The Color of Death (10 page)

Quartzite, AZ

Wednesday afternoon

Tex White acquired his target
just where he’d been told she would park: the McDonald’s in Quartzite. He watched her make a short call on her cell phone—probably checking in with her boss. Then she got out, locked the car with a remote-control key, and stretched like she hadn’t been out of the vehicle since L.A.

Probably she hadn’t. Couriers didn’t take many breaks, because they knew that was when they were the most vulnerable.

He moved his white van into the parking space next to hers, near her left front door, but he allowed her plenty of room to open her door. He didn’t want her to feel so crowded that she got smart and went around to the passenger side to get in.

The van’s windows were very dark, even on the driver and passenger doors. The windshield was just light enough to get past the law in California. Quickly, White unfolded a wide sunscreen on the inside of the windshield. Not only would it keep heat out, it would give him complete privacy.

He got in the back of the van, cracked the side door so that the courier wouldn’t hear it open, and pulled on a ski mask. He reached
for the exam gloves he’d stashed in a grocery bag. He pulled on the gloves, flexed his hands, and examined the gloves for flaws. The damn things came apart quicker than a rubber. Satisfied, he pulled a spring-loaded sap from his rear pocket.

Ready to rock and roll.

With the patience of a trained hunter, he crouched in back and waited for the courier to use the john, pick up her order, and come back to her car.

Sweat seeped into his ski mask.

He ignored it.

There weren’t many people around the parking lot. The snow-birds had mostly pulled up stakes and headed north again, following the melting ice. Nothing was going on in Quartzite this week, so there weren’t thousands of people crammed onto the dry, dusty grounds of the annual gem and mineral show. It was too late for lunch and too soon for dinner. Only people traveling between L.A. and Phoenix stopped here for a break.

Not that the nearly deserted parking lot mattered to White one way or the other. He’d taken people out of theater lines with no one the wiser.

The glass door to McDonald’s opened and the courier came out. Middle-aged, dyed brown hair, lightweight slacks and T-shirt for the hundred-degree heat. Her purse was as unremarkable as she was. She already had the key to the car in her hand. She punched the button that opened the driver-side lock and opened the door.

White went out of the van like a hundred-and-seventy-pound cat. His lead-filled sap hit the base of her skull with a meaty sound. As she slumped forward, he grabbed the key from her hand and used her momentum to dump her over the car’s center console and into the passenger foot well. He ripped off the ski mask and threw it on the seat. Then he turned and closed his van’s side door.

Five seconds after the courier had unlocked the door to her car, White slid into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and started the car. He drove to an empty stretch where desert and town overlapped
right next to a motel that was barely clinging to survival. Most of the action here was at night, when girls took their customers for a fifteen-minute spin. In the daytime, the place was a ghost motel.

He drove around to the back, parked next to the big trash bin, and dropped his pants. Gritting his teeth, he ripped off the tape holding a steel bar to his right calf.

After a quick look around to assure himself that nobody was watching, he went to the trunk, wedged the bar beneath the rim, and gave a brutal yank. The trunk of the little car popped open. He saw a suitcase and a package with brown paper wrapping closed by various security seals. He stuffed the package under his shirt and closed the trunk. Because it had been forced, the lid didn’t shut completely, but it was close enough to look good from across the lot.

Again he glanced around without seeming to. Still alone. He started to walk back to his van, then remembered the rest of his instructions.

Rough up the courier.

He pulled on black leather gloves with lead inserts in the back of the fingers and opened the passenger door of the white car.

Glendale

Wednesday evening

Why hasn’t he called?
Did he tell his boss about me and now he doesn’t want to face me?

Kate paced her workshop, wondering if by trusting Special Agent Sam Groves she’d effectively signed her own death warrant.

Don’t be silly. No one has called to threaten me.

Maybe that’s because they won’t threaten this time. They’ll just kill me and be done with it.

