An Absence of Light

Chapter 54

1:25 A.M.

Graver sat at Arnette’s library table with Cheryl and Arnette as Cheryl rewound the tape for the third time.

“You want to hear it again?*’ Arnette asked.

Graver shook his head. He was not likely to forget anything he had heard in Dean Burtell’s last conversation. It was an eerie recording with its wavering beginnings as Cheryl zeroed in on the range and the frequency followed by a remarkably clear reception. Bruce Sheck’s voice was whiskey raw and surly, and it was easy to imagine him after what Valerie Heath had already said about him. Good-looking, athletic, more savvy for sure than Valerie Heath could have imagined, an element of meanness sulking just beneath the surface.

But listening to Burtell was like listening to a brother. Graver didn’t have a brother, but he imagined that Burtell could have been one and to know that with each word he spoke he was another syllable closer to imminent, violent death was a painful thing to experience. They were so unsuspecting. True, Sheck did say he thought they were in danger, but clearly it was a danger he had every intention of being able to deal with, and neither of them thought they were in danger then, at that moment. And then too, the entire conversation was almost a monologue by Sheck. It seemed that he had been drinking for some time, which had made him loquacious. Burtell spoke very little on the tape and when he did speak it was brief, an indication, it seemed to Graver, that he was either tense or angry or maybe even cautiously uneasy. But, the fact was, the few words he did speak were all the more painful to listen to because they were so few. Graver found himself leaning toward the tape recorder on the table, hoping to hear Burtell say something, anything, at length.

Graver looked at Cheryl. “Thank you,” he said. He saw a flicker of surprise in her eyes, but that was all right He didn’t mind that his gratitude must have sounded a little odd to her. He was grateful for this last audible witness.

Arnette made a little gesture with her hand, and Cheryl snapped off the recorder, stood up, and left the room.

“That was a hell of a thing to have to listen to,” Arnette said, reaching for her cigarettes that lay on the table in front of her. “I’m sorry you had to do it I’m sorry it happened, baby.”

Graver’s stomach was a knot of queasiness and anger. He could hardly believe… any of it. It was outrageous, even grotesque. The events of the last two days seemed to be evidence of the unraveling of all that was sane and reasonable.

“That was pretty damn crude of Kalatis,” she said. “I think it signals a major change in the game.”

“You’re convinced it was Kalatis.”

Arnette flicked her lighter and looked at Graver over the flame, lit the cigarette and laid the lighter on the table.

“Think about it, baby,” she said. “Or do you know something you haven’t told me?”

Graver shook his head. “No, I know so damn little if I knew something it wouldn’t be much.”

“Christ, Sheck practically narrated his own death. He was pointing his finger at Kalatis when he blew up.”

“What about the man at the fountain?”

Arnette looked as though she dreaded giving him any more bad news.

“The pictures have been rolling in here over the computers ever since I told you I was going to look. But he’s not in there,” she said. “I don’t know who the hell he is. But that doesn’t mean he’s not government. It just means my source may not be as good as it used to be, or he’ll be in the next batch that comes through.”

“Or that he’s not government.”

“Okay,” she conceded, her elbow resting on the table, the cigarette up in the air.

“I just don’t understand why Kalatis would use a bomb, for God’s sake,” Graver said. “After he’d gone to all the trouble of making veiled hits on Tisler and Besom.” He tilted his head at the recorder. “Dean obviously thought Tisler killed himself because of the photographs.”

“Dean was mistaken,” Arnette said coldly. “I don’t have any doubt about that. Tisler’s death may have caught you people by surprise, but I can assure you it wasn’t a surprise to Panos Kalatis. What we’re seeing here is a methodical burning of bridges, an elimination of liabilities. Kalatis is distancing himself from the little guys who’ve been doing his dirty work in this operation. I think Sheck was right about that.”

“And do you also think he was right about Kalatis bringing something to culmination here?”

Arnette tapped her cigarette on the edge of the glass ashtray.

“It looks like it,” she said. She read his thoughts and shook her head. “Forget it What are you going to do? Go to the feds with what you’ve got? You don’t even have enough… I mean actual documentation… to get them to stop him from leaving the country. And if you did find some goof who would authorize it for you, Kalatis’s lawyers would shred it, and in twenty-four hours he’d be gone for good.”

She stood up and crossed her arms, her cigarette lofted in the air next to her face as she paced to one end of the room and then back, stopping across the desk from him, leveling her eyes at him.

