An Absence of Light (51 page)

“You don’t think this is some kind of bomb, a booby trap, do you?” Boyd mused, only half in jest as he put the first twist on the cap. No one said anything.

“I just want to know if it’s film,” Graver said. “Then I’ll get out of your way.”

It was a long-threaded cap, as was customary with such waterproofed containers, and when it finally came free Boyd laid it on the worktable. Holding it over his opened hand, he turned it over in the palm of his hand, and a tightly coiled, shiny black scroll fell into his hand.

“It’s film,” he said. “Already developed.” He stretched out the roll between his hands, one high in the air, the other down below his waist. “Microfilm.”

“Okay, that’s good enough for me,” Graver said. “How long will it take you to get something.”

“I can get you the first frame—microfiche—in about twenty minutes.”

They stepped out of the darkroom leaving Boyd to his magic and walked around the corner to the main computer room. Every work station was being used and the room was chattering with keystrokes. Quinn was at her radio, writing in a notebook, and speaking with professional ennui into her pencil-sized microphone. Neuman took it in quickly, trying not to gawk, but naturally wanting to see as much as possible. Arnette smiled and stopped.

“This is Quinn,” she said to Neuman, but not interrupting the girl for an introduction. “Right now she’s fielding reports from the South Shore Harbor. We’ve got stringers, much like a newspaper does. When something big like that happens they bring us up to speed. Every call is computer-recorded and the reports are tallied and the information is assigned a value, very much like a value code is given to an informant or a source. We keep track of both the quality and the volume of information from each stringer. Sometimes that pays off in ways you wouldn’t expect.”

She walked around the room slowly, clockwise.

“These two women are working on Tisler’s computer data. This is still a very long shot,” she said, looking at Graver, “but they’ve gotten through some doors, made some progress. Over here, this guy’s working on trying to ID the guy who met Burtell at the Transco Fountain. We haven’t found him, but we’re getting updates on these people so it’s actually a useful exercise for us. It’s been a while since I updated my photo file, and it’s expensive, so you don’t want to do it without a good reason.

“Dani,” she said, pointing to the girl at the next station, “is running leads on Brod Strasser. You guys stumbled onto some of the most reclusive boys in the business. Take Kalatis. We
think
he bought a place in the Houston area around 1989. We
think
he’s been spending about half his time here since then, but we can’t verify it Our real estate stringers say they don’t think so, that there are no shell residential purchases they can’t open up. They’re wrong, but we can’t prove it He owns a private plane, a Desault Falcon. We know that it’s in the name of his pilot, a former Israeli Air Force instructor. We know when he leaves Colombia in that thing… and that’s all we know. Once, in 1989, we nailed it at Hobby. It stayed there three days. Now, I
know
the guy’s been back here in it, but we can’t prove it We think he’s paying off an air traffic controller in Honduras—Tegucigalpa. He enters the country at that little narrow Gulf of Fonseca, crosses Honduras, and comes out over the Bay Islands as somebody else. Then to be safe, he’s using a private strip somewhere around Houston instead of one of the airports. But we can’t prove it.”

She stopped without explaining anything about the last three or four work stations.

“And it goes on and on,” she said. “We’re always chasing down something.”

She headed toward the library and Graver and Neuman followed. As they walked in, Graver’s handset that he had left on the library table was buzzing. He picked it up. It was Paula.

“Graver, everything went okay with Heath. She’s gone. But as soon as we got back to your place Ginette Burtell drove up right behind us. She’s hysterical. She thought you’d be home. She says she thinks that Dean is dead. She’s really unglued. Lara’s with her.”

Graver’s heart sank.

“Why does she think he’s dead?”

“That explosion. Local stations broke into network programming with it. She says Dean kept a boat in a slip at South Shore Harbor.”

“Christ.”

“I think you’d better get over here. She says she has something to tell you. Apparently Dean had been afraid the last few days. She says he had given her a message to give to you in the event of his death. I think she’s frightened, too. I don’t know… there seems to be more to this. I think you’d better get over here.”

