Diamonds and Blood (Chameleon Assassin Book 5)

by BR Kingsolver

  Everyone laughed at the glowering Benito.

  “Miss Nelson, what do you think of this other door?” Wil asked.

  I pretended to study it. “It’s a Sentry vault,” I said. “Usually you see this model installed in banks. I know that Modern Bank of Toronto uses one.” I pulled out the tools I’d used to crack the safe the previous night and started to work. Since I already knew the combination, it wouldn’t have taken me as long to open it, but I still put on a twenty-minute show.

  The door finally swung open, and Wil entered. Benito stared at me with a malevolence that promised a death sentence, and I deeply regretted not using a different persona that day.

  Wil did a quick search through the vault and came out with a handful of photographs in one hand, and a bag of diamonds in the other. Since I had told him where to look, it didn’t take him very long. He held out the photos.

  “How nice of you to keep the evidence,” Wil said. “This proves our information about the corruption in Montreal PD. And where did you get these diamonds? We found bags like this at Joseph Morgan’s penthouse when we investigated his murder.”

  Benito assumed a stone face and said, “I want to speak with my lawyer.”

  Wil laughed. “I’ll bet you do. Benito Capozzi, you’re under arrest for bribing a public official, grand theft, and murder.”

  The Chamber men handcuffed Benito and hustled him up the stairs.

  With the evidence the Chamber pulled from Benito’s vault, Wil issued search warrants for all of Benito’s businesses, as well as the homes of his adult children and those of Benito’s siblings. It was impossible to keep all that quiet, and though Wil and the Chamber could keep their operation off the main corporate networks, there were plenty of independent websites more than willing to broadcast the news. By the following morning, even the corporate organizations broadcast the assault of the Chamber on organized crime in Montreal.

  By sundown on the day after the raid on Benito’s, more than a hundred officials of the local government, the Chamber, and corporate employees had been arrested on corruption charges.

  Wil was ecstatic, his smile about to split his face. I was terrified, not believing for a minute that any of the mobsters would stay in jail. And even with Benito locked up, I was sure hit orders had already gone out for me, Wil, the ex-chief of police, and anyone else the mob thought should be silenced.

  I was sitting in my hotel room, nursing a glass of whiskey and staring out the window.

  “You sure stepped in it this time,” Nellie said, coming in from her room and flopping down in a chair.

  “Yeah. Hell, talk about ironic. I’m going to get killed because I did something to help solve a murder.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s a plane out for Ireland in the morning, but there’s also a huge storm out in the Atlantic. I can maybe get a car and drive south. They’ll expect me to go west to Toronto if I run.”

  “Libby, there’s probably a sniper aiming at every door of this hotel,” Nellie said. “I wouldn’t even trust the elevators to get to the metro. And you shouldn’t be anywhere near that window.”

  She wasn’t doing a very good job of cheering me up, especially since I agreed with everything she said.

  Something kept nagging at me. Benito had no reason to kill Morgan, and no reason to kill any of the others. Sure he was a crook, and probably a murderer many times over, but I didn’t believe he was responsible for any of the murders we were investigating. That meant the murderer was still out there, and I was increasingly convinced that most of what we’d found had nothing to do with the original murder of Joseph Morgan.

  Sabrina wanted Clarissa to hack into Morgan’s computers, and the intrusion to Hotel de Charm happened three weeks before Morgan’s death. Then the next one, into J. Morgan Jewelers, the night before his death.

  And how were Sabrina and Sonia connected?

  Chapter 25

  When Wil got back to the hotel, he was as excited and animated as I’d ever seen him, and grinning like a fool. He grabbed me up out of my chair, swung me around, and gave me a kiss that made my head spin.

  “This is the biggest bust of organized crime ever on this continent! And some of the information we’re getting implicates members of organizations in other cities as well,” he said. “The Chamber’s board is sending me congratulations, and my boss says I’ll get a big bonus.” He kissed me again. “I’m buying you the biggest lobster in Montreal for dinner. A lobster for a mobster.”

