Lisa Unger - Smoke

Dax looked down at his feet. “All right already,” he said, getting up. “It’s been a hard year for you two, huh?”

Jeff looked at him. “For all of us, man.”

Dax nodded. “I’ll call you after I find out about the security system. A couple hours tops.”

Lydia came back through the door without knocking, holding a photo printout in her hand.

“Take a look at this,” she said. They came and stood behind her, gazing at the blurry photograph of a girl running through a crowd of people wearing costumes.

“What’s this?” Jeff asked.

“It’s a witness photograph from Halloween night in Riverdale. Apparently, a girl was shot in the middle of this parade. Police were unsure whether it was a Halloween prank or not, since there was no blood found at the scene. But look at this,” said Lydia, pointing to the white van. There was a logo they could just barely make out on the side of the van, the image of a sun with some geometric shapes inside.

“The New Day,” said Dax slowly.

“Is that the van you saw last night?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Yeah, or very similar,” said Dax. “I think I’d better skip that PT appointment and make those calls now.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” said Lydia.

“Does that look like Lily Samuels to you?” asked Jeff.

“At first glance, I’d say no. Too thin and her head is shaved,” said Lydia.

“You better hope that’s not her,” said Dax, looking closely at the photograph. Lydia could tell he was noticing the things she had noticed, the way her shoulder blades were visible straining through her flesh, the way she was clad only in panties and a thin tee, the way her arms were pumping in a dead heat. The woman in the photograph was running for her life and Lydia was sure if they could see her face that it would be a mask of terror. She prayed it wasn’t Lily. Because if it was, they might be too late.

Pink diamonds are for the very wealthy,” said Christian Striker, holding the gem in his hand. “This stone is just more than a carat. Very pricey.”

“Strange thing to find in the dirt at an abandoned house,” said Jeffrey.

“Is that where you found it?” he asked with a shake of his head. He pulled a loupe from his desk and examined the diamond.

“When you talk about diamonds, you talk about four things: cut, carat, clarity, and color. This is a brilliant stone, heart-shaped cut, nearly flawless. I can see one minuscule imperfection in the stone, making the clarity like a VVS1 or 2, meaning that the inclusion is not visible to the naked eye. And then there’s the color. White diamonds are measured by the colorlessness. Colored stones, called ‘fancy’ diamonds, are more valuable the richer their hue. Many colored stones are irradiated these days, meaning that the color was created in a lab. This is just because they’re in style but exist so rarely in nature. But to me this looks like a natural pink diamond, only because the pink tint is so subtle.”

Christian Striker knew more than anyone Lydia had ever met. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of facts-history, science, geology, mathematics-which is to say he knew a little bit about many things. Lydia liked hanging out with him because she always learned something. And he was cute, with sandy blonde hair and a boyish face but searing dark eyes, so brown they were nearly black, that missed nothing. He was a few years younger than Jeffrey, who had just turned forty-three.

“Where would you get one of these?” asked Jeffrey.

“I imagine most diamond dealers can get their hands on one. The largest diamond mine in the world is the Argyle mine in Kimberly, Australia… of course there’s Sierra Leone, Russia, and since 1991 Canada has become a major player on the scene. They have two diamond mines in the Northwest Territories, and two others expected to be operating by 2006. There’s been a bit of a diamond rush up there in recent years. What people like about the Canadian diamonds is they’re ‘clean.’ ”

“What do you mean?” asked Jeffrey.

“They’re not what people call ‘blood’ diamonds or ‘dirty’ diamonds. They’re not used to finance terror, war, and weapons the way they are in Sierra Leone and Angola. You know in Sierra Leone, for example, the Revolutionary United Front controls the mines and uses the proceeds to buy weapons. They also provide untraceable diamonds to other terrorist organizations to launder money. The people doing the mining are dying in slave-labor conditions; they’re imprisoned by the rebels and forced to work until they die. Meanwhile, said rebels randomly amputate the hands of children as a warning to their parents not to support the civilian government. These rebels are just children themselves, children high on drugs, carrying AK-47s and machetes. It’s pretty fucked.”

“See?” Lydia said to Jeffrey. He nodded.

“Anyway,” said Christian. “This is a nice one. Most dealers don’t sell gems without settings. So, it’s possible that this was purchased on the black market, which makes it even more likely that it’s a blood diamond.”

He handed the gem back to Lydia and she gazed at it. It was stunning. She considered it a terrible irony that something so naturally gorgeous could be surrounded by so much ugliness. Was it greed or a lust for beauty that led people to kill and die for these stones? Maybe both.

“Who would know where this might have come from?” asked Jeffrey.

“I know a guy in the diamond district,” said Christian, flipping through his Rolodex. He wrote a name and number on a pad by his phone and handed it to Jeff. “Tell him I sent you. He’ll tell you what he can.”

Jorge Alonzo thought he was king of the jungle. To show he was not intimidated by Matt Stenopolis’s size or the presence of detectives in his apartment, he slumped in his leather recliner, scrolling through channels on his digital cable. When he did finally turn his eyes to them, he stared at them like he was hard. Matt could feel his chest constricting, the guy was pissing him off so bad.

“Rosario’s brother told us that you were calling her all night, trying to get her to go to the club with you,” Jesamyn was saying. Matt was looking around the apartment: large flat-screen television with surround-sound speakers, a Blaupunkt audio system, leather furniture as soft to the touch as velvet. Matt counted four framed posters of naked or nearly naked women in a variety of evocative poses. There were some Japanese anime prints that looked pretty expensive, featuring scantily clad Asian women with gravity-defying breasts and bulbous asses, long thin legs and tiny waists.

“I know what that punk thinks he heard. But I was finished with that bitch,” he said lazily. “We were done. She was getting fat.” He held out his hands to express her expanding girth.

“She was pregnant. With your child,” said Jesamyn slowly, looking at him like he was a curiosity better seen on the Discovery Channel than right in front of her face.

“So she said. I asked for a paternity test,” he said, scratching his crotch and looking at Jesamyn with a smile. “Fat bitch. Not like you, girl. Your shit is tight .”

Matt was on him then. He knocked the remote out of Alonzo’s hand and lifted him off the recliner like he was made out of gauze.

“What the fuck-” Jorge protested shrilly.

“You’ll have some fucking respect for my partner, you piece of shit,” Matt said, the anger in his chest threatening to split him in two. His disrespect for Jez, his general attitude, and the fact that if Matt worked OT for the rest of his life he’d never be able to afford an audio-visual system like that without going into debt was making him crazy.