“Anyway, this woman came through my line with a really good-looking man and these two kids, and I was so surprised when I saw her that I ran a can of baby food through the scanner twice.”

“Why were you surprised?” Toni asked.

“Because she looked so much like the First Lady.”

“A lot of women resemble the First Lady.”

“Not like this. I’ve always admired Mrs. Case, ever since the campaign, so I started keeping a scrapbook of pictures and articles about her. I know her face nearly as good as I know mine.”

Toni gave her an encouraging nod and tried to decide whether the fact that the woman was a Cornelia Case groupie made her testimony more or less valuable.

“She’d cut her hair. It’s short and light brown, but her face was the same. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any blown-up pictures of her, but—here, let me show you.”

She hurried over to a bookcase and pulled out several fat scrapbooks. After rustling through the pages for a moment, she showed them a head shot of the First Lady taken last year for the cover of Time.

“Look. Right there. Next to her eyebrow. She’s got this little freckle. I’ll bet I stared at this picture a dozen times before I saw it. The woman in my checkout line. She had a freckle in the exact same place.”

Toni gazed at the place where she was pointing, but the spot looked more like a blur on the negative than a freckle.

“Her voice was the same, too,” Barbara Shields went on.

“You’re familiar with Mrs. Case’s voice?”

She nodded. “Every time I know she’s going to be on television, I try to watch. This woman sounded just like her.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the man about what he liked on his sandwiches.”

“She was speaking English?”

She seemed surprised by the question. “Sure she was.”

“Did she have any kind of foreign accent?” Jason asked.

“No. She sounded just like Mrs. Case.”

He and Toni exchanged a glance. Then he leaned forward. “Tell us as much as you remember of the conversation, right from the beginning.”

“She asked the man what he wanted on his sandwich, and he said he liked mustard. And then the teenager said she wanted to buy this little paperback we had in the display with the astrology books. Ten Secrets to a Better Sex Life. The woman said no, and the teenager started to argue. The man didn’t like that, and he said something about how the girl had better listen to Nell or she was going to be in trouble. Then the baby—”

“Nell?” Toni gripped the water glass tighter. “That’s what he called the woman?”