An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  “No, it’s okay,” Graver said, standing. “No problem, come on in.”

  Lara didn’t get up, though Paula looked at her as if she expected her to.

  “Lara’s staying,” Graver explained. “There’s a lot to discuss.”

  “Oh,” Paula said again, and Graver could see her brain working all over her face. She was cautious, suspicious, and clearly doubting the wisdom of what it seemed that Graver had apparently decided to do.

  Neuman immediately read the situation and came in and sat down on the other side of Lara. From that moment on he accepted her as part of the team without reservation and wanted to be seen as having accepted her. He spoke freely in front of her and looked at her as well as the others when it came time for him to give his report.

  Paula was less comfortable as she sat down on Lara’s other side. Paula was always game, but she was not blindly game. She would have questions and inevitably would hold to the independence of her own opinions. She was going to reserve her judgment.

  “Okay,” Graver said to Neuman, standing behind his chair, “what have you got?”

  Neuman loosened his tie, undid the collar button of his plaid shirt, and took a notebook out of his coat pocket.

  “Colin Faeber’s married to his second wife, no children. His first wife and a daughter live in Denver where he sends hefty alimony checks. Second wife is from a wealthy family in New Orleans where he went to college. Owns a new home—built four years ago—in the Tanglewood area. Nine hundred thousand plus mortgage… note at Southern Federal. His personal indebtedness, aside from the house, is about four hundred thou… a couple of cars, another residence on South Padre, some furniture. I went to the Uniform Commercial Code filings. His business, DataPrint, dates back seven years when he started it with an initial investment of two hundred thousand borrowed from a bank. That note was paid off after a couple of years. At first the company was a kind of processing operation. He had some pretty heavy duty hardware, and when a smaller firm needed data merged or sorted in a manner that was too complex for their own hardware, Faeber’s company would do it for them. It seems to have been very successful.

  “About three and a half years ago Faeber expanded suddenly and enormously. Bought new, more powerful computers with an enormous influx of capital. A new lien holder appeared on his UCC filings: Concordia International Investments… in Buenos Aires, of all places.”

  “Do you have anything on that?” Graver interrupted.

  “Wait…” Neuman flipped back several pages. “I did take the time to check World Traders Data Reports, but the information was so sketchy I had to resort to tracking down an annual directory of firms in four Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela… here. CII is owned by a holding company, Strasser Industries, which owns dozens of businesses worldwide.”

  “Strasser?” The word leaped out of Graver’s mouth.

  “Right.”

  “That’s a surname?”

  “Right Brod Strasser. He’s the CEO of Strasser Industries.”

  Graver kept his eyes on Neuman as he came around from behind his chair and sat down. They all looked at him as he motioned for Neuman to continue.

  “Well, there’s not a lot more. But from looking at the UCC filings it seems to me that CII owns more of DataPrint than Faeber does at this point It looks like they just about bought him whole when they financed these huge systems for him.”

  “Has his business changed? Does he still do the same kind of work he did before?”

  “On the books he does. I haven’t had time to do any of my own legwork, so I don’t know any more than that.”

  Graver nodded. “Well, I doubt if he does.”

  Paula, increasingly impatient, could not control her fidgeting, and Graver didn’t blame her. It was probably clear to all of them now that he was holding a lot of information that he ought to be sharing with them if the investigation was to move forward with any speed at all.

  “Okay,” he said, “let me bring you up to speed from my end.”

  For the next hour he told them everything he knew except for identifying Arnette or Victor Last. As he spoke he watched their faces alternate through a series of changes from incredulity to grim by the time he had come to the end of Yosef Raviv’s dossier and Brod Strasser’s name.

  Several times during his recitation, he saw Paula cut her eyes at Lara. She was still having a hard time believing Graver was including her in such a sensitive development. She would have been even more surprised if she had known how much more Lara knew about this than she did, as well as the Division’s entire operations.

  “So there’s the connection to Kalatis/Raviv,” he said. “Colin Faeber is well connected, and I doubt if Kalatis and Strasser are interested in the kind of business that DataPrint has described in the documents on file.”

  Neuman was slowly shaking his head.

  “Then these… people… you’ve got tailing Burtell,” Paula said. “They’re… a pretty high-powered operation.”

  Graver nodded. Paula just looked at him. She was considerably sobered by what she had just heard, the way that people are sobered when they realize that they were mistaken about what it was, exactly, out there in the dark. She glanced once more at Lara as though Lara, too, now took on a significantly new dimension.

  “What are you going to do, then?” Neuman asked. “What do we do now?”

