Diamonds and Blood (Chameleon Assassin Book 5) Read online

  “Can you make it down to Chamber headquarters? We have another development in the Morgan case.”

  “Oh, what’s up?”

  “A woman just walked in and says she’s Morgan’s wife.”

  I dropped everything and took the elevator down to the metro station in the hotel’s basement. My nails finished drying on the way. It took me half an hour to get to the Chamber building, and one of Wil’s aides awaited me at the entrance.

  When I reached the fourth floor, Wil intercepted me and took me to a room full of screens. He pointed to one of them, and I saw a blonde woman sitting in a room, looking bored and impatient.

  “None of the research I’ve done found a wife,” I said. “Three engagements, no weddings.”

  “We didn’t find any, either,” Wil responded. “I’d appreciate your opinion.”

  I winked at him. “Figure it takes a grifter to catch a grifter?”

  His lips turned up a little. “Something like that.”

  We went into the room where the woman waited.

  “This is Elizabeth Nelson,” Wil said in French, “and this is Sonia Morgan.”

  I shook her hand, and as I sat down, I said, “We searched for Mr. Morgan’s next of kin, and the only person we were able to identify is his brother, Michael.”

  “Joe often wasn’t forthcoming about his marital status,” she said. “It cramped his style.”

  The purported bride wore an expensive blue dress and even more expensive shoes. Her jewelry was striking—a diamond choker necklace with a thumb-sized sapphire pendant, matching earrings, and a watch that probably cost as much as my townhouse. I estimated she was about five-three or five-four, and twenty pounds overweight. In spite of that, she was very pretty and reminded me of a lot of middle-aged trophy wives.

  Sonia pulled some papers out of her designer bag and handed them to me. The one on top was a marriage certificate in French. I read it over, and although I wasn’t an expert on such documents, it looked authentic.

  “We were married twenty-one years ago in Strasbourg,” Sonia said. “We didn’t live together very long. I wasn’t happy with his philandering, and he objected to my bitching about it. When his father died, he skipped off to Canada and didn’t come back.”

  “You seem to have survived without him,” Wil said.

  She smiled and batted her eyes at him. “I’m not a fool, Director Wilberforce. If you check the corporation’s books, you’ll find me listed as a vendor under my maiden name, Sonia Kensington. Joe dropped a quarter million in my account every month, and I stayed away. But now that he’s gone, someone must take control of the family business.”

  The second piece of paper in the stack was a printout from a bank, showing the deposits and balances. The lady didn’t spend it all, and over a twenty-year period, her bank account was much healthier than Joseph Morgan.

  “You don’t happen to have a will in there, do you?” I asked.

  Sonia shook her head, the sapphire earrings bouncing around hypnotically. “Is there one?” She shrugged. “If there is, I never saw it.”

  “When was the last time you saw Joseph Morgan?” Wil asked.

  She pointed at the papers I held. I shuffled through until I came to a picture of Sonia and Joseph Morgan standing outside a ski chalet with snow everywhere. The picture looked recent—Morgan looked like his recent pictures, and Sonia looked like the woman sitting in front of us, extra weight and all.

  “That was taken in July at Mount Tyree.”

  “Where is that?” I asked.

  “The ski resort?” Wil asked.

  “Yes. That’s how we met originally. We were both ski bumming around Antarctica. Turns out that’s about all we had in common. But we still got together every winter for a week or two at some resort. Other than that, we lived our lives completely apart.”

  Wil thanked her and told her we would be in touch. She said she was staying at the Queen Elizabeth, and had a meeting scheduled with J. Morgan’s lawyers the following day.

  After she left, Wil asked, “What do you think?”

  “You need to authenticate that marriage certificate. I can verify the bank transactions, but you should verify her story about Morgan paying her surreptitiously. One thing I can’t do is check if Morgan was actually the one paying her. Doing it the way she said makes sense. List her as a business expense, and it lowers the corporation’s payments to the Chamber as well as other payments they owe based on profits.”

