An Absence of Light (26 page)

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.

They picked him up the moment he left the house. Four cars, two with only drivers, two with drivers and a single passenger each. Three of the cars were Japanese models, and the fourth was American. Each car was light in color, none of them new, none older than five years. The cars were driven by Arnette Kepner’s own heterogeneous mix of specialists who, for purposes of their radio communications, were identified only by their first names.

Connie was a woman forty-two years old, a former detective in sex crimes with the Chicago Police Department. Three years ago she had moved to Houston when her husband’s employer, an engineering company, transferred him down to corporate headquarters. The mother of two high-schoolers, she had deep red hair, an Irish sense of humor, and a no-bullshit attitude about the jobs she worked for Arnette.

Murray was fifty-seven, retired four years from the army where he spent his entire career in numerous branches of the army’s Intelligence Services. Stocky but still muscular and athletic, Murray favored tennis shoes and jeans and white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled into tight cuffs that revealed his weight-lifter’s arms. He was balding, had striking blue-green eyes, and a clipped, graying mustache. He was the group leader once they were on the job.

Remberto was a thirty-two-year-old Bolivian who first came to the United States eight years earlier when he was part of a small, select contingent of Bolivian police officers who were brought to Virginia by the DEA for a special intelligence training course designed for drug agents. Remberto learned English quickly, spent three years undercover in La Paz and in the jungles of the Beni River valley radioing out information about the ever-shifting coca plantations that supplied the cartels in Colombia. He married a DEA agent’s daughter, and was now in the University of Houston law school.

Li was a twenty-eight-year-old Amer-Asian whose mother Arnette knew during one of her Vietnam tours. Li’s mother was killed in 1971, a fact Arnette did not know until 1978 when she tried to find them in the chaotic months after the U.S. pullout. When she finally found Li in a Catholic orphanage, she went through a year and a half of red tape to adopt her and then brought her to the United States. Li was educated mostly in Virginia public schools and was now working on a master’s degree in Art History at Rice University.

The two women were accompanied by passengers, Boyd, a photographer with Li, and Cheryl, a sound specialist, with Connie. Murray had been briefed about the target, but the others knew nothing about him except that he was thoroughly familiar with surveillance techniques, a fact that let them know that they couldn’t take anything for granted and a lack of watchfulness was likely to be detected.

Burtell left the condominium complex, passed through the entrance gates and turned east on Woodway, a curving, wooded street that eventually would go under the West Loop and merge with Memorial Drive just inside Memorial Park. Murray pulled out of a parking slot in front of another condominium, let a couple of cars get between him and Burtell, and then nosed into the traffic. The other three quickly entered the traffic stream from different streets a block away, Connie, Remberto, and Li. Murray was immediately on the radio.

MURRAY: “Okay, Connie, go ahead and get in front of him. If he goes for the Loop we’ll stay with him. You double back when you can. If he goes all the way into downtown peel away the first chance you get after the merge with Memorial.”

CONNIE: “Okay, here we go.”

She pulled out and passed Murray and then Burtell, getting in front of him before the next light and adjusting her speed so that she didn’t go through without him. When the light turned they went to the next one which they caught green and passed under the Loop, staying on Woodway as they entered the one-hundred-and-fifty-five-acre Memorial Park, its dense stand of loblolly pines turning the city-lighted night to a deeper darkness. Suddenly Burtell hit his brakes and turned off Woodway before it merged with Memorial Drive and entered the drive to the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center.

MURRAY: “Remberto. Li. Stay outta there. Don’t go in. This is a bullshit stop. It’s a dead end. He’s not going to meet anybody in there, not this early in the game. He’s trying to pull us off. Everybody watch for countersurveillance—they’re gonna see who panics. Remberto, turn off on Picnic Lane ahead and look to pick him up if he goes on to merge with Memorial when he comes out of there. Connie, Li, the three of us are going to spread out and start circling Memorial, North Post Oak, and the access road. We’ll pick him up if he comes out and heads west.”

For a minute there was silence on the radio as they each did as they were told, Connie, being the farthest away already coming back and beginning the first leg of her circle as the others turned around. It was still early enough in the night for the traffic to provide a moderate flow of headlights.