While Lee sat in front of his computers, sipping seltzer, Julie filled him in on what had happened at the hospital and showed him the printouts of the information Bobby had acquired earlier that morning. Frank Pollard sat with them, in the third chair, where Julie could keep an eye on him. Throughout their conversation, Lee exhibited no surprise at what he was being told, as if his computers had bestowed on him such enormous wisdom and foresight that nothing—not even a man capable of teleportation—could surprise him. Julie knew that Lee, as well as everyone else in the Dakota & Dakota family, would never leak a word of any client’s business to anyone; but she didn’t know how much of his supercool demeanor was real and how much was a conscious image that he put on every morning with his ultra-voguish clothes.

Though his unshakable nonchalance might be partly feigned, his talent for computers was unquestionably real. When June had finished her condensed version of recent events, Lee said, “Okay, what do you need from me now?” There was no doubt on either his part or hers that eventually he could provide whatever she required.

She gave him a steno pad. Double rows of currency serial numbers filled the first ten pages. “Those are random samplings of the bills in each of the bags of cash we’re holding for Frank. Can you find out if it’s hot money—stolen, maybe an extortion or ransom payment?”

Lee quickly paged through the lists. “No consecutive numbers ? That makes it harder. Usually cops don’t have a record of the serial numbers of stolen money unless it was brand-new bills, which are still bound in packets, consecutively numbered, right off the press.”

“Most of this cash is fairly well circulated.”

“There’s an outside chance it might still be from a ransom or extortion payoff, like you said. The cops would’ve taken down all the numbers before they let the victim make the drop, just in case the perp made a clean getaway. It looks bleak, but I’ll try. What else?”

Julie said, “An entire family in Garden Grove, last name Farris, was murdered last year.”

“Because of me,” Frank said.

Lee propped his elbows on the arms of his chair, leaned back, and steepled his fingers. He looked like a wise Zen master who had been forced to don the clothes of an avant-garde artist after getting the wrong suitcase at the airport. “No one really dies, Mr. Pollard. They just go on from here. Grief is good, but guilt is pointless.”

Though she knew too few computer fanatics to be certain, Julie suspected that not many found a way to combine the hard realities of science and technology with religion. But in fact, Lee had arrived at a belief in God through his work with computers and his interest in modern physics. He once explained to her why a profound understanding of the dimensionless space inside a computer network, combined with a modern physicist’s view of the universe, led inevitably to faith in a Creator, but she hadn’t followed a thing he’d said.

She gave Lee Chen the dates and details of the Farris and Roman murders. “We think they were all killed by the same man. I haven’t got a clue to his real name, so I call him Mr. Blue. Considering the savagery of the murders, we suspect he’s a serial killer with a long list of victims. If we’re right, the murders have been so widely spread or Mr. Blue has covered his tracks so well that the press has never made connections between the crimes.”

“Otherwise,” Frank said, “they’d have sensationalized it on their front pages. Especially if this guy regularly bites his victims.”

“But since most police agencies are computer-linked these days,” Julie said, “they might’ve made connections across jurisdictions, saw what the press didn’t. There might be one or more quiet, ongoing investigations between local, state, and federal authorities. We need to know if any police in California-or the FBI nationally-are on to Mr. Blue, and we need to know anything they’ve learned about him, no matter how trivial.”

Lee smiled. In the middle of his brass-hued face, his teeth were like pegs of highly polished ivory. “That means going past the public-access files in their computers. I’ll have to break their security, one agency after another, all the way into the FBI.”

“Difficult?”

“Very. But I’m not without experience.” He pushed his jacket sleeves farther up on his arms, flexed his fingers, and turned to the terminal keyboard as if he were a concert pianist about to interpret Mozart. He hesitated and glanced sideways at Julie. “I’ll work into their systems indirectly to discourage tracebacks. I won’t damage any data or breach national security, so I probably won’t even be noticed. But if someone spots me snooping and puts a tracer on me that I don’t see or can’t shake, they might pull your PI license for this.”

“I’ll sacrifice myself, take the blame. Bobby’s license won’t be pulled, too, so the agency won’t go down. How long will this take?”

“Four or five hours, maybe more, maybe a lot more. Can somebody bring me lunch at noon? I’d rather eat here and not take a break.”

“Sure. What would you like?”

“Big Mac, double order of fries, vanilla shake.”

