“If he never came back, who killed her?”

“The people he crossed. They decoyed her to that room at the Galaxy Downtowner. She probably thought she was going to be meeting him there. She wasn’t hooking anymore, she wouldn’t have gone to a hotel room to meet a john. In fact she’d never been much on hotel tricks. But suppose she gets a call from somebody who says he’s a friend and the boyfriend’s afraid to come to her place because he thinks he’s being followed, so would she please meet him at the hotel?”

“And she went.”

“Sure she went. She got all dressed up, she wore the presents he gave her, the mink jacket and the emerald ring. The jacket wasn’t worth a fortune because the guy wasn’t rich, he didn’t have money to burn, but he could give her a terrific emerald because the emeralds didn’t cost him anything. He was in the business, he could take one of those smuggled stones and have it set in a ring for her.”

“So she went over and got killed.”

“Right.”

Danny Boy drank some vodka. “Why? You figure they killed her to get the ring back?”

“No. They killed her to kill her.”

“Why?”

“Because they were Colombians,” I said, “and that’s how they do it. When they have a reason to hit somebody they go for the whole family.”

“Jesus.”

“Maybe they figure it’s a deterrent,” I said. “I could see where it might be. The cases make the papers pretty regularly, especially in Miami. A whole family gets waxed because somebody burned somebody else in a coke deal. Colombia’s a rich little country. They’ve got the best coffee, the best marijuana, the best cocaine.”

“And the best emeralds?”

“That’s right. Kim’s jeweler wasn’t a married guy. I figured he was, that’s why he was so hard to get a line on, but he never married. Maybe he never fell in love until he fell in love with Kim, and maybe that’s why he was ready to kick his life over. Anyway, he was a bachelor. No wife, no kids, no living parents. You want to rub out his family, what do you do? You kill his girlfriend.”

Bryna’s face was as white as her hair now. She didn’t like stories where they killed the girlfriend.

“The killing was pretty professional,” I went on, “in that the killer was careful about evidence. He covered his tracks pretty well. But something made him do a butcher job instead of a couple of quick bullets from a silenced handgun. Maybe he had a thing about prostitutes, or maybe it was women in general. One way or another, he went and did a number on Kim.