Diamonds and Blood (Chameleon Assassin Book 5) Read online

  Georges shook his head so hard I thought he was going to sprain something, all the while saying, “No, no, no, no. That does not happen.”

  I raised an eyebrow and pointedly looked into the vault.

  “I think we need to conduct a thorough audit of the whole company,” the insurance guy in charge said.

  Georges turned a horrified look on him.

  “What are we looking at here?” Wil asked me.

  “I’m not sure exactly how to calculate it, but I’d guess at least half a billion credits,” I replied. “That is one hell of a lot of gemstones. I don’t know how long it took someone to grade and sort all of them originally, but it might have to be done again.”

  I picked one stone out of the bag and held it up to the light. “It says grade E flawless. Now if it’s grade D, it’s worth twice as much. If it has a flaw, it’s worth half as much.” I gestured to the computer on the desk. “Maybe he has the inventory for these, and hopefully the invoices for their purchase.”

  Wil took me back to the hotel, and we had lunch with Nellie and Tom. That afternoon, he went back to work, and Tom drove Nellie and me up to Montmorency Falls, where we drank a bottle of wine with local cheese and enjoyed some sunshine that wasn’t completely obscured by the smog. I tried to take my filter mask off but put it back on after five minutes. The air looked clear, but I could taste the contaminants.

  Back in Montreal, I had just stepped out of the shower when my phone rang. Wil again.

  “Hi, miss me?” I answered.

  “Libby, I need you.”

  “Of course, you do. Once a man has had me, he’s never the same.”

  He laughed, then said, “While that is true, it’s your expertise in another area that’s needed. My computer experts have had no luck breaking into Morgan’s computer.”

  “Amateurs. No wonder hacking is so profitable. Sure, when do you need it cracked? It is almost dinner time, you know.”

  “First thing in the morning?”

  “How about second thing?”

  “It’s a deal. Plans for dinner?”

  “Yes. A handsome young Chamber of Commerce official is going to escort me to dinner with Nellie and some stuffed-shirt Entertaincorp executive. Six-thirty, and don’t be late.”

  Chapter 4

  Wil and I grabbed a quick breakfast and drove over to Morgan’s apartment on Saturday morning. I asked why he hadn’t taken the computer to Chamber headquarters, and he said, “You’ll see.”

  Yeah. The damned thing was a custom installation built into the desk. Or the desk was built around it. It took me about five minutes to realize just how custom. I had never seen the operating system before.

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said, taking a screwdriver, a hacksaw, and a bolt cutter to the desk. “I’m going to pull the guts of this thing out, then hook all the stuff up to a computer at your headquarters, load up my tools, and see what I can see.”

  “And that will take how long?” Wil asked.

  “Probably all day. Maybe all weekend. Wil, let me put it this way. Let’s say that most computers speak English, but a few speak French or Russian. With me so far? Now, I have English-French and French-Russian dictionaries, so I can tunnel my way in. Right?”

  “Okay?”

  “Well, think of this analogy. This thing speaks Swahili, and I don’t have a dictionary, or any native Swahili speakers at all. Someone created their own operating system—not that hard really, most computer science students do it as part of their training—and I might have to take the software apart to make sense of it so I can unencrypt the data. At worst, it could take me all week and then find nothing useful. If I’m incredibly lucky, I’ll find a clue as to who wrote the operating system.”

  Wil gave me a funny look. “Joseph Morgan had a computer science degree.”

  I stared at him for a full minute while I processed all the ramifications, then said, “I sure as hell hope I’m smarter than he was.”

  As I started taking the thing apart, I noticed something weird, and a thought struck me. Grabbing a voltage meter, I checked the wiring, then traced it back to where he had purposely reversed polarity on the single circuit leading to the computer. The man had been seriously paranoid. Plugging that computer into a standard circuit would have fried the thing.

