Mary Cormier

It started with a murder and a heist.Mary Cormier was sixty-three, sitting in a Newbury Street coffee shop with the Globe open in front of her, when she saw what the FBI had missed.Thirteen masterpieces hadn't been stolen from the Gardner Museum.They had been removed - selected, one by one - by someone who knew exactly what mattered and what didn't. Not a thief. A conservator. Someone with a trained eye and access to the room.On page B7 of the same paper, a retired museum registrar lay dead at the foot of his stairwell.The police called it a fall.Mary didn't.By Friday she was at Eleanor Ferraro's kitchen table on Hanover Street with three other women - a reference librarian, a retired detective, and Eleanor herself.Four chairs.One name forming between them.What they didn't know yet was that the man they were circling already knew they were looking. That every name pulled from a registry triggered a phone call. And that before they understood how deep the network went, one of those four chairs would be empty for good.Three bodies. Eight months. One small black notebook.This is where Mary Cormier begins - not as a private investigator, not yet anything official, but as a woman who reads the room, pays attention, and refuses to let a wrong answer stand.