Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

savagely. That’s the way it is.
    After ten years he should have learned that fighting the inevitable only wore him out. He might as well fight gravity by pretending that someday he would flap his arms and fly just because he wanted it so bad.
    But he still kept wanting, still kept trying to fly. Still kept crashing.
    “Go forward again, Kyle.” Lianne frowned at the screen. “That leaves forty percent of thousands upon thousands of oysters unaccounted for in terms of pearl production.”
    “Closer to seventy,” Kyle said. “He was hiding more than he was admitting.”
    “Were the experimentals all opalescent black pearls like the one you showed us?” Lianne asked.
    Archer forced himself to focus on his sister-in-law’s clear, whiskey-colored eyes instead of on the indigo eyes that haunted and condemned him simply for being what he was. “From what Hannah has said, yes.”
    “Then where are the pearls? Surely all of them couldn’t be as perfect as the ones in the necklace you described. Some of them had to be less valuable, even a noncommercial grade.”
    “Hannah told me Len ground those to dust.”
    Lianne’s eyes widened. She shifted against Archer’s knees, trying to balance against the freewheeling, agile twins she was carrying.
    Absently Archer widened the space between his legs just enough to reach through and rub Lianne’s lower back, relieving the stress of pregnancy.
    “Thanks.” Sighing, she leaned into his long, soothing fingers. “They’re in kick-boxing mode today.”
    Kyle looked up, grinned, and put one hand on his wife’s stomach. He loved feeling the heat and urgency of life growing in her. “Want to go back up on the couch?”
    “Archer and the floor are more comfortable. Your couches are too tall.”
    “Nope, you’re just a Munchkin,” Kyle said.
    Lianne shot him a sideways look from under thick, black eyelashes. “This Munchkin dumped you on your butt the last time we got on the exercise mat together.”
    “You had just told me we were having twins!”
    “Excuses, excuses. A little more down and to the left,” she said to Archer. “Ahhhh . . . ”
    “Let me know if I push too hard.”
    As an answer, she made murmurous sounds of pleasure and leaned into the massage. But her mind was still working. “So Len launders pearls to keep the Australian government off his back. Chang gouges Len on the illegal goods to the point that Len barely has enough to survive on and keep Pearl Cove going. Sounds like Len had more reason to kill Chang than vice versa.”
    “That’s not the way it happened,” Archer said. “Chang wasn’t even at Pearl Cove when the cyclone hit. As far as I can find out, neither were any imported surrogates.”
    “Surrogates?” Lianne asked.
    “Hit men,” Archer said succinctly.
    “As in the Red Phoenix Triad?” she muttered. “God knows they have a full roster of killers.”
    Kyle remembered when Lianne had been the target of triad assassins. He ran his hand down her arm as though to assure himself that she was alive. “What about the Aussies?” he asked. “They have my vote as the guy on the ramming end of the knife that got Len.”
    The memory of Broome’s impromptu morgue flashed in Archer’s mind, Len’s body so white, so still, so cold, the bruised mouth between his ribs grinning . . . .
    “Why would the Aussies kill Len?” Lianne asked.
    Archer shoved the memory down into the darkness along with other, similar memories. Too many of them. Bitterly he acknowledged that Hannah was right. He had seen and done too much. He wasn’t fit for the tender intimacy of love.
    “They’re worried about the Chinese,” Archer said. His voice was completely neutral despite the pain twisting through him.
    Lianne rolled her eyes. Being half-Chinese, she had dealt with subtle racism and the more overt kind—from both Chinese and Caucasians. “The Yellow Horde garbage again?”
    “That’s part of it,” Archer said. “The Australians don’t have much tolerance for non-Caucasians. But bigotry isn’t the only driving force in world politics. Often it isn’t even the most important. Pull up that world map again, Kyle.”
    The screen changed to a map showing the continents on either side of the Pacific Ocean.
    “See the lines and shadings Len added?” Archer asked.
    Lianne leaned forward. “They don’t overlap with political or geographic boundaries.”
    “Right. They’re showing who controls what percentage of the various kinds