Diamonds and Blood (Chameleon Assassin Book 5)

by BR Kingsolver

  “David.”

  “David Capozzi?”

  “Yes.”

  “You told him what?” I punctuated the question by shoving the pistol under her ribcage, pointing straight at her heart.

  “A chameleon was asking about Alysia and business.”

  “A chameleon?”

  “I see both the image you project as well as how you really look.”

  “And you described me to David?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “He paid me.”

  “Tell me about the hack on Hotel de Charm.”

  I could tell by her reaction that she hadn’t expected that.

  “I don—”

  I moved the muzzle of the pistol, jamming it hard under her chin.

  “Don’t you dare lie to me. You set me up to get killed. Your chances of walking out of here alive haven’t improved in the last five minutes. No place to go but up, Adrienne.”

  It was a bit difficult understanding her, so I eased up the pressure so her jaw could move.

  “A client paid me.”

  “Names, Adrienne.”

  “Sabrina Kensington.”

  “And the hack on J. Morgan?”

  “That was Sabrina, too.”

  “But she didn’t pay you,” I said. “Not nearly enough to do that kind of job. So, what’s the game? What kind of information was she looking for?”

  “How the hell do you know so much?” she asked.

  “You see through physical personas,” I said, increasing the pressure with the pistol again, “and I see through lies. I’m starting to lose my patience. Start talking or I’m going to leave your body here on the floor.”

  She broke. She said she knew Sabrina Kensington from when they went to school together. Sabrina had a scheme working that she said would pay off big and offered a large cut—a million credits—when it came down. Sabrina had always come through in the past, so Clarissa trusted her.

  Clarissa hacked the two computer systems searching for information on Sonia Morgan, Sonia Kensington, Michael Morgan, and Janice Boulanger. As long as she’d hacked the systems, Clarissa figured she could make a little money, so she downloaded the transactions and sold them.

  Clarissa was also long-time friends with Geraldine Parker, and Gerry had approached Clarissa months before about finding an outlet for diamonds. That wasn’t something Clarissa knew about, but over time she developed a suspicion that David Capozzi was selling diamonds that Alysia and Gerry mysteriously acquired. So, when someone in disguise came sniffing around, Clarissa saw an opportunity to make one last score off the dead women and told David about me.

  “Where do I find Sabrina?” I asked. “And don’t tell me to look in the damned phone book or I’ll hurt you.”

  “I don’t know. Honestly. She’s been moving around a lot. She stays with a guy in the northeast sometimes.” Clarissa gave me an address in the mutie part of town. I wondered if Wil would be able to find it.

  When she finished, I pushed a jet injector against her neck and filled her up with enough sleepy juice to knock her out for hours. Then I searched her, took her purse, and left her lying there in the hallway when I wandered back to where I’d left Wil and Tom.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I told Wil, appropriating his drink and downing it, hoping to wash the bad taste from my mouth left by my interrogation of Adrienne-Clarissa.

  “So, what did you find out?” Wil asked as we drove away from Safari.

  “It appears David Capozzi is the mystery man who was marketing the stolen diamonds,” I said. “Interesting situation. David is selling stones stolen from his father’s business partner.”

  “Okay. And is he the one littering the town with bodies?”

  I found myself shaking my head. “I don’t know. He could be trying to eliminate witnesses, but would he or anyone else have known that Alysia and Geraldine would be with Savatier?”

  “The wife could have been an accident,” Tom said, “or she could have been the target. The gossip around is that young Capozzi prefers men.”

  “But we don’t have any real evidence against him, do we?” Wil asked.

  “Not unless you’re up for searching his house and office,” I said. “If you find any of Morgan’s diamonds, you’ve got him.”

  “And if we don’t find any evidence, I’ll have pissed off Benito Capozzi big time.”

  “So, search him, too. He’s probably got a few pounds of gemstones sitting around.”

