Rarities Unlimited 04 - The Color of Death

“You’re different.” He lowered his forehead to hers. “God help me, Kate, you’re different. I think about you when I should be thinking about the job.”
    She closed her eyes and was glad to have the elevator wall for support. “I know. You’d be fired.”
    “I’d survive getting fired. You wouldn’t survive getting killed.”

Chapter 38
    Scottsdale
    Friday
    4:45 P.M .
    Sam surveyed the men gathered in Boris Peterson’s suite and wondered why it was women who wore the high-end pretties and men who bought, sold, traded, and cut them. In this gathering of dealers, as in her chosen profession, Kate was odd woman out.
    “And I thought the Bureau was an old-boy club,” Sam said quietly.
    Kate started at the brush of his lips against her hair. Even two hours after the meltdown in the elevator, she was unsettled. She didn’t like that, but she sure had liked kissing Sam.
    “I’m used to it,” she said. “I don’t even notice it anymore.”
    “Some of the women in the FBI say that.”
    “Do you believe them?”
    “No.”
    “Smart man,” she said.
    “Sometimes I’m downright stupid,” he said under his breath.
    Kate didn’t want to get into that again. If it pissed her off that he thought kissing her was downright stupid, then she could just stuff it under her red wig and ignore it.
    And him.
    Although she did owe him some good karma for having the connectionsto get invitations to private showings, the ones she hadn’t been invited to. It was an opportunity she wasn’t going to waste by thinking about a man who kissed her stupid one moment and called himself stupid the next.
    So stop thinking about him.
    Kate blew out a breath and concentrated on the room. Not including the guard at the door of the suite, there were about sixteen people. The murmur of conversation as men discussed the merits of various gems didn’t quite drown out the all-news network on the television in the corner. On tables everywhere finished gems were displayed in individual see-through boxes with electronic tags embedded in the clear plastic. The boxes made it easier to handle the gems. The electronic tags made them harder to steal.
    Some fool might try to grab a prime stone anyway, but there was a guard at the only exit, right next to the portable electronic “gate” that would start screaming if an active tag set it off. As all tags were active until passed through a device only one employee of the Butterworth Gem Trading Company had access to, shoplifting wasn’t a big problem.
    If a potential buyer wanted to examine a stone more closely, someone from Butterworth would escort the customer to another room, where a variety of microscopes, light sources, polariscopes, and the like were set up. Once a Butterworth employee zipped a gem’s protective box through a device—rather like a CD at a music store—the box opened and the gem was ready for serious study.
    “Ms. Collins,” a man’s voice said from across the room. “You seem to be at all the best private showings today.”
    After an instant Kate remembered that she was Ms. Collins and smiled at the approaching man. She’d met Carter outside the door to Branson and Sons’ locked suite—the notice on the door had said to try again in a few hours. Kate, Sam, and Carter had gone on together to the next private showing. Then as now, Carter was casually and expensively dressed in gray silk slacks and shirt. The watch on his wrist was a Rolex Oyster. The twenty-carat cabochon star sapphire in his ring was a high-quality Burmese blue. His haircut wasstraight out of a southern California trendsetting Hollywood magazine. On him it looked good.
    “Mr. Carter,” she said. “Nice to see you again. Did you have any luck buying that ruby?”
    White teeth flashed. With barely a glance at Sam, Carter put his hand on Kate’s arm and urged her toward a nearby table.
    “That fifty-carat ruby?” Carter sighed and shook his head. “The dude was in love with it. Same for the matched peridot. Gorgeous goods, but he wanted the moon and the stars for it. Even my Hollywood clients won’t pay that kind of money. There’s no investment potential if you buy too high.”
    “Too bad. Have I missed any good untreated sapphire rough or great finished blue sapphires?”
    “That’s what I wanted to show you,” Carter said, smiling down at her. “There’s a lovely hunk of umbra yellow rough over here. Not the sort of thing I would recommend to my clients—I only do cut