  I chuckled. “If her story’s true, she’s not losing any time putting in a claim on Morgan’s assets.”

  “He was the chairman and president,” Wil said. “I imagine his estate is worth a healthy number of credits.”

  “More than that, Wil. Morgan held fifty-one percent of the stock. He literally controlled the company, and by my estimation, his estate is worth as much as twenty billion credits.”

  I got up to leave, but Wil asked, “How come you can’t tell if the payments came from Morgan? I thought you were the bank-hacking guru.”

  I rolled my eyes around the room, pointedly looking at the cameras and listening devices. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out into the hall. “I am,” I hissed. “And being smart and discreet, I’m still walking around free and not working in a mine on the moon. Morgan’s companies got hacked, and your Chamber boys are watching all of his accounts, hoping to catch someone coming back for another go. No way am I going near all that.”

  Chapter 7

  Entertaincorp paid good wages, but I wasn’t going to get rich as a glorified babysitter. If Nellie wasn’t involved, I would have turned it down. When Richard O’Malley hired me as a bodyguard for Nellie’s tour, I talked to my dad, and he gave me four potential targets in Montreal and two in Quebec City. I added Joseph Morgan’s apartment to the list.

  “Three of these are commissions I wouldn’t normally pursue, but as long as you’re there, take a look and see what you think,” Dad said.

  In other words, check them out, see if the jobs were doable with low risk, and maybe pick up a few extra credits. Rich collectors often commissioned thefts for artworks they weren’t able to buy. Of course, they couldn’t publicly display such acquisitions, but that wasn’t important to some people.

  I was upset at missing out on the Joseph Morgan security contract, but his requirements for a security system were totally over the top for an apartment, and the vault he required was the largest I’d ever seen in a private residence. If I wasn’t curious about what he was hiding, I wouldn’t be human.

  Then, the first time I followed him, he did several things that piqued my interest. I saw him meet a half-lycan woman for lunch. Afterward, Morgan left with the briefcase the woman brought, and took the briefcase home with him.

  The following day, he took the briefcase to his headquarters and left it there. Since it would have been quicker and easier to have taken the case to his business the day he got it, it raised the question of why he took it home first.

  Of course, the whole sequence of events reminded me more of an exchange of illegal goods than a legitimate delivery. It definitely was different than the deliveries by armored car of cut stones from his European operation. That took my curiosity up a few notches and led me to the vault in Morgan’s apartment.

  Three of the commissions in Montreal were for assassinations. Assassination was a standard business practice, whether to remove someone at a competing business or to open a rung on the corporate ladder. Want a promotion? Kill the boss. Subordinate showing a little too much ambition? Kill the subordinate before he saved enough money to commission a hitman.

  I had to laugh at two of the commissions. The owners of competing restaurant chains had each offered a contract on the other. Since the money for such contracts was always held in escrow with an agent, I could collect it even if the original paying party was deceased. The idea of taking both the idiots out appealed to me.

  The other commission was of a more personal nature. Dennis Dunbar was the president of
a food company that sold fresh produce from farms all over Quebec. Much of eastern and southern Quebec had missed most of the industrial and mining pollution found in other places, and the food grown there, especially dairy, was in great demand.

  Dunbar’s daughter married a man daddy didn’t like. In fact, he disliked his son-in-law enough to offer two hundred thousand credits to anyone who made his daughter a widow. I did a little research and found that his daughter had an affinity for hospitals. A dip into the hospital records revealed that Debra Dunbar Hastert was either incredibly unlucky, incredibly clumsy, or had incredibly bad taste in men.

  Her medical history prior to her marriage showed nothing worse than a case of tonsillitis. So, I leaped to the conclusion that the broken jaw, broken arm, dislocated shoulder, severely sprained knee, and multiple bruises that hospital personnel documented on her five visits over a three-year period might be due to her husband.

