Snake in the Glass

Table of Contents

 

 

“Another one, huh?” The assistant at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office slouched against the wall of the building, watching his colleague pull a body bag out of the back of the van. “Any details?”

“Nope. Adult male, doesn’t look like he’s been out there long. No ID, nothing on him except some pebbles in his pocket.”

“Hey, kid, if he’s been out in the desert, it’s hard to tell how long he’s been there. At least he’s not a mummy like some of ’em. How’d they find him?”

“Border Patrol noticed the birds. He wasn’t on one of the usual routes. Looks like he didn’t want to be identified.”

“Or someone didn’t want him to be.”

THROUGH A GLASS, DEADLY
PANE OF DEATH
SNAKE IN THE GLASS

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

SNAKE IN THE GLASS

 

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / September 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-14000-0

 

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Gems have always fascinated people, so of course glassblower Em Dowell has to check them out when she’s looking for glass ideas. Besides, she lives in Tucson, home of the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, the largest in the world, so she couldn’t ignore them completely.

Less well known is the fact that the San Carlos Indian Reservation not far from Tucson is the world’s primary source for the gemstone peridot—a fact that Em learns quickly, but for the wrong reasons. However, the events and individuals associated with the reservation are purely my own invention.

Thanks as always go to my agent, Jacky Sach of Book-Ends, and my tireless editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez of Berkley Prime Crime. The dealers at the International Gem and Jewelry Show in Marlborough, Massachusetts, taught me a lot about displaying and selling stones, and Gail Clark served as another set of eyes and ears at the show. And once again, the faithful members of Writers Plot, Sisters in Crime, and the Guppies were behind me all the way.

My husband didn’t complain when I kept bringing home more gems “just for research!” My daughter still prefers the glassblowers of Cape Cod, who continue to provide me with both inspiration and practical information.

—Antonio Neri,
The Art of Glass

 

SUNDAY

 

“
Another one, huh?” The assistant at the Pima
County Medical Examiner’s Office slouched against the wall of the building, watching his colleague pull a body bag out of the back of the van. He tossed the half-smoked cigarette away and stepped forward to help wrestle the bag onto the waiting gurney. “Any details?”

“Nope. Adult male, doesn’t look like he’s been out there long. No ID, nothing on him except some pebbles in his pocket.”

“Hey, kid, if he’s been out in the desert, it’s hard to tell how long he’s been there. At least he’s not a mummy like some of ’em. How’d they find him?”

“Border Patrol noticed the birds. He wasn’t on one of the usual routes. Looks like he didn’t want to be identified.”

“Or someone didn’t want him to be. Most people who cross the border, they’ve got something on ’em— picture of family, religious medal maybe. Could be he was traveling with a pal who thought he had something worth taking.”

“That’s lousy. You make it this far. . . . You think somebody killed him? I didn’t see any marks on the body.”

“I’ll take a look, when I get a chance. It’s probably nothing to worry about. Maybe he got lost, or maybe someone gave him lousy directions. These guys who get ’em across the border—they don’t care squat about what happens to ’em next, as long as they’ve got their money. You got the paperwork?”

“Sure do.” The younger man pulled a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to him. “All there, by the book. What happens to him now?”

“No ID? We tag him as John Doe number whatever—I think we’re up to thirteen already this year. We hold him until we can do an autopsy. Then, if nobody claims him after a few months, we’ll probably end up cremating him.”

“Poor guy. Not a good way to go. Somebody ought to miss him.”

“Yeah, somebody should, but they may be out of luck.”

 

THE PREVIOUS FRIDAY . . .

 

On a good day it takes eighteen hours to fly from
Dublin to Tucson. Thanks to the vagaries of February weather and customer-unfriendly airlines, it turned out to be closer to twenty-four, and I was ecstatic to arrive at the Tucson airport on Friday. At least, I thought it was Friday, but then, I thought it had been Friday when I left Ireland. I could have kissed the cacti in the parking lot, I was so giddy. Jet-lagged or not, I figured I could handle the few miles to my downtown shop and the apartment I lived in above it. Luckily I remembered where I had left the car.

As I drove carefully home, relishing the intense sunshine and the sandy terrain dotted with saguaros and ringed by mountains (Arizona brown! Not Irish green!), I tried to sort through what I had to do. My brother Cam’s plans had been vague when I left.

My brother Cameron is a high-end computer geek. He’s a sweet, somewhat shy man with a genius for manipulating code. No, he’s not one of those nerdy guys who loves to talk gibberish and tinker with the wire guts of computers, and he doesn’t create animated games for teenage boys where things blow up loudly and spatter the screen with body parts, thank goodness. Instead, before he’d committed himself to the cyberworld, he had taken some biology and ecology classes, and now he specialized in modeling environmental systems, calculating things like the long-term impact of increased housing on dwindling aquifers. At least, that’s what I thought he did. If there is a computer gene, it missed me. And luckily in my line of work—creating artisanal glassware—computers don’t figure much. But I was eight years older than he was, forty-something to his thirty-something, and the world had changed rapidly in those years, when we were younger. It was enough for me that he liked what he did and apparently he was good at it.

Normally I was thrilled when Cameron came to Tucson, but this time I had to admit I had mixed feelings. Only a couple of months earlier, Cam had fallen madly in love with my sales assistant Allison McBride, who had dropped into our lives as a woman on the run, immediately awakening a chivalrous side of Cam that I hadn’t known he possessed—and I don’t think he had either.

Falling in love with Allison had thrown a monkey wrench into Cam’s neatly organized life, and now he was in the process of relocating to Tucson to be closer to Allison. Once the way was clear for Cam’s romantic intentions, he’d acted with what for him amounted to lightning speed. For the past several years he had been living and working in San Diego, although he could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had actually spent time on a beach. It was near enough to Tucson that he could make the six-hour drive to visit me several times a year, and since he was the only close relative I had, that made a difference. We had been muddling along quite well for years now.

But the advent of Allison in his life had made him impatient, and suddenly San Diego seemed a lot farther away from Tucson. So he had resigned from his job and found one here, at what he described to me as a start-up company supporting desert ecology and sustainable development. I think. It sounded right up his alley when he described it, and I applauded his effort to preserve the fragile deserts I had come to love.

In any case, he was in the midst of a move, leaving one job and packing up before starting his new one. He had allowed himself a couple of weeks between the end of his old job and the start of the other, and he had intended to use the time to find a place to live in Tucson—and to hang out with Allison.