An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  He appointed Ted Leuci to be the acting squad supervisor—in Graver’s opinion he should have had the job anyway, instead of Besom—and told them if they had any questions, problems, suggestions, requests… anything, to take it to Leuci first He said he knew this was a weird set of circumstances, but sometimes life dealt these kinds of hands and all they could do was play them out as they came. It was an inane statement, but he felt he had to say something to acknowledge the eerie coincidence. He asked Leuci to stay back a moment and dismissed the rest of them.

  He gave Leuci the security code to Besom’s room and told him to go in there, gather Besom’s personal things and put them in a storage box. He told him to go ahead and go through Besom’s records, and start familiarizing himself with what he had to do to keep things rolling. If he had any questions, any at all about what he found among Besom’s records, he should bring them to Graver.

  After Leuci left he picked up the telephone and buzzed Paula. In a few minutes she and Neuman were walking through Graver’s door.

  “It’s all over about Besom,” Paula said, quickly sitting down in front of Graver’s desk. Her hair was pulled back at the temples and fastened behind with a clasp. As always, one wrist was draped with a collection of bracelets that clacked as she gestured. Her slightly puffy eyes belied the late hours of the night before.

  “Yeah, I know,” Graver said. “What have you got?”

  As Paula flipped open her ever-present legal pad, Neuman sat down in another chair and crossed his arms, ready to listen to Paula’s summary. At least with one ear. He seemed preoccupied.

  “We got fifteen separate pieces of paper from Valerie Heath’s garbage,” Paula began. “Three envelopes: one from Gulfstream National Bank and Trust with a window in it so we don’t know who it was addressed to. One from The Secure Maintenance Services with the name ‘Doris W.’ written on the outside; one from Excell Executive Secretarial Services with ‘Olivia M.’ written on the outside. We found seven receipts from various places, grocery, car wash, pharmacy, that kind of thing. Of these seven, five were for cash, the other two we couldn’t tell. We got three pieces of notepad paper with telephone numbers on them: one belongs to a male strippers’ club called Phallacy; another is a beauty salon called La Riviera, and the third is a bar called Maggie’s in Kemah, not too far from where she lives. We’ve also got a piece of notepaper with the name ‘Don C.’ doodled on it.”

  Paula looked up and nervously wagged a yellow pencil in her fingers. “Now. Valerie was driving a new Corvette, not the vehicle listed on the vehicle and tag listed on her Contributor ID sheet in the file. Computer tells us the Corvette is in the name of Frances Rupp at some other address. Neuman got the dealer’s name off the trunk, and we talked to the guy who sold it to Rupp. The description fits Valerie Heath. While we were interviewing Heath, Neuman pointed out a magazine on the coffee table with a subscription label on it in the name of Irene Whaley. We ran a check on Whaley. No criminal history, but her Texas driver’s license gives another address, not Heath’s.”

  “Did the magazine have Heath’s address on the label?”

  “It did. We checked the bank. Valerie Heath does not have an account there. Neither does Irene Whaley or Frances Rupp.

  “We checked with the Secure Maintenance Services and asked if anyone with a last name beginning with a W and having the first name Doris worked there. No. Did the same thing with Excell Executive Secretarial Services, asked about a last name beginning with an M, first name Olivia. No.”

  “What about Gulfstream bank?”

  “We checked. No.”

  “Did you ask if Heath or Rupp or Whaley worked at either place?”

  “We did. And we checked for Bruce Sheck too, and anybody with a last name that begins with a C, Don or Donald. They don’t.”

  “I’m betting Heath has a bureau drawer full of false IDs,” Neuman interjected. “Since the ‘Doris’ and ‘Olivia’ envelopes were found in her trash I’m assuming she was the recipient.”

  “Maybe someone living with her is using those names,” Graver said.

  “Could be,” Neuman conceded, “but how likely is that considering we already have Heath assuming two other identities with false IDs? And since there were no last names on the envelopes, just initials, I’ll bet these are the only names the addressers know her by. Heath is using the names as contact names.”

  “Spy stuff,” Paula said.

