The Color of Death Read Free Page A

had to do was make sure they didn’t find out.
    Breathe slow and deep, like you’re making the first cut on a piece of really good rough.
    The silent advice didn’t slow Kate’s heartbeat, but the thought of shaping colorful rough material into brilliant, eternally dreaming gems did the trick. Working with rough stone always calmed her. She didn’t know why. She just knew it did.
    That’s the way, she told herself. Slow and steady. This is the easy part.
    She had good hands. She’d always had them, even when she was only eleven and entertaining neighborhood kids by pulling pennies out of their ears.
    Breathe slow and move fast and be grateful the emerald-cut Sin didn’t turn up in one of the private showings in a dealer’s room. That would have been much harder to pull off.
    Quietly, Kate let out another long breath and stepped into the conference room. The booths spread out in front of her belonged to the second- and third-tier gem dealers and jewelers. Even so, the booths were a universe away from the crowds of bead and gimcrack sellers haggling and sweating on the clogged public parking lots where temporary open-air booths had been set up beneath the desert’s blazing April sun.
    Inside Phoenix’s newest, most luxurious hotel-spa, all was tranquil, cool, and lightly scented with flowers. If Kate’s sensitive nostrils also picked up the oily, pervasive smell of greed wafting through the conference area, it didn’t offend her. Shortly after she’d had her first period, she’d realized that the presence of gems made some humans sweat. The fact that she could look at gorgeous jewelswithout thinking in dollar signs gave her an edge over a lot of people in the trade.
    She shook down the long sleeves of her raspberry silk jacket, felt the small weight poised just above the edge of her left palm, and took a last slow breath.
    I’ll make those FBI bastards listen, Lee.
    I swear it.

Chapter 5
    Scottsdale
    Tuesday
    9:32 A.M .
    Sam Groves leaned against the Scottsdale Royale’s expensively papered wall and thumbed through a catalogue of upcoming attractions that would appear when the real gem show got under way. The catalogue was thick enough to take several days to read, but long before that he would have moved on, changed his clothes, put on a hat, and altered his profile. Simple enough disguises, because most people were simple. Especially with all the colored pretties scattered around. Like big tits, big gems often had a negative effect on the IQ of the men looking at them.
    Sam enjoyed tits and gems as much as any man, but he managed to keep his mind on his job. He was sixteen years into the FBI and hoped to make twenty before someone added up the “doesn’t play well with others” and “colors outside the lines” flags in his file, and then kicked his “runs with scissors” ass out of the Bureau.
    No matter how hard Sam tried, when someone asked his opinion, he gave it. All of it, no matter how disagreeable it might be to the people who asked.
    Good thing you’re bright, boy, ’cuz you sure ain’t politic.
    That’s what his first SAC—special agent in charge—had told Samfifteen years ago. Nothing had changed since then. The Bureau got even with him by delaying his promotions and assigning him to low-profile jobs. So instead of tracking international and domestic terrorists with the other Bureau hotshots, he was part of a special task force trying to break a ring of jewel hijackers that had plagued the gem trade in the past five years.
    But even on what should have been a straightforward assignment, Sam’s offbeat way of looking at the world had gotten him into trouble.
    Tough titty. Sam flipped another page and scanned another breathless advertisement describing rubies as the colored gem investment of the century. I’ve weathered worse than Mr. “Legend in His Own Mind” Sizemore. In less than five years I’ll have my pension and my own business, and the politically correct assholes who