The Color of Death (13 page)

Several of the cops shifted uncomfortably. Everyone in the room had enough experience to know that the chances of a quick solution to a professional hit were very small.

Kennedy had just selected Sam and Mario to take the fall when the case wasn’t solved in time for the six o’clock news.

Royale parking lot

Noon Thursday

Sam had more experience
with the media than Mario. When the on-scene director called for yet another makeup break, Sam didn’t even shift his feet.

Mario tugged at his tie and said out of the side of his mouth, “I thought this was ‘live’ television news.”

“We’re breathing, aren’t we?”

“I won’t be much longer if that reporter’s perfume doesn’t lighten up.” Mario sneezed for the fifth time in as many minutes. “Does she swim in it before she goes on camera?”

The corner of Sam’s mouth kicked up. “Nobody told her that TV may stink but it doesn’t smell.”

Someone straightened the TV reporter’s suit collar, powdered her nose, and tucked in some stray blonde hair. The reporter swapped sexist jokes with one of the technicians until the director gave the signal. Instantly, grave concern replaced the humorous leer on the reporter’s face. She checked her notes and faced the camera squarely.

“This is Tawny Dawn reporting live from the parking lot of one of Scottsdale’s most exclusive hotels, where a shocking double murder
has just taken place. The terrible details are still unfolding, but we’re here to bring you what we’ve learned by questioning people close to the case.”

She turned to Sam. “You’re Special Agent Sam Groves with the FBI.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Then to Mario, “And you’re Mario Hernandez, a detective with the Phoenix PD.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Behind the camera, the director sighed but didn’t interrupt. There was plenty of time to edit out overlaps with the other “live” interviews she’d done with the two cops.

“You’re both part of the crime strike force that is gathering evidence against the gangs who target couriers,” Tawny said.

Both men nodded and wondered why in hell their boss had decided to spread that fact all over the TV news. Maybe Kennedy was angling for a segment on
America’s Most Wanted
.

“Were these murders part of your investigation?” Tawny asked.

Mario struggled not to laugh at the badly worded question—
Yes, ma’am. We always kill people in the course of our investigation. That’s why we’re called a crime strike force
.

Sam didn’t crack a smile or miss a beat as he fed meaningless phrases to the TV reporter. “We can’t be certain. We’re investigating all possibilities.”

Holding the mike between herself and the two men, Tawny leaned closer and tipped her face up to them earnestly. “Mr. Groves, what can you tell us about this tragic double murder?”

Sam didn’t even flinch at being reduced to a civilian mister. He’d learned long ago that TV was a prime example of “their marbles, their schoolyard, their rules.” He and Mario were sacrificial goats for the titillation of breaking-news junkies. Screw facts. Sensation was all that mattered.

“We’re still gathering evidence, ma’am,” Sam said. “It would be premature for me to divulge any details of the investigation at this time.”

“What were the names of the victims?”

“The names of the victims are being withheld pending notification of next of kin,” Sam said.

Mario sneezed.

“Keep going,” the director said. “If he sneezes again, make it a close two-shot with Tawny and the other one. We’ll clean up the sound later.”

Mario’s sideways look at Sam said,
Live, huh?

Sam’s look said he’d done it all before.

“But surely you’ve arrived at some conclusions as to the manner of death?” Tawny asked.

“Unexpected,” Sam said without inflection.

Mario turned a laugh into a sneeze.

Tawny’s eyes narrowed. “Have you any explanation as to why the FBI agents who were less than a hundred feet away didn’t hear anything?”

“The crime strike force motor coach is heavily soundproofed.”

“But still, less than a hundred feet! Surely the victims screamed for help?”

Not with duct tape over their mouths.
“We’re questioning other people who might have been nearby,” Sam said.

“Did anyone hear anything?”

“Not so far as we know.”

“Was robbery the motivation?” she asked.

“We’re investigating that possibility very closely,” Sam said with a total lack of emphasis.

“Was anything missing?”

“We’re investigating that too.”

With her back to the camera, Tawny rolled her eyes. This agent was about as interesting to interview as a dead fish. At this rate she’d be lucky to get twenty seconds in a network feed.

“They’re bringing out the bodies,” one of the techs called.

Instantly, the camera swung toward the two slack sacked up corpses being hauled out on stretchers and then put on gurneys for the short ride to the waiting ambulance.

“Do your intro again,” the director said.