“Did she wonder why you and Lara were at my place?”

“Yeah, but I just told her we were in the middle of something. You’d better come on.”

“Okay, I’m coming right now.”

“You heard from Neuman?” There was an edge of concern in Paula’s voice.

“He’s with me. He got something from Sheck’s. I’ll fill you in when I get there.”

By the time Graver got home, Ginette Burtell was sitting quietly with Lara on the sofa in the living room, each turned slightly to the other, their knees just touching as they talked. Lara, who had a softer touch than Paula and with whom Ginette was more familiar because she saw her every time she came into the office to see Dean, had a natural ability to communicate on a visceral level and a manner that was immediately discernible as genuine and without calculation. It was the kind of candid compassion that Ginette needed at that moment, and Lara apparently had been able to calm her.

When Graver walked into the room Ginette stood up immediately.

“Marcus,” she said. “Thank God.” She wore no makeup to hide the fact that her eyes were red and swollen, and her fashionable skirt and blouse were wrinkled as if she had been wearing them too long and had no interest in their condition.

“We’ve got to talk,” she said quickly, her voice cracking on the last word. Her face wrinkled as Graver came over to her and took her hands, which were twisting a tissue.

“Okay, Ginny, it’s okay,” he said, getting her to sit down again with him as Lara stood and started to leave the room. “Ginny,” Graver said, “you don’t mind if Lara stays, do you?”

She shook her head and buried her face in the tissue, grabbing others from the box on the sofa. Graver glanced at Lara.

“Ginny, I know you’ve got something to say that you feel is important,” Graver said. “I don’t want to miss anything. This is all very complicated. I’m going to ask Paula to come back in too. We need all the help we can get on this, and of course Paula… works with Dean”—he almost said “worked”—”and needs to hear this.”

She nodded again and Graver again looked at Lara, who left to get Paula from the kitchen where Graver had found her a few moments earlier nursing a cup of coffee and looking thoroughly uncomfortable. Graver had paused only a moment to speak to her when he came in the back door. She quickly had told him of his messages and handed a piece of paper with the calls on it: Westrate and Olmstead as Graver had guessed, each a couple of times—Graver deliberately had turned off his pager when he had left the house earlier—and Victor Last.

“Do you want anything to drink?” Graver asked. He was turned toward her on the sofa.

“No, I… no,” she said, wiping her nose and putting all of her energy into an effort to gain control of herself. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to be,” Graver said. “If you’ll just try to think of everything… every detail, it’ll help us get to the bottom of this.”

As Lara and Paula came back into the room and found chairs, Graver told Ginette to start from the beginning, to take her time, and not to be disconcerted if he had to interrupt her a number of times to ask questions.

“God, I don’t know how to start,” she said. “I saw the news bulletin… South Shore Harbor. We keep a sailboat out there and I think… I think that’s where Dean was going when he left the house tonight.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because he had a meeting… with someone. When he had meetings he used the boat sometimes.”

“How do you know?”

“He let it slip one time, a reference. Something hadn’t been cleaned up when we went out there to go sailing, and he said oh he’d forgotten to take care of it after the last meeting. I saw him cringe, you know, kind of. I guessed it had something to do with work, so I didn’t say anything further. I tried not to quiz him. That’s always hard, trying to ignore all the… inexplicable things.”

“But there are a lot of boats out there, Ginny,” Graver said. “Why do you think Dean was on the boat that blew up?”

“Was he?” She looked at him, visibly bracing herself. It was a brave question, and one that revealed that she believed Graver already knew the truth.

“I don’t know anything about what’s happened out there,” Graver lied. “The Department’s gotten a ton of calls about it, but I doubt if I’ll know much of anything until tomorrow. I understand it’s chaos out there.”

“The boat was in slip forty-nine,” she said, stiffening.

“Ginny, we don’t know that kind of detail yet I’m pretty eager to know myself, and when I do find out something I’ll let you know immediately.”

He paused, and she continued to stare at him. He thought she might be seeing right through him, but he plunged on.

