Trial By Fire

“He was looking for some positive publicity?” Ali asked.

Sister Anselm nodded. “He ended up with something else entirely. I thought we should seek legal recourse, but Reverend Mother’s take on the situation was that we should let it go. No one wrote irate letters to the editor or anything like that, but the sisters at the convent pray for Ms. Hazelett every day.”

“They pray for her soul?” Ali asked.

“No,” Sister Anselm said with a smile. “We pray that she’ll find enlightenment. It’s not quite turning the other cheek, but it’s close.”

There was a small buzzing sound, an electronic alert of some kind. Sister Anselm pulled the small device from her pocket again. She did something to it, and the sound was silenced.

“Duty calls,” she said, rising to her feet. “I enjoyed chatting with you, Ms. Reynolds. If you come up with any information on the identity of my patient, I would be most grateful.”

“Of course,” Ali said. “I’ll let you know. Immediately.”

Sister Anselm started to walk away. Then she stopped and turned back. “If you have a chance, you might want to stop by the nurses’ station. Tell them you need to sign into my logbook. They’ll know what you mean.”

For a time after the nun disappeared behind the closed door, Ali sat staring after her. It seemed that she and Sister Anselm were working opposite sides of the same coin. The people from the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department wanted to identify the victim to track down the woman’s would-be killer.

Sister Anselm wanted to the same thing-to save the woman’s immortal soul.

Very different goals, Ali told herself. But maybe we can work the problem together.

CHAPTER 7

Sheriff Maxwell’s text message came through, giving Ali the name and contact information for the ATF media relations officer in Phoenix. Still provoked by the sheriff’s parting comment about Ali and her Glock, she could easily have delayed passing along the media requests she had collected, but she didn’t. She sat there for some time, dutifully forwarding the information. Only when she finished did she step over to the nurses’ station.

“Excuse me,” she said, when the attendant looked up from a phone call. “Sister Anselm says I need to sign the logbook.”

Nodding, the attendant handed over a small spiral notebook. The cover was blank other than a self-adhesive tag with the number 814 handwritten in ink. When she opened it, the first page had marked spaces that called for name, date, phone number, and message. Ali looked up from the page and aimed a questioning look at the attendant.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Ali asked.

“Just fill it out,” the woman said with a shrug. “Sister Anselm likes to keep a record of visitors for the patients and their families. That way they have some idea of who came by to visit, and why.”

“What’s the reason for doing that?” Ali asked.

“For many family members it’s a comfort to know that someone cared-that at the very least their loved one wasn’t all alone here in the hospital, alone and forgotten.”

Returning to her chair, Ali opened the notebook to the first page and jotted down her name, department, and contact information. Writing those snippets of official information was the easy part. After that she spent several minutes staring off into space and trying to decide what else to write.

If she told the actual truth, she would be obliged to say something to the effect that she was the injured woman’s sole visitor because there was a turf war brewing between the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department. Family members reading those words after the fact weren’t likely to find much comfort or solace in them. Finally, after several long moments of consideration, Ali took up her pen and continued:

I witnessed the fire the other night. It’s a miracle anyone survived. Sheriff Maxwell asked me to come here to handle any Phoenix-area media concerns regarding the unidentified patient or the hospital.

When she finished, Ali read through what she had written. It wasn’t much, but it was close enough to the truth to pass muster.

If a grieving family member read it later, she hoped they might find comfort in knowing Sheriff Maxwell had seen fit to dispatch a representative from his office, someone who was there in person. And even though Ali was in the burn unit in an official capacity, she was also a legitimate visitor.

Closing the book, Ali returned it to the nurses’ station. Then she went back to her chair and opened her laptop. While she waited for her computer to boot up, a text message came in on her cell phone from her friend and homegrown cyber-security guru, Bartholomew Simpson. Cursed with sharing his name with a cartoon character and teased mercilessly about it by his classmates, B. Simpson had abandoned his given name by the time he reached junior high. He had also dropped out of high school and thrown himself into the world of computer science. He had put his natural genius and self-taught computer skills to work in Seattle ’s computer-gaming world, where he had made a name for himself as well as a fortune.

In the aftermath of a tough divorce, B., like Ali, had returned to his hometown roots in Sedona, where he started a computer-security company called High Noon Enterprises. Months after Ali had signed on to become one of his clients, he had come to her rescue when she had been the subject of a cyber-stalking event. Her computer had been hacked by a serial killer who used an Internet dating service to target and harass unsuspecting victims. B. Simpson had played an integral part in taking the bad guy down.

In the months since then, High Noon Enterprises had become wildly successful. B. had, in fact, spent the last three weeks in Washington, D.C., doing something he couldn’t discuss, with someone at Homeland Security whose name was classified and couldn’t be mentioned.

While B. had been gone, he had sent the occasional text message, several of them hinting that when he got back, he would like to look into the possibility of their being more than friends. That was another issue entirely. Ali had kept her responses breezy and noncommittal. Admittedly, she was attracted to the man. Why wouldn’t she be? He was smart and had plenty of money and a disposition that reminded her of a gentle giant (he towered over her at six foot five). Ali liked him, her parents adored him, and Chris thought B. was slick. As far as Ali was concerned, however, the difficulty lay in the difference in their ages. She couldn’t quite get beyond the fact that B. Simpson was closer in age to Christopher and Athena than he was to Ali.

That disparity seemed to have no effect at all on B.’s apparent interest in her. She sca

Bak n Sed. Bfast @ SLC. Prnts say u r in PHX. Kno u r workn 4 Sheriff Max, PHX in June! R U NUTS?

Smiling, Ali texted him back:

Nuts R U!

The elevator door swished open. Ali looked up from her cell phone in time to see a stocky young man step into the hallway and stride purposefully toward the nurses’ station.

“I’m here about the burn victim from Camp Verde,” he a

Ali was suddenly all ears. Closing her phone, she turned her attention to what was happening at the nurses’ station.

“Are you a relative?” the charge nurse asked.

“No,” the man said impatiently, pulling out his wallet and displaying his identification. “My name is Caleb Moore, and I’m with the Camp Verde Fire Department. I’m the one who carried the victim out of the burning house.”

The nurse glanced at his ID. Ali more than half expected that the man would be given the bum’s rush. Before the nurse could do so, Caleb rushed on.

“I already know that you can’t give me any information about her condition. You probably can’t even confirm she’s here, not officially anyway, but I know this is where the helicopter brought her. I know that nun is here, too. You know, the one who takes care of dying patients. So I’d like to sign the logbook, please-the one Sister Anselm keeps. I want to let the woman and her family know that I was here and that I was thinking about them.”