An Absence of Light (42 page)

This time he saw something working in her eyes. As she calmed down she began to think, and Graver had the feeling that thinking was going to do her a lot of good. Maybe.

“Now listen,” he said, “we need to get out of here as soon as we can. We’ve got a boat out in the canal. Why don’t you get dressed. This is not a good place to be.”

“Let me see that shield again,” she said.

Graver took out his shield again and handed it to her. She took it and leaned over under the lamplight and looked at it very closely. She passed her fingers over the face of the shield. Then she handed it back to him. She looked at Neuman.

“I knew that goddamned insurance story was phony,” she said.

“I need a little more practice,” Neuman said.

“No shit.” She relaxed a little.

“Why don’t you get dressed,” Graver said, standing.

“Oh,
yeah,”
she said with exaggeration, looking at each of them.

“One of us is going to have to watch you,” Graver said. “You know we can’t turn our backs on you. Choose whichever you want.”

“Oh, give me a
break
, “she said, flinging aside the wet sheet as she crawled off the bed. “This jerk here has already had his hands all the hell over me. What am I gonna do, get modest all of a sudden?”

She walked naked to her dresser, opened the drawers, and started looking for panties and a bra. She didn’t hurry, glancing at them a couple of times, letting them get a good look at her two-toned body as she seemed unable to immediately find what it was she was wanting.

“Get several changes and put them in a bag,” Graver said, turning and walking out the bedroom door. He threw a look at Neuman who rolled his eyes and wiped his face one more time.

By the time Valerie Heath had gotten dressed—for some reason she selected a wraparound skirt with an orange and brown pattern of African motifs and a sleeveless white blouse—and had put some clothes in a weekender bag, she and Neuman were on pretty good terms. The same elements in his personality that enabled him to work easily with the ever thorny Paula seemed also to appeal to Valerie Heath.

While Neuman was charming her, Graver had picked up a small flight bag from another bedroom and had searched the house, gathering a considerable cache of false IDs and some paperwork and documents that he didn’t take the time to read. He just swept everything into the bag.

Valerie was nervous at the idea of Neuman driving her Corvette into the city, but was finally convinced it was necessary. So as Neuman drove away from the front of her house, she and Graver stepped onto Ollie’s boat, a craft that did not much impress her.

Graver avoided the issue of handcuffs until they got to Ollie’s place, thinking any scene she might make there would attract less attention than on her own patio and dock. But he hadn’t needed to worry. She accepted them, along with a waist chain, with a little obligatory grousing and willingly got into the passenger side of the front seat.

On the way into town Graver prepared her for her unorthodox “custody.” He said that because of the deaths of the two police officers, a special undercover task force had been put together and that he was in charge of it He said that there were two factions inside the police department One faction wanted to throw the book at her because of her “role,” while the other faction—himself, Neuman, and others—wanted to give her a break in exchange for what information she could provide them. What they would like to do when this was all over was simply cut her loose in exchange for her cooperation. She wouldn’t need to call a lawyer because they weren’t going to charge her with anything if she agreed to go along with them. Otherwise she was going to risk spending the rest of her life in prison.

Graver talked in a conversational way, explaining all of this to her as if she were being trained for a new job. He answered her questions, lying to her easily and readily, whatever it took to prep her to be ready to spill her guts once they started questioning her. He could tell by her questions what her fears were, and he played to those with the dexterity of a psychoanalyst Valerie Heath was not a brilliant person, which was part of the reason she had found herself in her present situation.

By the time they got to the edge of the city and he told her he was going to have to blindfold her, she accepted the idea as aggravating but not necessarily un-police-like. Graver radioed Neuman that he was going to pull over for the blindfold, and the two cars exited onto an access road. Once the blindfold was in place, Graver did not talk to her again. The first time she asked a question, Graver only said “Shhhh” very softly, and not another word was spoken until he slowed to pull to the curb in front of his house. He was glad to see the lights on in the house and the garage door closed as he had instructed.

