An Absence of Light

Chapter 29

Graver stared at the darkness just in front of him as he followed the crumbling asphalt drive around to the back side of the compound. He had been shaken by the news of Ray Besom’s death, though Westrate had not realized it, so preoccupied was he with his own over-the-top performance. It was hard to believe Besom had had a heart attack, especially in light of what Graver knew about Tisler and Besom’s involvements. No, he didn’t think it was a heart attack. But that was instinct His judgment reminded him that if the Besom/Tisler/Burtell conspiracy-whatever it was-was indeed coming apart, it would be logical that the fear of the consequences would be exacting a severe toll on the participants. Weren’t heart failure and stress undeniably linked? So what the hell was he supposed to think? The grim fact was, he still didn’t know much of anything.

He stopped in the spartan lobby beneath the CID offices and called Paula on the pay phone. “I’m downstairs,” he said. “Catch the security system for me, will you?”

She met him just as he approached the receptionist’s glass booth and reactivated the security system after he came through.

“Were you on your way here when I called?” she asked.

“Kind of,” he said, pushing past her and walking straight to his office.

She followed him and stood in the doorway and waited as he sat down behind his desk and quickly jotted down a couple of notes.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

He looked up at her and saw that she was barefooted, and her hair was pulled back in a bun, much of it working loose from the few pins she had holding it together. “You’ve been here all this time?”

“Yeah, me and Casey. We think we may have something.”

“Good. Get him in here. Is there any coffee in there?”

“Yeah, we made a fresh pot about half an hour ago.” She was staring at him with a puzzled frown, knowing something was wrong.

She stepped out into the hall and called Neuman from her office down at the other end as Graver went across to the coffee room and poured half a mug of the Division’s stout generic coffee. When he came back, he took off his suit coat and hung it on the hat rack in the corner and then sat down behind his desk. As Paula and Neuman came in, he was taking his first sip of coffee. Paula sat down, but Neuman remained standing, his arms folded, a notebook sticking out from under his elbow as he twisted his waist and shoulders. He had already had enough sitting.

“You guys had anything to eat?” The air-conditioning seemed not to be working well, and Graver loosened his tie.

“We brought in sandwiches,” Paula said.

Graver nodded. “Look, before we get started, there are two developments. First, when I got to Tisler’s rent house I found a computer setup. Nobody lives there, apparently, but it looked like Tisler must have spent quite a bit of time there. It was a fairly good-sized computer. I wasn’t able to get in, but I did manage to copy the hard drive.”

“My God.” Paula looked as if she had been given another clue to the location of the Holy Grail. “So where is it?” Neuman took a step forward.

“I’ve got someone working on it.”

Paula was incredulous. She started to speak, but Graver quickly preempted her.

“And some worse news,” he said. “Ray Besom has been found dead down near Port Isabel.”

Paula gasped as if she had been punched in the stomach, and Neuman unfolded his arms and walked behind her to the windows.

“Holy shit.” Neuman looked outside, then turned and walked back to where he had been standing.

“Heart attack,” Graver explained quickly, “according to the autopsy. Apparently he died while he was surf fishing.”

“Oh God, Marcus,” Paula said, placing the flat of her hand on her forehead, her bracelets rattling, “I’m not going to believe that.” She dropped her hand. She shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe that.”

Graver looked at her.

“We know too much… just too damn much to swallow that,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

“There’s going to be another autopsy,” Graver said. “Here.”

Paula was still shaking her head. “It doesn’t matter, even if the Harris County ME says it was a heart attack-”

“Wait a minute,” Neuman interrupted. He was moving back and forth between the windows and the door again, his eyes darting back and forth between Paula and Graver. “The thing is, if Besom was killed somehow-in whatever way-it was meant to be disguised as a natural death, wasn’t it? If we believe that, if that’s true, then this is… this is definitely a high-octane situation. I mean… what kind of people do shit like that?”

Neuman, of course, had quickly closed on the central question. Each of them knew at this point that even they, with all their suspicions, had probably underestimated what they had stumbled upon. And Graver suspected all three of them were turning their suspicions in the same direction.

“What about Dean?” Paula asked quickly. “Maybe he’s in danger.”

“Or maybe he isn’t”-Graver shook his head-”which is even scarier.” Now he had confirmation that he hadn’t overreacted by going to Arnette Kepner. He thought a moment and then he said, “I’ve got to call him.”