Automatically, she glanced at the bolts securing the doors to her home workshop. Still locked. Status lights on the security system were still green. She wished it made her feel better, but it didn’t. She was smart enough to know that all the locks and alarms in the world wouldn’t keep out someone who was really determined.

The knock on the front door made Kate jump. Heart racing, she went to the nearest intercom, flipped the switch, and said curtly, “Yes?”

“Sam Groves.”

“Are you alone?”

“I keep my promises, Ms. Chandler.”

“I’ll be right there.”

What she didn’t say was that she’d be praying every step of the way.

Sam waited with barely leashed impatience while Kate went through the ritual of peering through the spy hole and undoing the heavy-duty locks and bolts. An afternoon spent memorizing a career-breaking file and making calls to agents who blew him off was just the thing to put a fine edge on his temper.

When the door finally opened, Sam stepped through fast, making sure she didn’t change her mind about talking to him.

“Did those locks come before or after Lee died?” he asked bluntly.

“Before,” she said, shooting the bolt.

“Why? Do you get a lot of death threats in your business?”

“No, just hijackers. Some of the rough I cut is quite valuable even before it’s worked.”

“Like the Seven Sins?” he asked.

“Yes. They were far and away the best quality rough I’ve done.” She walked three steps and armed the security system again.

Sam remembered what the dealer had said about the big synthetic sapphire. “So the rough had great color, clarity, and rarity?”

“All three to the max.” Kate pushed a wave of black hair away from her face as she turned toward Sam. “It was the most beautiful rough I’ve ever worked. Even better, it was one hundred percent natural.”

“As opposed to synthetic?”

“You really want to know?”

“That’s why I asked.”

She sighed. “It’s tricky. I mean, lab gems are synthetic through and through. Everyone agrees on that. But at what point does a natural stone become so enhanced by man that you can hardly call it natural anymore?”

“You got me.”

“Daunting thought.” The corners of her mouth twitched upward. “Every gem association in the world has long, tedious, occasionally
short-tempered meetings about where to draw the line between acceptable enhancement of a gem and treatments that are so extensive that they effectively make the stone not natural.”

“Unnatural translates into less valuable?”

“Every time.”

“The rarity thing?”

She nodded, swiped hair away from her face again, and said, “I’ve got a hair clip in my workroom. You need anything from the kitchen first?”

“No thanks. There’s a great taco place only a mile from here.”

“Pedro’s Burrito Gordo?” she asked.

“That’s the one. Nuclear hot sauce. I had to order milk to put out the fire.”

“I noticed.”

Sam licked his upper lip and felt the roughness of dried milk. He rubbed at it with his hand. “Well, damn. It’s hard to have command presence with milk on my manly mug.”

She snickered and felt the tension ease. If she had to have a cop hanging around, she’d take one with a milk mustache and a bent sense of humor.
Watch it, girl,
she told herself.
He’s not supposed to have a sense of humor. He’s too damn appealing already.

“So you don’t have motion sensors in your alarm system?” Sam said, looking at the status lights.

“No. When the system was installed I had a cat. It came with the house, sort of a package deal. But no matter how the security guys tinkered to give me a pet zone, I still had too many false alarms. I got tired of paying for the call-outs, so I canceled the motion sensor.”

Sam looked around. No sign of a pet anywhere. “What happened to the cat?”

“Gone. She liked the neighbors better.”

Enjoying the female sway of hips beneath butt-hugging jeans, Sam followed Kate toward her workroom. He started to tell her that she didn’t need to clip her hair in place as far as he was concerned but decided that was the kind of unprofessional remark he should
avoid. Just like he should avoid noticing her long legs and fine ass and the citrus fragrance that floated from her skin if he stood close enough.

And while he was at it, he should sign up for sainthood.

“So,” he said, “except for cutting and polishing, you aren’t supposed to do anything to gemstones?”

“That’s the ideal.” She opened the door to her workroom and started looking for her hair clip.

“We’re talking human beings here, not saints,” Sam said dryly.

