The Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum Page B

widow could kick them out any minute, and she couldn’t allow that to happen. In a gentle voice she said, “Your husband could have lived longer than he did. You two could have had more time together. We think someone may have taken that away from you. Something no one had the right to take. If anyone did that to you, we want to find out who it was.”
    The widow’s stare seemed to relent.
    “Without your help, we’ll never know who took your husband from you.”
    Slowly the space widened and the screen door came open.
    The front parlor was dark. Mrs. Mailhot switched on a lamp, which cast a sulfurous light. She was wide-hipped and even shorter than she had first appeared to be. She wore a neat gray pleated skirt and an ivory fisherman’s sweater.
    The room was gloomy but immaculate, and it smelled of lemon oil. Recently cleaned—perhaps because Mrs. Mailhot expected relatives at her husband’s funeral. Hair and fiber would be a problem. The “crime scene,” such as it was, was not exactly preserved.
    The room, Anna noticed, was furnished with great attention to detail. Lace doilies adorned the arms of the tweedy sofa and armchairs. All the white fringed silk lampshades matched. On little end tables silver-framed photographs were placed just so. One of them was a black-and-white wedding picture: a plain, vulnerable-looking bride, the groom dark-haired, sharp-featured, proud.
    Atop the walnut television cabinet was a line of identical little ivory elephant figurines. Tacky, yet touching.
    “Oh, aren’t those exquisite ,” Anna said, pointing the elephants out to Arsenault.
    “Sure are,” Arsenault said unconvincingly.
    “Are they Lenox?” Anna asked.
    The widow looked surprised, then gave a proud little smile. “You collect them?”
    “My mother did.” Her mother had neither the time nor the money to collect anything except her meager paychecks.
    The old woman gestured. “Please sit down.”
    Anna took a seat on the couch, Arsenault in the adjoining armchair. She remembered this was the room in which Mailhot had been found dead.
    Mrs. Mailhot sat in an uncomfortable-looking ladder-back chair all the way across the room. “I wasn’t here when my husband died,” she said sadly. “I was visiting my sister like I do every Tuesday night. I just feel so terrible he died without me here.”
    Anna nodded sympathetically. “Maybe we can talk a little about the way he passed…”
    “He died from heart failure,” she said. “The doctor told me that.”
    “And he may have,” Anna said. “But sometimes a person can be killed in such a way that it doesn’t look like murder.”
    “Why would anyone want to kill Robert?”
    Arsenault gave Anna a quick, almost undetectable glance. There was something about the woman’s intonation: it wasn’t a rhetorical question. She sounded as if she really wanted to know. The approach they took now would be crucial. The two had been married since 1951—half a century together. She surely had some inkling of whatever it was, if anything, that her husband might have been involved in.
    “You two retired here a few years ago, is that right?”
    “Yes,” the old woman said. “What does this have to do with his death?”
    “You lived on your husband’s pension?”
    Mrs. Mailhot raised her chin defiantly. “Robert took care of the money. He told me never to worry about those things.”
    “But did he ever tell you where the money was coming from?”
    “I told you, Robert took care of everything.”
    “Did your husband tell you that he had one point five million dollars in the bank?”
    “We can show you the bank records if you’d like,” Arsenault put in.
    The old widow’s eyes betrayed nothing. “I told you, I know very little about our finances.”
    “He never talked to you about receiving money from anyone?” Arsenault asked.
    “Mr. Highsmith was a generous man,” she said slowly. “He never forgot the little people. The people who had helped