He made a strange gurgling noise, as if he was choking on his own spit. He sagged back against the safe, both hands on top of his head.
“Have you ever made that mistake?” I asked gently. He shook his head without moving his hands. “Ever reach for the wrong box? I mean, the guns are similar-the ammo is similar.” I reached across the bench and retrieved the empty casing by slipping my pen down its mouth. Sure enough, the head stamp in the brass base announced.30–30 Winchester.
“No.”
“Did you ever run short of.32 cases and blow out a few.30–30’s to get you by? I mean, you could do that.” I was no reloader, but knew enough folks who did, and knew that they were always experimenting with this and that, fashioning cases that couldn’t be purchased commercially. He shook his head again. “Ever loan these guns to someone who might do that?” There was that chance, of course-the chance that somehow, Mo Arnett was innocent as the driven snow.
I reached out a hand and rested it on Mark’s shoulder. “We need to talk with your son, Mark. We need to talk with Mo.”
“You better find that little shit before I do,” he threatened again, the only thing he knew how to do just then. He was of the old-fashioned beat-the-crap-out-of-the-kid school of child rearing-a school that sometimes had my sympathy. But sometimes that mentality just wasn’t enough.
“No, that’s not what’s going to happen, Mark.” My grip on his shoulder rocked him a little, ameliorating the sharpness of my words. “Let me tell you what is going to happen. One of the deputies will be back with a warrant. We’ll use that whether you think one is required or not-and let me tell you. We appreciate your cooperation. But we’ll have a warrant. Then, this room will be sealed off, inventoried, all that happy shit. The two rifles will be taken into evidence, along with all the ammo for them. We’ll have photos up the whazoo. Prints on everything. Interviews, depositions. You know the drill. Between now and the arrival of the warrant, that door,” and I turned and nodded at the entry that Deputy Torrez so effectively blocked, “will be sealed with a Sheriff’s Seal. You won’t come in here. None of your family will. Not until we’re finished.
“And if we’re wrong in all this, and Mo walks through the front door in five minutes with a hell of a perfect alibi, with a hell of a good reason for touching your rifles, I’ll be the first to show up and grovel with an apology, Mark.“ I smiled at him. “I’ll buy you a case of beer. Whatever the apology takes.” Safe promise, I thought. But it sounded good, and I saw Mark Arnett wilt a little.
“What do I do?” The stuffing had been knocked out of him, the umbrage diluted. We were making progress.
“First, we want Mo found, we want him safe. So go fetch your wife. Then decide what attorney you’re going to use, and get him over here to assist you, to assist Mo. Trust me on this…if he’s charged with anything, you’re going to need all the help you can get. So start early.”
“He’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yep, he is. Or was.” I opened the safe again, touching it gingerly by one corner of the massive door. “Are you missing any guns?”
Mark Arnett’s glance was perfunctory. “No. Everything’s there.”
“Small thanks for that, at least.”
“There was one in the center console of the Pontiac,” Arnett said. His face had drained of color. “He don’t know anything about that one.”
“You better hope he doesn’t,” I said, not the least bit optimistic. “What was it?”
“A.45 Springfield.”
“Loaded?” Why would it be there if it wasn’t?
“One loaded magazine. Nothing in the chamber.”
I groaned inwardly as Mo Arnett’s slippery slope clicked a few degrees steeper. Someone, most likely Mo, had used the not-so-thoughtfully hidden key to the gun room. Why he’d decided to take a shot at the grader-and maybe the operator in it, I certainly didn’t know. If the kids’ stories were to be believed, Mo was humiliated by Larry Zipoli. Most folks could take a little humiliation. But now, someone had managed to open the safe, unless dad was so careless that he left it unlocked. That someone was now fleeing in his mother’s car. And we could add the ‘A and D’ to the BOLO.
Chapter Thirty-three
Estelle Reyes held out the photograph, and I took it reluctantly, standing just inside my office door with about thirty other things that demanded my attention at that moment. The last thing I wanted was to be sidetracked by a treatise on religious art. Who the hell knew where Mo Arnett was at that moment, or what the kid might do next. Jim Raught’s saint panels weren’t going to fetch the boy home. But I could tell by the look on the young lady’s face that she’d been captivated by that puzzle, if in fact it was one. Maybe the muse of the three saints had grabbed her attention.
“The attorney is sending us a photograph of the original retablo,” she said. “A good series was taken for a magazine article not long before the theft. It shows,” and she leaned forward to point out a neat circle she had drawn with an orange hi-liter around St. Ignacio’s left sandal. “That margin is a portion of the gold leaf. And you can see where it’s been mended at one time.”
“I can?” One gold leaf looked pretty much like another to me, but I could see some small fracture lines that appeared to interrupt the flow of metal.
She persisted. “Sophía Tournál is sending an enlargement, but from her description, I would guess that this is much the same.”
“Sophía…”
“My fiancé’s aunt. The lawyer.”
“Much the same? It damn well better be more than that if we’re going to make time for this.”
“Yes, sir.” She drew another photo from her briefcase. “This is the enlargement Ernie made for me from the art book. The damage to the gold border is quite clear in this.”
I glanced, compared, nodded, and looked at my watch. Time was on Mo’s side. The saints could wait.
“More important is that the work is attributed to Orosco on the back,” Estelle persisted. “The three retablos were actually framed as one unit in 1919, and the framer documented Orosco’s artistry by writing his name in India ink on the back, just beside the new frame.”
“Okay.”
“The original retablos disappeared in the art theft with several other important pieces four years ago. No trace since.”
I handed the photos back to her. “I’m impressed, although not with the timing of all this. Look, we’ve got a missing kid, maybe armed and dangerous. The saints can look after themselves for a little while longer.”
“Did Mr. Arnett have any notions?” Her easy change of subject suggested that she was easy with relegating the saints to the back burner.
“None. So we start digging. Are you ready for that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not suggesting that we’re going to forget all this.” I waved a hand at the photos she was sorting back into her briefcase. “But right now, the good judge is signing a warrant for us, and that’s where we’re headed…to take Mo’s life apart and see what we can find.”
She nodded, almost eagerly sure enough, but I could see the resignation just the same.
A few minutes later, with a fresh warrant in hand, we talked with his parents, now sitting hand-in-hand on the living room sofa while officers upset their household. Mark had given up blustering and promising a punch, and now had deflated a couple of sizes. We talked with Mo’s little sister, and finally elicited from fiesty little Maureen the evaluation that Mo was decidedly “a creep.” Of course, to a fourth grader, most of the world was full of creeps. Mindy ‘Mom’ Arnett’s favored expression was, “I just don’t understand this.”
We discovered that Mo’s life wasn’t an open book. That was scary. Mo Arnett was truly a stranger in his own house. We had heard lots of helpful gossip from others.