“Dean was officially on vacation, Ginny,” he said. “He wouldn’t be going to meet someone now, would he?”

She sat staring at the tissue she was kneading. “I, uh, I said to, Paula, that… Jesus”—she looked up and away toward the windows, her eyes batting back the tears—”Dean’s… Dean’s had something else going on… besides work… I mean CID work… something else…”

She stopped, finding it difficult to broach the subject.

“Did he tell you this?”

She shook her head.

“No, of course not,” she said. “He wouldn’t have done that” She took a deep breath. “Uh, about a year ago… or a little less… he began going out at night again. I got used to that when he was an investigator, but that was years ago. As an analyst it was pretty rare that he would do that But it got to be he’d go out at least one night almost every week. I finally asked him about it, I said what’s the deal with this going out? You don’t have to do that” She dropped her eyes. “I thought… I thought he was seeing another woman. I blew up. He sat me down and said there was a special investigation under way and that everyone was having to put in extra time. It was a big project, a long one, and that this would have to go on for a while. After that he was very… sensitive about it, never tried to hide it or make it mysterious. But he reminded me that if I ever spoke to any of you, you know, when I came to see him at the office, that I must never mention that he’d been working late, that it wouldn’t look good if it seemed that he’d been talking about his work at home.”

Ginette reached a hand up and wiped it across her brow, brushing aside a wisp of her short, jet hair. She sighed heavily, exhausted from the tension that was eating every bit of her strength.

“About four or five months ago Dean began to change. He seemed… stressed. He grew kind of broody, irritable. I’d seen this before when he was an investigator, if something he was working on wasn’t going right. And in those days he’d talk about it after a while, if I insisted. But this time”—she shook her head—”this time he just got angry when I tried to draw him out. He made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that it wasn’t something we could talk about.

“Then he began going out more often at night. Sometimes I think he was going to meet Art. Sometimes Art would come by here, or he’d call and come over, and they’d stand outside in the drive and talk. So I knew it was business, not another woman. But it was eating him up. He couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up in the night, and he wouldn’t be in bed. I’d find him sitting out in the courtyard, or in the living room. Or I’d wake up suddenly, and he’d just be lying there, staring at the ceiling… or… or just be staring at me.”

She stopped and swallowed and, though she didn’t sob, tears rolled out of her eyes so that she had to stop and use more tissue. Graver glanced at Lara, whose large, dark eyes were fixed on him with sober concern. Again Ginette got herself under control and went on.

“Sunday night when you came over and told him about Art—God, it seems like a month ago—it was terrible. After you left Dean came in and told me. He told me we had to get over to Peggy’s and break the bad news to her. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door. In a few minutes I heard him vomiting. He stayed in there a long time. I went ahead and changed clothes, and he was still in there. He, uh, he was sick until there was nothing left… uh, I, uh, could hear him in there just,
you
know, coughing and coughing.”

She started crying again, covering her face in the wad of tissues. Lara quickly got up and came over to the sofa and sat down on the other side of her, putting her arm around her. She took the wet tissues out of Ginette’s hands and gave her dry ones and hugged her and said something to her.

Graver sat there helplessly, the image of Burtell vomiting playing over and over in his mind. Paula was sitting near Graver’s desk with a pen and notepad, staring at Ginette with a drawn face. Graver saw that she hadn’t written down a word.

It was a few minutes before Ginette was able to continue, and when she did her voice was thin and without strength. This time Lara stayed at her side.

“We went over and stayed Sunday night with Peggy,” she went on. “We got a sedative for her and finally, about three in the morning, she went to sleep. Neither Dean nor I slept a minute. When Peggy’s folks came in from Corpus Christi about five-thirty the next morning, we went home. We both bathed, cleaned up and went to work. But Monday night was miserable. Dean wasn’t able to sleep at all. Tuesday morning the loss of sleep was killing me, and I called in sick. Dean got up and went to work as usual. I slept through the day and got up late in the afternoon. Dean had left a note on the kitchen table saying that he had left the office early, that, you know, you had let him start his vacation, and that he would be home again later.