Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

strands of the cable that had once connected the cage to a grid of huge floats. He didn’t bother to check the health of the oysters jumbled inside the framework. The water wasn’t deep enough or cold enough to kill them. Even if it had been, the oysters and their potential treasure weren’t what fueled the urgency driving him.
    He needed to find out as much as he could as quickly as he could. He couldn’t shake the certainty that Pearl Cove wasn’t a healthy place to be for Hannah. Or himself. The “accident” in the shed had been a warning as plain as a shout.
    After a few moments Archer found the end of the cable snarled beneath the heavy cage. He shoved and pushed, trying to free enough of the cable to see the severed end. If it had been pulled apart by the force of the cyclone, the cable would be ragged and frayed, with fine wires going every which way, because each strand would have snapped separately.
    It took only a glance to see that the end of the cable was as smooth as glass.

Ten
    “C ut,” Archer said curtly.
    He yanked the screen door shut behind him and stalked through Hannah’s living room with his borrowed fins jammed under his arm.
    “What?” she asked, following him.
    “The cables.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “The cables were cut. That’s why the raft came apart in the cyclone. The cables that weren’t cut somehow pulled free of the grid. If I thought it was worth the exercise, I’d check the ruined grid cables. But my gut already knows what I’d find.”
    Hannah hesitated, then gestured for him to follow her into the bathroom. “You think they were cut, too?”
    “I sure as hell do.”
    She dumped her fins in the bathtub and ran her hands up and down her wet suit as though trying to rub up a little warmth. She was always cool after a long dive, but not like this. Not queasy chills. “Why would anyone slash the rafts apart? That’s killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
    “Len’s gold. Not theirs.” Archer’s fins made a smacking sound as they landed on top of Hannah’s.
    She stepped into the tub, grabbed the shower wand, and began rinsing off the wet suit she still wore. “Is it that simple?”
    “Greed usually is. The question is, who? Did Len talk with you about his plans to sell the special pearls?”
    “He didn’t plan to sell,” she said as she bent over to rinse out her hair.
    “Ever?” Archer asked.
    “I don’t think so.” Her voice was muffled by water. “The rainbow blacks were . . . a religion to him, I guess. As close as he came to God.”
    “What did he want from his religion?”
    “Want? What do you mean?”
    “Len wasn’t raised in any church. Converts almost always have an agenda. Wealth, acceptance, power, happiness, peace, health . . . ”
    Health.
    For a minute there was only the sound of water dripping and splashing on porcelain.
    “I didn’t mean religion in the literal sense,” Hannah said. “A church, a set of ceremonies, that sort of thing.”
    “Yet you called pearls his religion.”
    She shut off the water and combed wet fingers through her dripping hair. “It’s the only way I could think of to describe his intensity about them. He collected and perfected the Black Trinity as though his next breath depended on it.”
    “How insane was he in the last few years?” Archer asked quietly.
    Hannah bit her lip. “On a scale of one to ten?”
    “Yes.”
    “An eight,” she said bleakly. “Some days, worse. A nine, maybe. But he wasn’t consistently insane. Except on his very worst days—when he locked himself in the shed—he could talk very intelligently about the problems of periculture and the nuances of the pearl-marketing monopoly.”
    “What were his crazy areas?”
    “Black pearls. The rainbow kind. He could never have enough, or have them perfect enough. It was an obsession.” She slicked water from her wet suit. “No, it was beyond obsession. It was a sickness. Except for the pearls that escaped his security measures, he destroyed any rainbow pearl that was less than perfect. Considering the rarity of the rainbows, he must have ground several million dollars into dust. And this was at a time when we could barely meet our bills.”
    Archer whistled softly and thought of what Kyle had discovered in Len’s files: the articles on pearls as a medicine for every ill. “Did he ever talk about pearls as a cure for certain diseases?”
    “He talked about pearls as his ‘little miracles,’