The Mountains Bow Down (42 page)

“Geert showed up.” I explained the Dutchman's story and how he told Larrah that some safes had been compromised due to failing batteries. “Apparently, it happens. When the batteries fail, the safe suddenly pops open automatically.”

“The crazy Dutchman's on our side?”

“I wouldn't say that. He wants the bracelet to save his job. But he's starting to realize something's not right with these people.” I described the money hidden in Vinnie's room. “Vinnie's also got a big blue stone, just like the Sparks have in their safe, and Martin Webb had in his jackets, and your buddy Milo—”

“Milo is not my buddy.”

“All of them, Jack. They're all hiding these stones.”

He watched them for several minutes. Milo was swigging from the flask. Larrah looked cold as a popsicle. And Sparks had taken a seat behind the windbreak, pulling on a jacket that had that same Spartan mascot on it.

Jack said, “I don't suppose you found the jewelry box.”

I shook my head.

“Too much to hope for.” He sighed again. “Short black dress, white apron?”

“Pardon?”

“Your maid's outfit. Was it a short black dress with a white apron? C'mon, Harmon, I need some cheering up.”

I grabbed my phone, flipping it open.

“You're reporting me for harassment?” he asked.

“No, I'm calling Kevin Barnes. I just thought of something.” I kept my eyes on Vinnie, still scowling at the wind. “The forehead might've tried to unload stones in Juneau. Maybe even some black prisms.”

Kevin Barnes's voice mail said he was often away for days and usually somewhere so remote he was unable to return phone calls. Must be nice, I decided, leaving him a message anyway, asking him to call immediately.

“Now what?” Jack asked.

“Now you can call the jewelry stores in Ketchikan and see if Vinnie tried to sell them anything.”

“Me? I'm busy.” He placed a hand on his chest. “I've got a movie star to babysit. Why can't you call the stores?”

“Because tonight's our last chance.”

“Harmon, I've waited a long time to hear you say that.”

“Keep waiting. Tonight's our last chance to catch these people.”

Hardcover books lined the library walls, but since they were locked behind stabilizing doors, the computers seemed like the most important part of the room. At a desk by the window, a woman was typing on a keyboard. She looked up as I came into the room, then acknowledged me with a sad smile. The elderly woman from the medical center. I nodded and she returned to typing, using only her index fingers.

I sat down across the room from her and searched public domain information only, quickly realizing why benitoite escaped my radar. Not only was the mineral rare, but in terms of geologic time, it was discovered last week.

In 1907 some California prospectors were searching the Diablo Mountain Range for gold when they stumbled across some blue rocks, randomly distributed around the headwaters of the San Benito River. The stones looked like sapphires and the prospectors carried them quietly into town, to a geology professor at the University of California. The geologist found the gemstone was a silicate mineral containing traces of barium and titanium. Beautiful, stunning, and there was nothing else like it on earth. The geologist named it benitoite, for the location where it was found in San Benito County, near the San Benito River.

Although some later geochemical matches were found in places such as Japan and Australia, gem-quality benitoite still came from only one tiny region in the California mountains. And even there, benitoite played hard to get.

Only a few thousand carats had been mined, cut, and polished. By the 1970s the mines were basically abandoned because so few gemstones came out, making benitoite rarer than rubies and emeralds—by several orders of magnitude. It was even rarer than Tanzanite, the bright blue gem found only in Tanzania. When an earthquake struck the Coalinga fault line in the 1980s, hitting 6.7 on the Richter scale, prospectors poured into the Diablo mountains, hoping the hills had shaken loose their benitoite. But the mountains refused to cooperate and these days rock hounds had resorted to night searches, clamping on ultraviolet headlamps to expose the gem's singular quality: powerful fluorescence.

Mineralogically, benitoite was what was called a dichroic mineral, meaning the color shifted depending on the type and angle of light. It was also birefringent, with a “fire” more powerful than diamonds. Colorless varieties had been found, along with some pink and orange specimens, but those were considered even rarer than the blue specimens. Geologists attributed benitoite's changing color to small inclusions of yet another rare mineral, Neptunite.

Neptunite was pitch black.

Under ideal conditions, it grew into perfect prisms.

Leaning back in my chair, considering all the information, I watched the woman from the medical center stand up. She gathered a sweater off the back of the chair, then looked around as if forgetting something. The back of my mind seemed to tingle, as if an idea was forming yet still out of reach.

I watched the woman walk across the library, into the empty atrium. Standing alone at the elevators, she waited for the descent back to the medical clinic, back to her ailing spouse, a trip where they had not been able to venture beyond the ship. As she watched the numbers above the elevator door, her back was straight, her chin raised. And in her defiant posture, I took all the hope it offered.

“The magistrate already called me about it,” Kevin Barnes was saying. “Something about a blue rock?”

