Diamonds and Blood (Chameleon Assassin Book 5)

by BR Kingsolver

  “You know where she’s going next, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Assuming she didn’t find what she wanted here, to Bistro Atlantique,” Wil said.

  I winked at him. “I always tell people you’re more than a pretty face.”

  He pulled out his phone and started issuing orders.

  “Wil?” He held the phone away from his face and gave me a questioning look. “The place is probably open for business,” I said. “Tell them to let in anyone who wants to go into the restaurant but do a thorough search of anyone who leaves.”

  He nodded and went back to talking into the phone.

  The other half of the duplex looked untouched, though having never seen it before, I couldn’t be sure. It took me half an hour to find Leslie’s safe, and thirty seconds to crack it. When I opened it, with Wil breathing down my neck, I found two of Morgan’s gem bags, several pieces of finished jewelry, and a diary. I handed the gems and jewelry to Wil and pocketed the diary.

  Chapter 13

  Around the corner from Bistro Atlantique, Wil and I saw Sonia Morgan walking down the street. I did a double take at her unusual attire. Sonia always wore designer dresses, but her style was usually very conservative, and she came off as rather dowdy. That afternoon she was far more fashionable, with a fitted, ruffled white top and tight black trousers. The look was slimming on her, and she even appeared to be several years younger. I wondered who managed to convince her to try something different.

  She hesitated in front of the bistro, and I thought she was going to go in, but she looked around, then continued walking down the street.

  I entered the restaurant wearing my rich-bitchy-lady persona—fiftyish, overweight, fancy dress and pearls, all glued together with an overly entitled attitude. The maître d wasn’t enthralled with the attitude and punished me by seating me at a small table next to the kitchen. For my purposes, it couldn’t have been more strategically located. Wil wasn’t dressed for the occasion, so he had gone around the back to enter through the kitchen.

  It’s not easy hanging out in a restaurant during lunchtime for two hours. I dawdled. Nothing pleased me. The wine was off, and it took three bottles before I found one that satisfied me. I sent the appetizer back because the capers were too dry. I sent my steak back because it was overdone, then again because it was too rare. I didn’t like the chocolate in the first dessert, or the crust in the second. The coffee wasn’t fresh, and I demanded they brew a fresh pot. By the time the restaurant closed at two-thirty to clean up and get ready to re-open for dinner at six, the staff was ready to kill me.

  Wil emerged from the kitchen as the staff ushered the last customer out, and together we launched an assault on Ricard’s office. The keypad lock on the door was mechanical instead of electrical, and it took me a few minutes to dismantle it.

  Ricard’s safe was much easier. Once I had it open, I reached in and pulled out the prize.

  “Well, well, look what we have here,” I said as I turned around. The yellow gold necklace had three large emeralds, a twenty-five or thirty carat center stone with four half-carat white diamonds on either side, and two ten-carat side stones that were perfect matches for the ring I found in Eileen’s purse. The gold work also matched the ring.

  I turned the necklace over and found Leslie’s mark on the back.

  “How much?” Wil asked, as he always seemed to with jewelry or art.

  Pulling a small black light out of my bag, I put the necklace back in the safe where it was dark and shined the light on it. Of course, that was a pretty rough test of whether the emeralds were real, but considering the value of the gold work, I was willing to go out on a limb.

  “Somewhere between fifty thousand and a million for the necklace,” I said. “It depends on how the stones grade out. But you have to realize, those stones are unusually large. You don’t just take a necklace like this down to your local pawn shop and walk out rich. Anyone you offer it to is going to want proof it’s not stolen.”

  When we finished, Wil informed the manager that Ricard was dead. I left a huge tip when I paid my check and made a mental note to never use that persona at that restaurant again. Assuming the place ever reopened for business. Ricard wasn’t married and had no children.

