Rarities Unlimited 04 - The Color of Death

hair, stopped, and wondered what his hair would feel like. “What?”
    “Emeralds,” he repeated. “Or sex. Your choice.”
    “Sheesh, you really know how to sweet-talk a girl.”
    Sam laughed, then looked at Kate straight on. “You’re a woman, not a girl. Quite a woman. The FBI turned loose its finest on you and came up with a profile of a person who is too honest and intelligent for her own good, fiercely loyal to the people she loves, a gem cutter of great skill and growing reputation, and stubborn enough to get herself killed investigating a half brother’s disappearance.”
    “Disappearance? I think he was murder—” She broke off when the rest of Sam’s words hit. “The FBI investigated me ?”
    “Yes.”
    “To which, Lee’s murder or investigating me?”
    “Both.”
    Kate went still. For the first time, Sam wasn’t backing away from the idea of Lee as a victim rather than a crook. It should have made her feel better. Instead, she felt hollow all the way to her soul.
    She really had wanted Lee to be alive.
    She really had been afraid he wasn’t.
    For the first time she asked herself if she would feel better knowing, dead or alive.
    She didn’t have an answer. All she had was the gnawing certainty that she couldn’t live without knowing. Maybe that was the answer after all. Knowing was better than fearing.
    And right now she was afraid.
    “What convinced you about Lee?” she asked finally.
    “Purcell’s murder.”
    “Why?”
    “First we go back to the emeralds. I want to be sure of a few things before I…” He hesitated. Before I drag you into a situation that’s more dangerous than the one you’re in right now wasn’t the sort of thing an agent dropped in the lap of an informant. “Were emeralds Purcell’s passion or specialty?”
    “Not that I’ve heard.”
    “Would you have heard?”
    “After I found one of the Seven Sins in Purcell’s case,” Kate said, hitching herself up onto a nearby worktable and letting her legs dangle, “I asked around about Mike and Lois Purcell. No one mentioned emeralds. Quite a few mentioned the gray market in Thailand. A lot of colored gems come out of there, but damn few emeralds.”
    Shit. Sam rubbed the stubble that had already layered over his late afternoon shave. If it wasn’t for his job, he’d have given up shaving twice a day and grown a beard.
    “For once I’d rather have been wrong,” he said heavily.
    “About what?”
    “A South American connection.” He gave up fighting against a yawn.
    “I’d offer you more coffee,” Kate said, “but the pot’s empty and you’ve had too much anyway.”
    “Worried about me?”
    “You bet. Even if I don’t like it, you’re the only one besides me who believes Lee was murdered.” She hesitated and then asked almost violently, “Why do you believe it? ”
    “You’d make a good interrogator,” he said.
    “I learned at the feet of a master. Your turn.”
    “What master?”
    “You.” With that, Kate shut up.
    And waited.
    Sam held his hands up in surrender. “Before I tell all, ask yourself if you really want to know any more than ‘condescending bullshit.’ A lot of what’s going down around this isn’t pretty.”
    She remembered his blunt description of the Purcell deaths. Then she thought of Lee, out in a mangrove swamp feeding crabs. She wanted to cry.
    But even more, she wanted to make the person who had hurt Lee cry. The savagery of her need would have surprised her if she’d noticed it, but she didn’t. She was too intent on Sam.
    “I can take it,” she said.
    He let out a long breath. “Good. It’s hard to protect someone who believes that ignorance is bliss. You sure there isn’t any more coffee?”
    “Protect? What are you talking about?”
    He didn’t answer.
    She handed him the pot from the automatic maker. There was about a tablespoon of thick black liquid cooling in the bottom.
    He drank it.
    She kept waiting. Silently.
    A corner of his mouth kicked up. “Okay. The preliminary background we have on Purcell sounds just like what you found out. He’s probably not a through-and-through crook, but he sure traded gems with some of them. He didn’t ask them any questions and they didn’t tell him any answers. He was questioned a few times by various law-enforcement agencies in regard to missing or laundered gems but never even arrested, much less charged.”
    Sam looked regretfully at the empty pot.
    Kate didn’t take the hint.
    He unplugged the