The Color of Death

by Elizabeth Lowell

  With that and a dollar I can get a cup of bad coffee. I sure as hell can’t get laid by Special Agent Sam Groves.

  Sam slammed the car door. “Kate—”

  “Branson and Sons is opening a booth today,” she said over his attempt to talk. “Do you want to start there?”

  Sam wanted to finish what he’d stupidly started back at Kate’s house. But that wasn’t on the table. Catching a murderer before he killed Katherine Jessica Chandler was.

  “Sounds good,” Sam said through his teeth.

  He pulled the dark Stetson farther down on his head and shook his Levi’s down over his cowboy boots. His weapon harness was concealed by a jacket that didn’t have pearl buttons but managed to have a western look anyway. As far as he was concerned, simple disguises were always the best. Something always came unstuck on the elaborate ones.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “I thought Branson and Sons lost their goods when their courier was hit.”

  “They did,” Kate said. “They sent another one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They didn’t have a choice if they wanted to stay in the show. Last I heard, they’re staying in the show. So either a courier came or one will arrive real soon.”

  With that Kate set off at a brisk pace—or as brisk as she could manage in platform sandals—across the employee parking lot.

  Sam didn’t have any trouble in the cowboy boots, because they were his own, legacy of a misspent youth on his uncle’s Arizona ranch.

  “Is that big bus really your headquarters?” she asked when Sam caught up.

  He didn’t bother to look toward the motor coach, whose generators were working hard to keep everything cool inside. “When we’re not in Sizemore’s hotel suite, yeah.”

  “You guys sleep in the bus?”

  “Not if we want to keep our jobs,” he said. “We have plebe quarters at the back of the hotel overlooking the parking lot and restaurant grease vent. Since my roomie is Bill Colton, I don’t spend much time hanging around there. Sleep, shave, shower, and split.”

  “Colton? Who fixed that?”

  Sam shrugged. “Luck of the draw. We have two other Phoenix agents on temporary assignment with the crime strike force while we’re here for the show.”

  “Are they like Colton?”

  “They’re solid, hardworking, politically savvy federal agents, the kind who make the bureaucratic world go around. Without them, we wild cards would be shit out of luck.”

  Sam ran a plastic key card through the employee entrance e-lock and held the door open for Kate. When she walked past him, he said in a low voice, “You’re not the only unsatisfied camper, Kate. Don’t push my buttons and I’ll stay off yours.”

  She gave him a sideways look. “I couldn’t push your buttons with a sledgehammer.”

  “Listen—”

  “Hey, hold it for me, would you?” a woman called from behind Sam.

  He turned, saw a twenty-something female wearing a bar hostess outfit—white ruffled shirt halfway unbuttoned, tight red pants, black half apron with a pad and a pen sticking out of the pocket. He held the door open for her as requested.

  “Thanks.” The woman brushed by Sam a lot closer than she had to and asked in a low voice, “You work here long, darlin’?”

  “Just started.”

  “Check out the lounge a little later, okay? I have a break in two hours. Gotta run. I’m late.”

  Kate saw the exchange but couldn’t hear it. Not that she needed to. Body language said it all. The woman had done everything but stick her hand in Sam’s pants.

  When he got closer, Kate fanned herself and said, “Whew. And I thought it was hot in the parking lot.”

  Sam made a sound a lot like a snarl. He looked irritated and embarrassed and altogether in a lousy mood. He took Kate’s elbow and hustled her past the employee lockers to a service elevator. He swiped his card again. The doors opened. He shoved his key in a slot, punched the button for the top floor, and waited until the doors shut.

  Then he grabbed her.

  “What—” she began.

  An impatient, hungry male mouth closed over hers. He tasted of coffee and something hotter, something primitive and demanding. She pushed her hands inside his lightweight jacket and grabbed the first thing she could to keep her balance.

  He felt her fingers weave around the weapon harness and called himself twenty kinds of fool. And then he crowded her up against the side of the wall and leaned into her female heat.

  The elevator bumped to a halt.