“What?” Paula was lost “What the hell for?”

“It’s what I would do,” Graver said. “If I didn’t know about all this other I’d call him to let him know about Besom.”

“I hope you’ve got good people on this,” Paula said. “When Dean hears about this he’s going to freak out, he’s going to do something.”

“Unless he already knows,” Neuman said.

Graver was a little surprised at Neuman’s remarks. He was quick to see a deeper, meaner undercurrent here, and Graver thought he was justified. Graver also guessed that each of them was feeling a sudden trepidation at the realization that the water was deeper and far more treacherous than they ever had expected.

Picking up a pencil from his desk, Graver tapped the cobblestone a couple of times.

“Whatever this is, it’s coming apart,” he said. “We may be getting here just in time to see its back going out the door.”

“Marcus, maybe we ought to go ahead and confront Dean,” Paula said.

Graver rubbed his face with his hands. “Our only leverage is that they don’t know we’re onto them. That’s not much, but we sure as hell can’t give it up.”

“God,” Neuman said, “can you imagine what must be at stake here for them to have risked killing Besom within twenty-four hours of Tisler? They’ve got to know, no matter what kind of evidence there is to support natural causes, that it’s going to look suspicious to a lot of people.”

“What are the odds Tisler was killed too?” Paula asked.

It was a moment before Graver looked up. “Good, I think now,” he said. “Pretty damn good.” He looked at her. “What did you call me about?”

“Oh,” she said, looking down at the notepad in her lap, remembering. She moistened her lips. Everyone’s thoughts had been derailed. “We’ve made some progress. Uh, in the Friel case, apparently the entire source documentation is bogus. All the contributors listed there are in the same category as Tisler’s tenant Lewis Feldberg. They came off the vital statistics records. It’s total bullshit.”

“What about the Probst sources?”

“Real people… we think. Bruce Sheck-he’s the guy who’s supposed to have flown Probst’s stolen goods to Mexico and Central America. Remember yesterday I only got an answering machine when I called his number. We started checking him out Essentially everything in the Contributor Identification Records is accurate. His TDL photo matches the ID records photograph. As far as it goes. He’s not on the computers, no aliases. He lives in Nassau Bay in a home that’s in his name, no lien. He pays his utility bills with money orders, for Christ’s sake, so there’s no bank to follow up on. No traffic tickets. No military record. Not registered to vote. No marriage record in Harris County. Owns a 1993 Honda, no lien. We checked with the FAA. He has a pilot’s license and owns a plane-no lien-which he hangars at Houston Gulf Airport, not far from his home. The guy lives a very unincumbered existence.”

“What about Synar?”

“Absolutely nothing. Again, nowhere on the computers, everything the same as Sheck… no traffic violations, not registered to vote, all that,” Paula said. “I called her old roommate again. She said Colleen wasn’t from Houston, thought Los Angeles was her home. She remembered Colleen referring to a cousin in New York who was also a Synar. But there were no Synars with telephone numbers in either Los Angeles or New York.”

“You know what,” Neuman said, stepping over and picking up the contributor’s ID record sheet from Paula’s lap, “I’ve been thinking. That’s a bullshit name.” He held up the sheet and pointed to the small photograph of Colleen Synar in the lower right corner. “This is not Colleen Synar. No way. But I’ll tell you what you do. You drive over to that address right now and talk to that woman who said she was her roommate… What was her name?”

“Valerie… Heath,” Paula said, looking down at her notes.

“Yeah, you talk to Valerie Heath, and I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you’ll be talking to ‘Colleen Synar.’ I don’t know where they came up with that name-Synar-but that woman took a flyer when she gave you her ‘lead,’ the two biggest cities in the country. That was right off the top of her head. She probably thought there ought to be Synars in those cities if there were going to be any anywhere, and by the time we ran them all down she would have bought some time.”

Paula stared at him.

“In fact,” Neuman said,” we ought to run a computer check on her right now. My hunch is her stats are going to look like Sheck’s-bare bones.”

“I think you’d better do it,” Graver said to Paula.” If he’s right, if they used that name only for this one reason, then it’s a trip wire, and they’re already on to us. If they’re as finely tuned as we think, they’ll know we’ve found a loose thread and are pulling on it I don’t know if we could have done it a better way, but it’s too late now for us to go at this as if we were doing background checks on these two. We’ve got to go right to them. So run the computer check on Heath right now.”

