The instant Hannah let go of her line, Archer swung toward her. He released his own line and finned after her. When he saw where she was heading, he doubled his speed. It wasn’t the rectangle of the oyster cage that galvanized him. It was the graceful, deadly streamers of snakes playing above the cage.
Hannah reached the cage first. Finning rhythmically, easily, she approached the snakes even as she ignored them. One of them swam gracefully through the cage as though taunting the stolid oysters within. The other two snakes simply fluttered like ribbons in a dreamy wind, ignoring everything. Since nothing preyed on the snakes, they had no fear of anything, even man.
While Hannah snapped an inflatable float onto the cage, the natural drift of the tide over the sea floor slid the two snakes away from the cage like decoys painted on a carnival conveyer belt. The third snake, caught by whatever passed for curiosity or play in its reptilian mind, twined around the cage for a while before swimming free and drifting off with the restless tide.
Archer took a breath, discovered that it had been too long, and took another. Bubbles whirled around him with the grace of laughter, but he wasn’t feeling humorous. Hannah must have known how deadly the snakes were, yet she had gone swimming with them as though they were pets. The feeling of helplessness he had had while he watched was as bad as anything he had ever known.
She triggered a carbon dioxide cartridge and watched the rapidly growing yellow float shoot to the surface. A thin line trailed down from the float, anchoring it to the cage. Soon a heavier line would sink down from the lugger. She would attach it and then let herself be towed up with the cage.
Wishing he could haul her off “upstairs” and yell at her for being a reckless idiot, Archer swam past Hannah. Without a glance in her direction, he started examining the heavy wire strands of the cable that had once connected the cage to a grid of huge floats. He didn’t bother to check the health of the oysters jumbled inside the framework. The water wasn’t deep enough or cold enough to kill them. Even if it had been, the oysters and their potential treasure weren’t what fueled the urgency driving him.
He needed to find out as much as he could as quickly as he could. He couldn’t shake the certainty that Pearl Cove wasn’t a healthy place to be for Hannah. Or himself. The “accident” in the shed had been a warning as plain as a shout.
After a few moments Archer found the end of the cable snarled beneath the heavy cage. He shoved and pushed, trying to free enough of the cable to see the severed end. If it had been pulled apart by the force of the cyclone, the cable would be ragged and frayed, with fine wires going every which way, because each strand would have snapped separately.
It took only a glance to see that the end of the cable was as smooth as glass.
Ten
“Cut,” Archer said curtly.
He yanked the screen door shut behind him and stalked through Hannah’s living room with his borrowed fins jammed under his arm.
“What?” she asked, following him.
“The cables.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The cables were cut. That’s why the raft came apart in the cyclone. The cables that weren’t cut somehow pulled free of the grid. If I thought it was worth the exercise, I’d check the ruined grid cables. But my gut already knows what I’d find.”
Hannah hesitated, then gestured for him to follow her into the bathroom. “You think they were cut, too?”
“I sure as hell do.”
She dumped her fins in the bathtub and ran her hands up and down her wet suit as though trying to rub up a little warmth. She was always cool after a long dive, but not like this. Not queasy chills. “Why would anyone slash the rafts apart? That’s killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
“Len’s gold. Not theirs.” Archer’s fins made a smacking sound as they landed on top of Hannah’s.
She stepped into the tub, grabbed the shower wand, and began rinsing off the wet suit she still wore. “Is it that simple?”
“Greed usually is. The question is, who? Did Len talk with you about his plans to sell the special pearls?”
“He didn’t plan to sell,” she said as she bent over to rinse out her hair.
“Ever?” Archer asked.
“I don’t think so.” Her voice was muffled by water. “The rainbow blacks were . . . a religion to him, I guess. As close as he came to God.”
“What did he want from his religion?”
“Want? What do you mean?”
“Len wasn’t raised in any church. Converts almost always have an agenda. Wealth, acceptance, power, happiness, peace, health . . . ”
Health.
For a minute there was only the sound of water dripping and splashing on porcelain.
“I didn’t mean religion in the literal sense,” Hannah said. “A church, a set of ceremonies, that sort of thing.”
“Yet you called pearls his religion.”
She shut off the water and combed wet fingers through her dripping hair. “It’s the only way I could think of to describe his intensity about them. He collected and perfected the Black Trinity as though his next breath depended on it.”
“How insane was he in the last few years?” Archer asked quietly.
Hannah bit her lip. “On a scale of one to ten?”
“Yes.”
“An eight,” she said bleakly. “Some days, worse. A nine, maybe. But he wasn’t consistently insane. Except on his very worst days—when he locked himself in the shed—he could talk very intelligently about the problems of periculture and the nuances of the pearl-marketing monopoly.”
“What were his crazy areas?”
“Black pearls. The rainbow kind. He could never have enough, or have them perfect enough. It was an obsession.” She slicked water from her wet suit. “No, it was beyond obsession. It was a sickness. Except for the pearls that escaped his security measures, he destroyed any rainbow pearl that was less than perfect. Considering the rarity of the rainbows, he must have ground several million dollars into dust. And this was at a time when we could barely meet our bills.”
