Trial by Fire Read online

  “That’s not all,” B. continued. “I’ve come up with an ELF connection. Donna’s parents got a divorce when she was a sophomore in high school. Her mother got full custody, and the father disappeared into the great beyond. Then, during Donna’s junior year, her mother hooked up with some off-the-wall people and ended up getting arrested for arson. She was part of a group of people who torched a bunch of houses that were under construction on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. They didn’t call the organization ELF back then. That name came later. The mother, Leah Lynette Carson, was sentenced to five to ten, but she never got out. She died of breast cancer while she was still in prison.”

  “So maybe Donna stayed in touch with some of those folks from her mother’s past.”

  “If you look at the ages, they work,” B. said. “It could be that Thomas McGregor and Donna’s mother were an item way back then. Here’s the real kicker,” he said. “I googled the location of phone calls placed to Thomas McGregor’s phone from the other one. Guess what? You can tell Bishop Gillespie for me that five of those calls originated through a cell phone tower three blocks from Donna Carson’s town house in Paradise Valley, and some of them came and went within blocks of Saint Gregory’s—when both phones were within blocks of the hospital.”

  Ali felt goose bumps spring up on her leg. “We’ve got her, don’t we?”

  “Maybe not close enough to cover all the probable-cause bases, but we’re close.”

  “Thanks,” Ali said. “You have no idea.”

  “You’re welcome,” B. said. “I’m going to grab a nap. I’ve got some meetings later today.”

  He hung up as the parking valet handed Ali her key. She looked around, hoping to see the man who had told her about the red crossover. She wanted to show him the picture. Unfortunately today was his day off.

  She climbed into the Cayenne, but instead of driving off, she sat there, thinking.

  So Donna had connections to someone from ELF. She must have gotten him to set the fire, but why? What did she have against Mimi? And why burn up that valuable painting? What was the point in that?

  Suddenly Ali knew. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. It all made sense. There had to be two paintings—the real one and a fake. The real one could be sold to the highest bidder, while insurance coverage would pay for the one destroyed in the fire. That meant that for someone, the Camp Verde fire was going to be a big win-win.

  Ali knew that there were times when owners of valuable art made their own copies of various pieces, thus enabling them to display the copy while keeping the real work safely stored in a vault. She doubted that was what had happened here. Had Mimi taken that kind of precaution, surely she would have told her husband. That meant the switch had been done without Mimi’s knowledge or consent. So who was behind it? Was that big win for Donna alone, or was Mimi’s son or daughter also involved?

  Bounding back out of the vehicle, Ali tossed the keys back to the valet, raced inside, and made straight for the nearest house phone.

  “Hal Cooper, please,” she said when the operator picked up.

  Ali was afraid she’d be told he had already checked out, but he hadn’t. “Hello,” Hal said. He sounded groggy, as though she had awakened him out of a sound sleep.

  “It’s Ali,” she said urgently. “Ali Reynolds. We spoke last night. In the lobby.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. What time is it? Eight-thirty? I should have been up a long time ago.”

  “I need to ask you something, Mr. Cooper. Tell me about your wife’s missing painting. When did Mimi have the reframing done?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Sometime last summer, I think. After we got married. Why?”

  “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know that, either, but I’m sure I can find out. I believe Serenity handled the job. She has lots of connections with framers and the like. I seem to remember that she sent Donna over to pick it up. Why?”

  So the reframing was done last summer, Ali thought. Now Donna Carson is beating a path out of town and taking a big loss on selling her condo in the process. Interesting.

  “Tell me something else,” Ali said. “How long had Mimi had trouble with cataracts?”

  “For a couple of years, I suppose,” Hal said. “Since before I met her. She didn’t want to have the surgery and kept putting it off. Why are you asking about Mimi’s cataracts? What’s this all about?”

  “I’m not sure myself,” Ali said, “but right now I need to run. Please give me your cell phone number so I can reach you if I need to.”