  Wil rolled his eyes. I got the impression he wasn’t too hot on the idea of irritating the Capozzis.

  The occasion was Carmine Capozzi’s eightieth birthday, and his entire family and all his minions gathered at the grand ballroom of the Queen Elizabeth. I didn’t receive an invitation, so I decided to entertain myself.

  Benito Capozzi’s mansion had a fairly sophisticated security system, but not up to the capabilities of the systems corporate bigwigs invested in. He made up for that by having a large force of thugs on duty around the clock. Half of that force had relocated to the Queen Elizabeth for the evening.

  I hadn’t been able to lay my hands on the house blueprints. One of the standards for mobsters seemed to be ownership of a construction company. Of course, there were blueprints on file with the Chamber and the local building codes department, but I about choked when I looked at them. The house in the blueprints was, in reality, the servants’ quarters—a building tucked out of sight between some tall trees and the outer wall at the back of the property.

  When I arrived at Benito’s mansion that evening, I made a circuit around the outer wall and discovered that a party was going on in the servants’ quarters. With a quick peek over the wall, I could see that some of the guards were in attendance.

  I blessed Lady Luck and blurred my form as I approached the wall around the estate on the side closest to the house. Scaling the wall wasn’t difficult. Dropping to the ground, I hugged the wall for a few minutes to see if I had set off any alarms. No one came to investigate, so I slid along the wall, then dropped to the ground and crawled to the house. Out in the open like that, someone looking directly at me might see a blurry motion if I was standing up and wouldn’t see anything that might be behind me. Much harder to see me when I could blend in with the grass in the dark.

  Having a large security force and a staff of servants meant the alarm system was always turned off. I climbed the wall to a second-floor balcony and let myself into the darkened room through an unlocked window. Night vision goggles showed me a girl’s bedroom—probably that of one of Benito’s two teenage daughters.

  Figuring the last place I would hide diamonds was in a girl’s bedroom, I moved out into the hall and began checking the rooms on either side as I worked my way along. The door at the end of the hall was locked, but I quickly picked it. The suite beyond was large enough that I figured it to be the lair of Benito’s wife.

  The safe in her closet held several high-end pieces with a J. Morgan mark. I assumed Benito and Joe Morgan met first in the customer-salesman capacity. Morgan would have known Benito by reputation, and anyone approaching a mobster with a multi-million credit scheme would get an audience.

  The safe in the smaller closet filled with men’s clothing also held some expensive jewelry, mostly tie bars and cuff links. Nothing that was incriminating. That meant there was another safe, probably in an office.

  I could hear people moving around when I reached the first floor, and lights were on in the kitchen and some other rooms. Sliding slowly along the walls, I went looking for a room that looked like an office.

  It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I was in the wrong part of the house. Dining room, kitchen, laundry, reception room, parlor, and a number of other public rooms filled up the main body of the house on the ground floor. The farther back I went, the more people I had to dodge as I entered the servants’ work spaces.

  Backing out of that section, I tried a hallway leading to the east wing. There I fou
nd a nursery, a play room, a glass-walled conservatory on the south side, filled with plants, and an exercise room. Considering Benito’s physique, I assumed he didn’t hang out there very often.

  That left the west wing, the basement, and the third floor. I had already been in the house over an hour and was starting to feel as though I was pushing my luck. When one of the guards turned a corner and came within inches of touching me, the anxious feeling intensified.

  I eventually found an office in the west wing, but my search of the room didn’t turn up a safe. But there was a heavy steel door on a closet with the kind of lock normally found on a safe. I disabled the lock and opened the door to find a spiral staircase leading down. Even with my night-vision goggles, the hole faded into black past a few rungs of the metal stairs.

  Looking around, I saw a light switch. Figuring there wasn’t anyone down there—and who would put an alarm on a light switch—I flipped it on. A light came on in the ceiling above me, and in a room far below. I checked the door and made sure it opened from the inside, then eased it shut.