Julie grimaced. “How come a high-tech guy like you never heard of cholesterol?”

“Heard of it. Don’t care. If we never really die, cholesterol can’t kill me. It can only move me out of this life a little sooner.”

43

ARCHER VAN CORVAIRE cracked open the Levolor blind and peered through the thick bulletproof glass in the front door of his Newport Beach shop. He squinted suspiciously at Bobby and Clint, though he knew and expected them. At last he unlocked the door and let them in.

Van Corvaire was about fifty-five but invested a lot of time and money in the maintenance of a youthful appearance. To thwart time, he’d undergone dermabrasion, face-lifts, and liposuction ; to improve on nature, he’d had a nose job, cheek implants, and chin restructuring. He wore a toupee of such exquisite craftsmanship, it would have passed for his own dyed-black hair—except that he sabotaged the illusion by insisting on not merely a replacement but a lush, unnatural pompadour. If he ever got into a swimming pool wearing that toupee, it would look like the conning tower of a submarine.

After reengaging both dead bolts, he turned to Bobby. “I never do business in the morning. I take only afternoon appointments.”

“We appreciate the exception you’ve made for us,” Bobby said.

Van Corvaire sighed elaborately. “Well, what is it?”

“I have a stone I’d like you to appraise for me.”

He squinted, which wasn’t appealing, since his eyes were already as narrow as those of a ferret. Before his name change thirty years ago, he’d been Jim Bob Spleener, and a friend would have told him that when he squinted suspiciously he looked very much like a Spleener and not at all like a van Corvaire. “An appraisal? That’s all you want?”

He led them through the small but plush salesroom: hand-textured plaster ceiling; bleached suede walls; whitewashed oak floors; custom area carpet by Patterson, Flynn & Martin in shades of peach, pale blue and sandstone; a modem white sofa flanked by pickled-finish, burlwood tables by Bau; four elegant rattan chairs encircling a round table with a glass top thick enough to survive a blow from a sledgehammer.

One small merchandise display case stood off to the left. Van Corvaire’s business was conducted entirely by appointment; his jewelry was custom designed for the very rich and tasteless, people who would find it necessary to buy hundred-thousand-dollar necklaces to wear to a thousand-dollar-a-plate charity dinner, and never grasp the irony.

The back wall was mirrored, and van Corvaire watched himself with obvious pleasure all the way across the room. He hardly took his eyes off his reflection until he passed through the door into the workroom.

Bobby wondered if the guy ever got so entranced by his image that he walked smack into it. He didn’t like Jim Bob van Corvaire, but the narcissistic creep’s knowledge of gems and jewelry was often useful.

Years ago, when Dakota & Dakota Investigations was just Dakota Investigations, without the ampersand and the redundancy (better never put it that way around Julie, who would appreciate the clever wordplay but would make him eat the “redundancy” part), Bobby had helped van Corvaire recover a fortune in unmounted diamonds stolen by a lover. Old Jim Bob desperately wanted his gems but didn’t want the woman sent to prison, so he went to Bobby instead of to the police. That was the only soft spot Bobby had ever seen in van Corvaire; in the intervening years the jeweler no doubt had grown a callus over it too.

Bobby fished one of the marble-size red stones from his pocket. He saw the jeweler’s eyes widen.

With Clint standing to one side of him, with Bobby behind him and looking over his shoulder, van Corvaire sat on a high stool at a workbench and examined the rough-cut stone through a loupe. Then he put it on the lighted glass table of a microscope and studied it with that more powerful instrument.

“Well?” Bobby asked.

The jeweler did not respond. He rose, elbowing them out of the way, and went to another stool, farther along the workbench. There, he used one scale to weigh the stone and another to determine if its specific gravity matched that of any known gems.

Finally, he moved to a third stool that was positioned in front of a vise. From a drawer he withdrew a ring box in which three large, cut gems lay on a square of blue velvet.

“Junk diamonds,” he said.

“They look nice to me,” Bobby said.

“Too many flaws.”

He selected one of those stones and fixed it in the vise with a couple of turns of the crank. Gripping the red beauty in a small pair of pliers, he used one of its sharper edges to attempt to score the polished facet of the diamond in the vise, pressing with considerable effort. Then he put the pliers and red gem aside, picked up another jeweler’s loupe, leaned forward, and studied the junk diamond.

