Rarities Unlimited 04 - The Color of Death

wanted.” He finished the coffee, rubbed his eyes briskly, and shook his head like a dog coming out of water. He pinned her with hard blue eyes. “I need everything you can tell me about Mike Purcell, especially any clients he had who might be happy to dance on his grave.”
    She stared at him.
    He waited.
    “Like a light switch,” she said finally.
    “What?”
    “Off with the tired human being. On with the cop.”
    “Two sides of the same coin. The cop’s tired too. What about Purcell?”
    “I didn’t know him any better than I had to.”
    “What did you hear about him?”
    Kate took the empty coffee cup, filled it, and drank. “He was the kind of dealer that gives the business a bad reputation.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Under a different name, he and his wife ran an Internet site that was a scam. Murphy’s Law of Gems. Colored stones for investments. Ahedge against inflation, deflation, war, drought, and hemorrhoids.”
    “Interesting,” Sam said, pulling out his notebook. “Nobody else mentioned that.”
    “That’s because the site was designed to be a lure for absolute gem amateurs and virgin investors. Then I noticed that the PO box listed at the site was the same as Purcell’s. No one in the gem trade would give the site a second look. The only reason I did was that I searched every site on the Internet for sapphires, even the web pages that were set up for gem novices.”
    “So he ran a site for amateurs?”
    “Worse than karaoke.”
    “You’re saying that none of Purcell’s clients in Phoenix at the moment are novices, so they wouldn’t associate Murphy’s Law of Gems with Purcell.”
    She looked amused. “ ‘Not novices’ is a gentle way of putting it. A lot of Purcell’s clients and fellow dealers are as, um, generous in their descriptions of their own stones as he is.”
    “And as careless about detailed sales receipts.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He flipped through his notes. “Two thousand carats of mixed Sri Lankan stones, Indian cut. Three kilos of mixed Brazilian rough.”
    “Invoices like that aren’t especially unusual.” As she spoke, she pulled a mother-of-pearl clip out of her hair and rubbed her scalp. “Most people think of gems as being scarce and tiny and very valuable. Not necessarily so. Sri Lanka exports zircons and topaz as well as rubies and sapphires. Brazil ships tons of colored stones from the Minas Gerais district.”
    “Like?”
    “Tourmaline, amethyst, smoky quartz, to name just a few. They’re the kinds of stones we used to call semiprecious but now are firmly encouraged to describe as ‘colored gems.’ In the jewelry trade, they’re entry-level goods.”
    “So Purcell’s record-keeping was no more slipshod than the next guy?”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” she said, shaking out her hair again and rubbing her scalp where it prickled from the clip’s teeth. “Anyone who sells heated, filled, doubled, tripled, glued, diffused, oiled, and otherwise treated stones and doesn’t mention it to the naive customer might be deliberately careless in other ways.”
    “Stop, you’re killing me.”
    She blinked. “Excuse me?”
    “Running your fingers through your hair and looking all sleepy-eyed and sexy like you’re thinking of bed.”
    Kate’s jaw dropped.
    “Was Purcell noted for an emerald specialty?” Sam asked, but what he wanted to do was slide his fingers into her black hair and feel the heat of her scalp beneath his palms.
    She closed her mouth, opened it, and closed it again.
    “Sorry about that,” he said, taking the cup of coffee from her. “When I’m tired and disgusted with my fellow man, my human side overtakes the cop. But don’t worry. I’m not going to jump your bones.”
    She watched him drink from her cup and wondered if he tasted her on the rim. Just as she started to ask him, she caught herself. Whoa, babe. Unless you plan on tearing up the sheets with SA Sam Groves, you better think before you speak.
    What really worried her was that the idea of grabbing him and dragging him into the bedroom made her heart kick hard and her blood light up like a Fourth of July sky. She wasn’t used to having that reaction when it came to men.
    It made her edgy.
    “Um…” She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “What was the question?”
    His smile was slow, very male, and said that he liked knowing he tempted her. “Emeralds.”
    “Oh, yeah. Emeralds.” She started to drag her fingers throughher