“Why don’t I go over to talk to Suzy Bunyon and find out what she says?”
“You do that,” Chase agreed. “She’ll probably talk to you a lot faster than she would me.”
“Deal,” said Odelia, and got up.
“So what’s happening with your folks’ house? Think they’ll be able to rebuild it?”
“Talk about a mess,” said Odelia. “Now the contractor is blaming the builders, and the builders are blaming the contractor, and when all is said and done it’s going to take a while before my parents will have their house back.”
“And a lot of money.”
“Unless the insurance kicks in.”
“Will it? Kick in?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether the contractor has insurance.”
Chase grinned. “Good luck with that.”
“Usually newlyweds move in with their folks until they’ve saved up for a place of their own,” said Odelia, “but this time it’s the other way around.”
We found Suzy Bunyon at home studying in her room. If Kathleen thought it was odd for us to pay her daughter a visit, she didn’t mention it. She’d asked Odelia to do anything in her power to get her husband out from under this murder charge, and Odelia had given her word that she would, so this was all part of the process of eliminating suspects and trying to find out what exactly had happened that fateful night.
“Hi, Suzy,” said Odelia as she approached the pink-haired teenager. Suzy glanced down at Dooley and me, and frowned. “Do you always bring your cats with you?”
“Yeah, I guess so. They like to follow me around, and I find it’s easier to let them.”
“Uh-huh, okay,” said Suzy dubiously. She was seated at her desk, a book on geometry open under a reading lamp, but the presence of a large box of Kleenex told me that she still wasn’t over the tragic death of her boyfriend.
“So your dad is in jail on suspicion of murdering a homeless person,” said Odelia, opening the interview with a shot across the bow, so to speak.
“My stepdad,” Suzy immediately corrected her. “Karl isn’t my real dad.”
“Okay, your stepdad. So your mother has asked me to find out what happened, because she just can’t imagine that your stepdad would be involved in a thing like this.”
“So?”
“So you know that the gun he kept in his gun safe was used to murder this person?”
“Yeah, Mom told me.”
“So I want to ask you this straight out, Suzy, and I hope you’ll give me a straight answer: did you ever take that gun out of your stepdad’s gun safe?”
“What? No, of course not.”
“But you did know the combination of the lock?”
“Duh. The guy used his own birthday. How dumb do you have to be?”
“So you admit that you opened the safe?”
“I did open it. Once. Just to see what was inside. I figured Karl kept his stash of dirty magazines in there, but instead I found that he kept a gun.” She smiled. “I never knew that dopey Karl was a gun nut. Turns out that he is.”
“Karl swears up and down that he only kept the gun in case of an emergency.”
“What kind of an emergency could an accountant possibly have? A paper cut?”
“She doesn’t seem to think very highly of her stepdad, Max,” said Dooley.
“No, clearly she doesn’t,” I agreed.
“Look, I opened that safe only once, all right? And I never opened it again. I mean, what am I going to do with a gun? I can’t even shoot. Besides, guns kill people.”
“I thought that maybe you took it for your boyfriend?”
“What boyfriend?” asked Suzy, suddenly suspicious.
“Darryl?”
“Who?”
“Darryl Farmer. I know he was your boyfriend, Suzy. I talked to Todd Park this morning, and he told me all about it. And so did Lucy Hale, Darryl’s girlfriend before you entered the scene.”
“Okay, so fine. Darryl was my boyfriend.” She grabbed the box of Kleenex and moved it closer to where she was sitting. “But he never asked me to take that gun, okay? Darryl wasn’t into guns. Like, at all. In fact he was as anti-gun as a person can possibly be.”
“Some kids like to play a game,” said Odelia, cutting a quick glance in my direction.
The girl gave Odelia a suspicious frown. “What game? What are you talking about?”
“The game is called shoot a homeless person. So I thought—”
“You thought I would be involved in something like that? You are crazy, lady.”
“Not you, necessarily. But maybe some of the people you know—the people in the rave scene.”
“No way,” said Suzy, shaking her head adamantly. “They like to party and have fun, but not at the expense of others. And they would never use violence against anyone, most definitely not people who are less fortunate. No, you’re way off base now, lady.”
“Okay, all right. It was just an idea. So if your stepdad didn’t kill that man, and your friends didn’t, then who?”
Suzy shrugged. “I have absolutely no idea.”
“Who had access to that gun safe, apart from you and Karl and your mom?”
Suzy thought for a moment. “Honestly? If you put it like that, then it’s almost obvious that Karl killed that guy, isn’t it?”
“Do you believe that he killed him?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe he did.”
“But why? Why would your stepdad suddenly go and shoot a person?”
“For kicks? Just like you thought me and my friends would? I mean, Karl has issues, Miss Poole. Here’s a man who lived with a cat in the house for years, even though he hates cats and he’s allergic to them. So maybe he hates homeless people, too, and decided to start killing them, one person at a time? Who knows what’s going on in that goofy head of his. But one thing I can tell you: I didn’t kill that man, and my mother didn’t, so by the process of elimination it stands to reason that Karl did, right?”
“Do you think that maybe Karl was so scared to lose his kids that he’d kill to protect his visitation rights?”
“How should I know?” She glanced out the window for a moment, then added, “But it’s definitely a possibility. Karl is crazy about those stupid brats. And I think he’d do just about anything for them.”
“Even murder?”
Suzy gave Odelia a pointed look. “Absolutely.”
Chapter 26
Odelia was back at the precinct. Kathleen Bunyon’s desperate plea had touched a chord but before she took on her case she wanted to look into Karl Bunyon’s eyes and hear it from the man’s own lips that he was innocent.
So she now sat in the interview room with the suspected killer accountant and it soon became clear that the man had no idea what was happening to him, and he was completely and utterly stunned to find himself in this predicament.
“I didn’t do it, Miss Poole, you have to believe me,” he said, wringing his hands. His left eye was twitching and he looked as close to a nervous breakdown as anyone could possibly get after spending a night in the precinct lockup.
“So what do you think happened?”
“I have no idea!” He scooted forward in his chair. “Look, I know I did a terrible thing, abducting those cats, but this murder business? I had absolutely nothing to do with that.”
“Your wife seems to think that Grace might be involved. That she took your gun from the safe and used it to murder an innocent man and put the blame on you.”
“Grace? Murdering a homeless man?” He frowned at this. “I don’t think she’d be capable of such a thing, Miss Poole. Grace has a mean streak—it took going through that awful divorce for me to discover that about her, but murder? I very much doubt she’d be capable of such a thing.”
“So what about Suzy? Is it possible she took your gun and gave it to some of those raver friends of hers?”
He shrugged. “Suzy and I get along, but that’s as far as it goes. She’s never really taken a great liking to me. I suspect she thinks I’m not the right man for her mother. Then again, Suzy was crazy about her dad, and she probably feels I pushed him out of the picture, which she resents me for.”