J. Jance: Trial By Fire

“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.”

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 like 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?”