  She jotted down the number. Then, instead of going back to her car, she made her way to an empty couch in the far corner of the lobby. Once there, she pulled out her phone and called Dave Holman’s number.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I hope we’re on better terms this morning.”

  “Maybe,” Ali said. “I wasn’t at my best last night.”

  “Are you feeling all right? Your dad said you got banged up pretty bad.”

  On the one hand it was nice to know Dave cared enough to be checking with her parents. On the other hand, it was a little provoking.

  “I’m fine, really,” Ali said. “I was about to go over to the hospital to check on Sister Anselm. She was in the ICU last night, and I didn’t see her.”

  Had Ali been doing full disclosure, she might have mentioned Sister Anselm’s other visitor, Bishop Gillespie, and what he had asked of her, but she didn’t. Instead she got straight to the point about the painting.

  “I have a question. Who’s handling the Camp Verde arson investigation?”

  “ATF,” Dave said. “Who did you think?”

  “Do you have a name and phone number?”

  “Why? What’s going on?” Dave sounded suspicious.

  “I’m working a hunch here. If it pans out, I’ll let you know. If it doesn’t, I won’t have to listen to your telling me you told me so.”

  He laughed. “Am I that bad?”

  “No,” she said. “Most of the time you’re not.”

  “Hang on. Let me look through what’s come in so far.” He paused, then said, “Okay. Here it is. The chief arson investigator is a guy named Sam Torrance. I’ve got a phone number here. Do you want it?”

  “Please.”

  That was the next number Ali dialed. “Torrance here,” he said.

  “Detective Holman gave me your number,” she said. “I’m Ali Reynolds with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department.”

  That was true insofar as it went. She didn’t mention exactly what she did for the sheriff’s department, and Agent Torrance didn’t ask. The fact that she had his cell phone number seemed to lend her some credibility, but he didn’t care to hang around making small talk, either.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m busy as hell right now. If you could call back—”

  “I have a question,” Ali interrupted. “Just one—about that piece of charred picture frame stock you found in the ashes yesterday?”

  “What about it?”

  Ali knew from the sudden shift in his voice that she now had Sam Torrance’s undivided attention.

  “I understand there were some scraps of paper found as well.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Torrance said. “I was told this was supposedly some supervaluable name-brand piece of art, right? Wrong. It’s nothing but a cheap copy. Done on old paper, so it looks real—until you see the pixels under a microscope, which one of my lab techs was able to do on one of the paper fragments this morning. I forget what they call that technique. Starts with the letter G. Just a minute. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. Giclée. That’s it. They do it with inkjet printers. My first guess would be that someone’s trying to rip off an insurance company.”

  “That’s my guess, too,” Ali said, “and someone else besides.”

  On that score they may have already succeeded, she thought, but she didn’t say that aloud.

  Ali understood in that moment that the switch most likely had been made mo
nths earlier, at a time when Mimi, the person who had loved the painting best, was being plagued with cataracts and was in no position to notice the difference. The person responsible must have known that once Mimi decided to put the picture up for sale, the jig would be up. By destroying the fake painting, the theft of the real one might never have been discovered.

  “Thank you, Agent Torrance,” Ali said. “I have Agent Robson’s number right here. I believe I’ll give him a call.”

  Before she could dial, though, her phone rang. The number in the readout wasn’t one she recognized.

  “Kelly Green here,” he said. “Sorry to be calling so close to the wire.”

  Ali looked at her watch. She had been so busy she hadn’t noticed that the nine o’clock deadline she had given Green was rapidly approaching.

  “I just got off the phone with Devon. I managed to weasel the information out of him. You won’t tell him I told you, will you?”

  That depends, Ali thought, but that doesn’t mean I won’t tell Sheriff Maxwell. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “His girlfriend,” Green said quickly.

  “That’s impossible,” Ali said. “She’s not even working right now. How would she have access?”

  “Beats me. All I know is, he said that Holly was keeping him in the know.”