  “We keep moving,” Graver said. “I’m convinced that Kalatis is the core of this. Dean obviously knows him, knows him well enough to discuss him with the man at the fountain. With Kalatis’s Mossad background, we’d be fools not to go after him, not to make the assumption that he’s the heart of this operation. I think Dean’s involved with him”—Graver glanced fleetingly at Lara—”but I’m beginning to have my doubts about exactly how Dean might be involved. From here on I want everything we do to be directed toward one end: working our way to Kalatis.”

  Neuman’s eagerness to take some of the weight of guilt off Burtell’s shoulders was obvious.

  “Then you think Dean’s being—”

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” Graver cut him of impatiently. “But I do think you were right, Casey, about picking up Valerie Heath. We’ve got to do it; we’ve got to talk to her. Right now she’s the only opening we have if we’re going to try this without showing our hand, without confronting Dean.”

  “Then what?” Paula asked. “What are you going to do with her? We can’t arrest her, and once we pick her up we can’t let her go. There’s too much risk.”

  “Lara’s going to stay with her.”

  Paula gaped. “Where?”

  “At my place.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Graver.”

  “I don’t see any other way,” he said. “We’ve got to keep an eye on her, for her protection and ours.”

  “Fine, but what about a motel?”

  “We don’t have the budget for something like that or the means of providing any kind of protection without drawing attention. If we can get her to my place without anyone knowing it would be easier. Meals wouldn’t be a problem there, and at night there’ll be two of us to take turns.”

  “Do you think she’ll actually be in danger?” Paula blurted.

  “I have to think so.”

  “What about Lara, then?”

  “What do you want me to do, Paula?” Graver was getting tired of her questions, and that she insisted on concentrating on the downside. “You come up with a better solution.”

  “When do you want to pick her up?” Neuman interjected a more practical question.

  “Now,” Graver said. “I’ll go with you.” He reached into his coat pocket and took his house key off the car key chain. He handed it across to Lara.

  “Go home and get some clothes,” he said. “Get something comfortable, something for several days. On your way to my place go by a grocery.” He took out his wallet and handed her all the money he had. “I keep a pretty bare pantry. Get enough for s
everal people for several days. Paula, you go with her. When you get there, pull your car into one of the two garages and close the door so it can’t be seen from the street When Casey and I get there with Heath, we’ll talk about what to do next A lot will depend on what we learn from her.”

  He stood up. “Keep your radio handy. If my surveillance people are right, Burtell will take another trip tonight. We need to be in touch with each other every minute. Okay?”

  They all stood. Lara hadn’t said a word.

  Chapter 45

  8:20 P.M.

  Before leaving the city Graver got a search warrant from a judge he could trust to keep the issuance quiet, and Neuman maneuvered their unmarked car onto the Gulf Freeway into the sluggish flow of traffic that bled from downtown for several hours every evening.

  Graver sat quietly on the passenger side watching the traffic, the congestion seeming to be an appropriate metaphor for the state of his mind at the moment. He kept going over and over the frayed ends of the developing investigation. It would have been difficult enough to conduct this kind of operation with the full knowledge of the administration and a full complement of investigators working with his own technical people. Difficult enough. But this covert effort with only two investigators and out-of-office technical support—regardless of how good they were—was an invitation to disaster. Having minimal control and keeping only a modicum of compartmentalization was very nearly counterproductive. He felt like he was hanging on by the tips of his fingers.

  He brooded over this for half an hour in silence and then gave it up and turned his mind to the immediate task at hand. He took the Key Map out of the glove box and opened it to the harbor complex where Valerie Heath lived.

  “You said she had a docking slip behind her place?” he asked Neuman.

  “Yeah, one of those canals. It’s a pretty narrow inlet Two cabin-type boats could pass in there, but it would be close.” Neuman reached over and pointed to the map. “I put a little dot where she lives. Ballpoint A blue dot’

  “Yeah, okay. Here it is.” Graver studied the layout of streets and docks and slips and inlets. He knew the area. It was not inexpensive real estate. “The street in front of her place is a cul-de-sac.”

  “Yeah. She lives about four, five houses from the circle.”

  “So eight to ten houses have a good view of the front of her place,” Graver asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Describe the place to me, the inside.”

  As Neuman did this Graver listened, asked a few questions, verbally playing back the description to him as though he was looking in from the canal side. When he was satisfied, he fell silent again.

  They took the 518 exit off the freeway and continued to Marina Bay Boulevard which they followed around toward the coast until they began seeing the entrances to the marinas and yacht clubs. Neuman slowed when he came to the long street that ran out onto the peninsula where Heath lived. It was late in the afternoon by now and the sun was low above Houston behind them, and the shadows were lengthening in front of them.

