“I know. Maveronski’s reasoning, if Maveronski can be said to reason, was that she’d seen a lot of people that day and one of them had fed her lobster and so what?”
“And never came forward?”
“I think I indicated that Maveronski could not exactly be said to think.”
Gregor waved it away. “Where’s the list of things found on her?”
Smith dug into his papers again. “Here it is. It’s a short list.”
“I know it is.” Gregor looked at it, paying as much attention to it as he had when he had first seen it downstairs. A plastic comb. A plastic brush with plastic bristles. Two packs of Virginia Slims cigarettes. A twenty-four carat plain gold wedding band, taken from the fourth finger of her left hand. A tote bag, made of quilted synthetic fabric and well worn. The report might as well have come out and said “cheap.” Gregor handed the list back to John Smith.
“That wedding band,” he said. “Was it her own?”
“We’ve got no way of knowing if it was her own,” Smith said, “but we do know she’d been wearing it for a long time. It’s in the autopsy report, if you can read through the jargon. The skin on the finger under it was worn smooth, and the right size and shape to have been worn down by the ring.”
“All right. Then the first question is, why didn’t she hock it?”
“I know.” Smith nodded. “All I could come up with was maybe her husband wouldn’t have liked that.”
“Then where’s her husband?”
“She left him back at wherever she came from?” Smith knew this was weak. “She was wearing the ring on her wedding finger. We have to at least consider the possibility that she was still married.”
“Yes, of course. We also have to consider the possibility that she was divorced but didn’t want to be. Or that she was never married but wanted to make people think she was.”
“I can’t see her keeping the ring just to make people think she was married,” Smith protested, “not in the condition she was in. You should really study that autopsy report. She might have got hold of some good seafood for a last meal, but she was malnourished and she was dying of cancer. She had real need for money. And I showed you the ring. It must be worth more than a thousand dollars at today’s prices.”
Gregor stopped himself just in time from saying “very good.” Smith was not one of his junior agents. Smith wasn’t a junior anything. “I was just trying to point something out,” he said, “and that was that that ring must have meant a great deal to her. She preferred to have it rather than the money it would bring, even when she was so hard up she could barely feed herself. Somewhere out there, there’s a man she cared for more than she cared for herself. Maybe he still cares for her.”
“What would that get us?”
“A little background, maybe. Have you thought of putting this out on the national wire?”
“You mean going to the FBI and asking them to circulate her description?”
“Why not? They’ll do more than circulate her description. If you can get to a fax machine, they’ll circulate her picture. If you tell them it’s part of a murder investigation, they might even make a fuss about it.”
This attempt to back into the giving of advice had only partially worked. Smith wasn’t offended, but he wasn’t fooled, either. He was looking at Gregor with an air of skeptical amusement.
“You thought of anything else we might not have?”
Gregor flushed. “Well,” he said, “I’ve thought of a possibility.”
“What is it?”
“It may not be real. Do you remember the date of Ash Wednesday?”
Smith didn’t, but he did have a calendar on his desk from Colchester Archdiocese, as did every other detective in the room. The Archdiocese seemed to have sent them to the police department in batches. Smith flipped his back to February and said, “The thirteenth of last month. That was Ash Wednesday.”
“Good. That would have made the seventeenth, let’s see, the following Sunday.”
“That’s right. That’s the day we found Cheryl Cass’s body.”
“It’s also the day a hotel near the Cathedral, called the Maverick, closed for renovations. They’ve got signs up to that affect all over town.”
“I know,” Smith said, “but we checked the Maverick. We really did.”
“How did you check it?”
Smith thought. “Well, by the time we got to it, it had closed. That was Monday the eighteenth, I’m almost sure. We got hold of the manager and asked him a few questions he didn’t have the answers to. Managers at places like the Maverick don’t spend a lot of time at the front desk. And we checked the register.”