The 9th Judgment

Conklin left his card with the boy's babysitter and asked Evan to please call if he remembered anything else. Then we headed down the block toward the next house.

I said to Conklin, "So maybe we have a live witness to Kitty making a run for it." And then my cell phone rang.

Yuki, sending a text message: Call me.

I hit the recall button, and Yuki picked up.

"God! I know her!" Yuki said.

"Know who?"

"Casey Dowling."

Frickin' grapevine. How could she have heard already?

"We went to law school together, Lindsay. Damn it. Casey was a sweetheart. A doll. When you catch the shooter, I'm going to fight for the case, and then I'm going to send Casey Dowling's killer straight to hell."

Chapter 15

SARAH WELLS SHUT her bedroom door and locked it. She was still panting from her escapade, her hands still shaking. She stood in front of her mirror, fluffed up her hair, and looked at herself-hard.

Did it show?

Her skin was so white, it was almost transparent, and her brown eyes were huge. She thought about her husband telling her she could look good if she'd ever try, but when he told her that, she became even more determined to look exactly as she was: a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher with a second life. And she wasn't even talking about the burglaries.

Sarah put her two duffel bags down on the floor, then opened the bottom drawer of the big, old American Waterfall dresser. Like her, the dresser held secrets.

Sarah took the piles of T-shirts and sweatpants out of the bottom drawer and pried up the drawer's false bottom. She held her breath, hoping, as always, that the jewelry was still there.

It was.

Each of her hauls had its own soft fabric bag, five collections of astonishing jewelry, and now the Dowling take made an even half dozen.

Sarah unzipped the bag with her latest haul and looked into the glorious tangle of jewels that had, until recently, belonged to a movie star's wife. It was the most unbelievable stuff: totally insane and wonderful sapphires and diamonds; rings and necklaces and bracelets; jewelry that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

She'd pulled off the burglary by the slimmest margin-a squeaker, for God's sake. She was safe for now, but she still had a big problem: how to get rid of the goods.

Maury Green, her mentor and fence, was dead, killed at the airport by a cop's bullet meant for his client, a jewel thief who'd been running from the police. Maury had been a good teacher and friend. It was truly depressing that he hadn't lived to celebrate her success and to collect his share.

Maury, like other good fences, paid out about 10 percent of the jewelry's retail value. It didn't seem like a lot, considering the hell that would rain down on her if she got caught, but still, it was a ton of money compared to what she earned as a teacher. And now Maury was gone.

The longer she held on to the jewelry, the greater her chance of getting caught with it. Sarah cupped a double handful of Casey Dowling's treasure and rocked her hands under a table lamp so that the light bounced off the facets.

Behind her locked bedroom door, Sarah Wells became mesmerized by the gorgeous refracting light.

Chapter 16

SARAH WELLS WASN'T the first cat burglar to do break-ins while dinner was on the table. She'd studied the greats, the Dinnertime Burglar and the Dinner Set Gang. Between them, they'd scored tens of millions in jewels using simple no-tech tools while their victims lingered over coffee and dessert on the floor below. Like her role models, Sarah thoroughly researched her intended targets and studied their movements. But with all the news about Hello Kitty, she marveled at how her victims felt so secure with the lights on that they didn't set their security alarms.

Their magical thinking was just amazing. And woo-hoo for that.

As Sarah gloried in the Dowlings' former riches, one special item reached out to her and hooked her in. It was a ring with a really large, pale-yellow stone, maybe twenty karats, cushion-cut and anchored in a thoroughly gaudy setting.

She took a rough count of the pav jewels surrounding the center stone and tallied 120 little diamonds.

What a ring!

This thing was a frickin' gasper. It just shrieked romance. Marcus Dowling had undoubtedly given this ring to his wife for some special occasion, and now Sarah wondered what it could be worth.

She had learned a lot about precious stones since she'd started moonlighting as a cat burglar, but she wasn't a true gemologist and was really curious to know what she had.

She stashed the rest of the Dowling loot and her bag of tools into the bottom drawer of the dresser, put back the false lid, and piled her clothes on top of it. Then she shut the drawer and fished a pictorial guide to gemstones out from under the armoire, taking it with her into the double bed.