Chocolate Diamonds (Jill Quint, MD, Forensic Pathologist Series Book 2)

by Peche, Alec

  Fifteen minutes later, the four women left the hotel to walk to the restaurant that was three blocks away. After the brief walk, they were seated on the second floor of the restaurant. They had a view of the street because the table next to them immediately adjacent to the window was empty. It was nice that they could see the activity on the street without being directly in view from the window.

  A friend of Nick’s owned the restaurant, and Nick was to be seated downstairs where he could monitor anyone approaching the second floor. Nick had helped his friend with the security for his restaurant, thus he knew the layout and entry and exit doors. Equally important, the food was excellent – a great example of Dutch cooking. Marie's hunger would be satiated by the end of the meal.

  The meal was delicious and uneventful. Once they finished they proceeded downstairs to discover a lively bar. The plan to return to the hotel and do some more research on the diamond consortium went out the window in an instant, and they sidled up to the bar. Nick and Angela even found time to dance together motivated by other patrons taking to the dance floor.

  Two hours later, doubtful they could have passed a sobriety test, they weaved their way back to their hotel. It was only three blocks, and they didn’t think anything could happen in such a short distance. They hadn’t been bothered since that morning’s incident.

  Nick had been wondering when the women would give up and return to the hotel. It was a long day and he had been hyper-alert since the morning all day. His restaurant owner friend was tending bar that night, and enjoyed the company of the women. Additionally, regular patrons had also been engaged talking to them. This was not a restaurant that catered to tourism so generally it was mostly all Dutch patrons. The women were attractive, amusing, and fun to talk to so he couldn’t blame his fellow man for enjoying the moment. To make matters worse, two of the patrons followed American football and so there was a long conversation about the Green Bay Packers. Finally, the women looked ready to leave.

  Nick approached the bar and asked his friend, “Max, do you want to join me in escorting the ladies back to their hotel?”

  Max did a quick assessment and determined that his bar could survive without him for thirty minutes. He had two other bartenders working, who seemed more than capable of keeping up with his patrons.

  “Sure, just let me grab my cell phone.”

  The men left the bar, following the women about half a block back. Nick had briefed Max on the situation with the women before he had booked the dinner reservation.

  When they started down the second block, an industrial van turned onto their street and seemed to pace the woman.

  Nick had a bad feeling and said to Max, “That van looks suspicious; let's get closer to them.”

  The two men took off jogging as Nick yelled, “Angela! Jill! Jo! Marie! Run!”

  The woman had a slow reaction to the words, but when they looked over their shoulders and saw the van with its door open and Nick and Max, running toward them, they took off in a sprint. Three of the four women routinely ran five-kilometer races and the fourth quickly realized she might be running for her life.

  Nick and Max had quickly closed the gap and reached the women at the same time as two men who had jumped out of the moving van. Nick saw the first assailant pull out a gun from the back of his waistband. Before the kidnappers could take aim, Nick executed a roundhouse kick, knocking the gun to the street, and followed that with a sweeping kick, which sent the man to the ground.

  The four women had the other man surrounded and were swinging their purses at the man’s head. He was so busy ducking the constant purse swings making contact with his head that it interfered with him reaching for his gun. Max pulled the gun out of the assailant’s pants while the women kept him occupied. He got a few punches in at the second man and he toppled to the ground.

  It appeared that the third man in the van was not going to come to the aid of his buddies. He was waiting for them to get up and run for the van, but they stayed on the ground, so he sped away as sirens in the distance got closer. Angela took a picture of the van, including its license plate, just in case it would be helpful later.

  The police were rolling up as Nick and Max detained the two men until the police arrived to take them into custody.

  Shortly, Inspector Graaf from Interpol arrived to join the party. “If you ladies had done as I asked and left the country, you wouldn’t have been attacked tonight.”

  “If we had left, perhaps you would not have gotten these two men who I suspect are on your most wanted list,” replied Marie to the inspector.

  “Look, do you want a license plate number for the van or not? There is still a third suspect out there,” said Jill.

  Jo was quietly watching the scene with a kind of detached feeling about her.” How did the men know we would be on this street at this time? They came from another street. They didn’t follow us from the restaurant.”

  “I’ll check your purses for a tracker,” said Nick. “I didn’t see these two gentlemen at the restaurant or bar so I think you are right that they have another way to keep tabs on you.”

  “Ask the police to question them about surveillance during their interview.” Jo would have asked them herself but the men were already in the back seat of the police car, so she couldn’t.

  Jo was usually the most laid-back of the group. She was excellent at forensic financial research, but had stayed on the sidelines in any case they’d thus far. This was the first time she and Marie had been put in harm’s way, thanks to this Laura Peeters case. With her friends and her own life at risk, she was taking a very active role in the case. It was a side of Jo that Jill had rarely seen.

  About forty-five minutes after they left the restaurant, the women were able to enter their hotel, completely sober after their experience. Nick escorted them up to their suite and he made a call to his office to get some laptops sent over.