  One thing I had to say for Montreal—the local chefs had decadence down to a science. Foie gras poutine should have been illegal, and might have been in other places, for all I knew. Together with Le Sommet’s best pinot noir and Nellie’s singing, I was in heaven. In fact, I was so wrapped up in the experience that Wil sat down beside me and stole a huge bite of my meal before I even realized I’d been robbed.

  “Hey! What are you doing? That’s my dinner.”

  He grinned at me and said, “That necklace and ring were logged in the inventory of J. Morgan’s Montreal store. Big upset over there when I told them I had pieces in my possession that they thought were in their vault.”

  I stared at him, dumbstruck, and didn’t even try to stop him as he took another bite.

  “They let a necklace like that walk out the door?” I asked. “What the hell kind of security is that?”

  “Sort of looks like it. Question is, how did Ricard end up with it?”

  Wil’s phone rang, and he answered it. He listened for a few minutes while I surveyed my plate and discovered he had eaten most of my poutine. Then Nellie plopped down in the chair on the other side of me, picked up a fork, and started devouring what was left. I gave up and signaled for the waitress.

  I heard Wil say, “Are you sure?” Then he listened some more. When he finally hung up, he said, “Morgan’s vice president insists they still have the necklace and the ring.”

  I thought for a couple of minutes. “I wonder how many copies she made.”

  “Huh?”

  “Leslie had her own studio,” I said, “but that wasn’t where she made that necklace.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  I shook my head, “Nope. Nobody in their right mind would just hand a half-lycan freelancer a half-million credits in fine emeralds and let her walk out the door. I don’t care who she was banging. She would have a workshop where she did her work for Morgan within one of his facilities—inside the walls of corporate security. But she could have made a second necklace at home with stones worth a fraction the amount and pulled a switch. We need an expert to take a look at both necklaces. My bet is, we have the valuable one. I’m not a certified gemologist, but those stones look damned good to me.”

  “Damn.” Wil pulled his phone out again. After his call, he turned to me. “Explain how this scheme would work.”

  “Just like copying a painting. The idea is to substitute the imitation for the real thing, then sell the real one.”

  “You said the necklace we found was real, but Morgan’s people aren’t stupid. They’re the experts on jewelry.”

  “Both necklaces are real,” I said. “The raw gold is the cheapest part of the jewelry. Leslie’s work, her skill and artistic ability, is what makes the setting more valuable than just the metal. Now, whether you set emeralds worth fifteen thousand credits per carat or emeralds worth less than a thousand credits per carat in the gold makes all the difference. To a casual glance, without having anything to compare it to, the lower quality piece looks great. But to the thief, she’s just exchanged a stone worth thirty thousand credits for one worth half a million.”

  “She could have been doing it for years,” Nellie said. “You wouldn’t start a scam like that with such a high-end piece.”

  I nodded. “And if Morgan caught her at it, that would give her a reason to kill him. A half-lycan would have the strength to drive that spear all the way through him.”

  Wil scrunched his brow and stared off into the distance. “So, how did her sister and Ricard end up with it, and who killed them? And who killed Leslie Desroches and Savatier? Remember the bag of gems we found in his safe? Not to mention the bag in the hall. How many pieces does this puzzle have?”

  He had a point.
r />   “Someone we don’t know about was involved,” Nellie said. “If Libby has the scam right, then someone had to sell the stolen jewelry. When Morgan died, that unknown person decided to clean up loose ends. Maybe Leslie Desroches wasn’t the murderer, and Morgan was the first loose end.”

  She stood up. “Well, I’ll leave the puzzle stuff to you geniuses. I’m going to go shake my ass and sing a song. Thanks for the poutine.”

  Sonia Morgan came in later that evening. I was disappointed to see she had reverted to her usual wardrobe. I pondered that even normal people could be chameleons and wondered if she was putting on some kind of act with the way she presented herself in Montreal. If so, which one was the real Sonia?

  Later that evening, after the club closed and everyone had gone to bed, I found myself lying in bed awake. Something was tickling in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t seem to catch it. Something someone had said was connected to another thing from somewhere else, but I couldn’t latch on to either one, let alone connect them. It took me a couple of hours to finally fall asleep, and I still hadn’t figured out what was bugging me.