  I had been inside Benito’s mansion for almost two hours, and he had been gone for three hours. Assuming that Carmine’s dinner would last at least three hours, I figured I had another hour before Benito came home to discover me and started down the stairs.

  The small room at the bottom was carved out of the rock, the walls unfinished and bare. Four lights hung from the ceiling, revealing a table and a chair and two doors. One of the doors was the kind used for bank vaults; the other was a steel door with a keypad lock like the one upstairs.

  I took the easy door first, disabling the keypad and opening the door. A long tunnel barely high enough for me to walk without bending over stretched out before me. I assumed that was Benito’s emergency exit, and that I had found my way out of the mansion.

  Turning to the vault, I pulled a couple of tools out of my bag and set to work. The combination turned out to be six digits, and it took me forty minutes to figure it out. Luckily it didn’t have a time lock like most banks used.

  When I finally swung the door open, a light came on inside, and I walked in. Shelves lined all three walls, some with drawers. I searched, finding a drawer with printed photographs, and another with cataloged audio and video chips. I wasn’t terribly curious about them, assuming they had blackmail value or evidence of corruption by Montreal Police and possibly Chamber officials. I snapped pictures and moved on.

  Eventually I found what I was looking for. Five exquisite pieces of Leslie’s jewelry with eye-popping gemstones, and three bags of Morgan’s diamonds. I took pictures of all of it, especially the jewelry. Closing the door, I found I had to go back up the stairs to turn off the lights. That done, I flipped on the night-vision goggles and descended the stairs again.

  Crossing to the tunnel, I entered it and closed the door behind me, noting that it couldn’t be opened from that side. I counted my steps as I walked along. At step three hundred, I encountered another door. Armed with my pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, I blurred my image and pushed the door open. I was in a small, round concrete room with a metal ladder attached to the wall. A metal grate covered the top, some twenty feet above me.

  The grate was hinged on one side, with a latch on the other. I pulled the latch, pushed the grate up, and found myself surrounded by dense bushes and tall trees. The faint trace of a trail led me out into a park. A hundred feet away was an area with children’s playground equipment, and the concrete paths winding their way through the grass were punctuated with occasional benches. No one was around that late at night, so I nonchalantly headed off in the direction of the nearest metro station.

  Chapter 24

  “What am I looking at?” Wil asked the following morning when I pushed my tablet across the breakfast table.

  “The inside of Benito Capozzi’s secret vault.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Libby. You know I can’t use anything you found in there.”

  I grinned. “All you need is reasonable suspicion to issue a search warrant, and I have a plan to get that. But take a look.”

  He paged through the pictures I’d taken, then stopped. “What’s this?”

  My grin grew. “Benito had a number of photographs. I took pictures of some of them.”

  Wil was looking at the chief of Montreal Police, dressed in a regular suit and sitting at a table with Benito. The series of photographs showed the chief taking a payment card and tucking it away.

  Wil raised his eyes to me.

  “Don’t you think Monsieur Chief Lefebvre will flip if you show him these? And with his testimony, you can search Benito’s home. And down in that vault, are bags of Morgan’s diamonds and Leslie’s jewelry.”

  I could almost hear the gears grinding in his brain. “Leslie’s jewelry? Why would he have that?”

  “Ya don’t suppose that David’s connection to sell the diamonds could be Benito, do you?” I asked with a smirk.

  The light went on. “Benito didn’t give a damn if people were stealing from Morgan as long as he made some money off it,” Wil said.

  “There is no honor among thieves, you know. And thieves at Benito’s level are also missing morals, ethics, mercy, and any other virtue you’d care to name. He was probably making more off the diamonds David brought him than those he got from Morgan. Morgan had costs, but Alysia got the diamonds for free.”

  Wil gave me a sour look, then went back to looking at the pictures on my tablet.

