I left him at the railing to watch the entrance and started down the wide hallway that led to 589, heavy black bag hanging from my shoulder. Anyone who has ever read the numbers on a lottery ticket over and over, feeling the realization that they have actually won spreading like an orgasm through their bones and belly, knows how I felt approaching the room of Evelyn Evermore in Indian Wells on the last Friday in January 1996. The adrenaline pump had kicked on like an air-conditioner compressor, flooding the spongy tissue of my brain with epinephrine, bringing a fresh surge of exhilaration. I had felt alien and out of place in normal society for as long as I could remember, but I was at home in the world of crime, happy as a soldier at the end of a war he never expected to survive as he crosses the bridge back into the town he came from.

The hallway was illuminated by crystal chandeliers that sparkled above my head. The rose-colored carpet was springy beneath my feet. I passed one dark-skinned housekeeper who snubbed her cart against the wall and stood with downcast eyes as I passed, and one room-service tray piled with dirty dishes and wadded cloth napkins outside the door of a suite.

I walked past 589, which was near the end of the long hallway. At the very end, there was a fire exit. The door opened into a bare steel and concrete stairwell that I could descend in a hurry if I had to. To my right as I faced the fire door, a narrow hallway extended for twenty feet, then jogged out of sight. I didn’t explore it.

Back at the door to the lady’s suite, I slid the key card into the slot. The green light blinked on, the lock beeped and, with a quick glance up and down the hallway, I stepped into a future far different than the one I imagined.

CHAPTER FIVE

The living room was furnished richly in desert brown and tan with umber and gold accents. Directly in front of me as I entered, a sliding glass door opened onto a large balcony. Through the door, framed by heavy gold drapes, I could see the orange disk of the sun half hidden by the Santa Rosa Mountains, which rose abruptly several miles to the west. Early in the morning when they are bathed in eastern light, the mountains glow red. But they turn black in the afternoon.

The bedroom, where everything of value would be, was through a doorway to my right. The bathroom was beyond the bedroom, corner of a sunken marble bathtub visible through a second doorway.

I entered the bedroom silently. Since the suite was empty, it wouldn’t have mattered if I coughed and scuffed my feet, but the habit of stealth was engrained in muscle memory. The king-size bed was crisp and unwrinkled, but I opened the louvered closet doors as softly as if a police captain was snoring beneath the yellow duvet. A small room safe fastened to the closet floor made a flutter in my chest.

Like most precautions approved by security-conscious citizens and their enablers, hotel room safes are actually a boon to serious criminals. The main hotel safe at the Oasis was, I knew without having seen it, a hard-core, high-tech device that would be difficult to access. But travelers in luxury hotels no longer put their valuables in big safes protected by cameras and security guards. Instead, they take advantage of an “amenity” they get for paying exorbitant rates and put their money and jewelry and drugs and weapons in convenient room safes, cracker boxes made of soft metal with no alarms.

I laid the black bag on the bed. It held a.32-caliber Beretta Tomcat; a very expensive, very powerful, nearly silent cordless drill; and a set of razory titanium bits that would cut through the little play safe like a surgeon’s scalpel slicing through a girdle of fat. There was also a flexible, lighted scope that I could insert through a drill hole to see the contents of the “safe,” and a hardened steel prying tool which, when the sections were screwed together into a five-foot bar and the hooked tip inserted up to its back spur in that same handy hole, would give me enough leverage to break the lock and pop the door open.

I was all set to crack the safe and steal the lady’s jewels, polishing my image of myself as a crafty and competent criminal in the process, but I didn’t get the chance. The safe was unlocked. And empty. Either Evermore was careless with her diamonds or she hadn’t brought them.

The three red hard-shell suitcases were empty, too. There was nothing bulky in the pockets of any of the clothes hanging in the closet. The top dresser drawer contained the outfit the lady had worn in the car, neatly folded, a nightgown, pantyhose, and half a dozen pairs of panties, silky and colorful. The middle drawer was cashmere sweaters and folded wool pants. There were no men’s clothes.

The bottom drawer held two phone books, a Gideon Bible with a cardboard cover, and what looked like a child’s jewelry box, flimsy wood with seashells glued to it, secured by a ten-cent latch. I felt the unmistakable weight of something valuable as I lifted it from the drawer and set it on top of the dresser.

Pasted to the underside of the lid was a photograph of a girl about the right age for a seashell jewelry box. She was smiling and waving at the camera, wearing what might have been a Confirmation dress. Pasted next to it was another picture of the same girl, older, sadder, with angry eyes, standing against the railing of a corral, with a barn and pasture in the background. She was wearing a blue jean jacket and her blond hair had been dyed black. A woman who could have been Evelyn Evermore some years back was looking at the camera with a strained smile, her arm placed awkwardly around the girl’s shoulders.

In the box was a collection of mementos: an ID card with a third and final picture of the girl, identifying her as Christina Evermore, an eighth-grader at Sea Winds Middle School; a silver thimble; a small magnifying glass; and a pink plastic unicorn with a bedraggled mane. The sense of loss that clung to the trinkets and fading snapshots made me think of my own lost daughter, the little girl who wasn’t so little anymore, growing up somewhere in the wide world without me.

But there was also a blue velvet case in the box, three inches wide by eight inches long by an inch and a half deep. It injected a silver shimmer into my dark heart, washing over the sadness like cool surf over disheveled sand after the last swimmer has left the beach at the end of a summer day. In the white satin interior lay the necklace: twenty-six carats of fancy pink diamonds. A set of earrings lay beside the necklace. Each earring was an unadorned one-carat rose-colored diamond in a simple platinum setting.

Diamonds are one of society’s most spectacular illusions. The clear, sparkling gems people think of when they hear the word aren’t actually all that rare. They are abundant all over the planet, from Africa to India to Siberia to South America. A cabal of South African businessmen and Israeli merchants that has persisted for generations maintains inflated prices by strictly controlling the flow of stones into the market. People routinely pay as much as ten thousand dollars for very fine one-carat clear diamonds, but if you try to sell a stone like that back to a jeweler, you will be lucky to get ten cents on the dollar.

Pink diamonds, on the other hand, are genuinely rare and valuable. Which meant I would be able to fence the necklace for a decent percentage of its quarter-million-dollar appraised worth, netting at least a hundred thousand dollars. Likely more.

Roy Rogers had just started playing “Happy Trails” in my mind when I heard someone move behind me. Whirling, I saw that it was the weightlifter. He was standing in the bedroom doorway holding a big black automatic that looked like it had come from a fascist country. It was an ugly, large-bore weapon that would make an ugly hole. The hall door was open behind him. Rifling the dresser drawers, I hadn’t heard him enter. I wondered how he had gotten by Reggie.