ask Stanley if he detected the scent of past owners on it.
“Lovely, isn’t it?” the woman suddenly asked him. “Exquisite, really. And expensive, I’d say. Probably has a history to it. Perhaps a family heirloom.” She raised her eyes to his. “Someone must be very upset about losing it.” She said it as if it were an emphatic statement that left no room for argument. “I’d say the best thing you could do would be to place an ad in the newspaper about it.” She put her hand over his. “It would be the kind thing to do, putting an end to someone’s unrest.”
It might be the kind thing to do, but in his line of work, there was no room for kindness, no time to stop and even notice the roses, much less attempt to smell one of them.
He opened his mouth to say as much.
James couldn’t explain it. If he tried, he was sure whoever he told would think he was crazy. Maybe he even entertained that notion himself, but when the old woman placed her small, soft hand on his, he experienced the oddest sensation of peace wafting over him. Something he was completely unacquainted with, but somehow still recognized.
It was fleeting, but it was there.
He cleared his throat, giving a half shrug. “Maybe I’ll do that.”
She beamed with pride, looking every inch the grandmother than he had never known.
“That’s just what I’d expect an officer of the law to say.” She glanced at the piece, than back at him. “It’s a cameo, you know.”
“No,” he admitted, “I didn’t.” Santini knew his way around jewelry, but he didn’t. The man’s wife demanded a decent piece for every occasion.
“Young men don’t usually,” the woman replied with a gentle laugh. Taking the cameo from him for a moment, she turned it around to examine. “And there seems to be an inscription on it.” Her eyes squinted. “But it’s very faint.”
He took it from her and looked at the back of the cameo. At first, there appeared to be nothing, but when he angled it just right, the early New York sun bounced off it in a way that managed to highlight very faint, thin letters.
“From W.S. to A.D.,” he read out loud.
He supposed she was right. This was more than just a piece of junk jewelry. Still, he would have paid it no mind if the woman hadn’t pointed it out to him. His field might be robbery, but his expertise was the criminal mind. When it came to things like jewelry, he didn’t know costume from the real thing. That was for someone else to ascertain.
If he put an ad in the paper, phone calls would start coming in and he didn’t have the time or, more to the point, the desire to interact with the callers this would bring out of the woodwork. That kind of thing was for someone who didn’t have a life that went full throttle every waking minute.
He turned to the woman, holding out the cameo to her. “I think that maybe you should be the one who places the ad in the paper. After all, you’re the one who really found it.”
James fully expected her to take the cameo from him. So he was surprised when she placed both her hands over his, closing his hand around the piece of jewelry, and shook her head.
“No, my dear, I think that you would be better suited for the task,” she pronounced softly, her voice carrying the kind of conviction he found very difficult to argue against.
But he was nothing if not firm. He just didn’t have the time for this. “No, I—”
“Trust me,” she said, her eyes on his. “I have an instinct about these things.”
He frowned. Just what the city needed, another pseudo-psychic. Still, in his experience, people usually were quick to take what wasn’t theirs. That she didn’t was admirable.
“If no one claims this, it’s yours, you know.”
“Yes,” she murmured, looking down at the cameo in his palm. “I know.”
Well, if he had to do this, he might as well get to it. Time and his early morning were ticking away. “Why don’t you give me your name and address and your telephone number—”
There was pleasure in the woman’s eyes as she laughed. He was struck by the thought that she must have been beautiful at one point. And that time was a thief. “Anyone listening would say you were asking me for a date. My name is Harriet. Harriet Stewart. I live just over there, in those apartments.”
She pointed vaguely toward a block that was comprised of two high-rise buildings standing elbow to elbow as they faced the early morning haze.
Stanley was impatient to be gone. That made two of them, James thought. By now, he would have been more than halfway through his jog and back to his apartment for a quick shower and another regenerating cup of black coffee before he went to the precinct.
This woman with her pleasant chatter was throwing everything off. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”
“Wait, I’ll write it down for you.” Taking a piece of paper and a pen out of her purse, Harriet quickly jotted down the particulars, then handed him the paper. “And you’re with the fifty-first, right?”
He looked at her, the hairs on the back of his neck beginning to stand at attention, the way they always did when something was out of sync. He’d never met this woman before. He would have remembered if he had. “How would you know that?”
She gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. “Closest one here. A detective likes to live near his precinct. Makes rushing to the scene of the crime in the middle of the night easier.”
When she said this, it sounded humorous, not suspicious. Probably something her son had told her at one time or another, James thought.
“Yeah, right.” Because there was no other choice available to him if he wanted to get going, he closed his hand over the cameo.
“You have to go,” she said with an understanding nod of her head.
“Yeah, I do.” He muttered something that passed for “Goodbye,” then turned toward his dog. “Let’s go, Stanley.”
“Don’t lose the cameo,” Harriet called after him cheerfully as he began to jog away from her.
James sighed. “I won’t.”
He could have sworn that Stanley sighed right along with him.
“You mean she wasn’t hot?” Disappointment dripped from Detective Nicholas Santini’s every pore as he stared at his partner within their police vehicle.
James had no idea why he’d said anything at all to Santini. It wasn’t as if he was one for sharing. That was Santini’s department. Santini shared everything with him, from last night’s fight with Rita to his concern with premature male-pattern baldness—something anyone looking at the man’s extremely full head of hair would have chalked off to paranoia. James was the closed-mouth one, but the woman he’d encountered had left a strange impression on him and he guessed he just wanted to sound it out loud.
His mistake. Santini was like a dog with a bone. A starving dog.
James