  “Yeah, something like that,” Neuman said. “She has something to do with someone at those businesses who know her only by those names.’

  “Those envelopes could have been picked up entirely at random,” Graver said.

  Neuman nodded. “Could’ve been, but I’m guessing someone who works at those places, or who has access to stationery from those places, is giving something to Heath in those envelopes and writing her contact name on the outside.” Neuman unfolded his arms and leaned forward in his chair. “Probably the envelopes were not hand-delivered from these persons to Heath. Really wouldn’t be any need in writing the name on the envelopes if they were. They were dead-dropped.”

  “What about ‘Don C’?” Paula asked.

  “Let’s don’t forget how we got to this point,” Graver said, holding up a cautionary hand. “‘Colleen Synar,’ actually Heath, and Bruce Sheck were cited as sources in the Ray Probst investigation. Whoever placed them in that context—Tisler, Besom, Dean—put them on an equal footing. Let’s do the same. Doris W., Olivia M.: Valerie Heath. Don C: Bruce Sheck.”

  “Partners?” Paula frowned.

  “Ohhh, I don’t know.” Neuman craned his head skeptically at Graver. “I can’t imagine the woman Paula and I talked to being very high up in anybody’s scheme. More likely they’re just at the same level—low—of something bigger.”

  “Ray Probst ran a temporary employment service,” Graver went on. “He was paying his people to steal information from the files of the banks and insurance companies where they worked. They would identify people who owned high-dollar consumer products that Probst knew he could quickly resell. And where were the envelopes from in Heath’s trash? A maintenance service and a secretarial service.”

  “Then you think Probst was eliminated because he was competition?” Paula asked.

  Graver didn’t respond. He was staring at his own notes on the desk in front of him, one hand slowly turning the cobblestone. He began to shake his head.

  “I just don’t know… The thing is, I can’t see that this kind of operation would turn over enough money, the kind of money it seems to me it would take to buy off three intelligence officers. If they were going to risk a career, jail, everything… wouldn’t you think it would be for bigger money than this kind of operation would pull down? And if we’re going to stick with our theory that Tisler and Besom were professional hits…”

  “Yeah”—Paula nodded, glancing at Neuman—”we talked about that That’s why we think we’ve just scratched the surface of this thing. And, uh, this is where our imaginations got carried away, and after a while we were bouncing off the wall. We thought we’d better run some of this by you, see what you thought.”

  “Like I said,” Neuman added, “we don’t think Heath and Sheck are the heads behind all this. We see them as underlings, subordinates.”

  Graver looked at them as he turned the cobblestone. He thought they were right on track. They didn’t know that Burtell had been photographed meeting with an unknown man the night before and that the meeting was overseen by a man and woman countersurveillance team, a pair who most certainly were not Bruce Sheck and Valerie Heath. And they didn’t know about Arnette Kepner whose judgment in such matters Graver trusted even more than his own. They didn’t know that she also suspected a larger, more important enterprise than the scam Probst had been operating. Yet they were right on target.

  “What we need to do,” he said, “to give us a little more confirmation is to get a list of the companies each of those places have under contract Maybe what we find there
will give us an idea of the direction they’re moving, even give us some sense of the dimensions, the size of their objectives.”

  “Sooner or later,” Neuman said cautiously—he didn’t want to seem too eager—”we’re going to have to confront either Heath or Sheck. I mean, in the interest of time. We don’t have that much time, do we?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Graver knew Neuman was right about the lack of time. It made their job seem nearly impossible.

  Neuman was rolling back the cuffs on his plaid shirt His tie, though still knotted, was tucked into his shirt placket between the first and second buttons to keep it out of his way.

  “We could interview Sheck, just as we talked to Heath,” he said. “But odds are she’s going to have talked to him already, and he’ll probably be expecting us. It’ll be a tougher interview no matter what he’s like, unless he’s completely spineless.” He glanced at Paula. “Heath though, she’s vulnerable. I think we can panic her without too much of a problem. We’ve got all this false ID stuff on her. I think we can make her believe we know more than we do, put her in a corner, press her, turn her around. I think it could pay off.”