Without being told, Tawny stepped away from the two cops so that the first camera could shoot the scene behind her while the second one would keep her in a close-up.

“This is Tawny Dawn, reporting live from the parking lot of…”

Sam yanked off his tie and walked away to question the crime techs who were still in the trailer. If sweet Tawny needed anything from him, she’d have to splice it together from the first five interviews.

Glendale

Thursday night

Kate glanced out the peephole
of her front door, then started opening locks to let Sam in.

“You look like hell,” she said.

“Comes from interviewing clients of recent corpses.”

“The Purcells?”

Sam shut the door behind him with his heel and shot the bolts before the thirty-second grace period on Kate’s alarm system ran out. “How did you know?”

She waved toward the TV set in the living room.

Though the sound was muted, Sam didn’t have any trouble placing the scene. Beneath a pitiless sun in an unshaded parking lot, two sacked up bodies were being loaded into an ambulance. The camera zoomed in for a close-up, saw no blood, and drew back to focus on the immaculately painted, suitably solemn face of a young blonde female who looked like she’d started life as a Barbie doll and would end it as a cosmetic surgeon’s wife. Her well-painted lips moved. Words crawled across the bottom of the screen.

Sam and Mario, freshly shaved, wearing suit and tie and white shirt, were standing behind the reporter, looking officially impassive.
It had been a hard act to pull off while explaining how a motor coach full of FBI agents hadn’t tumbled to two murders going down a stone’s throw away.

“She pronounced Mario’s name like a native Spanish speaker,” Sam said. “Is her name really Tawny Dawn?”

Kate shrugged. “You’re the one who talked to her.”

“Like I had a choice.” He gritted his teeth against a yawn.

“What really happened?” Kate said. “And don’t give me the same line of condescending bullshit you gave to Tawny baby.”

“Mike Purcell was bound with duct tape, carved up some around the genitals, thighs, and neck, and then murdered. Apparently, the wife was an accident. Couldn’t breathe much through her nose and couldn’t open her mouth because of the duct tape wrapped around it. It took a while, but she suffocated. Probably after her husband bled out next to her in bed.”

Kate ran her hands up and down her arms.

“Chilly?” he asked sardonically. “Turn off the air conditioner.”

Her head came up. She started to take a chunk out of him for being cold enough to freeze a stadium, then saw all over again how weary he looked.

Interviewing corpses.

“Your job sucks,” she said.

“It has its moments,” he agreed. “You got any coffee?”

“Is that what CIs do?” she asked lightly, trying to shift the mood. “Keep their agents in coffee?”

Instead of smiling at her joke, he turned back toward the front door. “Forget it. I’ll—”

“Of course I have coffee,” she cut in, putting her hand on his arm to hold him back from the door. “There’s a pot in my workroom, if you don’t mind using my cup. The dishwasher is full and I haven’t—”

“Right now, I’d drink coffee out of a dirty shoe.”

She didn’t have to lead him to the workroom; he knew exactly where it was. Another muted television was on in that room. Interviews with people who had walked through the employee parking
lot last night seemed to be a specialty. Tawny was flogging it hard to lead the six o’clock news.

Sam glanced away and hoped that tomorrow wasn’t another slow news day. He really hated talking to earnest young things who were trained to look horrified one moment and segue into a chirpy sign-off the next.

He poured himself a cup of coffee, drank it down in two long gulps, and poured another, trying to wash away the taste of the bloody crime scene.

“Sit down before you fall down,” Kate said, shoving one of her rolling work chairs at him.

“Thanks.” He sat heavily and finished off the second cup of coffee. “Sure tastes better than the crime scene or the morgue.”

She stood close to him, uncertain of what to do. This was a side of Special Agent Sam Groves she hadn’t suspected existed. Worn. Haunted.

Way too human.

“Have you eaten anything today?” Kate asked.

“More than I wanted.” He finished the coffee, rubbed his eyes briskly, and shook his head like a dog coming out of water. He pinned her with hard blue eyes. “I need everything you can tell me about Mike Purcell, especially any clients he had who might be happy to dance on his grave.”

She stared at him.

He waited.

“Like a light switch,” she said finally.

“What?”

“Off with the tired human being. On with the cop.”

“Two sides of the same coin. The cop’s tired too. What about Purcell?”

“I didn’t know him any better than I had to.”

“What did you hear about him?”

