Chapter 9 - The Recovery of the Diamonds
The lobby of the Petroleum Club was deserted save for two Dallas police officers standing near the brass elevators and Vanessa Cross, who was sitting on an upholstered velvet bench, surrounded by four security guards.
Her scarlet silk dress was torn along the left seam; her French twist had come undone, a strand of bleached-blonde hair hanging across her mascara-streaked cheek.
She was not crying.
She was hyperventilating—short, shallow, desperate hitches of her chest that made the gold chain around her wrist rattle against the armrest.
Rachel Kim stood over her, accompanied by Detective Marcus Rodriguez from the Highland Park Department of Public Safety.
"Ms. Cross," Detective Rodriguez said, his voice flat, professional, and entirely devoid of sympathy. "You have two choices. You can remove the earrings right now and surrender them to the property clerk as evidence in an active felony theft investigation, or I can have my female transport officer take you down to the Lew Sterrett Justice Center and remove them during your intake processing."
Vanessa looked up as my heels clicked against the marble floor.
She saw the emerald dress. She saw the sapphire choker.
She saw the four-carat diamond baguettes that had belonged to my mother shiver in the light of the lobby chandelier.
"Elena," she whispered, her voice cracking into a thin, broken plea that had lost every trace of its Carmel-by-the-Sea drawl. "Please. I didn't know he stole them. He told me they were an anniversary gift from his grandmother. He told me you didn't care about jewelry."
"You knew," I said, stopping three feet from her bench.
I didn't raise my voice. I didn't lean down.
"You knew when you drank my wine on my sofa," I said. "You knew when you told him to use the poultry shears on my hair. You knew when you signed the general partnership units for Westover using my equipment leases as collateral."
I held out my right hand.
Palm up. The skin smooth, clean, smelling of lavender and cold rain.
"Take them off, Vanessa."
Her fingers were shaking so violently that she couldn't work the screw-backs on the platinum posts. She fumbled, her manicured nail scratching the skin of her lobe until a tiny speck of crimson appeared on the diamond setting.
Detective Rodriguez stepped forward, produced a pair of small, sterile medical forceps from his vest pocket, and with two quick, professional twists, released the clips.
He dropped the earrings into my palm.
They were cool.
They had the heavy, unmistakable density of old platinum—metal that had survived fifty years of births, deaths, and surgeries in the hands of women who worked for a living.
I closed my fingers around the stones.
"And Vanessa?" I added softly.
She looked up through her tangled hair, her eyes wide with a terrifying, hollow dread.
"Hair grows back," I said. "A credit rating does not."
I turned toward the glass doors that led out to the private porte-cochère on St. Paul Street.
Outside, the rain had stopped.
The Dallas night was cold, clean, scrubbed of dust by the autumn front, the towers of the downtown skyline rising into the clear black sky like pillars of dark obsidian.
My black Mercedes S-Class was idling at the curb, its doors held open by Tasha, who was wearing a long, wool trench coat and grinning with all thirty-two of her teeth.
I climbed into the back seat.
The leather was warm, heated to seventy-two degrees, smelling of cedar and fresh flowers.
Tasha slammed the door shut, climbed into the front passenger seat, and turned around with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and two crystal flutes.
"Did you leave anything inside, boss?" she asked.
I opened my hand.
May you like
The diamond baguettes caught the amber dome light of the car, burning with a cold, pure, incandescent white fire that had survived forty years of dark drawers and forty-eight hours of theft.
"No, Tasha," I said, leaning back into the leather headrest, feeling the cool silk of my emerald gown against my skin. "I took everything that mattered."