“A faint scratch,” he said. “Diamond cuts diamond.” He held the red stone between, thumb and forefinger, staring at it with obvious fascination—and greed. “Where did you get this?”

“Can’t tell you,” Bobby said. “So it’s just a red diamond?”

“Just? The red diamond may be the rarest precious stone in the world! You must let me market it for you. I have clients who’d pay anything to have this as the centerstone of a necklace or pendant. It’ll probably be too big for a ring even after final cut. It’s huge!”

“What’s it worth?” Clint asked.

“Impossible to say until it’s finish-cut. Millions, certainly.”

“Millions?” Bobby said doubtfully. “It’s big but not that big.”

Van Corvaire finally tore his gaze from the stone and looked up at Bobby. “You don’t understand. Until now, there were only seven known red diamonds in the world. This is the eighth. And when it’s cut and polished, it’ll be one of the two largest. This comes as close to priceless as anything gets.”

OUTSIDE Archer van Corvaire’s small shop, where heavy traffic roared past on Pacific Coast Highway, with disco-frenetic flares of sunlight flashing off the chrome and glass, it was hard to believe that the tranquility of Newport Harbor and its burden of beautiful yachts were just beyond the buildings on the far side of the street. In a sudden moment of enlightenment, Bobby realized that his entire life (and perhaps nearly everyone else’s) was like this street at this precise point in time: all bustle and noise, glare and movement, a desperate rush to break out of the herd, to achieve something and transcend the frantic whirl of commerce, thereby earning respite for reflection and a shot at serenity—when all the time serenity was only a few steps away, on the far side of the street, just out of sight.

That realization contributed to a heretofore subtle feeling that the Pollard case was somehow a trap—or, more accurately, a squirrel cage that spun faster and faster even as he scampered frantically to get a footing on its rotating floor. He stood for a few seconds by the open door of the car, feeling ensnared, caged. At that moment he was not sure why, in spite of the obvious dangers, he had been so eager to take on Frank’s problems and put all that he cared about at risk. He knew now that the reasons he had quoted to Julie and to himself-sympathy for Frank, curiosity, the excitement of a wildly different kind of job—were merely justifications, not reasons, and that his true motivation was something he did not yet understand.

Unnerved, he got in the car and pulled the door shut as Clint started the engine.

“Bobby, how many red diamonds would you say are in the mason jar? A hundred?”

“More. A couple hundred.”

“Worth what—hundreds of millions?”

“Maybe a billion or more.”

They stared at each other, and for a while neither of them spoke. It wasn’t that no words were adequate to the situation; instead, there was too much to say and no easy way to determine where to begin.

At last Bobby said, “But you couldn’t convert the stones to cash, not quickly anyway. You’d have to dribble them onto the market over a lot of years to prevent a sudden dilution of their rarity and value, but also to avoid causing a sensation, drawing unwanted attention, and maybe having to answer some unanswerable questions.”

“After they’ve mined diamonds for hundreds of years, all over the world, and only found seven red ones ... where the hell did Frank come up with a jarful?”

Bobby shook his head and said nothing.

Clint reached into his pants pocket and withdrew one of the diamonds, smaller than the specimen that Bobby had brought for Archer van Corvaire’s appraisal. “I took this home to show it to Felina. I was going to return it to the jar when I got to the office, but you hustled me out before I had a chance. Now that I know what it is, I don’t want it in my possession a minute longer.”

Bobby took the stone and put it in his pocket with the larger diamond. “Thank you, Clint.”

DR. DYSON MANFRED’S study, in his house in Turtle Rock, was the most uncomfortable place Bobby had ever been. He had been happier last week, flattened on the floor of his van, trying to avoid being chopped to bits by automatic weapons fire than he was among Manfred’s collection of many-legged, carapaced, antenna-bristled, mandibled, and thoroughly repulsive exotic bugs.

Repeatedly, in his peripheral vision, Bobby saw something move in one of the many glass-covered boxes on the wall, but every time he turned to ascertain which hideous creature was about to slip out from under the frame, his fear proved unfounded. All of the nightmarish specimens were pinned and motionless, lined up neatly beside one another, none missing. He also would have sworn that he heard things skittering and slithering inside the shallow drawers of the many cases that he knew contained more insects, but he supposed that those sounds were every bit as imaginary as the phantom movement glimpsed from the corners of his eyes.