  Sam dragged his mouth from Kate’s and hit the control that would hold the doors closed. “I told you to stay off my buttons,” he said roughly.

  Kate blinked, gulped at air, and wanted to hit him almost as much as she wanted to jump him.

  “Bullshit,” she said. “That waitress was all over your buttons and you didn’t—”

  “She wasn’t you,” he cut in. “You’re different.” He lowered his forehead to hers. “God help me, Kate, you’re different. I think about you when I should be thinking about the job.”

  She closed her eyes and was glad to have the elevator wall for support. “I know. You’d be fired.”

  “I’d survive getting fired. You wouldn’t survive getting killed.”

  Chapter 38

  Scottsdale

  Friday

  4:45 P.M.

  Sam surveyed the men gathered in Boris Peterson’s suite and wondered why it was women who wore the high-end pretties and men who bought, sold, traded, and cut them. In this gathering of dealers, as in her chosen profession, Kate was odd woman out.

  “And I thought the Bureau was an old-boy club,” Sam said quietly.

  Kate started at the brush of his lips against her hair. Even two hours after the meltdown in the elevator, she was unsettled. She didn’t like that, but she sure had liked kissing Sam.

  “I’m used to it,” she said. “I don’t even notice it anymore.”

  “Some of the women in the FBI say that.”

  “Do you believe them?”

  “No.”

  “Smart man,” she said.

  “Sometimes I’m downright stupid,” he said under his breath.

  Kate didn’t want to get into that again. If it pissed her off that he thought kissing her was downright stupid, then she could just stuff it under her red wig and ignore it.

  And him.

  Although she did owe him some good karma for having the connections to get invitations to private showings, the ones she hadn’t been invited to. It was an opportunity she wasn’t going to waste by thinking about a man who kissed her stupid one moment and called himself stupid the next.

  So stop thinking about him.

  Kate blew out a breath and concentrated on the room. Not including the guard at the door of the suite, there were about sixteen people. The murmur of conversation as men discussed the merits of various gems didn’t quite drown out the all-news network on the television in the corner. On tables everywhere finished gems were displayed in individual see-through boxes with electronic tags embedded in the clear plastic. The boxes made it easier to handle the gems. The electronic tags made them harder to steal.

  Some fool might try to grab a prime stone anyway, but there was a guard at the only exit, right next to the portable electronic “gate” that would start screaming if an active tag set it off. As all tags were active until passed through a device only one employee of the Butterworth Gem Trading Company had access to, shoplifting wasn’t a big problem.

  If a potential buyer wanted to examine a stone more closely, someone from Butterworth would escort the customer to another room, where a variety of microscopes, light sources, polariscopes, and the like were set up. Once a Butterworth employee zipped a gem’s protective box through a device—rather like a CD at a music store—the box opened and the gem was ready for serious study.

  “Ms. Collins,” a man’s voice said from across the room. “You seem to be at all the best private showi
ngs today.”

  After an instant Kate remembered that she was Ms. Collins and smiled at the approaching man. She’d met Carter outside the door to Branson and Sons’ locked suite—the notice on the door had said to try again in a few hours. Kate, Sam, and Carter had gone on together to the next private showing. Then as now, Carter was casually and expensively dressed in gray silk slacks and shirt. The watch on his wrist was a Rolex Oyster. The twenty-carat cabochon star sapphire in his ring was a high-quality Burmese blue. His haircut was straight out of a southern California trendsetting Hollywood magazine. On him it looked good.

  “Mr. Carter,” she said. “Nice to see you again. Did you have any luck buying that ruby?”

  White teeth flashed. With barely a glance at Sam, Carter put his hand on Kate’s arm and urged her toward a nearby table.

  “That fifty-carat ruby?” Carter sighed and shook his head. “The dude was in love with it. Same for the matched peridot. Gorgeous goods, but he wanted the moon and the stars for it. Even my Hollywood clients won’t pay that kind of money. There’s no investment potential if you buy too high.”

