TRIAL BY FIRE (40 page)

“What painting?” Donna demanded in return. “I don’t have any idea what painting you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” Ali insisted. “You stole Mimi’s Klee months ago, when you took it out for reframing. You replaced it with a fake. The two house fires in Camp Verde were supposed to get rid of the evidence. So what’s your connection to Thomas McGregor?” Ali asked. “How did you persuade him to help you?”

Donna had been warned that anything she said could be held against her, but apparently she wasn’t listening.

“I didn’t have to persuade him,” she said dismissively. “He offered to help me. He wanted to help me. He hated those people as much as I do.”

A hint of a smile twitched at the corners of Detective Salazar’s mouth, but she said nothing.

“What people did he hate?” Ali continued. “Sister Anselm?
Mimi Cooper? What did they ever do to you, or to him? You still haven’t said what you did with the real Paul Klee. Where is it?”

“It’s on its way somewhere you’ll never find it,” Donna answered. “You’ll never get it back. Neither will Serenity or Win. It’s mine. All mine.”

Donna sounded like a petulant little girl, frustrated because she hadn’t been allowed to have her own way and had been forced to share some beloved toy. She didn’t sound the least bit like someone capable of planning and executing a cold-blooded murder.

But if she’s damaged goods,
Ali thought,
if her uncle took advantage of her …

Ali decided to tackle that delicate subject head-on.

“Why did you do this?” she asked. “Why are you lashing out at Winston Langley’s family? Is it because your uncle molested you? Was he your lover?”

For a moment Donna stared at Ali in openmouthed amazement. “My lover!” Donna exclaimed. “Are you kidding? That bastard was never my lover.”

Ali and Maria exchanged looks. If Donna Carson and Winston Langley hadn’t been lovers . . .

“And he wasn’t my damned uncle, either,” Donna declared, trembling as outrage overtook her. “Oh, he played the good uncle, all right, the beneficent uncle. But he was my father—my biological father! He raped his own sister and convinced their parents that she was the wild one! She ran away and found someone who married her and gave me his name. Those are the names on my birth certificate, you know—Leah Lynette Carson and John David Carson.”

Ali was appalled by the whole idea. “You’re saying Winston
Langley was your father, and that he raped his own sister?” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“What about your mother’s parents?”

“What about them? I never even met them until after my mother went to prison. That’s when Winston came riding to the rescue, playing the part of the generous uncle. And all this time, that’s what I thought he was.”

“Your mother never told you what happened?”

“Tom McGregor was the only person who ever told me the truth. Winston didn’t, not even when he was dying, and his goody-goody bitch of a wife didn’t tell me, either, although she knew. She claimed she didn’t, but she must have. As far as the world was concerned, Winston Langley was this really good guy—the magnanimous uncle who stepped up to the plate to help out his poor, deprived, and orphaned niece by seeing to it that I got an education and by giving me a job. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut about my mother. She was the bad seed, and the less said about her the better.

“So I went along with the program. I was the charity case. I wore Serenity’s cast-off clothing, but I had a place to live and food to eat. That was the price I was prepared to pay as long as I was an orphan. But it turns out I wasn’t an orphan at all. Once Tom told me the truth, I realized how badly I’ve been cheated—by Winston and Mimi and by Serenity and Win, too.

“What I’ve earned in paychecks over the years is a drop in the bucket compared to what Win and Serenity got when Winston died. I’m expected to bow and scrape and do whatever Serenity says, while she treats me like dirt. But then, she can afford to. She had access to her share of Winston’s estate, and mine, too.”

“That painting belonged to Mimi,” Ali put in. “How does stealing it even the score with her dead husband?”

“It didn’t,” Donna said. “Not nearly. All three of them got way more than I did.”

“Tell us about Tom McGregor,” Detective Salazar suggested. “What brought him into the picture?”

“He reached out to me after he saw Winston Langley’s obituary in one of the Phoenix papers,” Donna answered. “He didn’t think it was fair that the story said Winston had a son and a daughter when Tom knew it should have been a son and two daughters.”

“When did you first hear from him?”

“A little over a year ago. He said his conscience was bothering him and that he owed it to my mother to set the record straight. When he first told me, I didn’t believe it, either, but then I had some DNA testing done. You’re cops. DNA doesn’t lie, does it?”

“So you convinced Tom McGregor to help you,” Ali asked.

“I already told you. He offered to help me.”

“Why kidnap Sister Anselm? What did you have against her?”

“Because Tom blew it the first time around. Mimi was supposed to be dead, but she wasn’t. I was afraid she’d tell someone that I was involved before I had a chance to get away.”

“You’re right,” Ali said. “She did tell someone.”

“The nun?” Donna asked.

“No,” Ali told her. “She told her husband.”

“Tell me about your mother’s involvement with Tom McGregor,” Maria Salazar urged.

“He was lonely,” Donna said. “She loved him and he loved her. He told me that he never got over her, and that he felt responsible
for what happened to her. Not that she died, but that she died in prison. He said that once he’d evened the score with my mother—once he’d repaid what he owed her by helping me—he didn’t care what happened. He said he was done and that chapter was finished. I’m not sure what he meant.”

Ali did. He was referring to all those handwritten notebooks—and to his suicide by cop.

The escrow officer, who had been listening to this whole exchange in slack-jawed amazement, rose to her feet.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I need to go.”

“But what about the papers?” Donna objected. “If I don’t sign them, I don’t get the money.”

“No one is getting any money today,” the woman said. “Under the circumstances, the closing can’t proceed. I’m sorry.”

She stood up to walk away. Before she made it out the door, Maria Salazar stopped her. “I understand Ms. Carson was leaving town today. Where were you expected to send the proceeds from the sale?”

