Rarities Unlimited 04 - The Color of Death

Doe patient that doesn’t know his own name.”
    “They’re sure?”
    Kate didn’t answer. Norm’s words had been more a cry for hope than a real question.
    “Call me the instant you hear anything,” she said.
    “You too.”
    She cut the connection and let her own tears come, grief and fear mixed together, shaking her.

Chapter 4
    Scottsdale, Arizona
    Five months later
    Tuesday morning
    9:30 A.M .
    Heart pounding, Kate looked over the crowded conference. She tried not to think about the eerie mechanical voice on her answering machine, telling her that she would die if she didn’t stop asking questions and trying to find out what had happened to Lee Mandel, why no one had seen him, why he hadn’t called anyone, even the older sister who had always loved him no matter what a handful he was.
    But she’d kept asking anyway. Just more carefully. She’d focused on the missing gems rather than on the brother she was afraid she’d never see again.
    She watched the room with dark eyes that had seen a lot of people yearning over a lot of gems. No one glanced back at her, not even the man leaning against the far wall, a heavy show catalogue in his hands and a shuttered expression on his face. Except for him, everyone was poring over the gleaming wealth laid out beneath glass.
    The real show wouldn’t open for days, but some nice goods were already on public display. The preshow booths were a kind of dress rehearsal featuring the dealers who couldn’t, wouldn’t, or hadn’t been invited to pay the stiff stall rentals for the main show. A handful of these excluded merchants had pooled their money to rent alarge conference room off the lobby of the hotel for the week before the main show. Purcell Colored Gems was one of the second-tier merchants that had set up a booth.
    Yesterday Kate had seen one of the Seven Sins on display there.
    The Purcells hadn’t been helpful when she’d asked where the gem came from, but she’d found a way around them. Now all she had to do was make sure they didn’t find out.
    Breathe slow and deep, like you’re making the first cut on a piece of really good rough.
    The silent advice didn’t slow Kate’s heartbeat, but the thought of shaping colorful rough material into brilliant, eternally dreaming gems did the trick. Working with rough stone always calmed her. She didn’t know why. She just knew it did.
    That’s the way, she told herself. Slow and steady. This is the easy part.
    She had good hands. She’d always had them, even when she was only eleven and entertaining neighborhood kids by pulling pennies out of their ears.
    Breathe slow and move fast and be grateful the emerald-cut Sin didn’t turn up in one of the private showings in a dealer’s room. That would have been much harder to pull off.
    Quietly, Kate let out another long breath and stepped into the conference room. The booths spread out in front of her belonged to the second- and third-tier gem dealers and jewelers. Even so, the booths were a universe away from the crowds of bead and gimcrack sellers haggling and sweating on the clogged public parking lots where temporary open-air booths had been set up beneath the desert’s blazing April sun.
    Inside Phoenix’s newest, most luxurious hotel-spa, all was tranquil, cool, and lightly scented with flowers. If Kate’s sensitive nostrils also picked up the oily, pervasive smell of greed wafting through the conference area, it didn’t offend her. Shortly after she’d had her first period, she’d realized that the presence of gems made some humans sweat. The fact that she could look at gorgeous jewelswithout thinking in dollar signs gave her an edge over a lot of people in the trade.
    She shook down the long sleeves of her raspberry silk jacket, felt the small weight poised just above the edge of her left palm, and took a last slow breath.
    I’ll make those FBI bastards listen, Lee.
    I swear it.

Chapter 5
    Scottsdale
    Tuesday
    9:32 A.M .
    Sam Groves leaned against the Scottsdale Royale’s expensively papered wall and thumbed through a catalogue of upcoming attractions that would appear when the real gem show got under way. The catalogue was thick enough to take several days to read, but long before that he would have moved on, changed his clothes, put on a hat, and altered his profile. Simple enough disguises, because most people were simple. Especially with all the colored pretties scattered around. Like big tits, big gems often had a negative effect on the