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 months 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.”