The Color of Death

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Kirby didn’t try to see what was on the screen. No point in peeking. Peyton wasn’t Kirby’s only source of courier and gem insider information—and vice versa, no doubt. So Kirby just settled in and concentrated on cleaning his plate before the grease got cold enough to write in. He was almost finished when Peyton spoke again.

  “We’ve got several Thai shipments of mixed cut and rough in the pipeline,” Peyton said around a mouthful of breakfast. Not that there was much rough, just enough to keep an auditor from wondering where the extra stones came from. Most of the rough ended up where it belonged—in the trash. “Two weeks is the earliest arrival for finished goods.” He shoveled in a forkload of eggs and potatoes. “You want to take the gems to Eduardo personally or just send them to the PO box?”

  “I’ll send them to the usual place.” Kirby swallowed and took a gulp of coffee.

  “Okay,” Peyton said. He entered a note into the file. In a few days Eduardo would pick the stones up and mix them in with the Thai shipment when it arrived. Peyton himself would never be seen handling either shipment. “What kind of stones and how much do they weigh?”

  “How should I know? I don’t carry a scale.”

  “Guess.”

  “Maybe like a half brick of marijuana.”

  “And that would be…?” Peyton asked impatiently.

  “About half a kilo.”

  “Let’s see them.”

  Kirby shoved his empty plate aside, shook out his napkin, and reached for the bagel bag. He pulled out another smaller bag and poured the contents on the big napkin. Stones the size of confetti spilled across the napkin like a broad multicolored tongue.

  “A grab bag,” Kirby said. “Maybe eight ounces of blue sapphire, two of ruby, and the rest are topaz, tourmaline, zircon, amethyst, whatever. Hell, I don’t know. You’re the expert, not me. You want to examine the stuff?”

  Peyton looked at the sparkling stones. The pick of the litter was a big pink-orange sapphire, followed closely by a large nearly char-treuse stone that was a hybrid emerald brilliant cut and was probably green garnet. A fine natural star sapphire in an unusual shade of luminous gold caught his eye. Then there was a cushion-cut stone that could have been garnet and would be worth a pile if it was a natural pink ruby.

  His eye went back to the brilliant yellow-green stone. The last time he’d seen it, Mike Purcell had been trying to sell it for twenty thousand to a collector who specialized in unusual colors of semiprecious gems.

  “Nice enough blue on some of these sapphires,” Peyton said, “but they’re all small and I guarantee they’ve been treated up the ass.” Some of the lot was probably yellow sapphire, which was in high demand right now. Not that he was going to mention that to Kirby. If the guy didn’t know his stones, tough. “What are you asking for the shipment?”

  “Two hundred thousand.”

  Peyton didn’t hesitate. “Eight thou.”

  “A hundred. I got expenses just like you.”

  Peyton hesitated, saw that there wasn’t any give in Kirby, and shrugged. The four good stones would bring that much, easily, even after reworking. Or better yet, he could put them in the vault and be that much closer to retiring.

  “If I don’t like what I see when these are inventoried,” Peyton said, “I’ll take it out of your next shipment.”

  “That’s the deal,” Kirby agreed.

  Peyton looked at the bagel bag. It still bulged.

  “I got lucky with another shipment,” Kirby said. “Cut stones. Well cut.”

  Chewing on a bit of steak, Peyton hesitated. “How big?”

  “How the hell should I know? The dude said they were real good quality and not small. Top-tier stuff.”

  “Total weight?”

  Kirby hefted the bag. “Maybe a pound.”

  Peyton turned to his computer again. “Precious or just colored?”

  “You tell me.”

  Kirby rolled up the first batch of stones in his napkin and put it on the other side of the table. He opened the bagel bag and carefully withdrew a fat plastic bag. With a care he hadn’t showed for the other stones, he eased the gems out of their package and nudged them over the white tablecloth until he could see individual stones.

  Peyton had his game face on. He looked at the blue, red, green, and occasional pink or silver-blue stones—diamonds, likely—without a flicker of expression.