  “But that really commits us, Casey,” Paula hedged. “If we can’t get her to cooperate and she walks away, we’ve given ourselves away.”

  “I think we have anyway,” Neuman admitted. “That insurance business isn’t going to hold up.” He looked at his watch. “By now she already knows there’s no such company.”

  Graver stared at his notes, turned the cobblestone a few more times. It was a close call. If he thought nothing was going to be forthcoming from the tail and the tap on Burtell, if he thought the password puzzle on Tisler’s computer tape was not going to be broken within the next twenty-four hours, if the audio tape of Burtell’s meeting was not going to yield any information today, then he would be all for Neuman’s plan. But Paula was right too. To try to turn Heath and to fail in the effort would scatter the pigeons without a doubt. The investigation would be out in the open.

  “Here’s what I want to do,” Graver said finally. “As incredible as this may seem, I’ve got an informant who save me something last night that may lead right into the middle of this.” Without telling them anything about Last, Graver told them of the conversation Last had over-heard at the party at Colin Faeber’s house.

  Paula’s eyes widened in amazement as she turned to Neuman who simply shook his head at yet another weird wist Graver entertained the idea of bringing them into he picture even more, telling them about Last, about Arnette, giving them all the pieces. But something warned him to hold back. As usual he was being cautious, and in doing so he knew he might be hampering their investigation by not having the benefit of their analysis of the en-ire scope of what they were dealing with. Still, he held back.

  “Casey, I want you to do a work-up on Faeber,” Graver said. “He may have nothing to do with the conversation these two guys had, I don’t have any idea, but we need to try to find out I’ll keep after my informant. There’s no way for me to corroborate this, obviously, but we can’t be picky at this point.”

  Graver rubbed his face with his hands. His neck was getting stiff; he could feel the tendons drawing, growing taut and rigid. He shook his head.

  “Jesus, we could use a dozen people on this. Paula, I want you to find out who’s involved in Gulfstream National Bank and Trust Officers, board members, that kind of thing. If it’s owned by a holding company get the corporate charter from the Secretary of State’s office, lave them fax you everything they have. We’ve got to find out if there are any threads coming out of there that we :an pull on.”

  He looked at his watch. “Check in with me. Maybe I’ll have something from my end by the middle of the afternoon.”

  Chapter 40

  Graver called Lara into his office and for the next how-she helped him work through the stack of paperwork that had been piling up on his desk. It was important that his office didn’t attract attention as a bottleneck to the paper flow. Whatever else happened, he didn’t want it to appear as though Tisler and Besom’s deaths were causing any disruption of routine.

  At one thirty-five he realized that Lara had stopped writing and was sitting with her hands folded on a stack of files in her lap, staring at him. He looked up.

  “I’ve got to have something to eat,” she said. “Really.”

  He looked at nis watch and slumped back in his chair. His head was splitting, and he was starving. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess you’re hungry, huh?”

  “Oh, just a little,” she said dryly, brushing the red-nailed fingers of one hand across her cleavage to pick up a wandering hair. “And you’ve got a headache, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, you’ve got that look. I’ll bet you didn’t have breakfast, either.”

  He nodded again.

  “Right,” she said, pushing her chair away from the desk. “What about it? What do you want to eat?”

  He grinned at her. “Okay. If you’ll go get it, I’ll buy it What about… Las Hermanas?”

  “Perfect,” she said, standing and giving a smart tug at the sides of her skirt to straighten it.

  Graver reached back to the coatrack behind him and took his wallet out of his suit coat pocket “I’ll take a couple of beef enchiladas—ranchera—a taco, and a tamale.”

  “A tamale?”

  “Just one,” he said, dropping the twenty on the stack of folders beside her ballpoint pen.

  “And beer,” she said.

  “Good try. How about an RC?”

  She smiled and snatched up the bill. “Be back in twenty minutes.’’

  Graver watched her walk out of the office and was still looking at her hips when the telephone rang. She looked back, he waved to her that he would get it, and she was gone. He picked up the telephone.

  “This is Graver.”