  “Do they have fashionable full-body armor?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Wil, do you realize what kind of target is painted on you? And on me? Why didn’t you tell me Benito would be there? I’d have come as one of your Chamber guys or a Sentry technician or something. You know he’s already sent out contracts on us, don’t you?”

  The look on his face told me the thought had never occurred to him.

  “Capozzi wouldn’t dare strike at the Chamber,” he said.

  I barked out a laugh. “God, you are naïve. Benito is either going to be executed or sentenced to a penal colony for life. What does he have to lose? But Carmine can’t allow you to take his family down without retaliating, or he’ll lose all credibility. And if you take Capozzi down, the other families have to wonder if you’re going after them. Donofrio, Samarin, Gregory, and all the others have your name on a cosmic dart board, begging people to take you out.”

  He set me on my feet and searched my face. “If you think taking them down is such a bad idea, why did you help me? Hell, you’re the one who encouraged me to do it.”

  I sagged against him. “I didn’t think it through. I mean, simply arresting Benito for dealing some hot diamonds, or for bribing the chief of police wouldn’t cause much of a ripple. People would blow it off, chalk it up to Benito being stupid. But you’ve gone after the whole organization, and that will get everyone’s attention.”

  I hugged him and said, “You do understand that we can’t just go out to dinner. There are people with rifles out there waiting for us to show our faces.”

  “Well, crap. I’ll see if I can get you a lobster through room service.”

  I wasn’t sure I trusted room service, either. One thing about being an assassin is that it didn’t take much to push you into a state of total paranoia. It was almost impossible to protect yourself from all the ways a person can be killed. A little bit of botulinum toxin injected into a lobster tail would be as fatal as a bullet.

  “I have a better idea,” I said.

  I called Nellie in, and between the two of us we created a disguise for Wil. While it was impossible to disguise his height, by trimming one of Nellie’s wigs, we covered his shaved head with shoulder-length dreadlocks. A little makeup helped to make him less gorgeous, and taking his most casual clothes, we crafted something that didn’t look new and fashionable. Tom wrangled an older car for us, and I morphed into a redhead that looked like my mom when she was young.

  As we drove out of the hotel’s parking garage, Wil asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Dinner.” I smiled at him. “When we first got to Montreal and explored a bit, we found a great place in the mutie district. I don’t know if I’d eat there all the time, but they say the food is screened, and none of us have gotten sick after eating there.”

  He gave a startled laugh. “That’s a helluva recommendation.”

  “Life isn’t always easy,” I replied.

  Compared to the mutie slums of Toronto, the poorer areas of Montreal were middle class. We drove northeast to Hochelaga, passing through the outskirts of a vampire enclave and circling around a lycan area that I thought was rather scary in the daytime. The restaurant was in a well-lit neighborhood where the people on the streets wore both shoes and filter masks.

  We parked the car in the back of the restaurant and walked around to the front. No one seemed to pay us any attention except for some of the men sizing me up. Considering that my mo
m was gorgeous, that wasn’t a surprise.

  The place wasn’t terribly fancy, using automenus instead of human wait staff, but it was clean, the menu looked good, and the beer was cold. When we finished ordering, Wil leaned forward and asked, “So, why are we here?”

  “To eat, of course. Someplace I’m fairly sure we won’t get poisoned on purpose.”

  “Ah. Of course. And afterward?”

  I smiled. “Well, this is fairly close to where Sabrina Kensington is known to spend some time.”

  Wil nodded. “I suspected it was something to do with the Morgan mess.” He leaned back and took a sip of his beer. “You don’t think Benito’s responsible for Morgan’s death.”

  I shrugged, then shook my head. “I don’t see him for any of the murders. What would be his benefit? Mobsters don’t have a reputation for killing the golden goose, and I think his reaction to the bombing was real. Besides, he would never countenance anything that sloppy.”

