He noticed she wore no wedding ring. It meant less than it once might have, Jesse knew. A lot of married women, especially married professional women, no longer wore wedding bands.
“Yes,” Jesse said. “Last week we found the body of a young woman who’d been dead for several weeks, in a lake in Paradise.”
“How awful.”
“Especially for her,” Jesse said. “She had been shot in the head.”
“Someone killed her?”
“Yes. On a chain around her neck was a Swampscott High School ring, class of two thousand.”
Jesse took the ring out and placed it on the desk in front of Dr. Summers. Dr. Summers was wearing a black linen suit and a crimson shirt. As she shifted in her chair to look at the ring, Jesse saw that the suit fit her very well. She was wearing a nice perfume, too.
“My God,” she said.
Jesse nodded.
“Is there a way to know whose ring this is?” Jesse said.
“From the size,” Dr. Summers said, “I assume it was a young man.”
“And a member of the class of two thousand.”
“Yes.”
“Any way to know which one?”
“We graduated a hundred and thirteen young men in June,” Dr. Summers said.
She crossed her legs. Jesse noticed that her legs looked good.
“Do you have any young women from the school that are missing?”
“None that I know of. It is, of course, summer. I’d have no way to know once school ended.”
“And the victim doesn’t have to be from your school,” Jesse said. “Does every graduating senior get a ring automatically?”
“No. They have to be ordered. And some students don’t bother.”
“To show you they don’t like the school,” Jesse said.
“I imagine so,” Dr. Summers said. “They are often among the more disaffected.”
“Not a bad thing,” Jesse said.
“Disaffection? No, not at all. Were you disaffected, Chief Stone?”
“You bet,” Jesse said. “Do you have a record of the orders?”
“No. We order from a company called C. C. Benjamin, in Boston. Did you attend college?”
“No,” Jesse said. “I went from high school to a minor-league baseball team.”
“Really? Did you ever play major-league baseball?”
“No. I was a shortstop. Got as far as Albuquerque and tore up my shoulder.”
“The one you throw with?”
“Yes.”
“That would be a bad injury for a shortstop.”
“Fatal,” Jesse said. “You follow baseball, Dr. Summers?”
“Lilly,” she said. “Yes, very closely.”
“Did your husband play?”
She smiled at him. “There is no husband, Chief Stone.”
Jesse smiled back at her.
“Jesse,” he said.
They looked at each other silently for a moment, and just as he realized suddenly that she was good-looking, he understood suddenly that she was sexual. Her eyes. The way she moved. The way she held herself.
“How will you identify her?” Lilly said.
“We’ll ask everyone who ordered a class ring to account for theirs.”
“And if they can’t?”
“It narrows the list. Then we ask around as to which of these guys had a girlfriend, and what was her name, and see if she’s missing.”
“Labor intensive,” Lilly said.
“It is,” Jesse said.
“Is it usually this laborious?” Lilly said.