  Holly, Ali thought. Holly Mesina? As in Sally Laird Harrison’s best friend?

  That meant that Devon was cheating on his wife and his girlfriend. Ali wasn’t entirely surprised. It made perfect sense.

  “Are we good, then?” Kelly was saying.

  “You kept your part of the bargain, so here’s some free advice,” Ali told him. “If I were you, I’d keep away from Devon Ryan. I have a feeling he isn’t going to be much use to you after this.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Instead of heading for the hospital, Ali called Dave back. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I have a photo of the person I think may be responsible for kidnapping Sister Anselm. She’s most likely the same person who hired McGregor to set the fire in Camp Verde.”

  “Wait a minute,” Dave said. “You’re supposed to be media relations. Who turned you into a detective?”

  “Wanting to do something for Sister Anselm,” she said. “As far as I can tell, no one else is particularly interested.”

  “Who’s the suspect?” Dave asked. “Serenity Langley, by any chance?”

  “She may be involved, but for right now the one I’m looking at is Donna Carson.”

  “Serenity’s personal assistant?”

  “That’s right. I was going to show the photo to Sister Anselm first, but now that I have reason to believe I’m on the right track, I don’t want to do anything that will screw things up. That’s why I’m calling you. What should I do?”

  “If you want the victim’s ID to hold up in court, don’t show that photo to Sister Anselm until you have an official mug shot photo lineup to go with it.”

  “How do I get one of those?” Ali asked.

  “You may be in luck on that score. I just got off the phone with Detective Maria Salazar,” Dave said. “She’s an investigator assigned to Phoenix PD’s Kidnapping Unit. She said the Sister Anselm kidnapping was reported to them late yesterday by someone from the Phoenix Diocese. She just left there. Now she’s on her way to the hospital to speak to Sister Anselm, if she’s up to it. She wants to speak to you as well. I told her that you have a reasonably comprehensive record of what went on in the waiting room the past couple of days. She asked me to tell you that she’d like a hard copy of that file. I’d like to have a copy, too,” he added.

  “I want to reread it myself,” Ali said. “I don’t remember for sure, but I don’t recall a time when both Sister Anselm and Donna were in the waiting room at the same time. They may have been for a little while yesterday morning, but there was so much going on, Sister Anselm might not have noticed.”

  “You’re saying Donna might have known who Sister Anselm was, but the reverse wasn’t necessarily true.”

  “Yes,” Ali said. “I’ll e-mail your copy, but since I’ll most likely see Detective Salazar, I’ll print hers out.”

  “Good,” Dave said, “but don’t edit them. Send and print them as is, typos and all. If you start editing, you might end up leaving out something important.”

  Ali e-mailed a copy of the file to Dave, then returned to the business center to print out the thirty-five-page single-spaced document. While the copies were being made, she called Agent Robson. It turned out the ATF agent had already spoken to Dave. Now that things were falling into place, he seemed to have a noticeable interest in being cooperative.

  “I’m up in Payson,” he said. “I’ve got a whole team reading through Thomas McGregor’s opus to see what we can find. One of the most interesting things we’ve discovered so far is the name of a friend of his, Leah Lynette Langley Carson—Donna Carson’s mother, and Winston Langley’s sister.”

  Ali was stunned. If Donna was Serenity and Win Langley’s cousin, why hadn’t anyone mentioned it?

  Robson went on. “Twenty-five years ago Donna’s mother and McGregor were an item. He claimed he talked Leah into being involved in one of their ‘actions,’ as they called them then. She got caught; he didn’t. The prosecutor offered Leah a plea deal—a lighter sentence if she’d rat out her cohorts, which she refused to do. She ended up receiving a sentence of five to ten for first-degree arson, first offense. The thing is, it turned out to be a life sentence after all. She died in prison three years later.”

  “Of breast cancer,” Ali added.

  She understood her misstep at once. Robson was giving her information he had gleaned from Thomas McGregor’s notebooks. Ali knew about Donna’s mother from B. Simpson’s capable research. But rather than asking about how Ali had come into possession of that bit of knowledge, Robson continued.