“You know what’s happened here, baby?” she asked. “Misfortune. You got in on the tail end of a god-awful operation. You may never know what happened. Ever. You lost two dirty cops, and you gotta face it, maybe three. If there’s more, odds are you’ll never know. The bad guys were organized so far over your head that all you got was a glimpse of hell before they slammed the gates closed. Consider yourself lucky.”

She smoked her cigarette and looked at him through the acrid haze. It was a brutal assessment and probably accurate, and Graver guessed there was a good reason why she had delivered it with so little finesse.

“But your instincts were right about one thing,” she said. “Somebody else hasn’t stepped out of the shadows yet. I’m guessing, too, that Tisler, Besom, and Dean could have ID’d that somebody else, and he, whoever he is, has benefited from their deaths as much as Kalatis has. Maybe he’s safe now. Unless you come up with something.”

She gestured at him with her cigarette.

“You can do two things. Bury it as long as you can while you keep hammering away at it on your own. Or write a goddamned elaborate, thesis-sized document about everything that’s happened in the last three days since Arthur Tisler turned up dead.” She stopped. “You did keep a personal log.”

Graver nodded.

“Okay, good. Write it just exactly the way it happened, detailing what you did and why-leaving me out, of course-giving them everything in chronological order. Bypass Westrate and give it to Hertig. Let him decide for you. That’s his goddamned job.”

She stared at him, a small, wiry woman of dusky complexion and murky past, who at too young an age had had to learn to make hard choices, not the least of which was to remain in a profession that demanded hard choices of her as a matter of course. Having done so, she had discovered too late that living with such decisions was altogether another proposition from making them. It was the former that had aged her. But for a long time now she no longer flinched at having to make gut-wrenching decisions. She made them and then did battle with her conscience afterward and in private. These were the true ugly confrontations, she once admitted to him, facing yourself, being your own judge and jury-and, someday, if it became necessary, hangman.

“We did some checking into Gulfstream Bank,” she said, interrupting Graver’s silence. “Did you know the bank is only six years old? I’d guess that maybe seven years ago Kalatis conducted a kind of market survey of Southern cities. I don’t know what his criteria might have been, but Houston seems to have fit the bill for whatever it was he wanted to do. Now that’s long-term planning. When you think about it, this ‘project’ has consumed the greater part of a decade of Kalatis’s life. That gives you some indication of the volume of money at stake here. It’s got to be colossal.”

She shook her head, staring at Graver, studying him though her thoughts were wandering.

“You know, more and more this business scares the shit out of me. Guys like Kalatis and Strasser, there are no limits, just no damn limits. They’re like a rogue government that commands a fortune but has no physical territory, has no constituency except its victims, no raison d’etre except greed.” She paused. “Makes you wonder if this is the future… bigger and bigger appetites, rapacious avarice.” She smiled cynically. “But I’m forgetting my history, aren’t I. All the way back to King Menes the Fighter.”

“Hermes Exports,” Graver said, as if he hadn’t been listening to her.

“Yeah, we’re running them down, too. It looks like they sell to a hell of a lot of importers. They’re probably scattering cocaine all over the nation.”

“You think they’re ‘Reconstituting’ it all here, then shipping it out?”

“Why would they? If the stuff ships safely, why not let it go on?”

“Then the process can’t be that difficult.”

“I imagine Strasser’s chemists have trained people… all over the place. Besides, the drug business, working with that shit, doesn’t take a big brain. You could almost train an orangutan to do it Sanitation and precise-ness are not exactly the hallmarks of a good drug processor.”

Graver let his eyes fall to the steno pad. He wanted to ask her to run a computer check on Victor Last to see if her data banks had anything he couldn’t get from his own source agencies, but something made him hold off.

“You’re cut off, aren’t you,” Arnette said, studying him. “Sheck would have been your next step. Failing that you could have hauled in Dean. That would have been a wild swing, but it would have been the only shot you had left if you wanted to stay hot” She smoked, studying him. “Now all you have is the prospect of a long, difficult investigation. No more sizzling fuse to follow to its source. You’re going to have to piece it together a fragment at a time, in the tried and true manner of intelligence work.”

He looked at her. She bent over the library table and mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray. Her fingernails were immaculate, no polish, precisely and smoothly filed to oval ends with narrow, bone-white outer margins. He chose his words carefully.

