by Sarah Atwell
“Em, so what? We can’t handle this—we’ve got to call the police. Talk to Matt—he’ll know what to do.”
“Damn it, Cam—Matt told me to stay out of this. Not that anything we’ve done, or haven’t done, led to this.” I hoped. I certainly couldn’t see what it was.
“I don’t care—I’m calling 911. I’ll call from the shop.” Cam started for the door.
“Don’t think that’s a good idea, mate.” At the sound of a new voice I must have jumped a foot into the air, and Cam stopped in his tracks. I turned to find that yet another man had walked in through my useless back door.
“Who the hell are you?”
I’d never seen him before in my life. Fifty plus, I’d guess, although his heavily tanned skin made it hard to tell. Middle height, wiry but well muscled. And was there a slight accent? Nessa’s visitor . . . ? “You with those other guys?”
“Not exactly. I’m Frank Kavanagh.”
Cam and I exchanged glances. “Who?” I said, bewildered.
“That’ll take some explaining.”
Abruptly I came back to the reality of the situation. “Well, you’ll just have to wait—we’re calling the police.”
“I wouldn’t do that. Won’t make the lads too happy.”
“What, you were listening at the door? You know them? Why didn’t you do something to stop them?” I could feel my anger building, glowing like my own glass, red-hot.
“Two of them, one of me—and they had a gun. But they don’t want her—they want the stones.”
“I told them, I don’t know anything about any stones,” I said through clenched teeth. “But we have to help Allison.” This strange man’s lack of concern was annoying me.
“They won’t hurt one of their own. They just want the diamonds—they figured they paid for ’em, right enough.”
I wanted to scream, or to cry, or to hit something. I curled my hands into fists, fighting for self-control, and the angry tears in my eyes made the shards of glass on the floor twinkle. I blinked away the tears. The shards still twinkled. Poor Chad—he really wasn’t having any luck with his frit technique, and now the thugs had destroyed his efforts.
But . . . I walked toward the smashed glass on the floor, carefully avoiding stepping on any bits. I studied the fragments, then squatted and picked up one of the larger ones and looked at it in the light. Chad had tried to replicate the technique of rolling the shaped piece in chunky frit, then heating it again so the frit fused with the glass, but only partially. Some of the pieces of frit on this piece had done just that, but there were others . . .
Cam was staring at me as though I had gone nuts. “Em, what the hell? This is no time for housekeeping!”
“Just a sec.” Moving like a sleepwalker, I went to the shelf, skirting the pile of glass, and located a small crucible. I placed the shard in it, then with a pair of long tongs stuck it in the glory hole, and waited what seemed like an eternity. Then I pulled out the crucible and set it on the bench, picked up a pair of tweezers, and poked around the softened glass. I extricated something and held it up to the light.
A diamond. Rough but clearly crystalline, rudely faceted, a diamond that twinkled dully even in the filtered studio light. “Is this what they were looking for?”
Frank grinned. “Spot on. Only there should be a lot more of ’em.”
I looked around the studio, then walked over to the bench where Chad had been working the day before. He had tidied up, but he’d left the can of coarse, clear frit out on the bench. I sifted my fingers through the contents, and found more of the crystalline shapes. No frit on earth looked like this. “Here,” I said flatly. “And there.” I gestured at the pieces scattered on the floor. “I know there were no diamonds last week when I used this. Chad made those pieces yesterday, so I’d have to guess that dead Jack dumped them there before he was killed. So he was alive when he came in.” I shut my eyes for a moment, willing myself not to think about his horrible death.
I turned to Frank, who looked amused by the goings-on. “Frank, we have to talk.”
Cam sputtered. “Em—what about Allison, and the police? We can’t just . . .”
“Cam, I think we need to know a little more before we can help Allison. And Frank here says they won’t hurt her. Why is that, Frank?”
“She’s one of them—Jack’s widow, or that’s how they’ll see it. They don’t hurt women and children.”
Cam looked incredulous, but I ignored him. “And who might ‘they’ be?” I admired my own calm.
