In Death 22 - Memory in Death

sizes that dripped from a cluster of more diamonds that formed the petals of a brilliant flower.
    “Wowzer,” she said. When he only smiled, it hit her. “Big Jack’s diamonds, from the Forty-seventh
    Street heist. The ones we recovered.”
    “After they’d stayed hidden away nearly half a century.”
    “These were impounded.”
    “I didn’t steal them.” He laughed, held up his game disc. “Remember? Only virtually these days. I negotiated, and acquired them through completely legal means. They deserve the light. They deserve
    you. Without you, they might still be shut up in a child’s toy. Without you, Lieutenant, Chad Dix
    wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas right now.”
    “You had them made for me.” That touched her, most of all. She picked up the magnifying glass.
    “Let’s check them out,” she said, and pretended to inspect the gems. “Nice job.”
    “You can think of them as medals.”
    “A lot jazzier than any medals the department hands out.” She put them on, knowing it would please
    him. Seeing the way it did.
    “They suit you.”
    “Glitters like these would work on anybody.” But she wrapped her arms around him, snuggled in. “Knowing where they came from, why you had them made for me, that means a lot. I”
    She jerked back, eyes wide. “You bought them all, didn’t you?”
    He cocked his head. “Well, aren’t you greedy.”
    “No, but you are. You bought them all. I know it.”
    He smoothed a finger down the dent in her chin. “I think we need more champagne. You’re entirely
    too sober.”
    She started to speak again, then buttoned it. The man was entitled to spend his money as he liked. And
    he was right about one thing. Big Jack’s diamonds deserved better than a departmental vault.
    “There’s one more under there,” he noticed as he started to rise. “The one you brought in today.”
    “Oh. Right.” Part of her had hoped he’d forget that one. “Yeah, well, it’s nothing much. No big.”
    “I’m greedy, remember? Hand it over.”
    “Okay, sure.” She stretched out for it, dumped it in his lap. “I’ll get the champagne.”
    He grabbed her arm before she could get up. “Just hold on a minute, until I see what I have here.”
    He shoved aside tissue paper, drew it out, and said only, “Oh.”
    She struggled not to squirm. “You said you wanted a picture, you know, like from before.”
    “Oh,” he repeated, and the expression on his face had color rising up her neck. “Look at you.” His
    eyes moved from image to woman, so full of pleasure, of surprise, of love, her throat went tight.
    “I just dug it out, and picked up a frame.”
    “When was it taken?”
    “Right after I went into the Academy. This girl I hung with a little, she was always taking pictures.
    I was trying to study, and she”
    “Your hair.”
    She shifted, a little uncomfortable. In the picture she was sitting at a desk, discs piled around her. She wore a dull gray Police Academy sweatshirt. Her hair was long, pulled back in a tail.
    “Yeah, I used to wear it long back then. Figured it was less trouble because I could just tie it back out
    of my way. Then in hand-to-hand training, my opponent grabbed it, yanked, and took me down. I
    lopped it off.”
    “Look at your eyes. Cop’s eyes even then. Hardly more than a child, and you knew.”
    “I knew if she didn’t get that camera out of my face so I could study, I was going to clock her.”
    He laughed, took her hand, but remained riveted on the photograph. “What happened to her?”
    “She washed out, made it about a month. She was okay. She just wasn’t”
    “A cop,” he finished. “Thank you for this. It’s so exactly what I wanted.”
    She leaned her head on his shoulder, let the lights of the tree dazzle her and thought,Who needs champagne?
    [“19”]19
    SHE WOKE, THOUGHT SHE WOKE, IN THE brilliantly lit room with the glass wall. She was
    wearing her diamonds, and the cashmere robe. There was a towering pine in the corner, rising up to
    the ceiling. The ornaments draping its arching boughs, she saw, were corpses. Hundreds of bodies
    hung, covered with blood red as Christmas.
    All the women, only women, were gathered around it.
    “Not very celebratory,” Maxie, the lawyer, said, and gave Eve a little elbow poke. “But you’ve got to make do, right? How many of those are yours?”
    She didn’t need the magnifying glass weighing down her pocket to identify the faces, the bodies,
    the dead. “All of