“I know it’s out of my territory,” he said, “and even out of my league, for that matter, but Kalatis is the only thing I can think about right now. For the present, he’s the only thing I care about, and a ‘long, difficult investigation’ is not going to get him.”

He saw a look of sober fear set in behind Arnette’s eyes.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” she asked.

“I simply mean that this time patience and the long view have no appeal to me whatsoever. I’m not going crazy here. I know what the odds are that Kalatis will get away with this. I live with those odds every day, just like you do. Only this time I can’t be philosophical about it Sorry. The larger investigation is secondary.” He paused, and they stared at each other. “Arnette, I want that son of a bitch so bad that it’s become the only thing I want.”

She didn’t even blink. She was standing behind her chair, her thin fingers gripping the back of it.

“You’d better keep your head screwed on,” she said evenly. Her face had hardened, and she was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t quite decipher. If he hadn’t been so wired, so nearly out of control inside his mind, the look on her face would have had a dark and restraining effect on him. He tapped the table thoughtfully with the side of his thumb.

“But I’m not cut off, Arnette. There’s a direct route to Kalatis… through Colin Faeber.”

“If you pick him up, the time you have to find Kalatis will be reduced to hours, not days,” she warned. “The minute he’s picked up…” She snapped her fingers once.

“If it looks like I’m going to lose Kalatis, I won’t hesitate to do it.”

“That’s risky.”

“That’s desperate.”

After a pause she asked, “How much time do you think you’ve got?”

Graver looked at the steno pad and pushed it back and forth on the table a few times.

“I’ve probably already had a telephone call at home from Westrate,” he said. “Or from Ben Olmstead, my sergeant in our Houston Terrorist Task Force. I’ve got three men besides Olmstead in a joint effort with the FBI. They work out of the Federal Building, not even in our offices. I’ll be getting immediate briefs from them, so I’ll know what they’re coming up with out there at South Shore Harbor as soon as it happens. At some point I expect Ginette to report Dean missing. They’ll eventually guess Dean might have been one of the bodies, but won’t be able to prove it. But because of his disappearance and the deaths of Tisler and Besom, somebody-probably Ward Lukens-will push for an inquiry. And they’ll get it That’s when I’m going to have to cough up what I know.”

“So… we’ve got…”

“I’d guess… a few days… maybe. I think it’ll depend on how quickly Ginette panics.”

The handset that had been sitting on the table at Graver’s elbow rang for the first time. He picked it up and answered it.

“It’s Neuman. I’m on the Gulf Freeway, coming in. I’ve got something from Sheck’s.”

“What is it?” Graver sat up in his chair, and Arnette froze, her eyes fixed on him. Graver flicked the conference switch on the handset so Arnette could hear.

“I’m not sure,” Neuman said. “I’ve got some aviation navigating maps, but I also found a canister, a waterproof, military-style container a little over five inches long. I found it tied to a piece of fishing line hanging down inside the floor drain of one of the bedroom showers.”

“Jesus, yes,” Arnette hissed, suddenly leaning forward and placing both hands flat on the table.

The muscles in Graver’s neck began a steady tightening.

“I didn’t open it.” Neuman said. “Afraid it might be undeveloped film.”

“Have him bring it here, “Arnette said, repeatedly jabbing a forefinger downward in front of her.

Graver looked at her.

“If you say it’s okay… then it’s okay,” she said.

Graver nodded.

“Give him the address,” she said.

“Neuman…”

“Yeah?”

“Listen, I’m going to give you an address. I want you to bring the canister to 4645 Rauer.”

Neuman repeated the address.

“That’s right. It’s a residence. Someone will be waiting for you at the front yard gate.”

“Give me twenty minutes.”

Graver clicked off the radio.

“In a shower drain. “Arnette grinned with admiration. “Your boy’s pretty good.”

Graver suddenly was hopeful again. His adrenaline had been so taxed in the last few days that he was surprised his glands could still produce anything.

“Everybody has some rainy-day security,” he said, thinking of Sheck.

“That’s the kind of business we’re in, baby,” Arnette said with satisfaction. “Spooks are as predictable as everybody else. They just think differently. Once you know how they think, the odds are good you can make some guesses about what they think.” She walked back to the other end of the table, tapped a knuckle on the wood surface, and returned to stand in front of Graver. “Kalatis may have cause to regret that marina bombing,” she said.

“I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that he does,” Graver said.

The fact that they were addressing two entirely different matters was clear to both of them.