  “This is your secure line, isn’t it?” Arnette asked.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “We’ve salvaged a little of the audio from the conversation at the Transco Fountain,” she said. “Not much on it in the way of context. But what has come through, twice, is a name. Marcus, you ever heard of a guy named Panos Kalatis?” She spelled the name.

  Graver wrote it down, but he didn’t have to think about it. “No.”

  “Okay. Well, I have. I think you’d better come over here, baby. We’ve got to talk.”

  Graver felt suddenly warm and queasy.

  “I’m on the way,” he said. He stood and grabbed his coat and headed out the door. Lara was already gone. As he slipped on his coat, he pushed through the door beside the receptionist’s booth and told her to tell Lara that he would call in.

  Chapter 41

  1:45 P.M.

  He picked up a hamburger at a stale-smelling little drive-in not far from the police station and ate it on the way to Arnette’s. As he ate, he thought of the enchiladas from Las Hermanas and how furious Lara was going to be when she got back to the office.

  Arnette met him at the front door. She was all business.

  “This guy’s name comes up twice, Marcus’” she said, taking him through the twilight and out the back door into the shade of the arched arbor that led next door.

  “Panos Kalatis. That’s Greek.”

  “Yeah, the name’s Greek,” she said, yanking a grape leaf off the vines and starting to shred it as they walked. The cicadas were carrying on a rousing throb in the midday heat “It’s Dean’s voice both times. Early on in their conversation he says something like he doesn’t think Kalatis will do… something… and then later, toward the end, he ends a sentence with ‘Kalatis.’ That’s it They sure as hell knew what they were doing getting inside that fountain. Anyway, that’s not much, just the name. But considering who he is, it’s a huge break.”

  They came to the screened back porch of the other house, and Arnette pushed open the screen door without breaking stride and in a few steps they were entering the house and the computer roo
m. The CRTs were busy again, and this time all of them were occupied. But Arnette didn’t pause here at the table where the small blonde was once again at her station. Instead, she took Graver back to her library and closed the door. The library table was bare except for a computer monitor and keyboard at the far end, a glass ashtray and a single manila folder laying in the center. There was a green band code on the raised tab.

  “I’m going to leave you here with this,” Arnette said, lifting her chin at the solitary envelope. “After you’ve read it, step outside and have Quinn buzz me. Then we’ll talk.”

  “Quinn’s the blonde on the radio.”

  “Right.”

  Graver nodded and Arnette walked out of the library and closed the door behind her. Graver pulled out a chair and sat down. There was a code number along the left side of the file, a long string of digits and letters. He pulled the file over in front of him and opened it It was a thick, single-spaced dossier on Yosef Raviv.

  Raviv was born in 1936 to Jewish parents in Athens, Greece. His father was a locksmith in the Jewish district who in 1943 smuggled his family aboard a ship in Galatas and fled with them to British-partitioned Palestine. They settled in Ashdod on the Mediterranean coast, and the elder Raviv joined the prestate Lehi underground, a radical Jewish group that, along with another underground group known as the Irgunists, conducted terrorism against the British and Arabs in an effort to hasten the creation of a Jewish state. Three months before Jewish independence was announced in 1948, the elder Raviv was killed when a bomb he was assembling accidentally exploded. Yosef was twelve years old.

  In 1953 at age seventeen Raviv enrolled in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he spent the next six years studying languages. When he left the university in 1959 at the age of twenty-three, he spoke French, English, Italian, and Spanish fluently and had a working knowledge of German, Arabic, and Russian.

  After university, Raviv entered the Israeli Army for his mandatory three years service. At the end of that period, in 1962, he was immediately summoned by Tsomet, the Mossad’s recruiting branch, at a time when a new era was beginning for Israel’s foreign intelligence. Meir Amit, the Mossad’s new director, was restructuring the agency and was emphasizing the recruitment of young men who had distinguished themselves in the military or university. He specifically sought men who exhibited “aggressiveness, cunning, initiative, eagerness for engagement with the enemy, and determination.” After three years of instruction, Raviv graduated from the Institute in late 1965 as a Mossad katsa, or case officer.