He radioed Neuman behind him to go into the drive ahead of him and park the Corvette in whichever of the two garages Lara had not used for her car. Graver then immediately rolled down his window and turned his head to the outside as though he was talking to someone outside the car.

“Signal the guys at the back that we’re coming around,” he said, and quickly rolled up the window, waited a moment, then pulled down the driveway to the back of the house, parking the department car out of sight from the street as Last had done two nights before. He cut the motor.

“Okay, Valerie. Here we are,” he said. “We’re going to take you inside the house now.”

Lara met them at the back door, stepping out of the way as she pulled it open. She had changed into a pair of jeans and a conversation-stopping tank top. Paula was standing in the entrance to the kitchen behind her.

Just as they all got into the kitchen Graver’s pager vibrated at his waist He looked down and recognized Arnette’s number.

“Wait right here,” he said, and walked out of the room leaving them standing there in silence. He went into the living room and called Arnette.

“Okay, baby, your man’s on the move again,” she said. Graver looked at his watch: it was 10:30. He could hear voices coming over radios in the background.

“You don’t know anything about where he’s going?”

“Nothing. No calls came in or out of his place. He just got up and left. But it looks like he’s going through the same maneuvers as last time. The guy’s relentless.”

“I’ve just picked up Heath,” Graver said.

“She’s going to talk?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Milk her. Let me know if we can use any of it I’ll call you with news from this end.”

Graver hung up the telephone and stood at his desk a moment A weighty disappointment settled on him again at Burtell’s betrayal. It had never been completely obliterated by the fast pace of the developing events, but sometimes it confronted him anew, and it struck him hard again as it had when he had first realized it He turned and walked back out into the hallway and down to the kitchen where everyone was standing just where he had left them.

“Okay,” he said, taking Valerie Heath’s arm again, “we’re going upstairs.”

He took her up, guiding her carefully, taking her around the landing to Natalie’s bedroom. Once inside, he turned on the light and let Neuman untie her blindfold. He didn’t remove her handcuffs. She blinked a few times and looked around.

“You know Paula,” he said. Heath nodded, looking her over quickly with a sarcastic what-else-is-new expression. “And this is Lara,” he said. Heath nodded again, giving her the same eye-flicking appraisal.

“What about the cuffs?” she asked, holding out her hands.

“Not yet,” Graver said. He was curt, and didn’t offer any explanations. “Are you hungry?”

She shook her head and sat down on the end of the bed. “Can I have a cigarette?”

“Not in here,” Graver said.

“Coffee? Can I get a cup of
coffee
then?”

“Sure,” he said. “Paula, will you give me a hand?”

Downstairs Graver went straight to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee while Paula dumped the overnight bag out on the kitchen table and began going through the documents. When the coffee was going, Graver sat down across from her. Paula had laid out six false Texas driver’s licenses, all with Heath’s picture on them—in a few she wore blond wigs—but with different names, birth dates, and identifiers, including licenses for Irene Whaley, who subscribed to magazines at Heath’s house, and Frances Rupp, who had bought the Corvette. There were bank account cards for each of the licenses, all at different banks, all of them containing money. All of the accounts together totaled nearly three hundred thousand dollars. “In-credible,” Paula said.

“I met Don C. about three years ago,” she said, cradling the coffee in her cuffed hands as she sat at the foot of the bed with her legs crossed yoga-style. Her white blouse was unbuttoned low enough to reveal the long cleavage of her weighted breasts. “Met him in a bar. I was coming off a bad marriage, a
bad
marriage, and I was depressed and broke. Don struck up a conversation with me, heard my story, and said he could use a kind of gofer girl to help him do his little stuff. That’s what he called it, his ‘little stuff.’ It didn’t take any convincing, that’s for damn sure. Shit, I jumped at it.”