Kate took the empty coffee cup, filled it, and drank. “He was the kind of dealer that gives the business a bad reputation.”

“Meaning?”

“Under a different name, he and his wife ran an Internet site that was a scam. Murphy’s Law of Gems. Colored stones for investments. Ahedge against inflation, deflation, war, drought, and hemorrhoids.”

“Interesting,” Sam said, pulling out his notebook. “Nobody else mentioned that.”

“That’s because the site was designed to be a lure for absolute gem amateurs and virgin investors. Then I noticed that the PO box listed at the site was the same as Purcell’s. No one in the gem trade would give the site a second look. The only reason I did was that I searched
every
site on the Internet for sapphires, even the web pages that were set up for gem novices.”

“So he ran a site for amateurs?”

“Worse than karaoke.”

“You’re saying that none of Purcell’s clients in Phoenix at the moment are novices, so they wouldn’t associate Murphy’s Law of Gems with Purcell.”

She looked amused. “ ‘Not novices’ is a gentle way of putting it. A lot of Purcell’s clients and fellow dealers are as, um, generous in their descriptions of their own stones as he is.”

“And as careless about detailed sales receipts.”

“What do you mean?”

He flipped through his notes. “Two thousand carats of mixed Sri Lankan stones, Indian cut. Three kilos of mixed Brazilian rough.”

“Invoices like that aren’t especially unusual.” As she spoke, she pulled a mother-of-pearl clip out of her hair and rubbed her scalp. “Most people think of gems as being scarce and tiny and very valuable. Not necessarily so. Sri Lanka exports zircons and topaz as well as rubies and sapphires. Brazil ships
tons
of colored stones from the Minas Gerais district.”

“Like?”

“Tourmaline, amethyst, smoky quartz, to name just a few. They’re the kinds of stones we used to call semiprecious but now are firmly encouraged to describe as ‘colored gems.’ In the jewelry trade, they’re entry-level goods.”

“So Purcell’s record-keeping was no more slipshod than the next guy?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” she said, shaking out her hair again and rubbing her scalp where it prickled from the clip’s teeth. “Anyone who sells heated, filled, doubled, tripled, glued, diffused, oiled, and otherwise treated stones and doesn’t mention it to the naive customer might be deliberately careless in other ways.”

“Stop, you’re killing me.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Running your fingers through your hair and looking all sleepy-eyed and sexy like you’re thinking of bed.”

Kate’s jaw dropped.

“Was Purcell noted for an emerald specialty?” Sam asked, but what he wanted to do was slide his fingers into her black hair and feel the heat of her scalp beneath his palms.

She closed her mouth, opened it, and closed it again.

“Sorry about that,” he said, taking the cup of coffee from her. “When I’m tired and disgusted with my fellow man, my human side overtakes the cop. But don’t worry. I’m not going to jump your bones.”

She watched him drink from her cup and wondered if he tasted her on the rim. Just as she started to ask him, she caught herself.
Whoa, babe. Unless you plan on tearing up the sheets with SA Sam Groves, you better think before you speak.

What really worried her was that the idea of grabbing him and dragging him into the bedroom made her heart kick hard and her blood light up like a Fourth of July sky. She wasn’t used to having that reaction when it came to men.

It made her edgy.

“Um…” She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “What was the question?”

His smile was slow, very male, and said that he liked knowing he tempted her. “Emeralds.”

“Oh, yeah. Emeralds.” She started to drag her fingers through
her hair, stopped, and wondered what his hair would feel like. “What?”

“Emeralds,” he repeated. “Or sex. Your choice.”

“Sheesh, you really know how to sweet-talk a girl.”

Sam laughed, then looked at Kate straight on. “You’re a woman, not a girl. Quite a woman. The FBI turned loose its finest on you and came up with a profile of a person who is too honest and intelligent for her own good, fiercely loyal to the people she loves, a gem cutter of great skill and growing reputation, and stubborn enough to get herself killed investigating a half brother’s disappearance.”

“Disappearance? I think he was murder—” She broke off when the rest of Sam’s words hit. “The FBI investigated
me
?”

“Yes.”

“To which, Lee’s murder or investigating me?”

“Both.”

Kate went still. For the first time, Sam wasn’t backing away from the idea of Lee as a victim rather than a crook. It should have made her feel better. Instead, she felt hollow all the way to her soul.