  Two hours later, Chief Marcus Lefebvre of the Montreal Police Department walked into Chamber of Commerce headquarters for an ‘urgent meeting’ with Wil. I wasn’t invited, but he met with Wil and the local head of Chamber security. They walked out three hours later, and the chief looked the worse for it. He had taken off his coat and tie, and his shirt showed sweat stains in spite of the air conditioning. His hair was limp and messy, and his facial expression was that of a man who had faced his fate and didn’t like what he saw.

  Two Chamber guards took the chief and led him to an elevator. Wil looked at me and gave me a thumbs-up sign.

  A couple of hours later, I led several Chamber tactical officers through the park to the metal grate that led to Benito’s underground escape tunnel. I showed them the latch that unlocked the grate, and we talked a little about the tunnel. After a few minutes, helicopters swooped down on the Capozzi estate.

  “Have fun, boys,” I said with a smile. “I think I’m going to be needed at the big house.”

  Humming one of Nellie’s songs, I set off across the park in the direction of Benito’s mansion. I really didn’t want to be there when Wil presented Benito with a search warrant, so I took my time. Knowing the type of person who became a mob thug, I was pretty sure some idiot would pull a gun and things would get nasty.

  Sure enough, I was halfway to the mansion when I heard gunshots. I pulled out my pistol, blurred my image, and walked slower. One of the copters swooped low over the compound and cut loose with its machineguns. When it pulled up, an eerie silence followed. All the shooting had stopped.

  When I reached Benito’s front gate, a dozen Chamber tactical troops stood at the ready. I presented my ID and was passed through. The first thing I saw were five bloody bodies laid out in a row. The next thing was the damage to the front of the house on the left side. Broken windows and the pockmarks of high-velocity bullets on the walls.

  On the other side of the compound, Chamber forces guarded about thirty men and half a dozen women, all sitting on the ground. I walked through the front door and found that Benito’s family sat under guard in a large parlor.

  “Miss Nelson?” an officer approached me.

  “Yes.”

  “Director Wilberforce is in the office.” He pointed toward the hallway. “Go all the way down to the end.”

  I thanked him but didn’t mention that I already knew the way. When I got there, I found Benito raging at Wil, the local Chamber Security head, and the acting Montreal chief of police.

 
; I cringed. Attracting the attention of a mob boss—any mob boss—was something I studiously avoided. But before I could back out of the room, Wil called out to me, interrupting Benito’s rant.

  “Ah, Miss Nelson. Please come in.” He turned to the others. “Miss Nelson is a security specialist on contract with the Chamber.” Turning back to me, he said, “We have a few locks that I’m hoping you can help us with. Mr. Capozzi seems to have forgotten the combination.”

  Wil pointed to the steel door with its combination lock keypad.

  I promised myself that I would torture him until he swore he would never do that to me again. The last thing I wanted was to broadcast my ability with locks, and he’d just done that to both sides of the law.

  But it was a little too late to have that conversation, so I turned to the door. I blocked what I was doing from sight with my body, pulling out my phone and reading my email for a few minutes while I randomly punched the buttons on the keypad. When I figured I’d taken enough time that they would think I’d done something technically whiz-bang, I shorted out the lock and opened the door.

  “Well, well, well,” Wil said as he strolled over and looked down at the stairs. He looked around, found the light switch, and flipped it on. “Whatcha got down there, Benito? Is this where you dispose of the bodies? Alligators? An acid bath?”

  He turned to a couple of the tactical guys and motioned them toward the stairs. Weapons at the ready, they cautiously started down the stairs. After a minute, one yelled, “Clear!”

  “Shall we go see?” Wil asked, and started down the stairs.

  The local Chamber chief said to Benito, “After you, Mr. Capozzi.”

  I followed after everyone else, and when I reached the bottom, the small room was rather crowded. They were all examining the vault door, but I went to the door to the tunnel. After shorting it, I swung the door open, and the men in the room all switched their attention to the tunnel.

  “Oh, my,” Wil said. “Now we know how you duck out when your creditors come around.”