12:27 p.m.
FOR MAKING a discovery this huge, Janie Hall thought she deserved lunch at the Sansom Street Oyster House.
While waiting for her boss, Janie sat at the raw bar and ordered a dozen assorted oysters from up and down the East Coast. Wellfleets from Cape Cod; Glidden Points from Maine; stormy bays and sugar shacks from Jersey. And a double shrimp cocktail.
This was just for starters.
The food was its own reward, but Janie also enjoyed knowing that her reporter’s instincts were still strong. When something nagged at her, it was the reporter inside her brain urging her to follow up, ask another question, keep pushing.
The ring. Like a Tolkien fantasy novel, it all came down to the ring. In this case, the missing Super Bowl ring.
It bothered Janie and fit none of the narratives Veena had been entertaining (professional hit man, personal grudges). A stolen ring made no sense with any of those. Why would a hit man take a Super Bowl ring when that would serve as a blinking red arrow pointed right at him? Maybe someone with a grudge would take the ring as a trophy, but again, to what end? The moment someone discovered it, the killer was as good as exposed.
No. A stolen ring meant a robbery.
As her boss and Cooper Lamb took a trip down to the shore, Janie called up one of the useful individuals in her life, this one from about five years ago.
The name he’d given Janie was Travis, but she knew it was fake. Travis was a kind of dark alternative-universe version of Cooper Lamb—a fellow shamus, but completely amoral and perfectly at home in the underworld. (Janie did enjoy the occasional bad boy.)
She had been writing a piece on high-profile art heists on the Main Line, and her reporting led her to Travis, a private eye who specialized in recovering stolen goods (for a steep fee), as long as the police were kept out of it. Only one of his quotes—on background—made it into the piece, but Janie and Travis had ended up downing more than a few martinis at the Continental over the years.
Which was where they’d met up the night before.
“Tell me who would try to fence a stolen Super Bowl ring,” Janie said.
“Somebody really stupid,” Travis replied.
And she would have left it at that if Travis had not followed it up with “You know, it’s funny you say that. Last week I had some idiot reach out through one of my associates trying to sell Archie Hughes’s ring. Even if it was real, the ring is radioactive. I can’t imagine who would buy it. If someone is selling it, it’ll be on the street, for crackhead prices.”
A noise next to Janie snapped her out of her reverie—the legs of the next stool over scraping against the tile floor.
“Did you start with a dozen oysters or did you order only three?” Veena asked.
“When you hear what I’ve got, you’re going to buy me another dozen,” said Janie. “And a chilled lobster tail.”