Archer whistled softly and thought of what Kyle had discovered in Len’s files: the articles on pearls as a medicine for every ill. “Did he ever talk about pearls as a cure for certain diseases?”
“He talked about pearls as his ‘little miracles,’ but he didn’t take them like vitamins or anything. At least, I don’t think he did. He could have. Some of the Chinese divers grind up the inferior, usual kind of pearls and drink them in a potion.”
“What about the Black Trinity? It must have represented something very special to him.”
Hannah frowned. “Last week, when I was color-matching the strands of the Black Trinity yet again—something he made me do at least twice a week—I said it couldn’t be any better. The last harvest hadn’t added even one pearl to the strands.”
“Odd. Most matches can be better.”
“That’s the beauty of the rainbow pearls. The orient—the mix of color overtones—on all the rainbows was usually quite close. All that really had to be matched was size, surface perfection, and shape.”
That kind of identity was rare, except with clones. Archer made a mental note to look into experiments to clone oysters. “Go on,” he said.
Frowning, Hannah slicked back her hair with her fingers. Still salty. She turned on the water and bent over to rinse more thoroughly. Her words mixed with the silvery splash and drip of water. “Len refused to believe that the new harvest of experimental pearls couldn’t improve the size or perfection of the Black Trinity. He started screaming at me to look again, it wasn’t perfect, it couldn’t be perfect, because if the Black Trinity was whole, he would be, too.”
A chill went over Archer’s skin that had nothing to do with his recent dive. “That explains what he wanted from his religion. A miracle.”
“That’s . . . ”
“Insane?” Archer asked softly. “We’ve already agreed that Len wasn’t a poster boy fo
r mental health.”
Hannah straightened, dripping and flushed, and handed Archer the shower wand. “Your turn,” she said, stepping out of the tub.
Archer stepped in, picked up the wand, and began rinsing off his diving gear. “Tell me about Len’s enemies.”
“Everyone he met became an enemy, sooner or later.”
Frustrated, Archer raked his hand through his rapidly drying hair. Salt made his scalp itch, but he noticed it only at a distance. He had more pressing problems than dried brine irritating his skin. No matter how he arranged the information in his mind, it came up with red flags sticking out all over.
He held his wrist under the water, rinsing off the watch that had gone diving with him. Seconds were fleeing while he looked, seconds turning into minutes, minutes turning into hours, hours turning into too much time lost and not enough information found. He was no closer to an answer than he had been when he arrived yesterday.
The watch told him that he had wasted several hours diving.
Maybe it hadn’t been a complete waste. Before diving he had guessed sabotage. Now he knew it. What he didn’t know was who and why.
“My guess is that it took more than one man to cut those cables before the full force of the cyclone hit.” Archer flipped the fins over, cleaning them thoroughly before tossing them out of on the floor. He didn’t worry about making a mess. The tile floor slanted down toa small grate, which funneled water into the darkness beneath the house. Standard plumbing in the rual tropics for everything but toilets. “Are any of Len’s enemies good friends with each other?”
“Are we talking about personal enemies or business competitors?” Hannah asked, using her fingers to comb her wet, seal-dark hair away from her face.
Archer thought about the fluid alliances among pearl producers. The Chinese, the Japanese, the French, the Indonesians, and the Australians all had periculture ventures. Even the Americans had set up a pearl-farming business in Hawaii. Len’s coalition of small farmers wasn’t much by itself, but given the right opening, the independent pearlers could shift the balance of marketing power in one way or another by joining with one of the larger alliances.
No doubt that was what Len had been trying to do in his sane periods, which meant that any of the big pearling operations might have decided they could live well without him. The quickest way to find out was to catch the murderer and convince him to talk.
“Personal,” Archer said. He knew more about the rest than Hannah did.
She opened her mouth, hesitated, and sighed. “Except for me, Len didn’t know anyone personally, only through the pearling business.”
“Too bad. Murder up close is a real personal kind of crime.”
Bending to get his head and shoulders within reach of the wand, he let the tepid water sluice over him. While he rubbed his face, he thought about shaving his beard. Teddy Yamagata was right. A beard itched in the tropics. But then, so did razor burn, which was what had made Archer give up shaving in the first place; he had inherited his father’s touchy skin.
When Archer cleared the water from his eyes enough to see again, he nearly dropped the wand. While he had been sluicing off, Hannah had been peeling out of her dive gear. She was down to tropical Australia’s second uniform—a handful of string and three patches of indigo fabric that were smaller than his palm.
He had seen women wearing less, but he had never wanted one of them more.
Then Hannah turned away and he saw bruises along her left shoulder and hip. He remembered last night, when he had knocked her off her feet and slammed her to the floor while pieces of roof rained down. He had shielded her head from the hard tile, but not the rest of her. There simply hadn’t been time.
“I’m sorry,” Archer said.
The emotion in his voice surprised her as much as his words. “For Len’s enemies?” she asked, looking over her shoulder.