  With O’Malley in town for a few days, I took the opportunity to check out Debra and Kevin Hastert’s home, and Kevin’s office at Industries de la Ferme du Québec, Dennis Dunbar’s company. Kevin and Debra lived in a nice mansion that my research showed was a wedding gift from daddy. Likewise, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Kevin’s position was a gift from daddy.

  But just to make sure of my assumptions, I borrowed a delivery van from one of the hotel’s suppliers and drove out to the Hastert home. In a society as full of crime as twenty-third century North America, the van driver really should have locked the doors when he left the vehicle.

  “Special order birthday cake,” I told the guard at the neighborhood’s gate. He waved me on through without even pretending to get up out of his chair in the gatehouse. Of course, it was raining buckets, and I hadn’t expected a real inspection, but I didn’t even identify the address for my delivery. My dad always said it was hard to find good help.

  In the persona of a middle-aged woman wearing the bakery’s uniform, I rang the doorbell at the Hastert home. A woman answered the door.

  “I have a special-order cake for Devin Hastern,” I said.

  She blinked at me. “What name did you say?”

  “Devin Hastern,” I repeated, slurring the name even worse the second time I said it.

  “Well, I guess I can take it,” she said.

  “No, I need him to sign for it.”

  “But he’s not here. He’s at work.”

  We went back and forth for about five minutes, then she finally called the lady of the house. Debra came to the door with a fairly new black eye. Hiding behind her, and peeking around her at me, was a little girl about four or five years old.

  “Special cake for Devin Hastern,” I said, shoving the invoice I’d faked in front of her.

  “I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,” she said. “This is the Hastert residence, not Hastern, and this address is two blocks over.”

  “Really? Oh, wow. I’m sorry.” I stood there staring at her face, and she blushed. “None of my business, lady, but I really think you should buy a gun. Blow the son of a bitch away next time he gets frisky.” Her face turned from red to deep maroon.

  With that, I turned and walked back to the van, started it up, and drove away.

  I considered my various options for killing Kevin. Doing it at his home would be a breeze, but it’s usually considered bad form to do a hit in front of the wife and kids. Killing him at work in downtown Montreal would put me in an area with a lot of police and security guards, not to mention several thousand potential witnesses.

  The route Hastert’s limo driver took in the mornings led through an area of parks near McGill University. Open grass on one side of the road, and forest on the other. A paved jogging or walking path wound through the forest paralleling the road. I considered a place where the road curved and the driver had to slow down. I would get one shot through the back window from fifty yards. Not ideal.

  Kevin seemed to go out after work, and often got home late, so I decided to check that out. I followed him a couple of evenings, and he hit a different bar each time. I couldn’t spend the night watching him as I had an obligation to guard Nellie.

  One night, though, he showed up at Le Sommet with a young woman, barely of university age. He proceeded to get drunk and feel her up, and while she looked fairly enthusiastic early in the evening, she became less so the more Kevin drank. Then about midnight he dragged her outside. I followed them out, where he ordered a taxi and pushed her into the back seat. I drew close enough to hear his directions, which were to a hotel that I didn’t recognize.

  As soon as their taxi drove away, I jumped into the taxi next in line. I gave the address to the robotaxi, then pulled out my phone to check on where I was going. From what I could tell, my destination hotel was several steps down from the Queen Elizabeth, and only a couple of steps above a flophouse. Kevin Hastert was obviously a romantic guy.

  Before I got out of the taxi, I morphed into a forty-something man in a cheap suit. I expected an automated check-in but discovered a man who needed a shower and a shave. My estimation of the hotel’s quality took a nose dive. Low-end automats weren’t that expensive. Twenty credits to the guy at the front desk got me Kevin’s room number.

  Not sure how I wanted to handle things, I took a rickety elevator up six floors to his room. The building’s soundproofing was pretty poor, and it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what was going on behind most of the doors.

  I pressed my ear to Kevin’s door and heard the girl crying, then the sound of a fist against flesh, followed by the sounds of sex. She cried louder.

