CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Morelli knocked on my door at nine o’clock. He had a bottle of wine and a box of cupcakes.

“Is this a celebration? ” I asked him.

“I thought we’d see how it goes. ”

He opened the bottle, and we took the wine and cupcakes into the living room.

“This has been a busy day for you, ” I said. “I heard Shine took a plea bargain on the kidnapping. ”

“We brought him in, and he went off on a rant. His lawyer was sitting next to him and he couldn’t stop Shine from talking. ”

“Anything you can share with me? ”

“I’m going to share everything with you. It’s going to all come out anyway. You can’t keep a secret in the Burg.

“Eighteen years ago, a guy named Paulie Valenti was working as a tech for a security company. On one of his jobs he got to see the interior of a vault in a pricey Manhattan brownstone. The vault held racks of gemstones. Mostly diamonds. Paulie mentions this to his cousin, who mentions it to his wife, who mentions it to Jimmy’s wife, who mentions it to Jimmy, who tells the La-Z-Boys. The La-Z-Boys get friendly with Paulie, and before Paulie knows it, he’s deep in their pocket and providing them with security codes to all his accounts. Two weeks later, the La-Z-Boys, armed with safecracking tools and the security code, break into the Manhattan brownstone and make off with $30 million worth of diamonds. They grab four boxes indiscriminately, choosing them by their unique blue velvet cases.

“It turns out the diamonds weren’t the largest or most valuable. They were the owner’s private collection. They were the diamonds that were never supposed to be sold. The owner goes gonzo and offers a sixty-million-dollar reward for the capture of the thieves and the return of the diamonds. This is double the value of the diamonds. ”

“He took it personally. ”

“Big time. ”

“Let me guess the fate of Paulie, ” I said.

“We did some digging in old police reports and Paulie’s fate wasn’t good. A shallow grave in Far Rockaway. ”

“So, they took the diamonds and hid them away until they weren’t so hot. ”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. All diamonds are unique. They have their own distinct fingerprint that identifies them under x-ray or with the use of a laser. The owner distributed the fingerprints of his diamonds to every law enforcement agency, every jeweler, every pawnshop, every black-market fence worldwide. The La-Z-Boys had no choice but to hide them away for a long time. ”

“If they’re all perfectly hidden away, how did Gabriela track them to Trenton? ”

“One of the smaller diamonds surfaced. Jimmy brought it to a trader in New York’s diamond district. Jimmy told him it was his wife’s, but his wife had passed some time ago, and now he was going to get married, and he needed money for his honeymoon. ”

“Omigod! ”

Morelli was grinning. “I know. It gets better and better. Anyway, the trader lasered the diamond and checked the list and knew it was hot. He bought it from Jimmy because he knew the reward was a lot more than the money he shelled out for the stone. Unfortunately for the trader, he walked into a bullet when he was closing up shop that night. I feel comfortable assuming Jimmy was the shooter. Unfortunately for the La-Z-Boys, the trader had already sent an email to the diamond’s legal owner. And the owner hired Gabriela to retrieve the diamonds. My understanding is that Gabriela is an expert at treasure retrieval. ”

“Did Shine say anything about how he found the safe location? ”

“He followed Jimmy way back when Jimmy first hid the treasure. Shine always knew where the safe was located, but he didn’t know how to get in without setting off the explosion. ”

“As it turns out, the treasure wasn’t in the safe anyway, ” I said.

Morelli topped off our wine. “You were surprisingly mellow when the safe turned out to be empty. ”

“In the end, it was the journey and not the destination for me. I am upset that you knew about Gabriela and didn’t tell me. ”

“I couldn’t. ”

“One of those cop things. ”

“Yes. ”

Morelli cut his eyes to the cupcake box. “Are you going to eat the chocolate one with the sprinkles? ”

“I might have been thinking about it. ”

“What would it take to bargain it away from you? ”

“What have you got to offer? ”

Morelli smiled. “Something a lot better than a cupcake. ”

I knew this to be true.

More from this Series

One For The Money Book 1	Two For The Dough Book 2

Three To Get Deadly Book 3

More from the Author

The Bounty	Stephanie Plum One, Two, …

Gabriela Rose returns in Janet Evanovich’s next novel, coming in July 2021. Here’s a sneak peek.

Gabriela Rose was standing in a small clearing that led to a rope and board footbridge, which was swaying in the wind. The narrow bridge spanned a gorge that was a hundred feet deep and almost as wide. Rapids rushed over enormous boulders at the bottom of the gorge, but Gabriela couldn’t see the water, because it was raining buckets and she could barely make out the far side.

She was celebrating her thirtieth birthday deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The birthday wasn’t important to her. She was all about the job. Her long dark brown hair was hidden under her Australian safari hat, its brim shading her exotic almond-shaped brown eyes. She was 5'6" and slim. She kept in shape for the job but also because she liked pretty clothes. And pretty clothes didn’t always come in size fourteen.

She was with two local guides, Jorge and Cuckoo. She guessed they were somewhere between forty and sixty years old, and she was pretty sure that they thought she was an idiot.

“Is this bridge safe? ” Gabriela asked.

