Ali was busy filtering everything Hal said about Donna Carson through the sum total of everything she had seen and heard during her endless hours in the burn-unit waiting room, trying to examine everything she had learned with her heart as well as her brain.
For example, Ali knew that Donna wasn’t necessarily on the best of terms with Serenity Langley, her current boss. Ali recalled that Donna had left out some of the telling details-details about the missing painting-when she had reported events to Serenity over the phone. And what was it Serenity had said to her brother, Win, about Donna? Something to the effect that she knew the art and she knew the customers but that she wasn’t irreplaceable.
“Do you happen to know what Donna’s major was in college?” Ali asked.
“Art history, I believe,” Hal said, “but I’m not sure. Don’t quote me on that.”
Ali felt her heartbeat quicken. What she had right then was little more than a spiderweb of tiny facts and innuendos, but she knew how strong spiderweb fibers could be when they were used to trap unsuspecting insects, and Ali was busy constructing her own spiderweb.
An art history major would know the worth of that Paul Klee. So would someone who had worked for years in the Langley art galleries. What was it Hal had said about Winston Langley being a chronic womanizer? Donna Carson was a dish now; Ali could easily imagine what a gorgeous bit of womanhood she might have been back in her teens and twenties.
What if Winston had betrayed Donna in the same way he had betrayed Mimi, by taking up with someone else? After all, wasn’t that what womanizers did, go from one unsuspecting victim to another?
Suddenly Ali was struck by another thought. Maybe Winston Langley hadn’t betrayed Donna at all. Maybe Winston’s plan had been for them to be together eventually, a plan that was inalterably derailed when Winston died before his divorce from Mimi became final. Good for Mimi; bad for Donna. Sort of like what had happened to Ali-good for Ali, bad for April, the young woman who had planned on being Paul Grayson’s second wife.
“Do you have any idea where Donna lives?” Ali asked.
Hal Cooper had been staring off into space, sipping his drink and woolgathering. He seemed startled when Ali’s question drew him back into the present.
“I seem to remember that she bought a condo, or maybe a town house, up in Paradise Valley. I don’t know where, exactly,” Hal added. “I’ve never been there. Had no call to go, but it seems like it wasn’t that far for her to come when Serenity needed her to keep an eye on Mimi.”
That was another strand to add to the web. Donna was the last person known to have seen Mimi on the day she disappeared. There had been no sign of forced entry. Whoever had taken Mimi and the priceless painting had been let into the house by someone.
Ali did her best to contain her excitement. The bartender poked his head out the door. “Last call,” he said.
“Nothing for me,” Ali said. “Just the bill.”
Hal pushed his empty glass away, put Maggie down on the floor, and stood.
“It was very kind of you to listen to my blabbing on and on tonight,” he said. “My mother is flying in tomorrow morning, and tomorrow I’ll be busy making funeral arrangements, but tonight I really needed to talk. You were a handy target. I hope I wasn’t too much of a burden.”
After billing their tab to her room, Ali reached out, took Hal’s free hand, and shook it. “I didn’t mind, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “You weren’t a burden at all.”
Ali exited the elevator on floor three while Hal and Maggie rode on up to twelve. By the time the door closed behind her, Ali had her cell phone out and was punching in B. Simpson’s number. Yes, it was the middle of the night, but those were B.’s prime working hours.
“Are you all right?” he said when he answered the phone. “I talked to your folks. They told me some of what happened this afternoon. I figured you’d get back to me when you could.”
“I’m a little battered and bruised,” she said. “Nothing serious.”
“That’s not what your mother said.”
“Mothers tend to exaggerate,” she told him.
“To what do I owe the honor of this call? It’s late for you-or is it early? I can’t tell which.”
“Late,” she said, “but I need your help, and so does Bishop Frances Gillespie.”
“As in the local bishop?” B. asked after a pause. “Of the Phoenix Catholic diocese?”
“The very one,” Ali said.
“What does he need?”
She explained the telephone-tracing problem.
“That’s no big thing,” B. said when she finished. “As long as I have the phone numbers, it shouldn’t be that difficult to triangulate the calls and create a cluster map of where they came from and where they went. That’s the wonderful thing about phone calls. They have a point of origin and a point of destination. Knowing those two things can often tell you a whole lot. What else?”
“Can you search Maricopa County property records for a Donna Carson? I believe she owns a town house in Paradise Valley. Anything else you can give me on Donna would be terrific.”
“Do you want this to be official information, or unofficial?”
“Whatever you can find without a court order,” Ali said. “School transcripts, property ownership, motor vehicles. If this person turns out to be who I think she is, I don’t want to have done anything that might come back on the sheriff’s department and muddy the water.”
“Okay,” B. said. “I’ll do my best to keep our noses clean. By the way, I think I found your Mr. Yarnov, the Russian art collector. Mr. Vladimir Yarnov. If he’s done something bad, he won’t be easy to catch. He’s a former arms dealer who took his money and an extensive art collection and decamped to Venezuela before the Russian economy went south along with everyone else’s. I understand he lives like a king in a beachfront mansion outside La Guaira, near Caracas. It turns out his private collection is thought to contain several Paul Klees.”
“You’re right,” Ali agreed. “Sounds like Vladimir is our guy.”
“Let me see what else I can find for you. Do you want me to call later tonight, or in the morning?”
“Morning,” Ali said. “I’m running on empty.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ll work the night shift. You get some sleep.”
On the bed in the bedroom part of her suite, Ali found a Nordstrom bag that hadn’t been there before. Wrapped in tissue inside the box was a brand-new jogging suit-the same make and model as her pink one, but this one was navy blue.
A card was enclosed. “Hope this fills the bill. L.B.”
Leland Brooks rides again, Ali thought. That man is a wonder and a marvel.
She was asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, and she was dead to the world until the phone on her bedside table rang at 7 a.m.
“It’s not much of a breakfast,” Edie Larson grumbled, “but your father and I are here in the lounge. The coffee is good, and there’s plenty of it.”
When Ali tried to get out of bed, she discovered that the parts of her that had gone slipping and sliding down the wall of the gully the day before were stiff and sore, and when she looked at her face in the bathroom mirror, the scar, still accentuated by the sunburn, stood out on her face. B. had told her once that he thought the scar gave her character. She did what she could to fix her face, then peeled the price tags off the new blue tracksuit and wore that upstairs to breakfast.
In the club lounge Ali discovered that the pickings weren’t nearly as grim as Edie had implied. As far as Bob and Edie were concerned, anything less than a cooked-to-order breakfast was something of a hardship. Ali helped herself to a bowl of fresh raspberries, a few slices of salmon, some cream cheese, and a bagel. Then she joined her parents at a small table, where her mother had already poured Ali a cup of coffee.
“I hope you had a better night’s sleep than we did,” Edie said. “Your father turned the air-conditioning down so low I was afraid we were going to freeze to death by morning.”