  “Too bad. Have I missed any good untreated sapphire rough or great finished blue sapphires?”

  “That’s what I wanted to show you,” Carter said, smiling down at her. “There’s a lovely hunk of umbra yellow rough over here. Not the sort of thing I would recommend to my clients—I only do cut stones—but I thought of you immediately.”

  Sam hoped that what he was thinking of Carter didn’t show. As far as Sam was concerned, Carter was slick as snot and twice as useless. Once the man had learned that Sam was the striking redhead’s bodyguard rather than her husband, lover, or date, Carter had started putting moves on her. Sam didn’t have to be a trained investigator to figure out what was on the oily bastard’s mind.

  It wasn’t business.

  Kate felt Sam’s eyes drilling holes in her back. She was divided between a purely feline pleasure in his irritation and a desire to tell him to have a little faith in her taste in men. Or maybe Sam thought she was too stupid to notice the indentation on Carter’s left hand ring finger where a wedding band had worn a groove into his flesh. Whether the ring had been freshly removed for play or freshly divorced, Kate didn’t care. Either one spelled Big Trouble for any woman smart enough to read the signs.

  Carter led Kate to the side of the room where samples of rough gems were laid out in groups according to kind rather than color. These specimens weren’t boxed. They simply had an electronic tag glued to an inconspicuous part of the rough, where the common stone matrix showed through the valuable gem material.

  She looked at the rough and then at the employee who was hovering nearby. “May I?”

  “But of course.” He hurried forward. “Would you like a loupe?”

  “No thanks, I brought several.”

  Kate pulled a 10x loupe from her big purse and examined the piece of intense yellow sapphire that had come from one of East Africa’s mines. No matter how many ways she turned and changed the lighting on the stone, some of the beautiful hazing that was the hallmark of untreated sapphire glowed in the gem. Unlike Asian sapphires, the yellows and oranges of East Africa didn’t have to be heated to deepen the natural color.

  There were flaws in the rough, but none that would interfere with cutting a stone that would end up between thirty and forty carats, depending on the skill of the cutter. At thirty carats finished, the price on the rough was about break-even for the cutter. At forty carats, there was a good profit.

  “Microscope, please,” Kate said.

  Sam kept an eye on the room while she examined the rough more closely. Carter hovered like a vulture expecting a juicy meal. The rest of the people glanced at Kate, but nobody stared or seemed to watch her any more than any good-looking woman was watched in a roomful of men. The men were here for business; if they’d wanted a meat market, they’d be down in the bar or bribing the bellmen.

  What a putz, Sam thought as he watched Carter hover over Kate. Almost touching her, but not quite. Nothing to call him on. No excuse to step all over his shiny Italian shoes.

  “…a flat tire, of all things,” a man’s voice said behind Sam. “Can you believe it? The price we pay for couriers and the cheap bastards don’t even rent good cars for a delivery.”

  “Branson and Sons will pay for it,” the man’s companion said. His eyes were on a long table of finished gems. “They’re losing the best action. We’ve had a day to look over everyone’s goods, we’ve made our choices, and if Branson doesn’t get his act together, there won’t be any money left at this show for him.”

  “Yeah, especially as everyone knows that the best of Branson’s stuff was already clouted.”

  “Yeah? Do you know anybody who hasn’t been hit?”

  “Not me. Not for two years.” The man’s knuckles rapped against a nearby wood table for good luck.

  Sam listened as he kept watching Carter with part of his attention. If the putz got any closer to Kate, he’d be touching her.

  “…believe the price he asked?”

  Sam glanced over. Two more men were making their way slowly down the long table of cut gems.

  “Oh, I believe it,” the second man said. “A big piece of finished kunzite, great color and clarity, and the brilliance. Wow. That took one hell of a fine cutter to pull it off. Kunzite is even more temperamental than emeralds.”

  “But he wouldn’t even consider looking through my inventory for a possible swap.”

  “Try him after the show. If he’s still got the stone, he might feel more like trading.”

