The Heist

brutal.”
    “You could say that’s the theme behind every piece in the Kibbee collection,” she said, though she doubted there was any theme at all to Roland’s collecting of artwork, or wives, besides an obvious breast fixation. “The dark side of love. That’s also the allure of the Crimson Teardrop.”
    “I thought it’s because it’s worth a gajillion dollars.”
    “Closer to fifteen million. It’s an exquisite diamond, but as a piece of art its value comes from its history.” She led him into the salon where the Crimson Teardrop was displayed in the center of the room, in a glass box, on top of an ornate marble pedestal. “It’s named for all the love, death, and sadness that has surrounded it.”
    Nick was well aware of the diamond’s history. The diamond had been discovered in 1912 by two young British naturalists hiking through South Africa. The couple were deeply in love, andintended to use the stone in a wedding ring, but when word got out about their find, they were hacked apart by machete-wielding thieves, and the diamond was stolen.
    The stone somehow made its way to Russia, where it was fashioned into a necklace that Tsar Nicholas Romanov gave as a gift to his wife, Alexandra. She later passed it along to her daughter Anastasia, who was wearing it under her clothing, along with other heirloom jewelry, when the family was executed in July 1918.
    The jewels pillaged from Anastasia’s corpse, as well as those hidden on the other Romanovs and their servants, were sold and resold, and the necklace didn’t appear again until November 3, 1929. That’s when banker Dick Epperson and his wife, Dollie, left destitute by the stock market crash late the previous month, dressed in their finery, kissed each other, and then jumped hand in hand off the balcony of their Park Avenue apartment. The Crimson Teardrop was around Dollie’s neck. No one knew how she’d come to possess it, but her heirs quickly sold it to pay off debts.
    More owners and tragedies followed over the decades, none making news until, legend has it, the Crimson Teardrop was acquired by a secret admirer who supposedly gave it as a present to Marilyn Monroe shortly before her death in 1962. The diamond wasn’t actually seen again until recently, when oil company heiress Victoria Burrows died at the age of eighty-seven in the Santa Barbara home she hadn’t left since the death of her husband in 1965.
    Roland Larson Kibbee snatched the diamond up at the Burrows estate sale, and now it’s my turn to snatch it from Kibbee, Nick thought.
    “They say the diamond is cursed,” Clarissa said. “Especially for lovers.”
    “Somebody is going to want to steal it anyway. What’s to stop them?”
    “A state-of-the-art alarm system, magnetic fields around the doors and windows, and, in this room alone, motion detectors, heat sensors, and a half dozen wireless cameras, and that’s just for starters,” she said. “You’ll notice there are no windows or doors in here.”
    “Of course I did,” Nick said, looking around. “I am a trained detective.” And thief.
    “The room is essentially a nicely decorated open vault. There’s only one way in, through the archway behind you. If any of the security systems are tripped, a recessed two-foot-thick reinforced steel door drops down, trapping the would-be thief inside and sending an instant alert directly to your police station. How fast do you think you can get here once the alarm is tripped?”
    “You got the guy trapped, right?”
    “Virtually entombed. The steel door is designed to withstand explosives and hours of concentrated assault by drills and blowtorches.”
    “So what’s the rush?” Nick shrugged. “Maybe I’ll stop by Starbucks on the way just to make the guy sweat.”
    “Assuming he wasn’t squashed under a half ton of steel before he even got inside the room.”
    “Then there’s even less of a reason to hurry,” Nick said. “Tell me now what your favorite coffee is and I’ll pick you up one, too, if the situation ever arises.”
    “Cinnamon Dolce Latte, if you please.” She smiled. The guy wasn’t much to look at, but he had charm. “Would you like to see the rest of the museum?”
    “Are there more naked women?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “Lead on.”
    “This is sort of awkward,” she said, “but there was a Norm Peterson on
Cheers
.”
    “No relation,” Nick said.
    At 9:52 that same night, if you’d happened to be inside the Kibbee, you would have