  Wil took a deep breath. “Well, we had to let most of his family go. No evidence of any crimes whatsoever. We searched their homes, and only Benito’s brothers and a couple of cousins were implicated by what we found in his vault. And not a speck of dirt on Carmine.”

  I chuckled. “Hell, I’ll bet Carmine is mad as hell at him. I’m sure the old man would never hang on to anything incriminating. The older guys are far more paranoid than the younger ones.” Then what Wil said sunk in. “Wait, you let David go?”

  “Had to. Nothing to hold him on.”

  “How about the guys in the hospital?”

  “Nothing, yet. They’ll crack, but both of them are still too out of it to talk. We did find the town car from the attack at Le Sommet abandoned with damage and some bullet holes. The blood in it matched Tremblay and Lupino. But no evidence of the other two men. The car was wiped and there weren’t any fingerprints at all.” He gave me a smirk. “There was a stolen car report turned in on it that night. I’m sure that surprises you.”

  “So, Benito and his brothers are all in jail?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That means that old Carmine is running things with the help of David?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so. David and the brothers’ sons.”

  “Benito’s two brothers have five girls and a seventeen-year-old boy between them. Considering the grilling you put David through, you really need to watch your back. Benito isn’t there to control him anymore, and Carmine is too old to get out and about.”

  “You really think he’s a threat?” Wil asked.

  “Someone has tried to kill me at least twice, and he’s at the top of my list. You’re the one who established that Tremblay and Lupino worked for David.”

  After dinner, we drove north to the address Clarissa had given me for Sabrina. The neighborhood was definitely a couple of notches lower on the income scale than where the Desroches sisters lived or where we had dinner.

  As we turned onto the street, I saw a woman walk out of a house about a hundred feet ahead of us, and as we drew closer, my first thought was, “What is Sonia doing here?”

  She opened the driver’s-side door of the same red car I had seen Sabrina drive, and as we passed, I got a good look at her face. The dress was all Sonia, but the face was Sabrina’s. I realized that she must be wearing some extra padding under her clothes.

  “Wil, go around the block, and then follow that red car.”

  “Wasn’t that Sonia Morgan?” he asked.

  “That’s what I thought at first, but no, it’s Sabrina Kensington.”

  “Wow. They’re close enough to be twins.”

  “Yeah, I know. The coincidences with those two are pretty weird. Same birthday but born two hundred seventy-five miles apart. Same last name, and the families are related. Went to the same college for two years here in Montreal.”

  “Clones, maybe,” Wil said.

  That startled me. There were a lot of cloning experiments in the previous two centuries, but I thought that had ended.

  “I thought all the cloning stuff had been shut down.”

  He shook his head as he turned the corner back onto Sabrina’s street just as she drove away.

  “There are still two labs I know of that do cloning for a price,” he said. “But there are a lot of techniques. If not clones, maybe genetic manipulation of embryos or other methods. If someone has enough money—”

  “—they can buy almost anything,” I finished for him. “Whatever. But that dress. I’ve seen Sabrina several times, and she doesn’t dress like that. She’s trying to impersonate Sonia.”

  We followed Sabrina out of the mutie district and into a more upscale part of the city. She drove as though she had no concerns about being followed, though Wil was an expert at tailing someone. After a while, I started to recognize buildings we passed.

  “Have we been here before?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t say anything more, and I didn’t push it because of the grim expression on his face.

  About forty-five minutes after we started tailing Sabrina, she turned down a residential street, but Wil didn’t follow her. Instead, he went past the street, pulled to the curb, turned off the car and jumped out, drawing his weapon. I followed him.

  “This is Janice Boulanger’s street,” he said. “Her place is 3617. Think you can go down the next street and find her place from the back?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.” I took off at a trot as Wil started down Boulanger’s street toward her house.

