Rarities Unlimited 04 - The Color of Death

was being coy this time. The Purcell murders had unsolvable written all over them. No glory there.
    “All right,” Kennedy said in a loud voice.
    Everyone shut up.
    The telephone rang.
    “Yank that mother out of the wall,” someone muttered.
    Kennedy ignored everything but the agenda in his mind: Cover Your Ass.
    “For those of you who just came in,” Kennedy said with a slicing look at Sam, “I’ll summarize.”
    Sam hoped the look was because he’d been three minutes late, not because he hadn’t had time to shave.
    Kennedy flipped through his notes. “Yesterday one of the Mandel Inc. couriers was waylaid in Quartzite. She was delivering a package to Branson and Sons. We should have a complete list of the missing items in a few hours.”
    Kennedy lit a cigarette.
    Sizemore got up, bummed a smoke, and sat down again. Usually he preferred cigars but knew better than to choke up the motor coach that way.
    The NYPD cop whose marriage had just ended looked grateful and lit up her own cigarette.
    Sam gave the room five minutes before it became uninhabitable.
    The phone stopped ringing. The message light blinked urgent red. Nothing new there. It had been blinking since dawn. Ditto for the phone in the other room, the one with a supposedly private number.
    “The courier hasn’t regained consciousness after the surgery to remove bone fragments from her brain,” Kennedy said. “She won’t be any use to us until she wakes up. Probably not even then.”
    A few murmurs around the room made it plain that none of the cops figured the courier would be good for anything in the way of information, or anything else, after that kind of brain trauma.
    “The MO was pretty much same old same old,” Kennedy said, exhaling heavily. “She was intercepted at an obvious stop and—”
    “What was she doing being so careless?” the NYPD cop asked.
    Mario said from the back of the room, “This isn’t Manhattan. If you’re driving from L.A., stopping in Quartzite isn’t a choice, it’s common sense. You’ve been through hours and miles of empty desert. The car needs gas to get to Phoenix. If you don’t do it in Quartzite, you have more hours and a lot more empty desert before you get to another gas stop. Only an idiot drives out of Quartzite without water and a gas tank at least three-quarters full.”
    “Who’d want to live like that?” the NYPD cop muttered.
    “After the thief intercepted the courier,” Kennedy said, “he drove or forced her to drive to a deserted place. Then he beat her unconscious, stole the package, and left.”
    “How did he leave the scene?” Sharon Sizemore asked.
    The telephone started ringing again.
    Everyone ignored it.
    “Either the robber had a confederate who followed the courier’s car and picked him up or he simply walked to another car he’d parked nearby. I get the impression,” Kennedy said, looking around the room for confirmation, “that Quartzite isn’t real big.”
    “Not unless it’s January,” Mario said. “Then you have a few hundred thousand swap-meet fanatics dry-camping everywhere.”
    The phone rang in the second room.
    “Dry-camping?” the NYPD woman asked.
    “No water but what you bring in yourself,” Sam explained.
    “What about toilets?” she asked.
    “Bring your own shovel.”
    “Jesus.” She shook her head and shuddered. “Give me a crack house any time.”
    The phones kept ringing.
    “Okay,” Kennedy said, speaking loudly. “The point is that the heist was easy because everybody stops in Quartzite and it’s a damn small place.”
    “He could have followed her from L.A.,” Sizemore said, looking at the burning end of his cigarette. “The desert is empty but the Interstate isn’t. That way he would know exactly where the courier stopped. He parks his car, waits for her to finish whatever she was doing, takes her, and drives her somewhere close by where they won’t be noticed.”
    Kennedy nodded. “Chances are, that’s just what happened.”
    “What about inside information?” Sam asked.
    One of the phones quit ringing. The other didn’t.
    Kennedy gave him a look that was anything but encouraging. “So, has your fancy confidential informant given you information that Branson and Sons is a front for the South Americans?”
    “Nothing like that, sir,” Sam said, keeping his voice even. “I’m simply pointing out that a variety of people had access to the courier’s schedule—Sizemore Security, hotel security, Branson and