  “Blue sapphires, rubies, and emeralds.” Kirby drank coffee. “Might be a colored diamond or two.”

  Peyton gently stirred through the flashing, brilliant stones with his fingertip. Taking tweezers from his bathrobe pocket, he carefully sorted by color. Then he pulled a loupe from his pocket and picked up stones at random to examine them. After a few minutes he put the loupe aside and fiddled with the tweezers. These were nice stones. Really nice. Well cut. Well polished. Except for the diamonds, there was nothing smaller than five carats. Yet no stone was so big it would have been photographed and documented for insurance purposes.

  If Peyton had to bet, he’d bet the stones were naturals. And they were big enough to show all those comforting flaws with just a 10x loupe. Even at wholesale prices, he was looking at a nice pile of portable wealth.

  “Too bad they aren’t Asian cut,” Peyton said, sighing.

  Kirby shrugged. “I take what I get. You interested?”

  Peyton tapped the tweezers on the thick linen, set them off to the side, and reached for his computer.

  Kirby watched Peyton’s quick hazel eyes scanning through whatever he’d called up from the computer’s memory.

  “Okay,” Peyton said after a few minutes. “We’re doing a nationwide loose stone promo in four months. Emphasis on higher-end stones.”

  “Looks like we’re both in luck.” Kirby grinned and poured more coffee.

  “Maybe.” Peyton used the tweezers to sort through the small puddle of green stones. When he was finished, it was divided into two uneven piles. “I can use Brazilian emeralds,” he said, indicating the larger pile, which was a darker green with a very faintly bluish tone, “but not Colombian.” He pointed at the smaller smoldering green pile, which had no hint of blue.

  “Why not?” Kirby asked. “I mean, they’re a little lighter than the others, but who the hell could tell?”

  “I can.” Peyton shrugged. “At the moment, buyers are shying away from the bad press about Colombia, drugs, emeralds, and politics. Traders are staying away because the stuff coming out of the Colombian mines today is treated from beginning to end and some of the treatments aren’t permanent.”

  “These are treated?” Kirby asked.

  Peyton grabbed his tweezers, picked one of the Colombian emeralds up, and viewed it from various angles.

  “Looks like it’s been filled,” he said finally. “Can’t be sure without more testing, but lately the Colombians have been doing everything to emeralds except making them in a lab.” He shrugged again and gestured with the tweezers toward one of the other piles of colored gems. “Blue sapphires are always at the top of the customer list. I’ll take everything you’ve got. Rubies…” Peyton shook his head and pointed toward the red stones that glowed like wind-stroked embers. “I’ll take these because I value your business, but I can’t offer much.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I told you the last time you brought me red stones, even at the mall end of the trade, treated Vietnamese rubies are blowing out the market. Not to mention that anything over four or five carats will have to be reworked. Just too easy to trace, if it’s truly top-tier goods.”

  “So you say.”

  “I’m the one doing the buying, remember?”

  Kirby sighed. He wasn’t going to get as much as he wanted from these stones. On the other hand, he hadn’t paid anything for them other than White’s share, twenty thousand.

  “Reworking an already well-cut stone,” Peyton said with emphasis, “costs time, money, and a lot of the weight of each stone. It’s a very expensive way to do business.”


  “Not when you get the stones at pennies on the dollar.”

  Peyton smiled slightly. “Still, I can’t give you the same money weight for weight as I would for badly cut stones.”

  “One hundred thousand.”

  Peyton’s eyebrows shot up. “For sixteen ounces of hot, finished goods I have to rework?”

  “Yeah.” Kirby smiled thinly. “Trust me. It’s a steal.”

  Chapter 31

  Glendale

  Friday

  9:00 A.M.

  Sam leaned on the table and watched Kate working over various pieces of equipment. He was close enough to touch her, but he kept his hands in his pockets.

  Her hair gleamed despite being skinned back in a clip to keep it out of her face; he wanted to take the clip off and bury his fingers in all that sleek hair. Her eyelashes were night-black and long enough to cast shadows; he wanted to kiss them. The casual cutoff jeans and faded red T-shirt looked as soft as butter; he wanted to touch them. Despite the curves of breasts and hips, there was a suppleness to each movement she made that looked like muscle tone to him; he wanted to test it with his hands. The economy and ease of her motions told him she was doing familiar tasks; he wanted to be that familiar with her body.