“No. For this.”
Hannah didn’t understand until she felt his fingertips tracing her bruises with a gentleness that loosened her knees. She started to speak, couldn’t, and tried again. “Not your fault,” she managed.
“The hell it wasn’t. I knocked you down.”
“Only to protect me.”
“Damn poor job I did.”
She turned fully around. “Don’t be ridiculous. Just because I was too rattled to thank you doesn’t mean that I don’t know what happened. I’m still rattled. No one ever did anything like that for me.”
“Knock you down?” he asked ironically.
“Protect me at their own expense,” she shot back. “My parents were too busy saving the Yanomami, and Len—well, Len figured he had done enough by marrying me. If I got into trouble after that, I could get out of it the same way I got in. Alone.”
Archer wondered if her pregnancy, illness, and miscarriage had been the kind of trouble she was supposed to take care of alone. He couldn’t ask without raising more questions than he was willing to answer. How he knew about her past history was foremost among those questions.
Shutting off the water, he stepped out of the tub. He expected her to back away from him, because the bathroom was small. Instead she went back to collecting wet diving gear.
“Is your shoulder stiff?” he asked, looking at the bruise while she bent down to snag the last fin.
“No.”
“Your hip?”
“I’m not a china doll.” Hannah straightened and gave him a hard look. She was amused, irritated, and touched by his concern. And being within inches of him was making her heart beat as though she was swimming too fast. “I’m an active, physical kind of woman, Archer. I get bumps, bruises, cuts, and scrapes all the time.”
“Not from me.”
She made an exasperated sound. “Take off the ruddy dive gear so I can hang it on the verandah to dry.”
With a hidden smile, Archer unzipped the borrowed wet suit and began peeling it off.
Hannah had spent her life surrounded by men of many races, athletic men, hunters in the Amazon and divers in Australia, men whose bodies were honed by the demanding physical necessities of their lives, men who often wore little more than a pouch to cover their sex. She was quite accustomed to the naked muscularity of a fit male.
And she was staring at Archer like a convent girl turned loose on a beach in Rio de Janeiro.
When she realized it, she forced herself to look away, or at least to look at him from the corners of her eyes under cover of her eyelashes. Then she saw the bruises striping his back and forgot everything else.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt! You had no business diving with—”
“I’m fine,” Archer interrupted without looking up from his dive gear.
“Bloody hell you’re fine. Your back looks like someone worked you over with a club.”
“So does your shoulder and hip.”
“That’s different.”
“Yeah?” He turned and looked at her. “How?”
“I know my limits.”
“That’s a relief,” he muttered, not believing a word of it. “I do know mine. My shoulder is a little stiff, that’s all. The rest is just colorful.”
“A little stiff. What a load of bull dust.”
“Bull dust? Is that what they call it here?”
“They call it stupid here when you dive injured. Just strapping on the dive tanks must have hurt you.”
Archer heard what Hannah hadn’t put in words: the thought of him hurting made her angry. If she could have taken his pain, she would have. The fact that he had six inches and eighty pounds on her—and easily twice her pure physical strength—didn’t seem to matter to her at all.
Amusement and something much more intense rippled in his voice when he spoke. He liked the concern in her eyes. He would like even better to turn it into sexual need. “You saw me dive. Was anything wrong?”
She took a deep breath, ready to chew him up one side and down the other for being a macho idiot.
“Was it, Hannah??
?? he asked calmly.
Her breath came out in a rush. “No. You dive like you were born to it. It’s just . . . ”
He waited.
“No one ever . . . ” She moved one hand jerkily. “I’m not used to being . . . ” Her voice died.
“Helped?”
“Protected. I don’t need it.”
“Everyone needs it.”
“Even you?” she retorted.
“I must.”
“What do you mean?” she asked warily. There was something beneath his calm that made her breath catch.
“You raced to beat me to that cage full of snakes.”
“I didn’t know if you knew that they were . . . um . . . ” Her voice faded again. She almost smiled despite the turmoil that had come when she saw his bruises and remembered how he got them. Protecting her.
And now he had boxed her in quite neatly, using her own reasons, her own rules.
“You wondered if I knew the snakes were lethal?” Archer asked with superficial calm. “As in the deadliest damn venom on the planet?”
“Um, yes.”
He took a half step forward. It was all the small room allowed. The palms of his hands slid across her cheeks as his fingers probed through her short, wet hair. He tilted her face up so he could see into her dark, dark eyes.
“Let’s make sure I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “You can play with sea snakes so that I won’t have to, but I can’t take a few lumps for you when the roof caves in.”
“That’s right,” she said defiantly.
“Wrong answer. Try again.”
“Archer—” Her voice broke. She had thought his eyes were like gray-green stone, hard and cold. Now she was close enough to see flashes of blue, gemlike shards buried in the smoky crystal iris. “You have blue in your eyes.”
“That’s because the bathroom is blue. Stand me up in a greenhouse and my eyes are green. Make me mad enough, and I’m told they go steel gray. About that answer, Hannah.”