste baskets and sweep the floors. And I know it was after the kids left, because he had popped his head in a couple of times while they were still there and said he would come back later. The last time I saw him, he did come in, and I was there when he cleaned my room. We talked.”

      “What about?”

      “Oh, the usual. How his family was doing. The Canucks. That kind of thing.”

      “Okay. I’ll talk to him too,” I told him, writing down Jurgen’s name on my growing list of things to look into. I wondered how much of this it might be possible to do on the weekend. It seemed to me the school had provided me with a list of all of the staff’s phone numbers. Of course, it also seemed to me that it was in my desk in my classroom. Wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good there.

      “All right,” I continued, “I think this could be helpful. I’m going to talk to these people and anyone else who might have been there and can verify your whereabouts.”

      “So they may be able to help?” he asked hopefully.

      “Let’s keep our fingers crossed. A lot will depend on finding out Tricia’s time of death. Once we have something definitive, we can start asking people if they can confirm your presence away from the crime scene.” I decided to take one last stab at jogging his memory before leaving. “Are you sure there wasn’t anyone else you talked to?”

      He looked at me hesitantly.

      “What?” I demanded. “What is it? This is no time to hold out on me, Carl. If there’s someone you’re thinking of, you need to let me know.”

      “Bonnie,” he said quietly. “My wife.”

      “Oh,” I replied gently, “what about her? Was she at the school with you?”

      “Well, no,” he began, “but I did call her at one point, I think just before I left the school.”

      “Is it possible she would remember the time of your call, or for that matter, when you got home?”

      “I suppose it’s possible,” he confirmed. “But, given what’s going to come out about me and Trish, I don’t know how helpful she’s going to be.”

      “Surely she’ll tell the truth?” I asked hopefully, though I couldn’t necessarily believe she would either. It was one thing to defend your spouse against spurious allegations, but when the spouse you thought you knew and loved so well was sleeping with an eighteen-year-old high school student, it would surely turn your world upside down. I knew Bonnie Turbot could prove to be a very unreliable witness for Carl’s defence. Still, it had to be checked out.

      “I guess she will,” Carl said. “But who knows how much she remembers? I don’t know if she’ll remember exactly what time I called home. Isn’t it possible to check the school’s phone records?”

      “I don’t know. I doubt it,” I told him. Unlike what you see on television cop shows, even the good ones like Law and Order, getting a computerized printout of all of a phone line’s activities is no simple matter. I knew it could be done, but it would probably take a court order to get the phone company to comply. I put that on my list under the subheading of “ask Derek.”

      “Wait a minute,” Carl blurted out. “We have one of those boxes!”

      “What boxes?”

      “You know, for the phone. It shows the numbers coming in so you can decide whether or not to answer the phone.”

      “You mean call display?”

      “Yeah. That’s it. We just got it, in fact.”

      “When?”

      He searched his memory again, then looked at me gloomily. “Sunday afternoon. We had gotten some hang-up phone calls during the past couple of weeks, so on Sunday we went to the phone store in the mall and picked up the call display. I had just hooked it up.”

      “Did you find out who was making the calls?”

      “No. The caller had blocked their number, but I had a pretty good idea.”

      “Tricia.”

      “Yeah. I think she was planning to tell Bonnie about us.”

      I started doing the math in my head. “You told me you and Tricia had been broken up for over a week, right?”

      “Yeah,” he confirmed sadly. “It was on a Thursday. She came to me on the Monday of this last week with her threats to go to the principal. So that makes it ten or eleven days since we had broken up.”

      “Were