Her Special Charm

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 sighed as he drove down the corner. The light had just turned red. He hated waiting for the light to change. “She looked to be about seventy-five, Santini. Maybe a seventy-six-year-old would have found her hot, but no, she wasn’t hot.”

Santini shook his head. “First woman you trip over—” he slanted a glance at his partner of three years “—literally—in I don’t know how long and she has to turn out to be a senior citizen.” The dark, weathered face gathered around a pout. “Couldn’t you have run into a hot babe?”

James thought of the cameo he’d left locked up in his desk drawer at home. He still had to place the ad and he was dreading the deluge of response he anticipated. “I wasn’t trying to run into anyone and if your wife catches you talking like that, you’ll be sleeping on the screened porch again.” The light turned green and he was off.

Santini jolted, then settled back. After three years, he still wasn’t accustomed to the fits and starts of his partner’s driving.

“Yeah, I know. But a guy can dream, can’t he? I can’t step out on her—won’t step out on her,” Santini amended, probably because the former sounded as if he were henpecked, which he had admitted in a moment laced with weakness and whiskey, but it wasn’t something he liked dwelling on, “but I can live through you—if you had a life, that is.” He frowned deeply, forming ruts around the corners of his mouth. “You owe it to me, Munro.”

He took another corner, sharply. Santini moaned beside him. “Watching your back is all I owe you, Santini.”

Santini shifted in his seat, his hand braced against the glove compartment. Another turn was coming up. “So, you putting in the ad?”

It wasn’t something he wanted to do, but Harriet Stewart was right. Someone was undoubtedly upset over losing a piece like this. The more he looked at it, the prettier it became. He could almost see it sitting against someone’s throat, moving with every breath she took.

He blinked, wondering if the heat was getting to him. Even the air-conditioning in the car was struggling with the air. “At lunchtime.”

Patience had never been Santini’s long suit. “Why don’t you do it now?”

James snorted. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a crime scene to cover.”

Responsibilities had shifted when it came to locking up crime scenes. These days, the scientists seemed to be all over it before the detectives had a chance even to survey the scene. “Why don’t you let the CSU guys do our walking for us? Most of the time they get all huffy if we’re in their ‘way.’”