  Something I was banking on was the storage chips being standard. Writing an operating system or wiring things weird were one thing, but I didn’t see him creating his own chips, although he had the money to pay for it. But once I had things working at Chamber headquarters, and had a couple of monitors hooked up, I was able to syphon off the data. That was eleven o’clock Saturday night. I staggered out of there and had Wil take me to the hotel.

  I was back at it mid-morning on Sunday. I loaded the data onto my laptop, then sent it to my home system in Toronto, and started running a series of programs. Every couple of hours I checked on progress.

  Tuesday afternoon I called Wil. “I have your inventory, but I’m not sure you’re going to be happy with it.”

  “Tell me the bad news.”

  “Morgan was buying black market diamonds out of Africa. The mine owners, their contracted buyers, and the wholesale and retail vendors downstream were all getting screwed. He has always had his own cutting shop in Brussels, but there’s evidently a second one off the books in Sierra Leone. He could set his prices twenty percent lower than everyone else and still make double the profit of his competitors.”

  “Any indication that people in his organization knew about it?”

  “No, but there are some interesting emails, some of which aren’t very friendly. Whether they’re business or personal, I haven’t figured out yet.”

  In my idle time, I looked up Morgan’s public background. Society pages, rumor and scandal pages, charities, and anything else I could find. Going back twenty years, I found evidence or hints of at least forty lovers—or at least people rumored or speculated to be his lovers. I didn’t count rumors of one-night stands, though there were plenty of those. Some to other rich people, some to celebrities, some to people he just picked up someplace. There were also allusions to hosting sex parties and orgies—I wasn’t sure what the difference was. He had backed out of at least three marriage engagements, publicly humiliating his rejected fiancées. And the cop was right, there were numerous rumors linking him to lycans and other muties.

  I was forced to start a spreadsheet to keep track of people who might have wanted him dead. It actually didn’t matter to me, but I did have a bit of curiosity—more about the why than the who.

  It was in search of the why that I delved into his emails. I organized them by sender and date, combining them with his replies to build conversations. Then I set a program running to search for certain words and phrases to sort them into business and personal communications.

  Illicit diamonds weren’t the only tools Morgan used to build his empire. I found evidence of at least seventeen assassinations he promoted. It was stupid to discuss such things through email, but he never expected anyone to crack his computer. He also actively engaged in industrial espionage, paying employees of competitors as well as inserting spies into competitors’ businesses.

  All of those practices were commonplace, but rarely had I encountered the head of a large enterprise being so actively and directly involved in dirty tricks.

  And then there were the personal emails. Those were so voluminous that I set another program to work on them, hoping to find hints of someone angry enough to kill him. I gave a list of the addresses responsible for the angry business emails to Wil so his investigators could check them out.

  “We got the autopsy results,” Wil said.

  We were eating a room service breakfast in Nellie’s suite and watching the morning news. The breaking news was Morgan’s murder. I was surprised it stayed a secret so long.

  “You were right, Libby. The spear entered under the breast bone, penetrated the heart, severed the spine, and lodged in the wall.
It took considerable strength to do that. But it was probably someone shorter than Morgan, based on the angle of penetration.”

  Morgan was five-foot-ten. Possibly a woman, but a very strong one.

  “Fingerprints?” I asked.

  “None. The spear and several surfaces were wiped clean. The housekeeper cleaned earlier that day, so that explains some of it, but we found Morgan’s prints on half of his desk, and the other half of the desk was clean.”

  “Morgan’s younger brother,” I said, “has an address here in Montreal, but no other information on him in the past three years. Morgan transfers money to a Swiss bank account in his name every month, and it shows regular withdrawals.”

  Wil gave me a disapproving look. “Have you been in the banking system again?”

  Nellie snorted, sprayed orange juice all over the table, and then choked and coughed. I helpfully pounded her on the back until she pushed me away.

  “Again?” Nellie managed to say through her chortling. “She cruises the damned banking system the way some people play video games. If she didn’t have some kind of hang up on draining accounts, we could all retire tomorrow.”