“Ya think?” She found the clip on the first worktable with a set of dop sticks and began taming her hair. “Some treatments are so old that they’ve become acceptable. It’s the newer treatments that are a problem.”

“Sort of a grandfather clause? If your grandfather did it, that’s okay, but you can’t do anything new?”

She nodded, felt her thick hair come loose, and started all over again with the clip. “Actually, you can do anything you want as long as you tell the buyer what has been done, particularly if the treatments aren’t permanent or don’t need special handling to keep their glow.”

“But if you tell the buyer,” Sam said, “he might not want to pay top dollar.”

“Bingo. All treatments are supposed to be disclosed to the buyer, but too many mall jewelers—and some upscale ones as well—figure if the buyer doesn’t ask, the buyer doesn’t care, because
everyone
knows that gems are treated somewhere between being mined and being set in precious metal.”

Sam’s left eyebrow rose. “I consider myself a fairly well-educated dude, but I don’t know squat about the difference between a treated and an untreated stone.”

“Neither do ninety-nine percent of mall shoppers, which is why disclosure is so important.” She spoke fast, telling herself that the fact that he could raise one eyebrow wasn’t sexy and neither was the width of his shoulders. “Some gemological societies boot out members
who sell treated stones and don’t mention it, especially if the treatments aren’t permanent.”

“So some folks dick with the stone and make it a better-looking gem and sell it without comment.”

She looked away from his intense sapphire-blue eyes.
He’s not sexy. He’s a federal robot. Remember that.
“Emeralds have been oiled to deepen the color for hundreds of years. Rubies and sapphires have been heated for the same reason for thousands of years. Take corundum that’s too light or too orange or too purple or whatever, add controlled heat, and you end up with better color in your gems. For every gem in creation, there’s a way—usually several ways—to enhance it.”

He leaned against a table and told himself he couldn’t smell her citrus scent. Really. “So why the fuss? If everyone does it, who cares?”

“Rarity. Rarity. Rarity. A synthetic gem is the bottom of the barrel. We can make them by the container load. A treated stone is more valuable because naturally occurring gems of any color or clarity are, by their very nature, relatively rare.”

“What you’re saying is synthetics suck bad water.”

The corners of her mouth curled upward and she admitted that the man was getting to her. “Yeah. Treated stones are naturals that weren’t up to par. All treatments I know about can be detected if you and your tools are good enough. Heat treatments leave traces that any expert should recognize. Despite that, a treated stone of fine color will almost always cost more than a natural stone of inferior color, and a synthetic of any color is just plain dismissed.”

“Okay.” He leaned slightly toward her, breathed in. Lemony and warm. Definitely. “So what kind of premium does a natural stone get?”

Kate’s hair slithered out of its coil. With a muttered word she gave up trying to look professional and clipped it all at her neck.

“Say you have two blue sapphires of equal weight and extra fine color,” she said, tugging at the clip. It held. “One is heat treated.
One isn’t. The stone that hasn’t been treated is priced at least a third higher—sometimes a lot more, depending on size—than a treated stone of equal weight and color. When you’re talking natural, untreated gems, you’re talking about the best of the best.”

“So when Lee disappeared, you started looking for the natural, fine, very rare blue sapphires he’d been carrying.”

She blinked and reminded herself that a half rubbed-off milk mustache didn’t make the man slow or stupid. “I hoped I could backtrack one or all of the Seven Sins and find out where it came from.”

“You must have had some luck.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Someone offered to kill you.”

“But it didn’t make any sense.” Kate threw up her hands and looked away from Sam’s vivid blue eyes. “Sure, I’d been bugging the FBI and the local cops and putting pictures of the missing stones online so that I’d be notified if any of them turned up, but nothing—”

“Hold it,” Sam cut in. “You have photos of the McCloud sapphires?”

“Both the Seven Sins and the synthetic ones I cut while I was deciding how best to work the rough.”

He shook his head like a dog coming out of water. “Back up. You cut
synthetic
sapphires?”

“Of course.”