She really had wanted Lee to be alive.

She really had been afraid he wasn’t.

For the first time she asked herself if she would feel better knowing, dead or alive.

She didn’t have an answer. All she had was the gnawing certainty that she couldn’t live without knowing. Maybe that was the answer after all. Knowing was better than fearing.

And right now she was afraid.

“What convinced you about Lee?” she asked finally.

“Purcell’s murder.”

“Why?”

“First we go back to the emeralds. I want to be sure of a few things before I…” He hesitated.
Before I drag you into a situation that’s more dangerous than the one you’re in right now
wasn’t the sort of thing an agent dropped in the lap of an informant. “Were emeralds Purcell’s passion or specialty?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“Would you have heard?”

“After I found one of the Seven Sins in Purcell’s case,” Kate said, hitching herself up onto a nearby worktable and letting her legs dangle, “I asked around about Mike and Lois Purcell. No one mentioned emeralds. Quite a few mentioned the gray market in Thailand. A lot of colored gems come out of there, but damn few emeralds.”

Shit.
Sam rubbed the stubble that had already layered over his late afternoon shave. If it wasn’t for his job, he’d have given up shaving twice a day and grown a beard.

“For once I’d rather have been wrong,” he said heavily.

“About what?”

“A South American connection.” He gave up fighting against a yawn.

“I’d offer you more coffee,” Kate said, “but the pot’s empty and you’ve had too much anyway.”

“Worried about me?”

“You bet. Even if I don’t like it, you’re the only one besides me who believes Lee was murdered.” She hesitated and then asked almost violently,
“Why do you believe it?
”

“You’d make a good interrogator,” he said.

“I learned at the feet of a master. Your turn.”

“What master?”

“You.” With that, Kate shut up.

And waited.

Sam held his hands up in surrender. “Before I tell all, ask yourself if you really want to know any more than ‘condescending bullshit.’ A lot of what’s going down around this isn’t pretty.”

She remembered his blunt description of the Purcell deaths. Then she thought of Lee, out in a mangrove swamp feeding crabs. She wanted to cry.

But even more, she wanted to make the person who had hurt Lee cry. The savagery of her need would have surprised her if she’d noticed it, but she didn’t. She was too intent on Sam.

“I can take it,” she said.

He let out a long breath. “Good. It’s hard to protect someone who believes that ignorance is bliss. You sure there isn’t any more coffee?”

“Protect? What are you talking about?”

He didn’t answer.

She handed him the pot from the automatic maker. There was about a tablespoon of thick black liquid cooling in the bottom.

He drank it.

She kept waiting. Silently.

A corner of his mouth kicked up. “Okay. The preliminary background we have on Purcell sounds just like what you found out. He’s probably not a through-and-through crook, but he sure traded gems with some of them. He didn’t ask them any questions and they didn’t tell him any answers. He was questioned a few times by various law-enforcement agencies in regard to missing or laundered gems but never even arrested, much less charged.”

Sam looked regretfully at the empty pot.

Kate didn’t take the hint.

He unplugged the whole unit and walked to the kitchen with it. She was right on his heels. He went to the correct cupboards, pulled out filter and coffee, opened the drawer that held the coffee measurer, and went to work.

“You have quite a memory,” she said, impressed that he knew where everything was after watching her make coffee. Once.

“It comes in handy in my line of work,” he said. “And everything I tell you from here on out is privileged information. You don’t talk to anybody about it but me. Okay?”

“Like I have Tawny’s home number?” Kate asked sarcastically. Then she waved her hand. “Of course I won’t talk to anybody but you.”

Sam filled the top of the coffeemaker with water and plugged the unit in. Then he pulled a dirty coffee cup out of the dishwasher. He didn’t bother to rinse the cup before he put it on the counter. He’d drunk out of much worse containers at headquarters, and in his own office for that matter.

Kate went to the refrigerator and began pulling out food. She knew from experience that too much coffee was hell on the stomach. She piled cheese, fruit, crackers, and some brownies she’d been resisting since yesterday on a plate and put it in front of Sam.

Ignoring the food, he leaned against the counter, crossed his arms across his lightweight jacket, and began talking. “Usually the goods Purcell traded and sold weren’t high end. The other dealers he rented the conference room with wouldn’t have let him in at all, except that he had four quite good gems and one very fine one, and they needed help on the Royale’s stiff rent.”