“Yes, sometimes safe, ” Jorge said.

“And it’s the only way? ”

Jorge shrugged.

She looked at Cuckoo.

Cuckoo shrugged.

“You first, ” she said to Jorge.

Jorge did another shrug and murmured something in Spanish that Gabriela was pretty sure translated to “chickenshit woman. ” Let it slide, Gabriela thought. Sometimes it gave you an advantage to be underestimated. If things turned ugly, she was almost certain she could kick his ass. And if that didn’t work out, she could shoot him. Nothing fatal. Maybe take off a toe.

It had been raining when she landed in Quito two days ago. It was still raining when she took the twenty-five-minute flight to Caco and boarded a Napo River ferry to Nuevo Rocfuerte. And it was raining when she met her guides at daybreak and settled into their motorized canoe for the six-hour trip down a narrow, winding river with no name. Just before noon, they’d pulled up at a crude campground hacked out of the jungle. Four hours on foot after that, following a trail that barely existed. All in the pouring rain.

She’d been hired to find Henry Dodge and retrieve a ring he was carrying. Not a lot of information on the ring or Dodge. Just that he couldn’t leave his job site, and he’d requested that someone come to get the ring. Seemed reasonable, since Dodge was an archeologist doing research on a lost civilization in a previously unexplored part of the Amazon rainforest. The payoff for Gabriela was a big bag of money, but that wasn’t what convinced her to take the job. She was a treasure hunter. For profit and for pleasure. She was an amateur anthropologist, a descendent of Blackbeard, a history buff, and a collector of pirate plunder. The opportunity to visit a lost-cities site was irresistible.

“How much further? ” she asked Jorge.

“Not far, ” he said. “Just on the other side of the bridge. ”

Ten minutes later, Gabriela set foot on the dig site. She’d been on other digs, and this wasn’t what she’d expected. There was some partially exposed rubble that might have been a wall at one time. A couple of tables with benches under a tarp. A kitchen area that was also under a tarp. A stack of wooden crates. A trampled area that suggested several tents had been recently used and recently abandoned. Only one small tent was left standing.

There were no people to see except for one waterlogged and slightly bloated dead man lying on the ground by the rubble, and a weary-looking man sitting nearby on a camp chair.

“This is not good, ” Jorge said. “One of these men is very dead, and something has eaten his leg. ”

“Panther, ” the man in the chair said. “You can hear them prowling past your tent at night. This site is a hellhole. Were you folks just out for a stroll in the rain? ”

“I was sent to get a ring from Henry Dodge, ” Gabriela said. “I believe I was expected. ”

The man nodded to the corpse. “That’s Henry. Had some bad luck. ”

“What happened? ”

“He was checking on an excavation in the rain first thing this morning, fell off the wall and smashed his head on the rocks. Then a panther came and ate his leg before we could scare it away. Everyone packed up and left after that. Too many bad things happening here. ”

“But you stayed, ” Gabriela said.

“They couldn’t carry everything out in one trip. I stayed with some of the remaining crates and the body. Cameron said he would be back with help before it got dark. ”

“Do you know where Henry kept the ring? ” Gabriela asked.

“It’s on his finger, ” the man said. “He felt it was the safest place. ”

Gabriela looked at the dead man’s hand. It was grotesquely swollen and clenched in a fist. The ring was barely visible.

“Someone needs to get the ring off his finger, ” Gabriela said.

No one volunteered.

Gabriela flicked a centipede off her sleeve. Could the day get any worse? She was wet clear through to her La Perla panties, her boots and camo cargo pants were covered with mud, and she had bug bites everywhere. All part of the jungle experience, she told herself. The dead man with the swollen hand was not. The question now was, how bad did she want the ring? The lost-cities site had turned out to be a bust, but there was still a payday attached to the ring. So, the answer to the question was that she wanted the ring pretty damn bad. Without the ring, there would be no big bag of money. And she needed the money to finance her own treasure hunt. She’d recently found a three-hundred-year-old map that had been lost in her family for fifteen generations. It was a treasure map signed by Blackbeard, and she had it on good authority that it was real.

“I’ve come this far, ” she said. “I’m not going back without the ring. ” She looked at the man in the chair. “I need to pry Dodge’s hand open and work the ring off his finger. I need gloves and a baggie. I know all archeological sites have them. ”

The man shrugged his shoulders as an apology. “They were all packed out. Truth is, we were shutting down before Henry happened. Henry was the holdout. He found the ring, and he thought there was more here. The rest of us didn’t care. ”

“We need to leave now, ” Jorge said. “It will be bad to be in this jungle after sunset. Hard to find the way, and panthers will be hunting at night. We have maybe five hours of daylight left. ”

“I’m not leaving without the ring, ” Gabriela said.

Cuckoo took his machete out of its sheath and whack! He chopped Henry Dodge’s hand off at the wrist.

“I suppose that’s one way to go, ” Gabriela said. “I would have preferred to try my way first. ”

“He’s dead, ” Cuckoo said. “He doesn’t need the hand. ”

He picked the hand up by the thumb, grabbed Gabriela’s daypack and dropped the hand in.

“Problem is solved, ” Jorge said.

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