“I don’t know the ins and outs of the investigation but I do know that an FBI informant posed as a hired thief. Graveyard thefts are relatively common. Now if you want to go into actual art thefts, there are lots to choose from: mostly items taken from museums and homes. They also dwarf in size and scope our cemetery break-in.”

“Give me an example.”

“Let me pull up my notes.” Shuffling over the line. “Okay. Here goes. The most famous art theft in this area was paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.”

“Is that the one where they still have the empty picture frames hanging on the walls?”

“I’m impressed, Old Man. How’d you know that?”

“It’s called reading the paper. I also remember getting the notice over the lines when I was in LAPD. When did the Gardner theft take place?”

“That was also in the nineties. Thieves posed as police and tied up the guards and walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars of artwork: a Manet, a Vermeer, several works by Degas, and Rembrandt’s only known seascape. I don’t see this having any connection with our case.”

“I agree with you. Anything else that’s vaguely similar . . . a theft from an odd place?”

“I did find one theft that was more our scale. And it’s still unsolved. But it’s also very old.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Hold on . . . okay . . . here we go. It took place twenty-five years ago in Marylebone, Rhode Island, about an hour away from Greenbury. Four mosaics were taken from the iconography of St. Stephen’s, a Russian Orthodox church. The mosaics were fashioned after the ones at the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. Would you like to know about Ravenna, Italy?”

“First I’d like to know what an iconography is.”

“Oh, sure . . . you know that most churches are laid out like crosses.”

“Yeah, the transept, nave, and apse . . . I do crossword puzzles.”

“Okay. On the transept wall—that’s the wall that forms the shorter end of the cross—leading up to the nave where the priest leads the service, there are often images of the saints or the Madonna or Jesus. It can be statues, gold work, bas-relief, oil paintings, and in this case, they were mosaics. Would you like to hear about Ravenna now?”

“Sure.”