“He got to the dump that Sunday at eight a.m. to get first dibs on the drop-offs, and it was close to the top of the big trash dumpster.”

“Which Sunday was that?”

She calculated the date in her head. It was the morning of the open house at the Stansfields’.

Carter knew that the garbage processing center did not have any surveillance cameras near the dumpsters themselves, but they did have a camera at the entrance’s check-in booth. Maybe he’d get lucky.

Back in his car, Carter reached out to a crime scene technician to follow up with Mrs. Streeter. Next up was the recycling center, to ask them to pull all camera footage from the morning the rug was discovered. He was seven minutes into a conversation with Bob Taylor when he heard the sound of another call coming in. A Manhattan area code. He let it go to voice mail. Mrs. Streeter hadn’t been lying about Bob Taylor’s loquaciousness.

Another six minutes later, he finally hung up. He’d learned nothing new from Bob Taylor but had been able to confirm his account of the rug’s discovery. He hit his phone screen to play the latest voice-mail message.

“Detective Decker, this is Ashley Banks from Tiffany and Company on Fifth Avenue. You sent me that photograph of the double heart sterling silver necklace. I went through our catalogue archives and was able to locate it. We discontinued that piece twelve years ago and launched it five years before that.”

If Alex Lopez had bought the necklace, he certainly hadn’t done so for his current girlfriend. He would have been at most twenty-four years old at the time of the purchase. It occurred to Decker that Lopez could have simply found a lost necklace dropped on his boat and stashed it in a tackle box in case a customer came forward to claim it.