She shook her head, remembering. “Truth is, I would’ve worked for that guy for nothing.” She looked at Lara who was sitting in a chair across from her as if she thought Lara would understand. “Guy’s”—she nodded and lifted an eyebrow wryly—”a
stud
. A real one. Not some Happy Hour Yuppie, but a guy who’s got muscles and never went to a gym an hour in his life.” She shook her head. “Anyway,” she said, glancing around at Graver who was sitting at the head of the bed with a tape recorder, “all I did was, I went to parking garages and malls and places like that and took manila envelopes from people—it was usually women but sometimes guys—and gave them envelopes of cash in return. I knew it was cash. Don told me. And I knew it wasn’t drugs… I mean, flat manila envelopes? Besides, I opened the ones that weren’t sealed good and looked. Sometimes it was microfiche or computer printouts or just photocopies of documents.”

“What kind of documents?” Neuman asked. He was sitting on the floor leaning back against the wail, his legs straight out on the carpeted floor. He was taking notes on a steno pad.

“Lots of time they were bank records. Sometimes it was corporate information, uh, market research, product development research, sales figures, financial reports, billing records. Anything, everything.”

“Did you always give the money to individuals?”

“Oh, no. Most of the time not. At first I did because Don wanted me to get familiar with them, but not later. Don would give me a key and the money. If the key was to a car trunk in a parking garage, he’d give me the license plate number too. I’d find the car, open the trunk, leave the money, and take the envelope that would be there. Sometimes the key was to a locker at an airport or a mailbox at the post office. A few times even a safety deposit box. The drops could be anywhere. Whatever you could think of.”

“How much money were you paying out?” Paula asked. She was sitting in a chair too, near Lara, her crossed leg swinging nervously.

“Sometimes hundreds sometimes thousands… per person. As much as thirty thousand, as little as a couple of hundred. But I was picking up from the same group of people all this time, same five or six people, so they were turning some serious cash.

“This was kind of my training. I did this for maybe six months before Don got around to talking to me about it, telling me what he was doing and how he was doing it He said he had a client who gave him a shopping list of information he wanted. It was this guy who furnished the money to buy the stuff. Don found the people who could get the information, and then he started running them.

“Anyway, eventually Don turned these people over to me, and I’m still doing it. He passes me information lists, and I pass them on to the right people, make all the buys. It’s so damn easy. The amount of money I get out of it goes up and down sometimes because I get a percentage of what my sources get and what they get depends on the kind of information Don is asking them to come up with. I can’t always count on a certain amount every month, but it’s always cash, for me, for them, all around, and there is so damn much of it it doesn’t matter. I never had so much money.”

“Do you put it all in one account?”

“Oh, hell no. Don taught me how to set up bank accounts all around, spread the money, never deposit more than eight thousand at a time in any one place. That’s his personal, rule-of-thumb cutoff, eight thousand. The thing is, he didn’t want to get the banks suspicious, thinking we were selling drugs, and report us to the cops.”

“He got you the forged driver’s licenses?” Graver asked.

“Yeah. His client can give us any kind of thing we want like that.”

“But you don’t have any idea who the client is.”

Valerie Heath shook her head. “Naw. Nobody knows anybody. I don’t even know Don, for Christ’s sake. I always meet him wherever he says to meet, and he’s always there ahead of me and makes me leave first so I can’t see what kind of car he drives.”

“You’ve never tried to hide and catch him leaving after you?” Paula asked.

Heath waited a beat or two before answering. “Yeah”—she nodded—”once. He caught me. That’s when I found out he knew exactly what I drove. He knows a lot about me. He said if he ever caught me doing that again it was over.” She paused and sipped her coffee. “I was already pulling down almost ninety thousand a year. Cash. I figured knowing more about him wasn’t worth losing that Hell, if he wants to be the mystery man, let him. I’ll take the cash.”

“What about the people you’re buying from? Do they know you?”

“No way. I do just like Don. I use a different first name and last initial with each of them. Debbie E. Linda M. Whatever. Every one of them knows me as somebody different.”

“Do you know any of them?”

“Nope. If one of them drops out for some reason—and I never know why they do, it doesn’t happen very often—Don gives me a new one. First name only. New contact routines. I don’t know them. They don’t know me. I don’t know Don.”