  The fact that she didn’t even look in his direction told him she wasn’t interested.

  Damn.

  Considering that he’d been enough of a gentleman and a scholar to keep his hands off her when he wanted her so much his palms itched, it rankled him to get the silent treatment. It was just professional irritation, of course. He needed her help.

  And if he told himself that often enough, he might believe it.

  “What’s that?” he finally asked, pointing.

  “A dop.” She didn’t look up.

  “No. Not the rod, the machine.”

  “It’s a transfer fixture.”

  “What does it transfer?”

  Kate gave him a brief, sidelong glance. “What’s this? Twenty questions?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to play.” Not the truth, but better than saying that the heat in his blue eyes made her clothes feel too tight. She picked up a special torch. “Go away. I’ve got work to do.”

  “So do I.”

  “Then go do it.”

  “I am.” Before she could say anything, Sam kept talking. “Look, right now I’m Joe Schmuck walking in the mall with the old lady and three whiny kids. I see a corner store full of glitter and I know I’m in trouble. Our anniversary is coming up and I’ve been hearing that ‘diamonds are forever’ so I go in and buy her fifty bucks’ worth of flash and I walk out. That’s all I know about the gem trade—what I see in a mall case and on TV ads.”

  Kate completed the transfer of the stone she was working on, set down the small, handheld torch she had used on the dop wax, and looked at him directly for the first time. The heat was still there. Damped down, but still burning.

  So was she.

  “And this matters to me how?” she asked sardonically.

  “I don’t want to be Joe Schmuck,” Sam said. “I want to know what happens before all the shiny stuff gets into the jewelry case. Where did the stone come from? Who transported them? Who worked them? Who mined them? But most of all I want to know who died and who lied so there could be stores full of flash and glitter.”

  She put the stick of dop wax aside and looked away from Sam. It was that or lean close enough to taste him. “You’re serious.”

  “As hell. I keep thinking I’m missing something because all I know is cops and robbers. I need some insight into the gem business as a whole, not just the moments of obvious danger when small, anonymous, valuable goods are wrapped up and transferred from point A to point B by a courier.”

  Kate removed the big clip she used to keep her hair out of her eyes while she was working. She shook her head and sighed in relief. The clip was good at its job, but it wasn’t vegan. It had a real taste for flesh.

  “I’m not an expert on the whole business,” she said, rubbing her unhappy scalp. “Just the cutting end of it.”

  “You know more than I do about the rest. That’s all an expert is. Someone who knows more than I do.”

  She smiled slightly. “Okay. ‘Who died and who lied…’ ”

  Sam watched her intently. She was fiddling with another machine, a piece of equipment she called a lap or something like it. Observation had told him she used it for cutting or polishing a stone. But she wasn’t working on anything now.

  He’d finally managed to distract her.

  Professionally, of course.

  “No matter the state of civilization in gem countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, South Africa, or whatever and wherever in the world you are,” Kate said slowly, “most colored stones come from wild places where the twenty-first century is barely a rumor. Men on the moon? Forget it. Never happened. Skinny miners crouch in hand-dug holes in the jungle or crawl through slanting, unstable tunnels that are just barely big enough to take the width of a miner’s shoulders. If you’re above ground, insects and standing water make your life miserable. If you’re below ground, standing water and cave-ins take your miserable life. Is that what you want to know? The age-old connection between death and gems?”

  “It’s a start.” Sam looked away from the distracting sway and shine of her unbound hair. And her hands in her hair, rubbing, sliding, just the way he wanted to do. She was making him nuts and she didn’t even notice. “Are the mines you’re talking about private or government?”

  She rolled her head on her shoulders. “It varies, but in the end it doesn’t matter.”