  Wil looked a little alarmed, and since Nellie was speaking too freely in front of the continent’s top cop, I felt the need to defend myself. “I don’t drain bank accounts, because that’s a good way to get a trip to an off-planet penal colony. I just quietly look around, and since I don’t touch anything, no one knows, and no one gets upset.”

  I gave Wil a warning look, hoping he wouldn’t push it, took a sip of my coffee, and asked, “Did you find a will on file?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then we should be hearing from the brother sometime soon. Joseph Morgan owned fifty-one percent of the corporate stock, which was worth about thirty billion yesterday before the news of his death hit, and there’s no other close relative. I think a conservative estimate of his personal wealth is probably in the twenty billion range.”

  “My team has identified a few close friends,” Wil said. “I planned on going to talk to them today.”

  I looked at Nellie, who said, “Richard is flying in this afternoon.” That meant she would be tied up until O’Malley left.

  “Want some company?” I asked Wil. “The computers will let me know if they find anything.”

  “Sure. Maybe I can keep you out of trouble.”

  Nellie helpfully blew a raspberry.

  The first man we went to see was Jacques Savatier, vice president of sales for a local computer firm. They installed and maintained systems for medium to large organizations. Savatier had been Morgan’s university roommate. His secretary showed us in to a moderately spacious office with modernistic furniture—all chrome and colors as befitting a high-tech firm.

  Savatier showed us to seats on a couch, then sat in an easy-chair across from us and poured coffee for us.

  “I saw the news of Joseph’s death this morning,” he said in Quebecois. “They said it was murder?”

  “Yes, we are treating it as a homicide,” Wil answered. “We have yet to determine whether it was business related or personal. When was the last time you saw him?”

  “It’s been a week or so,” Savatier said, pulling out his phone and checking something. “Yes, nine days. The night he died, according to the newscast. We attended a charity function at the art museum, then went out and hit a couple of clubs.”

  “And at the end of the night?” Wil asked.

  Savatier looked embarrassed. “I’m not sure how that might have any bearing on your investigation.”

  “As I said, we’re looking at his business and personal relationships.”

  “Well, we picked up a couple of girls and took them back to my place.”

  “Perhaps I should speak to them,” Wil said.

  “Uh, I’m not sure that’s possible. You see, I’m not even sure I remember their names. I know I never got their last names.” He cast a nervous glance toward me. It’s funny sometimes how men will go out in public and do things but get embarrassed later and pretend they didn’t.

  “Did you pay them?” I asked.

  His eyes gave him away.

  “How much, Monsieur? And at which club did you find them?”

  He licked his lips, glancing back and forth between me and Wil, who looked very interested.

  Savatier took a deep breath. “The Safari. We paid them a thousand each.”

  I saw Wil’s eyebrows rise at that. Wil grew up in Montreal, so he knew the city better than I did.

  After another half hour of questions, during which Savatier professed to know no one who Morgan might call an enemy or who might have any reason to kill him, we took our leave.

  When we got back to the car, Wil said, “That’s one suspect, for sure.”

  I waited for him to explain that conclusion.

  “The Safari is a very high-end mutie club,” Wil said. “If you’re looking for mutie kinks, that’s the place to find them.”

  “Is it on our way to your next appointment?”

  “It won’t be open. Let’s take care of the rest of our suspects before we go looking for more.”

  Janice Boulanger owned Les Vêtements Font la Femme, a high-end boutique sandwiched between a white-tablecloth bistro and an ultra-upscale hair salon on Rue Sainte Catherine in the heart of the shopping district. She also had been a friend of Morgan’s since university, but Wil’s investigators found no evidence the two had been lovers. She had a reputation for supporting several charities, and Morgan donated heavily to all of them.

  We entered her shop, and I noticed several little tables scattered around, each with a bottle of champagne on ice, a pair of glasses, and a bowl of chocolates. Shopping could be such dreary business, but Boulanger obviously did her best to pamper her customers.