I shifted the phone to my other ear, leaving the library and heading for the purser's office. “Why did the magistrate call you?”

“Because his wife runs a jewelry store in town. Some guy walked in, asked her to buy a blue rock, and she told her husband the guy gave her the creeps. He called me but I haven't had a chance to call him back.”

“That didn't seem urgent to you?”

“Raleigh, we get ten thousand people walking off those cruise ships every single day from May to September. You're lucky she even saw the rock.”

“I don't believe in luck.”

“Why should you?” he said. “You're working with Jack.”

“Did the magistrate say anything else about the guy who came in?”

“Heavy.”

“He was fat?”

“No. Heavy, as in, heavyweight. A guy who breaks kneecaps. That's all I got.”

“That's more than you know,” I said, stopping near the concierge desk. A man and woman were talking to the clerk. I turned my back, speaking low into the phone. “Anything from your LA contacts?”

“No. And now it's the weekend.”

“If by some miracle you talk to them, see if they have any local information on a guy named Sandy Sparks, aka Lysander Sparks. And the ‘heavy' is named Vinnie Pinnetta.”

Kevin asked me to spell the names, stumbling over “Lysander.” Then he asked, “When do you need this by?”

“Yesterday,” I said.

Pink tights. Red sweatshirt. Fuchsia fleece. The yellow raincoat. It was all flung across the twin beds in my cabin while Andes flute music tooted, every note poking my brain like a sharp stick, reigniting the headache. But the pain was nothing compared to the agony of seeing Claire's attempt at dancing. She was humming that weird sound, trying to harmonize with the puffing whistles.

“Do you feel it?” she asked.

“I feel something.”

“Darkness, death. But I'm getting some answers from beyond.”

I didn't have the time—or interest—to deal with her. I opened the closet, grabbed my clothes and suitcase, including the titanium case.

“I was wondering what that was for,” she said, staring at the rock kit. “It looks top secret.”

“How could you even see it? It was inside my suitcase.”

“Well, I . . .”

“You were snooping.”

She shook her head, the asbestos spikes of hair not moving. “I'm a clairvoyant, I saw it in my mind's eye.”

“In a pig's eye.” I lowered my voice, threatening. “If you touch anything that belongs to me or my mom, I'll turn you in for those parking tickets.”

She gasped. “You know?”

“I know a lot of things, Claire. And I don't make idle threats.” Carrying my things into my aunt's cabin, I slammed the door and twisted the lock. I set the rock kit on the desk, closed the curtains, slipped on sunglasses and latex gloves, and took out the bracelet retrieved from the purser's safe. Turning off the lights, I flicked on the shortwave lamp.

I pulled the bracelet closer.

Then I shook it.

Then I brought it so close the blue stones touched the lamp's bulb.

No glow. No fluorescence. And I stood in the eerie dark, trying to wrap my brain around the new order of things.

This wasn't the bracelet.

This was fake.

Who switched them, the pilot? But the FBI's evidence tape was intact on the package. And where would the pilot get a fake that fast? Larsen, our airport liaison?

No way
.

In Claire's room little birds had started tweeting on the CD player, making me wish I had my gun. Flicking on the lights, I unplugged the lamp and took off the sunglasses. Picking up the jeweler's loupe, I examined every millimeter of the bracelet under twenty-times magnification.

Definitely not the same stones.

If these even were stones. More likely, dyed glass. Plain old silica. As I turned the bracelet back and forth, the bracelet looked attractive, not cheap. But nobody in their right mind would kill for this thing.

And that ruined my whole plan.

Chapter Thirty-seven

A
ll right, all right,” said the man opening the chapel's heavy door. “I'm here. I'm here.”

The wedding was over and the white chairs were folded and put away, leaving the room with a dim and dusty odor, a tired scent, like stuffed animals left on high shelves their entire lives.

“What did you need to talk about?” he asked, walking down the aisle toward me. “What was it again?”

Lanky except for a potbelly that made him look like he'd stuffed a volleyball under his black shirt, the chaplain was trying to smile. Bloated jowls hung over the Nehru collar.

“Reverend Dennis?” I asked, making sure.

“Please, call me Den.” He sat on the carpeted platform, crossing his legs, directly under the stained glass medallion.

I sat down beside him and he smiled. A reflexive gesture. Like my official FBI smile.

“So. What did you want to talk about?” he asked.

“My mother,” I said. “The ship's doctor, Dr. Coleman? He believes she suffered a psychotic break. She's in the medical clinic, sedated. And I can't talk to her.” I paused. “She
won't
talk to me, but I thought she might talk to you, since you're a chaplain.”

“Okay, okay.” He nodded, graying hair brushing the black collar. “Is this the woman who broke down in here?”

I nodded. “She was praying and then—”