  Disabling the door lock, I walked in. The room was tiny, and the bed took up most of it. Kevin and the girl were each partially dressed, and the girl’s dress was torn. She had a bloody nose, an incipient black eye, and she was crying as though her heart was broken. Kevin wasn’t paying any attention to either her or me.

  A film of red rage clouded my vision. I almost shot him, but stopped because I was afraid I might hurt the girl. Instead, I grabbed him by the shoulders, hauled him off her, and threw him against the wall. He missed and hit the window. The glass obviously didn’t meet normal hotel safety standards. The last I saw of Kevin he had an astonished expression on his face as his naked butt shattered the glass, and then the rest of him followed his posterior through the window. I peeked out quickly to make sure he had made it all the way to the ground, and he had. A very awkward landing and a lot of blood.

  I checked the girl, who was curled up sobbing in a fetal position. It didn’t appear she had life-threatening injuries, so I pulled a blanket over her and left the room.

  Back out in the hall, I morphed into a dark-haired woman dressed like a hooker and took the back stairs down to the street. A couple of blocks away, I morphed again, taking on the form of a troll, a form guaranteed to discourage muggers, and hiked a mile to the nearest metro stop. There, I morphed into my own loveable self and took the train back to the Queen Elizabeth. I called Dad from the train to tell him I had completed the commission.

  Chapter 8

  It turned out that Sonia Morgan enjoyed blues music. At least, she enjoyed it enough to buy tickets to Nellie’s performances almost every night. She also enjoyed men. Young men, old men, men in between. The young men she hung out with were very good looking and muscular. The old men were rich. That made her exactly normal for the single women at the club, no matter their ages.

  The Queen Elizabeth wasn’t cheap, and tickets to hear Nellie sing at Le Sommet ran a hundred credits. Add that to twenty-credit drinks, hundred-credit dinners, and the shopping trips Sonia took almost every day, and the woman was burning money as though she had no worries.

  Wil set a tail on her, and I got to read the reports every morning. Sonia was ambitious and not worried about her reputation. It was rare for her to share breakfast with the same man two mornings in a row. As opposed to me, who was enjoying having the same man with a room-service breakfast every morning.

  “The woman is obvi
ously drowning in grief over her husband’s death,” I told Wil as I slathered marmalade on a piece of toast. “I mean, I’d do exactly the same thing if you got skewered by a spear. Eat, drink, shop, and screw Harry. Right?”

  Wil laughed. “Well, she has to hang around here until we figure this thing out. The stock market has suspended J. Morgan from trading. The probate court has frozen all of Joseph Morgan’s assets pending a resolution as to the cause of death. Everything is up in the air, and the wise heiress personally tracks her interests.”

  “I thought we knew the cause of death. Shish-ka-bob.”

  “Yes, but it’s considered bad form to reward a murderer with the proceeds of the deceased’s estate. The court wants to know for sure that she, his brother, and the rest of their vast conspiracy weren’t involved in helping Joe into the Promised Land.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. She’s got an alibi, but I’ve heard a rumor that the person who pays for an assassination is also guilty of murder.”

  “Just so.” He poured himself another cup of coffee. “I called Eileen Desroches, the sister of the jewelry designer who had dinner with Morgan the night before he died. As soon as I identified myself and said I was calling about Joseph Morgan, she hung up and blocked me.”

  “You should have made a video call. Even I would talk to a cop as good looking as you are.”

  Wil chuckled. “She doesn’t have a record of any sort. I do have an address. Want to go over there?”

  “Can you find an address for her sister? Isn’t that really who we want to talk to?”

  He smiled at me, and I melted a little.

  “As luck would have it, both Eileen and Leslie share the same address.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Probably fake.”

  An hour later, as I looked out the car window, I began to have a bad feeling about Leslie and Eileen Desroches.

  “This is the mutant part of town,” Wil said.

  “Yeah, I kinda figured that out.” Duh. We hadn’t seen anyone except lycans for the past fifteen minutes since we crossed a bridge, and for half an hour before that, the streets were almost empty. Unsurprising, since daytime was the best time to cruise through vampire neighborhoods.