  I blurred my form, and when I found 3618 on the parallel street, I hopped their fence into their backyard, then scrambled over the back fence into the yard of what I hoped was 3617. The house had lights on, but several of the neighboring homes did also. I peeked in a window but didn’t see anyone. Going around to all the windows, I still didn’t see anyone, but I did recognize Janice’s bedroom and office from my previous visit. The back door was locked, so I stuck a microphone on the glass and leaned against the wall, listening through an earbud.

  I could barely hear voices but couldn’t tell what they were saying. Collecting the mic, I circled back around the house to a window just inside the fence and stuck the microphone on the glass there. The sound was better, and if I controlled my breathing and listened very carefully, I could hear some of the conversation.

  “I don’t care what you believe,” Janice said, “to my knowledge, Joe never filed a will. I certainly didn’t do one for him. Now, if that’s all you want, it’s late, and I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “How do I get hold of Michael Morgan?” Sabrina asked. I was struck with how much she sounded like Sonia.

  “I don’t know. The last I heard of him, he was in France.”

  Sabrina laughed. “Even I know that isn’t true. He’s in Quebec City, but I can’t find an address or phone number.”

  “Then you know more than I do,” Janice said.

  I didn’t hear anything else until the front door opened.

  “You’d better not be sandbagging me,” Sabrina said.

  “Good night, Ms. Kensington,” Janice said, and the door closed.

  I listened for a couple of more minutes, curious if Janice would make a phone call, but she didn’t. Instead, she went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine, turned off the light, and went to her bedroom.

  Retrieving my microphone, I hopped the fence into Janice’s front yard and almost landed on Wil. I don’t know which of us was more startled, but luckily, we didn’t shoot each other. I had to smother a laugh when I saw he had an earbud in and a mic attached to the window above him.

  We watched Sabrina go out to her car and get in it.

  “I’ll run and go get the car,” I whispered, then blurred my form and sprinted off down the street. In the dark, I wasn’t worried about Sabrina seeing any motion.

  I started the car and wheeled it around, leaving the lights off, then pointed it down the street toward Sabrina’s car. When she pulled away from the curb, I accelerated, then braked to a stop
in front of Janice’s house, and Wil jumped in. As soon as Sabrina turned the corner, I turned on my lights and followed her.

  “So, what did you think about that?” I asked Wil.

  “Did you hear anything?” he asked in return.

  “Yeah. She wants the will, and the whereabouts of Michael Morgan. The same questions Sonia asked us.”

  Wil nodded. “I think I should make more of an effort to find Michael Morgan.”

  Chapter 26

  To my surprise, Sabrina drove to a fancy nightclub, turned her car over to the valet, and went inside. We followed her there, but I had not only to flirt with the bouncer but also to bribe him to get Wil inside dressed the way he was. For me, upgrading my wardrobe was accomplished with a thought.

  I deposited Wil at a corner table so he wouldn’t offend the staff’s snooty sensibilities and went to the bar to order our drinks. On the way, I cruised by Sabrina’s table, where she was holding court for three wealthy-looking men. Practicing to be Sonia? It certainly looked like it. I wondered what kind of disguise she was using to study her doppelganger.

  “Who’s the rich babe with all the sugar daddies?” I asked the bartender.

  He laughed. “Sonia Morgan, widow of Joseph Morgan and heiress to the J. Morgan jewelry fortune.” He leaned close. “Only one of those guys is sugar-daddy material, though. The other two are gold diggers.” He winked at me. “At best.”

  “Ah, well, the last thing I need is another lazy boyfriend to support,” I said and ordered our drinks. When he came back and slid them across the bar to me, I handed him my payment card and asked, “Does she come in here often?”

  “Couple of times a week. I hear she hangs out at Le Sommet a lot, too.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I haven’t been there since the shootings. I’m not sure it’s safe.”

  The bartender nodded. “Yeah, that was bad, but I never heard of that kind of trouble there before.” He shrugged. “We’ve never had anything like that. Our clientele is a little older, though.”