Midnight in Ruby Bayou by Elizabeth Lowell Page A

at the beer. Then he chose another web site, the one he privately referred to as suckers.com. This site was dedicated to gem history, lore, and modern twists on the ancient idea that anything as beautiful as a gem had to be good for whatever ailed man. Having trouble with your boss or your mother-in-law or your pecker? No problem. There was a gem to cure your ills. Just leave your credit card number, and your own personal miracle would arrive by UPS within ten business days. Faster if you wanted to pay for next-day air service.
    He searched through the chaff until he came to a link that led to a compilation of more or less legitimate gem legends. Using “ruby” and “carved,” he searched the data pool. Most of the references were in Hindi or Arabic, neither of which he could read. Same for Chinese and Russian. He dumped the information into his best translation applications and went on to read the few that were in English.
    They all sounded like they would have suited Faith’s fussy client. Big, bloodred, and flawless. A few were accompanied by solid documentation—appraisals, detailed descriptions of size, color, clarity, and source. Those stones were presently in public collections or in anonymous private ones. The rest were simply legends that had been passed down through time, with or without the accompanying gem.
    Walker took another drink of beer and read through the translations of other ruby myths as they appeared. Some of the machine translations were hilarious, some were inscrutable, but all of them gave enough information for his purposes. Not surprisingly, many of the rubies had ended up as gifts to royalty, as tribute, or as spoils of various wars. Some of the files were accompanied by sketches that were as fanciful as the legends.
    Only two of the rubies were described as having been inscribed in India in the time of the Mughals. Only one of them was the right size.
    The Heart of Midnight.
    He had read that name somewhere on the myths and legends page. He was sure of it. He went back, scrolled until he found it, and read carefully.
    According to legend, the Heart of Midnight first appeared in a sixteenth-century Mughal emperor’s court. One of his daughters had a mysterious lover who came to her only at midnight, masked in darkness, and left the same way. After a time, deeply in love and angry that he wouldn’t reveal his identity, the princess agreed to wed a distant prince. The next night, her lover came to her in her dreams as a dead man whose heart had been cut out.
    In the morning the princess was discovered in bed, quite dead. An inscribed bloodred ruby the size of a baby’s fist lay in her cold hand. The elegant inscription read: Beware the Heart of Midnight.
    The stone, replete with its legends of love and death, and the mysterious fire that only the finest rubies own, came to Catherine I from Peter the Great, whose mistress and ultimately wife she became. The ruby was believed to be part of the spoils of the campaign during which Peter the Great conquered the Ottoman Empire. No drawings or paintings of the stone are known to exist. No mention of it has been found since the seventeenth century, when it became part of the Russian imperial collection, though undoubtedly many royal princesses wore the gem to various official functions.
    As with many other gems of such size and quality, dire prophecies attach to anyone who dares to own the Heart of Midnight. Perhaps that is why it fell out of favor in the Russian court.
    For a long time Walker stared at the computer screen, wondering who had told Ivanovitch to look for a deadly legend in Faith’s jewelry shop in Pioneer Square.
    And why.
    Across the street and up a block, Ivan Ivanovitch, dressed in shabby clothing he had purchased at a Goodwill store, approached one of Seattle’s homeless drunks. The man had staked out a recessed doorway as a shelter from the cold,