  “So this may be some kind of payback,” he said. “I don’t know if Donna stayed in touch with McGregor all these years or if she tracked him down recently. We may learn that in one of the later notebooks. For now, I’m operating under the assumption that Donna may have gone looking for his help when she wanted to put out a hit on Mimi Cooper. Most likely she had learned that Mimi had decided to go ahead and sell the painting.”

  “If she had done that,” Ali said, “everyone would have figured out that her supposedly original Paul Klee was a fake.”

  “Which explains why that one had to be destroyed,” Robson said. “It’s a good thing Torrance’s people were able to retrieve a few scraps of identifiable paper ash.”

  Ali had seen the utter destruction of the burned-out houses. It had seemed unlikely to her that anything identifiable could have been found inside.

  “How did that happen?” she asked.

  “McGregor detailed all of that in one of his last notebook entries. He had Mimi in the trunk, the gas cans in the backseat, and the picture in the front seat with him. He got so busy doing everything else that he forgot about the picture until he was almost ready to take off. He ran back and tossed it into the second house at the last minute. It landed just inside the door, but since that’s where the firefighters first attacked the fire, that part of the house didn’t burn as thoroughly as the rest.”

  “He wrote this stuff down?” Ali asked. “Why?”

  “Ego,” Robson said. “He had ultimate bragging rights. He was with ELF before ELF was ELF, and he documented everything that got near him. He had already made up his mind that he was never going to be taken alive or go to jail. That’s in the notebooks as well. He was determined that his life’s work would survive him—that everyone would know what he had done. Once word about the notebooks gets out, McGregor’s going to get his wish,” Robson said. “Posthumously, and in spades.”

  “What about the other people involved?” Ali asked.

  “They’ll be going down, too. We won’t be able to convict on just his say-so, but the notebooks give us a good jumping-off place in terms of who, where, and when. It looks lik
e a number of them have lived respectable lives—with bland, ordinary façades that kept them from ever coming to our attention. Now that they’re actively under suspicion, however, I have no doubt we’ll find corroborating forensic evidence. It’s a lot easier to find a needle in a haystack when you’ve got a line on the right needle.”

  Someone spoke to Robson in the background. “Sorry,” he said to her. “Have to go.”

  Ali rang off and finished collating and stapling her two sets of documents. In looking over the hard copy, she had found some typos that she wished she’d taken the time to correct, but that was the problem—time. There wasn’t any.

  After stuffing the burn-unit transcripts into her briefcase, Ali went back down to the lobby. Halfway to the door, a woman rose from a chair and cut her off. “Ms. Reynolds?”

  Ali nodded as the woman quickly produced an ID wallet, complete with a Phoenix PD badge.

  “Detective Maria Salazar, I presume,” Ali said.

  The woman, fairly tall and clearly Hispanic, smiled and nodded. “Word gets around, doesn’t it?” she said. “I would have called ahead, but it’s a matter of some urgency.”

  “What can I do for you?” Ali asked.

  “I’ve just come from Bishop Gillespie’s office,” the detective said. “Naturally he’s quite concerned about what happened to Sister Anselm. Believe me, if Bishop Gillespie is concerned, our department is concerned.”

  “Naturally,” Ali agreed.

  “Most of the kidnapping unit has spent the last night trying to free a drug dealer from the hands of the people he ripped off. They grabbed him during a carjacking yesterday afternoon. It took until five o’clock this morning to bring that one to a close. As a consequence, we haven’t had much time to deal with the Sister Anselm situation, which appears to be quite different from our usual cases. But we’re dealing with it now. In the meantime, Bishop Gillespie has had some of his people working on the problem as well. That’s where you come in.”

  “How?”

  “Donna Carson is in the process of selling her condo. She listed it for fifteen thousand dollars less than she paid for it originally. She’s about to accept an offer that will mean a fifty thousand loss.”