“The Irish Mob, out of Chicago. Jack’s gang—at least, it was.”
“Ah,” I said. I was sure that made sense to someone, somewhere. “Why don’t we go upstairs where we can be comfortable? Oh, maybe we should sweep up the diamonds first.” I looked down at the mess at my feet. “Frank, you seem to know what’s going on. How much are we talking about?”
“The diamonds, you mean? Market value, maybe half a mil, U.S. Legal market, that is.” He grinned.
“My. Well, then, we really should sweep them up— carefully.”
“I’ll do it,” Cam volunteered, grimly. I let him. He needed something to do right now—something that didn’t involve charging after armed thugs, or dragging the police into the whole mess. Frank said Allison was safe; we knew where the diamonds were. What we needed now was a plan.
“What do I do with the pieces?” Cam asked, holding a loaded dustpan.
“Put them in a bag, for now. I’ll have to think about how to extract them from the glass, and that’ll take a little time. We can worry about that later.”
When Cam had methodically stowed the pieces of glass in a sturdy bag, and then double bagged it, just to be on the safe side, I led the procession up the stairs to my home. Fred and Gloria came surging forward, then stopped when they identified a stranger. We all stood for a moment, taking each other in. Then Fred advanced and sniffed Frank’s shoes. Frank squatted easily and held out a hand. Fred sniffed again, then sat. Not smiling, but not hostile either. Frank had passed the first test.
I walked into the living room and gestured. “Sit. I don’t know about you, but I need something to drink. You guys want anything?”
Frank had taken a seat, and the two dogs had stationed themselves on either side of him. Okay, they still weren’t quite sure about him, so they were going to keep an eye on him. Fine with me. “Beer?” he said, looking hopeful.
“No problem. Cam?” When Cam shook his head at me, looking impatient, I went to my fridge and fished out a bottle of beer for Frank and an iced tea for me—I’d been working all afternoon, and maybe it was the depletion of fluids that was making me light-headed. It couldn’t possibly be the two murders and a kidnapping that I was involved in. So, iced tea: I wanted to keep my head as clear as possible, and I was worried even that wouldn’t be good enough to make sense out of this.
I handed Frank the bottle, then took my own chair. “Okay, explain.”
Chapter 16
incalmo: the technique of joining two or more bubbles together to form one larger piece (Edward T. Schmid, Advanced Glassworking Techniques: An Enlightened Manuscript)
Frank was in no hurry. He took a long swig of his beer and settled himself more comfortably in his chair. Damn him—he looked like he was planning for a long visit. “Right. Introductions are in order, don’t you think? I gave you my name. Now, how about yours?”
Fuming inwardly, I spat, “I’m Emmeline Dowell, and this is my brother, Cameron. I own the glassblowing shop and studio downstairs and live up here. Cam is just visiting. Can we get on with this?”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Emmeline. I’m from Australia—New South Wales, if you know the place—in case you haven’t figured that out. I’m involved in the diamond industry there. How much do you know about Australian diamonds?”
In spite of the seriousness of the moment, I laughed. “Take a look around. Does it look like I’m the diamond type?”
“Point taken. For your informati
on, Australia is currently the largest single supplier of diamonds in the world. The first big deposit was discovered in 1979—West Kimberley region, to the west. Really big, it was. Still is—turns up more than a third of the world’s supply. Pretty much split between industrial quality and what we call near-gem quality. The ones you’ve got there are high-end, nice ones.”
Frank took another long swallow of his beer. Damn him, he looked completely at ease, and it just didn’t seem right to me. He went on as though he was giving a lecture to a bunch of kids. “So we’ve been scurrying around the country ever since looking for more. And finding them. Big business, really big. Big money. And not a lot of, shall we say, supervision?” Frank grinned. He paused to make sure I understood his hints.
I did—and I really didn’t care. “Fine, great. But what’s that got to do with us? With Allison?”
I think he was enjoying torturing us, because he didn’t answer the question directly. “So I gather that Jack Flannery is dead?”