Louise looked as though she was ready to object. “I can get a warrant,” Detective Salazar told her, “but it would be easier all around if you’d just tell me.”

Biting back a comment, the escrow officer opened the file and shuffled through the papers. Finally she settled on one.

“Here it is,” she said. “Once we received the funds, we were to make a wire transfer to an account in Caracas, Venezuela. It’s a joint account, registered to Ms. Carson and a Mr. Vladimir Yarnov.”

“Vladimir wanted the painting and I wanted him,” Donna Carson explained. “I was going to give it to him. For a wedding present.”

“Too bad for him, Ms. Carson, because I don’t believe there’s
going to be a wedding,” Detective Salazar said. “We’re done here. You’re under arrest. Hands behind your back.”

The whole process left Ali stunned. Winston Langley had set in motion an avalanche of evil that had overwhelmed everyone in its path. He had raped his own sister and let her parents throw Leah to the wolves. He had betrayed his wife in life, and he had continued to betray her in death, leaving her to die a horrible death that left behind a truly bereft husband and an equally bereft cockapoo.

Tom McGregor, the arsonist who had personally started the fatal blaze, was dead as well, gunned down in a hail of gunfire before he could hurt anyone else. Two innocent bystanders—Sister Anselm and Gila County Deputy Guy Krist—had come away from their encounters with these people gravely injured.

Without a further word of objection, Donna Carson stood and placed her hands behind her back while Detective Salazar snapped the cuffs into place.

And that’s how it all ends,
Ali thought.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.

To Ali’s surprise, Donna Carson never did stop talking. In the year since she had learned the truth about Winston Langley’s family and her own, she had built up a lifetime’s worth of resentment that all came gushing out. She had spent the better part of that year wallowing in unreasoning hatred and plotting her revenge, all the while maintaining the façade that nothing had changed. It had been Serenity’s casual order for Donna to look in on Mimi that had put the last pieces in place.

Donna spilled out her story with no attempt to minimize her culpability and with zero regard to how her words might impact a legal defense in a court of law. Her defense attorney would have a mountain of self-incrimination to overcome if Donna’s case ever made it as far as a trial, but as long as Detective Salazar and Ali kept asking questions, Donna kept answering them, both in the car on the way to the precinct and later in an interview room at Phoenix PD.

Listening to Donna’s tale of woe, Ali couldn’t help but compare what had happened to her to what had happened to Judith
Becker. Both of them had been disowned and dispossessed—but Judith Becker had responded to the loss of both her parents as well as the loss of her country by turning her horrendous losses into a blessing for others.

Donna had done the opposite. She had lost her mother, the man she had always believed to be her father, and her biological father as well. She had turned the injustice of what happened to her into an excuse to inflict incredible harm on others.

Ali looked on as Donna was being booked. As the booking officer inventoried the items in her purse, Ali saw that there were two diamond rings tied inside in a small felt bag. The diamond on one was a rock, while the other was much more modest.

Mimi’s missing rings,
Ali thought, making a mental note to pass that information along to Detective Salazar.

The purse also contained a whole series of documents—Donna’s passport, along with preprinted boarding passes for both her Phoenix-to-L.A. flight and the one from L.A. to Caracas. Tucked into her wallet was a FedEx receipt for a package Donna had shipped to herself in care of her hotel, the Caracas Hilton. For import duty purposes the document listed the contents of the package as a “framed art print” with an insured value of $50.

“I’m guessing that’s an original and that it’s stolen goods,” Detective Salazar said.

While she went off in search of a warrant that would allow the package to be intercepted and returned, Ali was left alone in the interview room with Donna. Sitting across the table from this dangerous woman, Ali was a little concerned that her weapons—her Glock and her Taser—had been placed in a locker before she entered the small, mirrored room.

As the silence deepened around them Ali asked one final question.

“What would have happened if you had come to Mimi and Serenity and Win and told them what you had learned?”

“You mean would they have made some provision for me?” Donna asked bitterly. “Like that’s going to happen. For one thing, Winston Langley’s money is mostly gone. Win has a gambling problem. He ran through his inheritance like it was water. As for Serenity? She’s convinced that she has a great head for business, but she doesn’t, not like her father did. The galleries are all losing money. She’s been keeping them afloat with her inheritance. Once that’s gone, so are the galleries. Where would that leave me? A third of nothing is nothing.”

“In other words, since whatever was left of Winston’s estate belonged to Mimi, you went after that.”

“Why wouldn’t I? She wasn’t going to give me any of it. After all, she’s no relation to me—no blood relation.”

“Not enough of a relation to talk to, but enough of a relation to murder,” Ali said.

“I guess,” Donna said with a shrug.

That was when Ali realized that Donna simply didn’t care. The fact that other people had been hurt or killed meant nothing to her. Less than nothing.

For the remainder of the fifteen minutes Detective Salazar was gone, Ali and Donna sat in the room in absolute silence.

Earlier, no one had been paying attention to what had happened to Sister Anselm and Mimi Cooper. Now everyone was.

Ali spent most of the rest of the day being debriefed by a series of agencies about what had happened. The Fountain Hills marshals wanted access to the information that would allow them to sort out what had happened to Mimi Cooper. Phoenix
PD wanted to know details about what had happened to Sister Anselm, an incident that had started in their jurisdiction and ended in someone else’s. But over all this, Agent in Charge Donnelley’s media embargo still held sway.

Donna Carson’s name wasn’t being released to the media because she had yet to be charged. Tom McGregor’s name still wasn’t being released pending notification of next of kin, who most likely didn’t exist. And Sister Anselm’s name and medical information were being withheld as well.