  Sam looked at the machinery and told himself he was an idiot for being aroused by something as simple as a woman with a headache. But there it was, and he was stuck with it. He wished he’d put his jacket on when he got up earlier—it was long enough to cover the woody he was fighting against. And losing.

  “Why doesn’t it matter?” he asked.

  “Government is always the choke point of trade,” Kate said. “In some countries armed soldiers confiscate stones dug by miners and call it taxation. In others, the bandits are running things, which makes them a government of sorts. Then the taxation is direct and brutal. In those countries Joe Schmuck is a man who sweats his balls off year after year in hope of digging out a stone big enough to hide and retire on.”

  “Does it happen?” Sam asked, looking back at her.

  “Sure.”

  “Often?”

  “The odds of finding that big stone are slightly worse than those of winning a big state lottery and then running naked through a gauntlet of thieves and tax collectors to get your prize to the bank.”

  The corner of Sam’s mouth kicked up.

  She wanted to lick it, so she looked away.

  “Most of the time,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck so that she wouldn’t reach for him, “the miner just finds a stone big enough to get himself drunk or laid with enough left over to buy food for the next week of gambling. Only instead of going to the corner convenience store to buy another lottery ticket, these Joe Schmucks go back to the mines and gamble in unsafe pits and die young.”

  “But not without hope.”

  She sighed and clipped her hair loosely at the base of her neck. The hair wouldn’t stay put that way for long, but the way Sam was watching it—and her—was making her pulse kick.

  My problem, not his, Kate told herself bitterly. Federal robots don’t think with their dicks. In fact, I wonder if they even know they have one.

  “You’re right,” she said. “In nearly all cases this is voluntary rather than slave labor. It’s just that I’ll never forget the first time I saw mining in Brazil. Or Thailand. It was a real shock for this First World girl. Of course, that was before I really understood the first axiom of buying rough gems.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The closer the mine, the more likely you’ll buy synthetics.”

  S
am laughed and wished she hadn’t tamed her intriguing hair with the clip. It was making things easier on him, but sometimes easy just wasn’t as much fun as hard.

  That was something else he wasn’t going to think about.

  “No joke,” Kate said.

  Her dark glance drifted over him. Pale shirt with sleeves rolled up. The weapon and harness she’d been afraid to touch when she tucked him into an uncomfortable bed on her couch. Dark jeans that hinted at long legs and bluntly stated that he was male.

  And aroused.

  Okay, so he’s not a robot. So what? Healthy men get hard over toothpaste commercials.

  And from where she stood, that was one healthy male.

  “At mine sites I found synthetic rough mixed with so-so real rough,” Kate said, looking everywhere but at him. “A hundred yards away, I found synthetic locally cut stones mixed with batches of so-so natural locally cut gems. I found buckets of synthetic stuff in local jewelry stores whose owners assured me they carried only natural gems lovingly set in eighteen-carat gold. Yeah. Sure. And I’m the Queen of the Damned.”

  “So the closer the mine, the better the chance of fraud?”

  “That’s my experience.” She wondered if it was safe to look at him again and then decided it might never be safe. “Someone who goes to the backwaters of any country figuring to score big on a stone purchased directly from ‘ignorant’ miners or country folk is going to get taken for a real expensive ride.”

  “Voice of experience?”

  “I bought my share of crap,” she said wryly. “I think of it as the price of learning a business. Now I buy my rough through reputable wholesalers. I pay them a markup, sure, but travel isn’t cheap and neither is experience.”

  Sam walked over to one of the worktables and stared down at the mysterious equipment. It was that or touch her. That would be a bad move. Really stupid.

  Really tempting.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’ve bought rough from a reliable source. Then what do you do?”

  “Study it.”

  “For what? You think you’re being taken for a ride even after all the precautions?”

  “I’m not looking for synthetics in my rough,” Kate said. She looked at her hand gripping the edge of the table. Fingers that were grubby from tools and grits. Short nails, no polish. She wondered if Sam would want to have such unfeminine hands on him. Then she remembered the fit of his jeans and knew the answer. Her pulse kicked. “I’m trying to decide which of all the possible shapes will bring out the best in the stone for the least amount of wastage.”