Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(44)

“I don’t think you’re important enough for that,” Lucas said.


TONI AND CALVIN WRIGHT resembled each other: dark-eyed with short dark hair, gym-conditioned, sleek as otters. “These men were all over us,” Calvin said. “They knocked down the door one minute after we came in, we never had a chance. Toni and I study tae kwon do, so we can take care of ourselves in a straight-up fight, but they had guns. They knew what they were doing. Never had a chance.”

“They said if we didn’t open the safe, they’d rape me until I did or I couldn’t,” Toni said, and she started to cloud up. “There was nothing Cal could have done, either. They’d have killed him.”

The men wore ski masks, but the physical descriptions fit Beauchamps, Deese, and Cole: Beauchamps, large and blocky; the other two, mid-height and thin. “Somebody else drove their car, but we didn’t see him,” Calvin said. “We know because when they went out the door, the car started up before they could have gotten to it.”

“Could be the woman,” Rae said to Lucas.

Toni Wright said her loss in jewelry would be over a half million dollars. “I had a collection of vintage Indian jewelry made by Charles Loloma, the most famous Indian artist ever. The thing is, the stones themselves aren’t worth much—coral and lapis lazuli and turquoise, and so on. Some of the settings were gold, but really, in terms of dollars, not more than a few thousand if you melted it down. If they’re looking for real money, they’d have to sell it intact, and there wouldn’t be many buyers. Indian art dealers, that’s about it. I’ve been trolling through some local places, seeing if I can spot any of it.”

“If they sold it to Indian art dealers, how much would they get?” Lucas asked.

She said, “It’s worth a quarter million, retail. So . . . you’d know better than me how much they’d get from a fence. I had twenty-two pieces, some of Loloma’s best things. If they broke them down for the gold and the stones, it’d be a tragedy and be worth only a few thousand, if that.”

“What about the rest of the half million?” Bob asked.

“I had a hundred and fifty thousand in a pair of earrings that Cal gave me when we got married. Great stones—three carats each, E color, flawless, brilliant cut.”

Calvin Wright said, “Great stones, but they’re nothing, like, unique. They’re not like the Loloma stuff. Pull them out of the settings and they’re totally anonymous.”

Toni said, “The rest of it was gold and platinum bracelets, three watches, plus a ring by Belperron and a pearl necklace. Not really a collection, but the Belperron was worth a ton. I’d kill to get it back.”

Lucas began, “This person, Belle Perron . . .”

“One name. Belperron is her last name, Suzanne Belperron, she was French. Long gone now,” Toni said.

“So the ring would be, what, worth more intact or in pieces?”

“Oh. Far, far more intact. It’s like the Loloma, each one is unique,” she said. “I gave the police copies of the insurance photos; we haven’t settled with the insurer yet, there might be a lawsuit.”

There had also been currency in the safe, mostly in dollars, but also an uncertain amount in euros and Chinese renminbi—the Wrights thought the total would be the equivalent of five or six thousand dollars. Toni Wright had managed to save her diamond-encrusted wedding ring by turning it around on her finger so that it displayed only its thin platinum band.

When they’d cleaned the safe out, the robbers had locked chains around the Wrights’ ankles, with the chains looped around a couch. They’d put the Wrights’ cell phones on the kitchen counter. “We had to carry the couch into the kitchen before we could get to our phones and call the police,” Calvin said. “That took a while, fifteen or twenty minutes, you know, because we had to go up the steps to the kitchen and then down the hallway. It was a tight squeeze. And that goddamn couch was heavy.”

Rae looked at Lucas and said, “It’s them. No doubt about it. They did the couch thing in LA.”

“One thing that you should know that I didn’t think of until tonight,” Calvin said. “It might not be important, but it was dark and we never saw their car, really. There’s not much traffic here, and I think I saw their taillights going out the exit. They turned left, went west, but there’s not a lot to the west of us—we’re right on the edge of town. They could have been going to the parkway and then east, but it’d be a weird way to do it. Or they could have been going out to the Beltway, but that’s right on the edge of civilization.”

Lucas: “So, you think wherever they’re hiding might be on the west side of town rather than downtown or the Strip or . . .”

“Or anywhere east, yeah. Don’t know if that helps.”

“The small stuff helps,” Lucas said. “We add it all up and it helps.”

“One other small thing, but I’m not sure I’m right about this because Cal says he didn’t see it,” Toni Wright said. “One of them, not the big man but one of the others, was wearing jeans, and there was something about one of his legs. It . . . It was fat around the knee, like he might have had a bandage on it. The other leg looked like, you know, nothing, but this one looked too fat. To me anyway. I wondered if he might have had to go to a doctor for something.”