  Later the women sat in a circle in the suite’s living room with Nick, computers in hand. They divided up their research, with Nick helping Jo with any translations of the financial information in Europe and South Africa. Nick could read the language of the data, and Jo knew how to interpret it once it was in English. Jill went back to studying Laura Peeters. Marie and Angela split up the diamond consortium members. Once Jo got the hang of the reports’ translations and what column headings meant, then it was all about the numbers. Nick began his own search on the two men in custody. The plan was that everyone would do research for half an hour, taking notes on relevant information, with the plan to share it at the end of that time period.

  After the half-hour had passed, Jill spoke. “Let’s start sharing what we found. I’d like to do this in an organized fashion. How about if we start with a brief bio on the person followed by whatever we found on social media, and the financials of all of these persons of interest. Does that sound like a plan?”

  Everyone nodded approval.

  “Nick, why don’t you start with our two men who were arrested tonight?”

  “Sure. The man that you took down with those mean swings of your purses is named Kenneth Lee Akselrod and he is also the man that fired the dart at Angela earlier today. The other man was Jan Storms – the same guy that followed you two days ago. They are both on Interpol’s list of most wanted, so even if they are not charged with trying to abduct you ladies, they will have to answer to other charges.”

  “Did you find anything more about them? Did Interpol share their information with you?” asked Angela.

  “Yes, Officer Graaf did email a list of all the crimes they are wanted for and descriptions of those events. They have been on the most-wanted list for at least a decade. They are what I believe you call in your country ‘guns for hire’, or in this case, burglars for hire. They are not connected to any murder or kidnapping attempts up to this point. Their prior alleged crimes are connected to moving precious stones, and burglary. Interpol attributes a total of thirty crimes between the two of them.”

&nb
sp; “I wonder if they were trying to kidnap us or do some greater harm in their actions tonight?” Marie said.

  “Hopefully we will know more after the police interview the two gentlemen. Let's move on to the diamond consortium,” said Jill.

  “I investigated the individual companies, while Marie looked at the consortium as a whole. I’ll do some more research on the members, but nothing really stands out so far,” Angela reported.

  “The diamond consortium is composed of six companies, each with an equal stake. Diamond thievery is a common problem costing the companies millions. About 40 percent of the stolen diamonds were stolen by the workers themselves. The other 60 percent was attributed to Laura Peeters,” said Marie.

  “Wow!” exclaimed Jill.

  “How could one person steal so many diamonds?” questioned Jo.

  “I think I might have the answer to that, or at least the beginnings of the answer to that question, but let's continue with the consortium,” responded Jill.

  “Five of the six consortium members were South African companies and the sixth was Russian. They have mines in South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, Russia, and Democratic Republic of the Congo and produce two-thirds of the world’s diamonds. The consortium was formed almost twenty years ago when diamond mining began in Canada and Australia and they were worried about competition in new parts of the world. Between these new sites and routine losses in the mines, their profits were flat.

  “At first they focused on marketing strategies to keep their diamonds as the most coveted. They worked with the diamond institute in Antwerp to make sure their diamonds were given the highest rating of clarity. Diamonds are diamonds and there is no such thing as one part of the world having more clarity than another, but as a strategy it worked for a decade, before independent gemologists outside of Antwerp began questioning the claims in journals like Science and National Geographic magazines. As near as I can tell, this clarity rating allowed the consortium to demand prices that were 25 percent higher,” explained Marie.

  “Was this falsely high rating of diamonds occurring when Laura Peeters worked in Antwerp?” asked Angela.

  “We’ll need to compare the dates, but it is possible that she was one of the gemologists that marked up the clarity during part of that decade. After the clarity was clarified, no pun intended, the consortium again was facing declining profits as they had lost the 25 percent mark-up that they had been enjoying, so they next turned to reducing losses at the mines themselves. Remember that the mines were losing some of their diamonds to the workers, so they installed cameras and x-ray machines, which helped reduced theft. Labor was plentiful and cheap, so as they discovered miners that stole, they would fire them and replace them with someone new. My research doesn’t say anything about if they collect the workers’ excrement to recover the diamonds.”

  “Yuck,” the three women said simultaneously.

  “The clarity scandal was followed by the problem with conflict diamonds. The mere thought that any diamond coming from Russia or South Africa could be a conflict diamond made some consumers look more favorably on Canadian and Aussie diamonds. The consortium suffered losses, as they were either paying warlords off or had reduced demand for fear of where the stones were mined. So the consortium worked to create a United Nations agreement, called the Kimberley Process, which was mostly window dressing for the problem,” said Marie finished with her synopsis of the consortium.

  “So what don’t we know?” asked Angela.

  “What is Laura Peeters’ role in all of this?”

  “Did the consortium hire the men who attacked us, and if so, why are we the target? What do they think we know? Why do they want to kill us?”

  “With the two men in the custody of the Dutch police, are we safe to travel to Brussels and revert to being tourists?”

  “What is the money, power, or sex motive in this case? How does that motive lead to us being a target?”

  “How did Laura Peeters manage to be such a skilled diamond thief?”