“Jack is very dead,” I replied grimly. “Somebody stuffed him into my glass furnace downstairs. Based on what we just saw, he had the diamonds on him, and he hid them in a hurry.”
“The lad showed a bit of brains every now and then. Not often enough, though.”
“WILL . . . YOU . . . PLEASE . . . GET . . . ON . . . WITH . . . IT?” I was beginning to look for something to hit him with.
“Right. Jack’s been with the Irish Mob in Chicago, see? Been their man for years, first in Boston, then in Chicago.”
“Why do you know this?”
“I’m getting to that, aren’t I? Give me a chance. Jack’s married to Allison, right? I’m Allison’s uncle, on her mother’s side.”
I processed that. At least his odd accent was explained: Irish with an Australian overlay. “Does she know you?”
Frank shook his head. “No, hard luck. I haven’t been back to Ireland in more than twenty-five years, and barely saw her then—lovely little thing she was, though. But her ma kept in touch, wrote me up until she died. So I knew Allison was in the States, knew she had married Jack Flannery, moved to Chicago.”
I was beginning to see glimmerings of light. “But Allison’s mother died a couple of years ago, so you weren’t up-to-date on the details. Like the fact that Allison had left Jack.”
He beamed at me. “Too right. So, let’s take a step back. The gang in Chicago was looking to—how shall I put this?—diversify their business interests. They needed to do a bit of juggling with their profits, and being sharp and educated boys, they investigated a broad spectrum of options, including trading in diamonds.”
He’d lost me again. Luckily Cam had been following the conversation and turned to me. “Money laundering. They trade in diamonds and they can cook the books, making it look like they paid less than they did, then they sell them at an inflated rate and claim the profit as legitimate.” He turned back to our guest. “How’d they connect with you?”
“Family ties, my boy. Like I said, I’ve been doing a bit of mining in New South Wales—whole new market. There are plenty of opportunities there. Not exactly legal, but not exactly illegal either. So, the guys in Chicago and I came together a while ago, and we’ve been working together quite happily. Jack was the front man on their end. We’d done a few deals, no problems. Then Jack up and says he wants to do a bigger deal. And I say, grand, how much? And we set a price.
“But this time I thought maybe I should handle things myself, and maybe visit my sweet niece along the way. So I arrive in Chicago, and Jack and I meet up, and we take care of business. And then I say, when am I going to see your lovely wife? And he gives me a cheesy grin and says, let me check with the little missus, and we can set a time. I go back to my hotel, and I wait for him to call me. And I wait. And then I call the number he left me—no answer. So I talk to a few of the other guys, and what I hear is, they’re none too happy with our boy Jack. Seems he never brought the diamonds back to them, and he’s fallen off the map. Aha, I say.”
Frank drained his bottle of beer and held up the empty. Wordlessly Cam retrieved it from him, went to the refrigerator, found another, and handed it to him. He looked grim. I probably did too. This was all over my head.
“Ta, mate. Well, then, I rang off and had a think. Something was rotten. I could have walked away—after all, I had my money, and the local boys could settle with Jack in their own good time. But there was Allison to think about, and Allison was family, and I didn’t want Jack to drag her down into whatever he was up to. Besides—I wanted to know if she’d turned out as pretty as her mother. So I started nosing around, and that’s when I found out Allison hadn’t been around for a while.”
I studied the man in front of me. He looked scruffy and nondescript, but his looks were obviously deceiving. He had arrived on unfamiliar turf in a foreign country and had managed to find out some things that had stumped even the FBI? My respect for him went up a notch, and I felt obscurely comforted. Maybe he could find a way out of the mess we were in. “How? I mean, how did you know how to find out, who to ask?”
“Can’t give away all my secrets, can I? Let’s say I’ve got a lot of friends, in more than one country. Besides, our late friend Jack wasn’t too careful when he took to the road—bought himself a plane ticket, rented a car, all with his own credit cards. To be fair, I figured he probably thought he’d find Allison, drag her back to have a happy dinner with me, and send me on my way, none the wiser. He didn’t count on being gone so long, and his pals back home got nervous. They sent along a couple of guys to look him up.”