Sam told himself to be patient. “Why?”

“Burmese rough as valuable as McCloud’s doesn’t come along every year or even every fifty years. Take my word for it,” she said quickly, heading off another question. “The Thai dealers who control sapphire and ruby rough have a stranglehold on mines, miners, and smugglers. Everything is treated. McCloud’s rough had been mined more than a hundred years ago, before every last gem was cooked, filled, oiled, pressure diffused, and in general dicked with.”

“Got it. Rarity, rarity, rarity.”

“Right. So when I saw the McCloud rough, I did what a lot of high-end cutters do. I bought a synthetic version of the rough and
practiced on it, trying out various cuts and sizes so that I would get the most valuable finished stones possible out of the natural rough.”

“Isn’t that work computerized now?”

“A lot of it is, especially at the lower end of the trade. And some high-end gem cutters are enthusiastic about the computer-aided design programs they use on their computer when it comes to deciding how to cut rough, but I’m not convinced.” She shrugged. “For me, nothing works as well as hands-on experience.”

“Well, that explains it.”

“What?”

Sam rubbed his short, almost spiky hair. “Why you didn’t have to chase around and hustle up a big blue stone to run the con on Purcell. You already had one right at hand. I thought maybe you went to him the first time to size up the stone, then came back with the fake the next day.”

“You talked with Purcell again?”

“His wife. She remembered you.”

“What a harridan.”

“She loves you too.”

Kate grimaced and began fiddling with one of the dops that had been next to her hair clip.

“What’s that?” Sam asked, eyeing the slender rod rather warily.

“A dop. A cutter’s tool used to hold the stone against the lap.” She brightened. “You want a tour of my workshop?”

“Right after you tell me why you switched stones on Purcell. Twice.”

She bit the corner of her mouth. “You’re really quick, Special Agent Sam Groves.”

He could have said the same about her, but he didn’t; if he was talking, she wasn’t, so he waited for her to speak. It wasn’t a hardship. It gave him an excuse to study her dark brown eyes and wide, tempting mouth.

Trying to ignore Sam, Kate leaned her hips against the worktable, crossed her arms, and tried to decide how much she could safely tell him.

“All of it,” he said.

She gave him a startled glance. “Are you a mind reader?”

“No more than any other cop. Don’t hold out on me, Ms. Chandler. You won’t like what happens.”

“Call me Kate,” she retorted. “The other guy who threatened me did.”

Sam filed that away for future reference and waited for silence to do its trick of opening Kate’s mouth.

“All right.” She braced her hands on the table and crossed her ankles. “I’d been looking for the Seven Sins, using my photos of the finished stones.”

“Any luck?”

“Everybody I asked said some variation of ‘Nice stones’ and ‘Sure, babe, I’ll let you know if I see them.’ I waited for calls. The only one that came was a death threat. So I started going to high-end gem shows and not telling anyone my name or connection to Lee. I was about to give up when I saw Purcell’s sapphire. I asked about it and he gave me a load of bullshit.”

“So you rushed home, got the twin stone, and switched them the next day.”

“Yes.”

“That took balls.”

“So to speak.”

He grinned.

So did she. “When I was younger, I used to do magic tricks. I earned money at kids’ birthday parties and even thought about magic as a career. Then I realized that the only women I saw in magic acts were centerfolds that were cut in half while wearing glittery underwear. One look in my bathroom mirror, plus a love of gemstones, saved me from the stage.”

Sam’s eyes gleamed with humor at the thought of a younger Kate dazzling her friends by pulling coins or bunnies out of their ears. “Okay, so you did the switch on Purcell. Then what?”

“I brought Purcell’s sapphire home and photographed it from all angles and compared the photos with the original photos of
McCloud’s stones. There’s no doubt about it. Purcell’s stone is one of the Seven Sins.”

“So after you verified the identity of the stone, you switched it back.”

“That’s when we met.” Kate’s humor vanished. Sam hadn’t come here to swap smiles with her. He’d come as a cop.