I studied the inventory sheet, knowing the ring wouldn't be on it. Then I went over the photographs of the death scene. I tried to look only at her hands. I looked at every picture, and in none of them could I spot anything that suggested she was wearing a ring.

I said as much to Durkin. He switched off the shaver, reached for the photographs, went through them carefully and deliberately. 'It's hard to see her hands in some of these,' he complained. 'All right, there's definitely no ring on that hand. What's that, the left hand? No ring on the left hand. Now in this shot, okay, definitely no ring on that hand. Wait a minute. s.h.i.t, that's the left hand again. It's not clear in this one. Okay, here we go. That's definitely her right hand and there's no ring on it.' He gathered the photos together like cards to be shuffled and dealt. 'No ring,' he said. 'What's that prove?'

'She had a ring when I saw her. Both times I saw her.'

'And?'

'And it disappeared. It's not at her apartment. There's a ring in her jewelry box, a high school cla.s.s ring, but that's not what I remember seeing on her hand.'

'Maybe your memory's false.'

I shook my head. 'The cla.s.s ring doesn't even have a stone. I went over there before I came here, just to check my memory. It's one of those klutzy school rings with too much lettering on it. It's not what she was wearing. She wouldn't have worn it, not with this mink and the wine-colored nails.'

I wasn't the only one who'd said so. After my little epiphany with the bit of broken gla.s.s, I'd gone straight to Kim's apartment, then used her phone to call Donna Campion. 'It's Matt Scudder,' I said. 'I know it's late, but I wanted to ask you about a line in your poem.'

She'd said, 'What line? What poem?'

'Your poem about Kim. You gave me a copy.'

'Oh, yes. Just give me a moment, will you? I'm not completely awake.'

'I'm sorry to call so late, but - '

'That's all right. What was the line?'

'Shatter / Wine bottles at her feet, let green gla.s.s / Sparkle upon her hand.'

'Sparkle's wrong.'

'I've got the poem right here, it says - '

'Oh, I know that's what I wrote,' she said, 'but it's wrong. I'll have to change it. I think. What about the line?'

'Where did you get the green gla.s.s from?'

'From the shattered wine bottles.'

'Why green gla.s.s on her hand? What's it a reference to?'

'Oh,' she said. 'Oh, I see what you mean. Her ring.'

'She had a ring with a green stone, didn't she?'

'That's right.'

'How long did she have it?'

'I don't know.' She thought it over. 'The first time I saw it was just before I wrote the poem.'

'You're sure of that?'

'At least that's the first time I noticed it. It gave me a handle on the poem, as a matter of fact. The contrast of the blue of her eyes and the green of the ring, but then I lost the blue when I got working on the poem.'

She'd told me something along those lines when she first showed me the poem. I hadn't known then what she was talking about.

She wasn't sure when that might have been. How long had she been working on one or another version of the poem? Since a month before Kim's murder? Two months?

'I don't know,' she said. 'I have trouble placing events in time. I don't tend to keep track.'

'But it was a ring with a green stone.'

'Oh, yes. I can picture it now.'

'Do you know where she got it? Who gave it to her?'

'I don't know anything about it,' she said. 'Maybe - '

'Yes?'

'Maybe she shattered a wine bottle.'

To Durkin I said, 'A friend of Kim's wrote a poem and mentioned the ring. And there's Sunny Hendryx's suicide note.' I got out my notebook, flipped it open. I read, ' "There's no way off the merry-go-round. She grabbed the bra.s.s ring and it turned her finger green. n.o.body's going to buy me emeralds." '

He took the book from me. 'She meaning Dakkinen, I suppose,' he said. 'There's more here. "n.o.body's going to give me babies. n.o.body's going to save my life." Dakkinen wasn't pregnant and neither was Hendryx, so what's this s.h.i.t about babies? And neither one of them had her life saved.' He closed the book with a snap, handed it across the desk to me. 'I don't know where you can go with this,' he said. 'It doesn't look to me like something you can take to the bank. Who knows when Hendryx wrote this? Maybe after the booze and the pills started working, and who can say where she was coming from?'

Behind us, two men in plainclothes were putting a young white kid in the holding cage. A desk away, a sullen black woman was answering questions. I picked up the top photo on the stack and looked at Kim Dakkinen's butchered body. Durkin switched on the razor and finished shaving.

'What I don't understand,' he said, 'is what you think you got. You think she had a boyfriend and the boyfriend gave her the ring. Okay. You also figured she had a boyfriend and he gave her the fur jacket, and you traced that and it looks as though you were right, but the jacket won't lead to the boyfriend because he kept his name out of it. If you can't trace him with a jacket that we've got, how can you trace him with a ring that all we know about it is it's missing? You see what I mean?'

'I see what you mean.'

'That Sherlock Holmes thing, the dog that didn't bark, well what you got is a ring that isn't there, and what does it prove?'

'It's gone.'

'Right.'

'Where'd it go?'

'Same place a bathtub ring goes. Down the f.u.c.king drain. How do I know where it went?'

'It disappeared.'

'So? Either it walked away or someone took it.'

'Who?'

'How do I know who?'