  Chapter 14

  When I logged on to check my email the following morning, I realized that I had never listened to the recordings of Savatier and the women having lunch. So, while Wil went off to deal with Morgan’s gem experts and the duplicate necklaces, I listened to a lot of boring conversation while I did my nails and waited for Nellie to wake up. I had four different recordings, and at a whim chose Leslie’s to listen to.

  About half an hour into the session, Alysia and Geraldine excused themselves to the ladies’ room. That’s when things got interesting.

  Jacques: “I certainly hope that Ricard can move that necklace. I’m getting so tired of those two.”

  Leslie: “Yes, they make me nervous. Alysia’s contact is far too close to the conduit Joseph was using to dump his excess diamonds. And that whole organization creeps me out. I never wanted to get involved with them. I mean, look what happened to Joseph.”

  Jacques: “Have you heard anything about how Joe was killed? The cops are being awfully close-mouthed about that.”

  Leslie: “No, but they said that poor Richard was shot in the back of the head. An execution.”

  It took me a second to remember that Morgan’s chauffeur was named Richard, and I almost missed what Savatier said next.

  Jacques: “You didn’t tell me. How did you get those stones?”

  Leslie: “That last night, the night I spent with Joseph, Eileen had just come back from Sierra Leone. He had a dozen bags just sitting on his desk. He hadn’t even put them away yet. He was just so damned casual about it all. Hell, each of those bags was worth ten million, and he just left them lying around. I said something to him about it, and I could tell it irritated him. He picked a bunch of them up and told me to grab the rest. We took them into the vault and put them there, then he closed it up. But I stuck a bag in my purse. He didn’t even notice.”

  Jacques: “That’s taking quite a chance.”

  Leslie: “Well, I was pretty tipsy. The next day, when I looked at the bag, it scared the hell out of me. But then he got killed. I’ll be glad to put them in your safe. Do we really have to have sex with them?”

  Jacques: “You know Alysia expects it. If we don’t, she’ll pout, and right now I don’t want to do anything to throw her off. The situation with the cops and those Chamber investigators sniffing around is very fragile. But if Ricard comes through, we can use Joe’s death as an excuse to shut down the operation with her.”

  The next sounds were of Alysia and Geraldine coming back to the table. After I finished listening to the rest of the recording, I went back to listen to that ten minutes from Alysia’s bug. Other than Geraldine bitching about Leslie and not wanting to have sex with her, and Alysia jabbering excitedly about having sex with Leslie and Jacques, there wasn’t much to learn. Alysia’s mysterious contact remained a mystery.

  Nellie finally dragged herself out of bed, and I talked Tom into going out to brunch with us. I called Wil, and he said he would meet us. I was curious to see if Ricard’s restaurant was open for business, but when we arrived, it had a closed sign on the door.

  I was prepared for that contingency and steered us to an Irish pub around the corner. Even Tom couldn’t complain about a full Irish breakfast.

  When Wil arrived, he sat down, shook his head, and said to Tom, “Are they ever wrong?”

  “Only when it comes to their taste in men,” Tom answered with a smirk. “You didn’t bet anything with them, did you?”

  “No, I’ve learned that lesson.”

  “What were we right about this time?” Nellie asked.

  “The necklace in Ricard’s safe and the one in Morgan’s inventory. The gold work is basically identical. The stones are slightly different in size, but the quality of the stones is radically different. The appraiser put the price of Ricard’s piece at six hundred and fifty thousand, while the one in their inventory was forty-five thousand. The stones in Ricard’s piece were given to Leslie to create the necklace in their shop about five months ago.”

  Tom guffawed. “If you ever want to change sides, Director Wilberforce, just have these two design a scam for you. Individually, they have the most devious and illicit imaginations of anyone I’ve ever met. Together?” he shook his head. “We’re all lucky they don’t have global conquest ambitions.”

