But Susan was determined to handle it. It upset her to think of Megan and what she had been through, but if Savannah could do it, so could she. Besides, this was Sam’s work. She didn’t want him to think he couldn’t talk shop when she was around.
She held up a hand in apology to Savannah. “Sorry. Go on. You were talking about Mexico.”
Savannah looked at Sam, who hitched his chin back at her. So, in a quiet voice, she continued. “Matty claims he was in Mexico during both the kidnapping and the Cranston heist. He has all kinds of paperwork to prove it. Obviously someone went in his place. Whoever it was may not have even known what he was doing.”
Jared found that hard to buy. “I can’t believe that someone would spend a week, or five days, or whatever, signing someone else’s name without knowing what he was doing.”
“Oh, he knew what he was doing,” Savannah corrected, “he just didn’t know why. Matty’s the type to come up with an explanation that a patsy would find perfectly logical.”
Susan thought of the day she and Sam had left the Jaguar with Matty. “I saw plenty of mechanics around his shop. Would he have sent one of them?”
Sam shook his head. “We’ve checked. They’re all clean, but we expected that. Matty wouldn’t do anything so obvious. He probably used someone from somewhere else entirely.”
“Like where?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. He’s been all over the country, Matty has. We wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“So what do you do?”
“We track down every clerk who processed his receipts and pray that one of them will take a look at Matty’s picture and swear that he wasn’t the one who signed the bill. We can also take those receipts to a handwriting expert who’ll tell us whether or not Matty was the one who signed. He very conveniently kept the receipts for us, but they’re carbons. We want the originals for a more valid analysis. We’re working on getting them now.”
“Any sign of the money yet?” Jared asked.
Sam shook his head.
“Or Megan’s gun? Or her watch?” Susan asked.
“The guy covers his tracks,” Sam acknowledged begrudgingly. “We won’t find those things. We won’t even find any clothes with tiny glass splinters that could be matched up to the French door he broke. He dumped everything.”
“Do you know where he held her?” Jared asked.
“Nope. Megan didn’t see a thing. She was in a laundry bag coming and going. She said the drive was endless, at least an hour, she thought. Given the terror she must have been feeling, I’m sure it seemed longer than it actually was. It was probably closer to half an hour, but even then there’s a lot of territory to cover. Half an hour could have taken them into either Massachusetts or Connecticut.”
Jared had been closely following the televised news reports on the case. “Stavanovich’s face has been all over the place. What are the chances of someone coming forward—maybe one of his unsuspecting dupes?”
“Not great,” Savannah said. “Let’s face it. The friends of men like Matty don’t sing in the boys’ choir. Like Sam says, he’s clever. I’d put money on the fact that whoever he used has good reason to keep his or her mouth shut, and even better reason to fear him.”
“He’s a disgusting man,” Susan muttered simply because she needed the outlet.
No one argued.
But Jared was lost in thought. He had originally been intrigued by Matty the Cat, and now he was intrigued by Matty the kidnapper. “He planned it all out. It’s incredible. He mapped out every little detail of the crime, even planned a second crime, the robbery, to coordinate with it, and he had an alibi for both. How much you want to bet that he used cars he was servicing to transport Megan from one place to another.”
Savannah and Sam looked at each other.
“Possible,” she mused.
“Probable,” he decided.
But Jared wasn’t done. “And the fact that he never robbed clients of his, yet he chose to kidnap a client. He deliberately broke the mold.” He sat back in his seat, leaving a hand on his fork, pushing a sliver of onion around his otherwise empty salad bowl. “And then there’s the issue of the ransom note. He’s a classical music buff, yet he chose wording for the note to suggest he listened to country. He thought of everything.”
“Maybe not,” Savannah cautioned. “There are still a couple of things that don’t make sense.”
He abandoned the fork. “Like?”
“Like the alarm system. How did he know it wasn’t working? I want to find that out.”
“The tour guide,” Susan murmured.
