Page 44 of The Expat Affair

“We met on a dating app, Detective. We were getting to know each other. Of course his questions were personal.”

“Let me rephrase. Did any of his questions strike you as strange?”

I pause, giving myself time to think, to remember the first flurry of messages. He asked me where I was from, what brought me to Holland, how I was liking it here so far, all pretty standard get-to-know-you fare. Later, during our date, we talked about our families, our schooling, past relationships and break-ups. All of it was personal. None of it went super deep.

“Nothing jumps out at me, why?”

“Did he talk about his work at all?”

“Barely. I knew Xander was a gemologist, but I didn’t know the extent of it until after his death. Most of what I know about Xander’s job I’ve learned since then, by searching his name online.”

“So you Googled him.”

“Yes. Why? What are you trying to get at here?”

“I’m trying to see if he told you anything significant, even if it didn’t seem that way to you at the time.”

“Like what?”

“Like if he had any reason to seek you out. For example, that you knew some people in common, or your work crossed paths somehow.”

“I’m a travel writer, and not a very successful one at that. My job has literally nothing to do with diamonds.”

His gaze wanders to my ringless hands, to the string of cheap beads poking out of my sleeves, to the scarf draped loosely around my neck, bare except for the gold-plate necklace I got at a boutique in the Nine Streets.

“They’re fake,” I say, picking the pendant up from my chest, running a finger along the tiny stones set in the three Xs, the crest for Amsterdam. “Not even good fakes. I think I paid like €39, and that’s including the chain. I don’t own any diamonds.”

Thenot anymorepiles up on my tongue, but I swallow it back down. No need to open old wounds that aren’t all that old, to prompt any new questions about my past.

“Not even in your jewelry box back home?”

I shake my head, a silent no when what I’m really thinking is,what’s the point of a jewelry box when you own nothing worth putting inside?

He pulls a black velvet bag from his inside coat pocket, wriggling a finger inside to tug out a bracelet, a complicated cuff with what’sgot to be hundreds of diamonds fanning out from a spectacular whopper in the center. “Then I take it this doesn’t belong to you.”

I laugh, because while it’s true that once upon a time, Barry bought me nice things, they were nothing like this. This is the kind of piece jewelers show in private back rooms, with cameras in every corner and an armed guard blocking the door. The kind you see on auction websites, or in photographs wrapped around Princess Diana’s arm.

Like the necklace Xander hung around my neck, the one that disappeared from his nightstand.

“No, that bracelet doesn’t belong to me. Not in a million years would it ever belong to me.” I run a finger over the biggest stone, smooth and icy under my skin. “It’s stunning, though.”

“We found it in Xander’s desk.”

I look up in surprise. “So the thief found the matching necklace in the nightstand drawer but left this piece behind? How did they miss it?”

“Could be they ran out of time, or maybe they just didn’t look hard enough. It was wrapped in a cloth at the back of his desk drawer, buried under a pile of papers.”

“Are the stones real?”

“Unclear. It’s not that easy to determine a diamond’s origins. Unless it has a laser inscription stating it’s lab-grown, which these don’t, it’s hard for even the experts to tell. These have certification numbers, though, so I’m guessing yes.”

“Well, either way, I’ve never seen it before, and it’s definitely not mine.”

He slides the bracelet into the velvet bag and tucks it back in his coat pocket. “Did Xander ever mention anything about a gun?”

“You seem to be under the impression that I knew Xander better than I did. No, he didn’t mention anything about a gun. Why would he?”

“Because Xander had one, built from parts created on a 3D printer and just as deadly as a metal one, but virtually untraceable. No serial numbers, no paper trails for us to follow.”

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