  Sam listened and watched as people drifted by in pursuit of a deal that would leave them better off than they’d been before they walked into the room. Nothing unusual about that. Just human nature, impure and not simple at all. That was the good news. The bad news was that no one in the room made his instincts sit up and howl. Most, if not all, of the conversations meant nothing in particular to him. Maybe Kate would be able to drag some wheat out of the chaff of whining and gossip.

  Maybe not.

  A lot of investigative work was a sheer waste of time. It was the nature of the beast. You never knew where a trail would lead until you followed it to a dead end.

  Kate appeared in front of him.

  Carter was about two inches behind her.

  “Cash, please,” Kate said, holding out her hand.

  Sam pulled out the wallet he’d filled with cash. Getting the money had damn near wiped out her bank accounts and his own, because he hadn’t dared to put in a request for FBI undercover funds to establish his confidential informant’s stature on the buying and selling circuit.

  And Kate had made it painfully clear that credit cards and checks weren’t welcome. Cash and carry. Period.

  He handed the wallet over to her without a flicker, as though he didn’t have any money at stake. But while he was doing it, he made sure that Carter got a good look at the weapon harness Kate’s “bodyguard” wore. Maybe seeing the gun would take some of the zip out of the jerk’s joystick.

  With no expression, Sam watched Kate count out bills. When she handed the wallet back to him, he put it away. Two minutes later the rough was wrapped up and stashed in her bag.

  Without saying a word, she went back to the table that held a rough rainbow of colors.

  Sam followed, crowding out Carter just for the pleasure of it. The TV in the corner was running a banner across the bottom: Live from the Scottsdale Royale. Sam gave up on Carter for the moment and eased closer to the TV. There was a medium close-up of an earnest blonde holding her exaggerated lips close to a microphone. He couldn’t hear all of what Tawny Dawn said, but he heard enough.

  “Sources close to the investigation…the Purcells were involved with the South American gangs…plaguing the jewelry trade.” Tawny turned aside. The camera shifted. “FBI Special Agent Mario Hernandez, could you tell us…”

  Sam bit back a curse. Kennedy must have his balls in a twist if he was playing
the old “try the victims if you can’t try the crime” game for the news vultures.

  At least now Sam didn’t have to call Mario or Doug. Not much doubt about what they were going to tell him.

  He still didn’t want to hear it.

  Sorry you got the short straw, Mario. But look at it this way—you’re learning how to handle TV reporters.

  Carter made his move on Kate, closing the last two inches of space between them. About three seconds later Sam stepped hard all over Carter’s loafers.

  “Watch it!” Carter said angrily.

  “Stop crowding her,” Sam said in a voice only Carter could hear.

  The man might have been pretty, but he wasn’t stupid. He took one look at Sam’s eyes and backed off all the way to the other side of the room.

  Sam resumed watching and listening to the men milling around while Kate looked at a piece of deep blue rough. She went through four different loupes from her bag, examining the rough as thoroughly as she could without a microscope. Then she put the rough down and shook her head.

  “I asked to see only natural rough,” she said distinctly.

  The sound level in the room dropped.

  “I’m sorry, Ms….?” the Butterworth employee said.

  “Collins,” Kate supplied.

  “Ms. Collins, you’re mistaken. This is a fine Burmese blue, untreated. I have the certificate to prove it.”

  The employee reached into a drawer beneath the case. A moment later he pulled out a piece of paper with a Swiss lab certification of 43.7 carats of blue sapphire from Burma. He slapped it down in front of Kate.

  She read it with the kind of speed that said she’d seen a lot of gem certifications.

  “Very nice,” she said evenly. “There’s just one problem.”

  “Really. What would that be?” the employee asked. His voice said he didn’t believe her.

  Though no one moved closer, everyone was quiet, listening. It wasn’t uncommon for a stone to be questioned, but it was always interesting when it happened.

  “Untreated Burmese blue with origins as described in that certificate would have pyrrhotite inclusions,” Kate said evenly. “I haven’t found any hint of them with even my 40x loupe. Perhaps you could point them out to me?”