  If I was going to cast an aging trophy wife for a vid, Janice Boulanger would be at the front of the line. About Morgan’s age of forty-six, she was tall, curvy, and beautiful, with thick, styled black hair and a pale, flawless complexion. I felt sorry for those women who spent fortunes in her shop trying to look as good as she did. Having spent my life around my mom and Nellie, I was fully aware of the futility of trying to match such women.

  The one accessory Janice lacked was a wedding ring. I searched my memory of the dossier I read on the way to question her and couldn’t remember any mention of spouses or children. For the daughter of a corporate president, that was surprising.

  “Mademoiselle Boulanger?” Wil asked, presenting his ID. I gave him points for picking up on her marital status. “I’m Wilbur Wilberforce of the Chamber of Commerce, and this is Elizabeth Nelson. We’d like to ask you some questions concerning Joseph Morgan.”

  She nodded, and her welcoming smile slid into purse-mouthed grimness. “Yes, I saw the news this morning. Why don’t you come into my office.”

  That wasn’t unexpected. Our mere shoddy presence would probably upset most of her customers.

  After declining champagne, red wine, and scotch, but accepting some heavenly dark-roast coffee, Wil said, “We understand that you and Monsieur Morgan were close.”

  She nodded. “We’ve been friends for almost thirty years. He dated my first university roommate. She didn’t last for either of us, but Joseph and I have been friends ever since.” She stared off into the distance for a moment, then said, “We think alike, you see. Have the same sense of humor, the same slightly twisted way of seeing the world. We’ve always been comfortable with each other.”

  “Were you lovers?”

  “Oh, no. I mean, back at university we slept with each other occasionally, but it was never what you’d call a relationship. Usually only when one or the other of us had our heart broken and needed some petting. Do you know what I mean? Of course, Joseph was far more promiscuous than I was.” She chuckled softly. “Hell, he was far more promiscuous than almost everyone, and still is. Was. Oh, hell.” I saw her eyes film and didn’t think it was fake. “How did he die? Murder? Was it a robbery?�
�

  Wil shook his head. “Yes, murder, but it doesn’t look like a robbery. We’re trying to figure out who might have a reason to kill him. Either business or his personal life.”

  Boulanger shook her head. “I don’t know. Do angry husbands still kill their wives’ lovers? I wouldn’t think so in this day and age. He wasn’t popular with his competitors, so an assassination wouldn’t surprise me. A kinky sex act gone wrong wouldn’t surprise me, either.” She looked thoughtful, and we waited for her. “If it was a spontaneous act of rage, I would bet on a lover, but that pool of suspects might be half of Montreal.”

  “Do you know his brother?” I asked.

  “Michael? Oh, yes, but I haven’t seen him in years. He’s an artist, and the last I heard he was living in France.”

  “Did he and Joseph get along?”

  “I suppose. They were very different, except for some of their appetites. Michael inherited a minor position in their father’s business but didn’t want anything to do with it. He signed it over to Joseph in exchange for a lifetime stipend.”

  “You seem fairly familiar with their business arrangements,” Wil said.

  Boulanger smiled. “I was a lawyer in those days, newly graduated. I drew up all the papers. A year after Joseph took over the business, he hired me as corporate counsel. Five years of that made me rich enough to start this boutique, and two years later, I quit to run it full time. But Joseph still consulted me occasionally. He trusted me.”

  “So, with Joseph dead,” I asked, “what is Michael’s position?”

  For the first time, I saw surprise on her face. “He inherits it all, I suppose. At the very least, the twenty-five percent he inherited from his father reverts to him.”

  “We haven’t found any evidence of a will,” Wil said.

  “If there was one, I never knew about it. Joseph thought he was invincible, that he would live forever. I seem to remember there were some items in the corporation’s documents about him becoming incapacitated, etcetera. You know, the standard codicils, but other than that, he never asked me to review anything.”