  Nellie smiled and winked at Wil. “We’re still young.”

  The automat started spitting out our meals, and we sorted out all the plates. I keyed in an order for more coffee and put my cup under the nozzle.

  “Just because I haven’t asked this before,” I said while my cup filled, “have your people found any interesting fingerprints or other forensic evidence at any of the crime sites?”

  Wil shook his head. “Possibly interesting, but the way things have happened, not sure any of it is useful. Leslie Desroches’s fingerprints were found in Joseph Morgan’s apartment, but not in the room where he was killed. Two other people’s fingerprints were found in that room, one was a woman who works for him, the other is unidentified. The employee was in Europe on her honeymoon when Morgan died.”

  “Unidentified? Who in the hell hasn’t been fingerprinted?” Tom asked.

  Nellie chuckled. “They didn’t have my prints until I signed that contract with Entertaincorp. Caused a stink ‘cause they couldn’t find me in the Chamber database.”

  I smiled. “Muties, for the most part. Those completely outside corporate society. Morgan had a mutant kink. He was doing a foursome with Savatier, a lycan, and a half-troll the evening he died.”

  Wil nodded. “Anyone who has had any contact with the corps or the Chamber has been fingerprinted, but otherwise we’d only have your prints if you’d been arrested.” He sighed. “We didn’t find those prints at any of the other scenes. Savatier’s apartment had so many prints we can’t even sort them all.”

  “We’ve heard he threw a lot of parties,” I said. “What about the Desroches house? I got the impression they weren’t the hostessie types.”

  Wil chuckled. “We found your prints, Ricard’s, those of the two sisters, and their mother’s.”

  “There you have it,” Nellie said. “Libby is the key to the whole plot. Catch her, and you’ll solve everything.”

  I ordered another round of drinks, then played the conversation between Jacques Savatier and Leslie Desroches. When it finished, I looked around the table. “Any thoughts?”

  Tom was the first one who spoke. “Mob.”

  Wil studied his face, then turned to me and said, “You really think so?”

  “My take is the same as Tom’s. Capozzi. What other connections would Alysia Capozzi have? And she’s bringing Benito’s mistress in as well? It stinks of low-level mob contacts.”

  “Play back that part about Morgan again,” Wil said. “What Desroches said right at the beginning.”r />
  I knew the part he meant, so I keyed it and watched my friends’ faces as Leslie’s voice said, “Yes, they make me nervous. Alysia’s contact is far too close to the conduit Joseph was using to dump his excess diamonds. And that whole organization creeps me out. I never wanted to get involved with them. I mean, look what happened to Joseph.”

  In the silence that followed, I gave Wil my best raised-eyebrow expectant look.

  He gave me a sardonic grin in return. “Benito Capozzi and I are not strangers. I grew up in this city. I went to school with his younger brother. I would have no problem believing that he and Morgan did business. It would explain how Morgan was getting the gems into Montreal without paying the Chamber transaction taxes.”

  “Morgan was important enough to warrant attention at Benito’s level,” I said. “What would the taxes be on a hundred million credits in diamonds?”

  Wil shrugged. “Ten percent.”

  “And from what I can tell,” I continued, “Eileen was traveling to Sierra Leone every month. But any gems she might have been skimming, and the jewelry switching that Leslie was doing, were minor amounts in the overall scheme. The sort of thing Alysia and Geraldine could make spending money with. The question is who did Alysia know who would take the risk for her?”

  Chapter 15

  The dream was pretty weird. Mountains of emeralds and diamonds with bloody-red streams running through them. The path I walked on sparkled like crushed diamonds. The soundtrack was pretty strange, too, like the ring tone of Wil’s phone.

  “Yeah? What the hell?” I heard Wil’s voice. “Aw, shit. Yeah. Where are you? I’ll be there in forty or fifty minutes.”

  “What time is it?” I mumbled, awakening enough to separate dream from reality.