  “What is the consortium up to financially? What are the actions they are presently pursuing?”

  After they exhausted themselves posing questions they did not have answers to, they gave up on that fruitless effort to return to discussing the results of their research. Everyone had reported out except Jill. It was time to look at Laura Peeters.

  “I’ve been working on her seven aliases. Laura Peeters was her real name. She seemed to use three names at a time, eventually killing off an alias after about five years. Laura was born in Mechelen, which is fifteen miles outside of Antwerp. Both her father and grandfather were certified gemologists, so it’s probably natural that she went in to that occupation. Her parents were killed in a bicycle accident when she was ten or so and then she was raised by her grandparents. Her grandparents have since passed and she seems to have had no siblings, aunts and uncles, ex-spouses and children. She killed off her original name nearly fifteen years ago, but wanted us to know it.”

  “Had she become a diamond thief while her grandparents were still alive?” asked Angela.

  “Good question. Give me a moment to look that up.”

  After a brief pause and a little keyboard typing, Jill had her answer.

  “Her first theft was two months after her grandfather died. Interesting timeline - perhaps after her grandfather’s passing she no longer felt any loyalty to her profession.

  “Interpol has the most detail on her first crime. It seems likely that she had been planning it for at least six months prior to that first theft. That guess on my part is based on when she set up her first alias.”

  “So her first theft wasn’t a single raw diamond? You would think it would be very tempting to start small,” Marie commented.

  “Actually, Interpol commented on that theory as well. The steal-a-raw-diamond-one-at-a-time theory seems to be the way most thieves are caught, including another woman working at the same gem house as Laura. So she had good reason to know that technique would quickly fail. I think that when she made the decision to steal, she went for the whole enchilada - or safe, in this case.”

  “So how did she pull the theft off?” asked Jo.

  “She replaced the raw diamonds with cubic zirconia for a week. She had a vacation scheduled for the following Monday which was also the start of a national holiday. When the first jewelers called irate that they had been sent CZ instead of diamonds, the switch was discovered the following Tuesday. Meanwhile, she had successfully switched the diamonds for CZ for a week thus walking away with the large dollar value of diamonds. The CZ stones had the exact weight as the raw diamonds. Her desk where she examined, rated, and certified diamonds was on camera. She was so skilled with sleight-of-hand that the police had to have a computer study the film to pinpoint where she switched diamonds each time. She actually lasered a serial number on the CZ stone. Meanwhile, she had her stolen diamonds certified and easily dumped them on the wholesale market.”

  “So why didn’t she just quit there? Twenty million euros is more than the average person needs in a lifetime,” commented Angela. “She could have retired to the Australian Outback and enjoyed her earnings.”

  “Her motivation seemed to be mission-driven. Since she couldn’t stop the mining and sale of blood diamonds, she turned her attention to making the lives of those miners better. Don’t get me wrong, she lived an elegant life; she didn’t give every penny back to the miners. Interpol speculates that she got plastic surgery immediately after the first heist. The pathology report states that she changed her nose, cheeks, and jawline. She was a natural brunette, made blonde, and she was wearing brown contact lenses that covered up her blue eyes. She hid in plain sight, perhaps even staying in Antwerp. Certainly staying in that city would keep her close to the diamond business. It was the best way to monitor how well the mines were producing, what the consortium was doing, and keep current with the new technology gemologists were using.”

  “It seems like the first theft was somewhat easy
,” said Jo. “Laura just had to master the hand motions and find the perfect weight of CZ to replace real with fake. How did she carry out the second theft?”

  “She pretty much used the same methodology all the time. She copied information from her employer before she left. Specifically, she had a list of some two-thousand diamond wholesalers worldwide. She visited their showrooms and asked, as many customers do, to see raw diamonds, where she would proceed to substitute CZ stones for the diamonds. She would ask for a particular carat and carry that same carat on her so she could make the substitution.”

  “This sounds like it hurt the diamond stores rather than the consortium members,” commented Jo. “I also recall you said that her calling card was piece of chocolate left at the scene of the crime. Where does that come into this story?”

  “It has taken me a while to run down that Interpol statement about Laura as I couldn’t figure out the chocolate thing either. Laura did steal from some private diamond owners. The other piece of information she took from her employer was a list of fifteen to twenty wealthy individuals who had commissioned special diamond items directly from the consortium members. These were things like chandeliers, ball gowns, tiaras, etc. Again, these diamonds could be resold since as a gemologist, she could verify their province and change it if necessary. In the case of these small items, she did one theft a year, which gave her a lot of time to plan. She clearly knew where the item was located, and had to know what the security system was as she always managed to keep any image of herself off cameras. It was these private residences where she left a piece of chocolate, and that was the only way the theft could be attributed to her.”

  “Perhaps anyone who owns a ball gown with real diamonds deserves to have it stolen. What a waste of money,” said Jo. “I guess that is what happens to your judgment when you have too much money to blow through in this life. I am liking Laura’s style more and more. Is there any proof that she stole from the diamond shops, or is that just speculation?