I gave my seat to an elderly woman on the bus, and before she got off, she whispered, “When your husband gives you a necklace, put it in water, and whatever you do, don’t wear it.” A week later, my husband showed up with a velvet box. I smiled, thanked him, and that night, I left the necklace soaking in a glass of water… By morning, the water had revealed something terrifying.

On Friday morning, while Julian was attending the pre-gala board breakfast at the downtown athletic club, Morgan met Helena behind an auto-body garage on 12th Street. With them was a man named Dennis Cole, an artisan jeweler and former forensic metallurgist Helena had known for thirty years.

Dennis sat at a makeshift workbench beneath an industrial halogen lamp, examining Julian’s lethal necklace inside a hermetically sealed glass chamber. He operated using thick butyl rubber gloves inserted through access ports in the chamber’s side.

"Ingenious. Horrifying, but ingenious," Dennis muttered, adjusting his magnifying visor. "The platinum isn't solid. It’s an electroplated porous alloy—sintered titanium carbide mixed with platinum powder. Under high pressure, they infused the microscopic pores with an organic lipophilic toxin suspended in a dimethyl sulfoxide vehicle."

"If it touches bare skin, what happens?" Morgan asked, leaning over the partition.

"DMSO is an industrial solvent with a unique property: it drives whatever chemical it carries straight through the stratum corneum—the skin barrier—directly into the capillary beds within minutes," Dennis explained, pointing with a steel probe. "This specific compound looks like an aconitine derivative combined with an anticholinesterase agent. It paralyzes the heart muscle’s electrical conductivity while leaving almost no visible necrosis. You wouldn't even feel a needle prick. Just a mild warm sensation, followed three hours later by total cardiovascular collapse."

"Can you duplicate it?" Morgan asked. "Visually? Perfectly?"

Dennis pushed his visor up and grinned, revealing a gold-capped canine. "I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours working from the high-resolution digital scans Helena provided from Clara's old insurance appraisals. I cast an identical setting in sterling silver, electroplated it with industrial rhodium, and fitted it with synthetic lab-grown blue spinels. To the naked eye—even to Julian holding it in his own hands—it is indistinguishable."

He reached into a secondary drawer and produced an identical velvet box. Inside lay the replica. It possessed the exact weight, the exact cut, and the identical dull brilliance of the star sapphires.

"What about the poison on the original?" Helena asked.

"I’ve already collected a liquid sample using an ethanol wash," Dennis said, gesturing to a small, sealed amber vial sitting in a biohazard canister. "Enough to send Julian and his chemist friend to federal prison for three consecutive lifetimes. I then neutralized the remainder of the original necklace with an alkaline bath. It’s inert now. A harmless chunk of metal."

Morgan took the velvet box containing the replica. "No. We put the inert original back in Julian’s case. If he inspects it with a jeweler’s glass, he needs to see his own serial numbers on the setting. We let him think the trap is set."

"And the gala?" Helena asked, her voice laced with protective worry. "If Gabriel Richter is there, he might notice the chemical hasn't deployed when you don't show symptoms."