I held up a hand. “Hold on a minute—why did he bother? Why didn’t he just tell you the truth? You were business partners, right?”
Frank dug at the label on his bottle with a chipped thumbnail. “Maybe he figured I’d walk away if I knew how he’d treated Allison, and he didn’t want to risk it. And he was probably right—I can sell my diamonds to a lot of blokes, but I’ve got only the one niece. Family trumps profit any day, and he knew that.”
So Jack had overestimated his own abilities—and apparently underestimated Allison’s, if she had covered her trail so well. He had thought he would collect her without any trouble. He had been wrong—and paid the price. But now it was up to us to make sure that Allison didn’t, and in my mind we were an unlikely trio of rescuers.
“Okay, I think I’m with you so far. Jack had the diamonds. He didn’t leave them in Chicago, but brought them along with him, thinking he’d wrap things up fast. And then he ended up dead. But the diamonds weren’t on him, they weren’t in wherever he was staying, and they weren’t in the car he was driving, so the bad guys thought maybe Allison had them. Then they searched Allison’s place and came up dry. And then they decided to come after me, here. Maybe they thought Allison had told me something, or given me something. So it’s the Chicago goons who have Allison at the moment? Because they think I know where the diamonds are, and they’re using her for leverage?” Well, they hadn’t been right before, but they were now. I had the diamonds. But what was I supposed to do with them?
“Right. They got tired of waiting—like they said, they wanted the diamonds, or they wanted their money back. They had no trouble following Jack, and I kind of tagged along, keeping an eye on them—from a distance, of course. I don’t think they’ve figured out that I’m Allison’s uncle—different name and all. And I doubt Jack would have mentioned it to his pals. Probably wanted to claim all the glory for setting up such a sweet deal.”
Cam finally ran out of patience. “Great, fine, wonderful. So now you’re in town, and the Chicago Mob is too, and they’ve got Allison. What are we going to do about it?” I cheered silently for Cam.
Frank smiled at me, ignoring Cam’s outburst. “Sweet on her, is he?”
Cam stiffened. Poor baby—he really didn’t know how obvious it was. “What’s the difference? She’s been kidnapped by killers! We have to do something, not sit around talking about the diamond industry.”
Before
Cam could embarrass himself further, I answered Frank. “Look, I’m the one who took Allison under my wing. She walked into the shop one day looking like she really needed a friend, and things sort of happened from there. Jack tracked her to Tucson, and she thought she saw him—in fact she did. He must have followed her back here with me, hoping to catch her alone when she left. Except that I took her home, so he didn’t have a chance. Anyway, I feel kind of responsible.”
Frank gave me the first serious look that I’d seen from him. “I thank you for that. She’s done nothing but bring you trouble so far, but she’s a good girl and deserves a better deal than that bastard Jack handed her.”
“Frank, what do we do now?” Cam was as close to boiling over as I had ever seen him. “You don’t come up with an idea right now, I’m calling the cops and telling them the whole thing.”
When he answered, Frank’s voice had taken on an edge. “Young man, you really want to see Allison caught in the crossfire here? The boyos from Chicago are feeling really itchy. They’re away from home, they’re frustrated, and they’re not too bright. You think the cops and the Feds are going to fix this? Hell, it’ll take a day just to convince them there’s a problem here. Just sit down and listen. I’ve got a few ideas of my own.”
Finally! I agreed with Cam: We needed to do something, and the sooner the better. I didn’t like the idea of Allison being held out there somewhere by a bunch of Irish hooligans with guns. But unfortunately, before Frank could launch into his plan, there was a knock at the door.
The humans froze; the dogs trotted over to the door expectantly. Then Frank reacted quickly. Without saying a word, he nodded toward the back. I nodded in agreement and watched as he disappeared into the bedroom— not before snagging his bottle of beer. Then I looked at Cam. Cam had absolutely no talent for hiding his emotions, and he looked equal parts furious and terrified. I didn’t feel much different.
