Rarities Unlimited 04 - The Color of Death

day.”
    “You talked with Purcell again?”
    “His wife. She remembered you.”
    “What a harridan.”
    “She loves you too.”
    Kate grimaced and began fiddling with one of the dops that had been next to her hair clip.
    “What’s that?” Sam asked, eyeing the slender rod rather warily.
    “A dop. A cutter’s tool used to hold the stone against the lap.” She brightened. “You want a tour of my workshop?”
    “Right after you tell me why you switched stones on Purcell. Twice.”
    She bit the corner of her mouth. “You’re really quick, Special Agent Sam Groves.”
    He could have said the same about her, but he didn’t; if he was talking, she wasn’t, so he waited for her to speak. It wasn’t a hardship. It gave him an excuse to study her dark brown eyes and wide, tempting mouth.
    Trying to ignore Sam, Kate leaned her hips against the worktable, crossed her arms, and tried to decide how much she could safely tell him.
    “All of it,” he said.
    She gave him a startled glance. “Are you a mind reader?”
    “No more than any other cop. Don’t hold out on me, Ms. Chandler. You won’t like what happens.”
    “Call me Kate,” she retorted. “The other guy who threatened me did.”
    Sam filed that away for future reference and waited for silence to do its trick of opening Kate’s mouth.
    “All right.” She braced her hands on the table and crossed her ankles. “I’d been looking for the Seven Sins, using my photos of the finished stones.”
    “Any luck?”
    “Everybody I asked said some variation of ‘Nice stones’ and ‘Sure, babe, I’ll let you know if I see them.’ I waited for calls. The only one that came was a death threat. So I started going to high-end gem shows and not telling anyone my name or connection to Lee. I was about to give up when I saw Purcell’s sapphire. I asked about it and he gave me a load of bullshit.”
    “So you rushed home, got the twin stone, and switched them the next day.”
    “Yes.”
    “That took balls.”
    “So to speak.”
    He grinned.
    So did she. “When I was younger, I used to do magic tricks. I earned money at kids’ birthday parties and even thought about magic as a career. Then I realized that the only women I saw in magic acts were centerfolds that were cut in half while wearing glittery underwear. One look in my bathroom mirror, plus a love of gemstones, saved me from the stage.”
    Sam’s eyes gleamed with humor at the thought of a younger Kate dazzling her friends by pulling coins or bunnies out of their ears. “Okay, so you did the switch on Purcell. Then what?”
    “I brought Purcell’s sapphire home and photographed it from all angles and compared the photos with the original photos ofMcCloud’s stones. There’s no doubt about it. Purcell’s stone is one of the Seven Sins.”
    “So after you verified the identity of the stone, you switched it back.”
    “That’s when we met.” Kate’s humor vanished. Sam hadn’t come here to swap smiles with her. He’d come as a cop.
    “Why did you go back to Purcell with the synthetic sapphire? What was the point of the risk?”
    “I wasn’t swapping the stones for fun and profit,” she said, her voice curt. “I figured that if I had proof that the stones were the same, Purcell would have to talk to me about where it came from. And if he wouldn’t talk to me, the FBI might help him change his mind. Either way, I’d be closer to what really happened to Lee between Fort Myers, where he last called in, and Captiva Island, which was his final destination.”
    “So you’re not sure where Lee went missing?” Sam asked.
    “No. I concentrated on McCloud first, but he never heard from Lee. At that point I worked with the assumption that Lee stopped on Sanibel for lunch at his favorite café.”
    Sam remembered one of the entries in the folder he’d spent most of the afternoon memorizing. “McCloud lives on Captiva.”
    She nodded. “Lee was taking the finished stones back to him.”
    “Seven Sins. Were they all alike?”
    “No. Each had a different cut, a different weight. It was a real challenge to maximize the rough and at the same time follow McCloud’s desire for seven sapphires of different shapes and the same extraordinary color.”
    “Wonder why he wanted them.”
    “He’s a collector. The point of collecting is to have something no one else has. The Seven Sins were just that—the rarest of the rare.”
    “Worth killing for.”
    “Somebody did.” Her voice, like