“Casey,” he said, getting up and walking to the safe cabinet, “I want you to go down to the tech room and get three radios with secure frequencies.” He opened the safe and got a key and tossed it to Neuman.

He looked at the two of them, Paula now standing and looking apprehensive, quite a different expression on her face than when she was so hungry to pin Burtell to the wall with her research findings. Neuman, on the other hand, looked like he had been born to the task; he was ready to hunt.

“After you’ve run the computer check, the two of you go out to Heath’s place and talk to her.”

Paula looked at her watch. “It’s almost ten-thirty.”

“It’ll take you, what, thirty minutes to drive out there?”

Neuman nodded. “If we push it.”

“Then push it,” Graver said. “Keep in mind: unfortunately, except for Dean, she and Sheck are the only two people we know about who might give us access to the bigger picture here-if there is a bigger picture. Keep checking in with me. I don’t want to have to wonder where you are or what you’re doing.”

They walked out of his office without saying a word, and Graver went back to his desk and sat down. He stared at the cobblestone. Jesus Christ The single feeling that weighed most heavily on him now was one of urgency.

Graver was used to taking suspicions seriously, but everything that came to mind to explain what was, and had been, going on right under his nose seemed so radical that he doubted his own abilities to read the meager facts with any clarity.

Within a few minutes Neuman and Paula came by the office again and gave Graver one of the three handsets. Paula’s first pass through the computers had yielded exactly what Neuman had predicted. Nothing. Valerie Heath seemed to live a life as tenuously attached to society as did Bruce Sheck.

They coordinated the radio frequencies, and Graver followed them to the outside door, reset the security system behind them, and then returned to his office. He sat down at his desk and turned to his own computer. With a few clicks on the keys he brought up his internal report regarding Tisler’s death. Actually he was already through with it, but he wanted to read it over very carefully a few times before he turned it in for Westrate’s approval in the morning. When he was satisfied, he printed out the final document, put it in a departmental envelope, stamped it Confidential, and put it in the locked distribution drawer so that it would be hand-delivered to Westrate’s office first thing in the morning.

Returning to his desk, he picked up the telephone and dialed Burtell’s number. Graver waited as the telephone rang two, three, four times, nervously hoping he would be able to discern something informative from Burtell’s reaction to the news. On the fifth ring Ginette Burtell answered.

“Ginny, this is Graver,” he said.

“Oh, hello,” she said, and for some reason he was surprised at the animation in her voice. Before he could speak again she said, “Oh, if you’re wanting to speak to Dean, I’m afraid you’ve just missed him.”

“Yeah, I did need to talk to him.”

“I’m sorry, but he left not four or five minutes ago.”

“You don’t happen to know how I could get in touch with him, do you?”

“No, actually, I don’t even know where he was going.”

Graver was surprised by this. How often did this happen? She must have sensed his surprise.

“Uh, he got a telephone call… and… he said he had to go out for a while.”

Graver waited.

“I don’t always, uh, ask him where he’s going,” she said hesitantly.

“You have any idea when he’ll be back?”

“No, I really… Well, he said… a couple of hours,’ I think.”

He wanted to ask if she knew who had called, but if Burtell quizzed her, he didn’t want her to say that he had asked.

On the other end she was hesitating. “Uhhhhh… can I take a message, have him call you or something?”

“Sure, if you don’t mind asking him to call me when he gets in. Tell him it doesn’t matter how late.”

“Oh… okay, Marcus. Sure, I’ll see that he gets the message.”

“Listen, Ginny,” Graver said, “I appreciate you and Dean going over to Peggy Tisler’s. I know that wasn’t easy. I owe you.”

“It was something we would have wanted to do anyway,” she said. “I felt so sorry for her.”

They visited a few moments longer, and then Graver told her good night and hung up. For the fourth or fifth time that night, he hoped Arnette’s people were in place and prepared. He resisted the temptation to call her. He knew the curious little control room he had been in earlier that evening would be buzzing now. Their target was on the move.

Wearily he started cleaning off his desk and discovered among the paperwork a packet of faxed reports stapled together with a note from Lara. “These came in one right after the other (note times circled) between 5:00 and 6:15.” He must have shuffled the packet aside several times while he was putting together the Tisler report Lara even had attached a red translucent plastic “Alert” tag to the staple.

He picked up the packet and sat back in his chair. The reports were responses to his inquiries that morning about Victor Last.