  “Just go in far enough to see if her car is parked in front,” Graver said. “If it is, turn around and come back out.”

  Neuman nodded and turned in to the street They didn’t have to go far before they saw the black Corvette.

  “There it is,” Neuman said.

  “Okay,” Graver said. “This is perfect We’re lucky. I know someone near here who’s got a boat.”

  Neuman looked at Graver but said nothing as Graver gave him directions. Within fifteen minutes they were pulling up in front of another house with boat slips in the rear. It was miles away from Heath’s by land, but by water it was just a few minutes. The houses here were considerably more modest than those in Heath’s neighborhood. There were more banana trees here than palms, and the oily smell of the shipyards nearby permeated the still air. An occasional camper or fishing skiff was parked here and there under the rows of shaggy oleanders that separated the houses, and the driveways here were made of crushed mussel shells from the bay instead of smooth paving stones.

  Graver directed Neuman into a driveway and the crunching of the tires on the shell base made a comfortable sound in the late heat and softening light of the afternoon. The garage in front of the car had been converted into living quarters and the crushed shell ran dead into the wall. An enormous outboard motor lay across two weathered sawhorses in front of the car. Neuman cut the motor, and Graver got out and walked between the car and the outboard motor to the front door that was shaded by an old mimosa that bloomed as brilliantly as if it had graced a palace garden.

  Graver knocked on the frame of the screen door and heard a parrot screech somewhere in the dark interior. He heard footsteps coming, heard them pause, then quicken as they approached the front door.

  “God damn,” a man said, and Graver stepped back and the screen door popped open as a stocky man in his mid sixties stuck out his suntanned arm to shake his hand.

  “How are you, Ollie?” Graver said.

  “Hell, I’m fine,” the man said, stepping out of the house into the shade. “How are you?”

  His gray hair was wispy, its thinness having allowed his scalp to become deeply tanned and speckled by the coastal sun. He wore khaki trousers rolled to mid calf over faded blue tennis shoes and a denim shirt that must have been washed a million times, its long sleeves rolled to the elbow. The shirttail was tucked into the waist of the pants which were hitched over a tight belly and held in place by a cracked leather belt that was much too large, its unused portion hanging down in front of his fly. He was grinning at Graver, looking up at the taller man with a cocky smile that revealed strong, even teeth.

  “You want somethin’, don’t you.” His grin broadened.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Graver said. “A little favor.”

  The stocky man looked at the car and at Neuman. “Business.”

  Graver nodded.

  “Right now.”

  “I need a boat ride,” Graver said. “Just a few minutes from here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need you to take us there, maybe wait a while. Twenty minutes. Something like that We’ll be bringing a woman back here, and then she’ll leave with me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then I’ll owe you… again.” Graver smiled.

  “No shit That’s the way I like it.” He looked at Neuman in the car. “Well, come on,” he said, jerking a thick arm at Neuman.

  Ollie was always game for a game, having spent years in tactical operations before he retired out If he trusted you, he didn’t ask a lot of questions; he just followed instructions. He knew that whatever was happening here had already been thought through by Graver. Graver wouldn’t be asking him in if it wasn’t something that wouldn’t pass Ollie’s own muster… or could have been done without his help.

  As Neuman got out of the car, the man eyed him and then he turned and started around the end of the house as Graver and Neuman followed. They passed under a tunnel of oleanders tangled in weedy vines to a back yard that was only thirty or forty feet deep and ended at a dock in the canal. Moored at the dock was an old inboard cabin launch, a small one, but well cared-for, if sparsely furnished.

  Ollie stepped on board without hesitation and began flipping switches and pulling buttons as Graver and Neuman stepped off the dock and into the cabin.

  “Where is it?” he asked as the ignition started grinding and the engine caught in a gruff cough that turned to a deep rumble. Graver told him. “Oh, yeah.” He stepped out of the cabin, threw off the mooring ropes and got back to the wheel. Without any further questions he eased back on the throttle, and the launch pulled slowly away from the dock as the old man let it glide into a drifting turn and in a moment they were moving forward, headed out of the canal toward the bay.

  No one said anything for a while as the old launch casually made its way along the shore, passing the entrances to other canals, the houses growing tonier as the dusk gr
ew darker. Graver heard the engine ease up before he actually felt it He had been watching the lights come on along the shore, watching their converging illumination flanking the narrow canals as they passed. The engine slowed yet again as they made another listless turn into yet another canal and glided past the docks of the houses.

  “I figure it’s the next one up,” Ollie said in a husky voice.

  “Casey,” Graver said, pulling Neuman to the cabin doorway. “You recognize it?”

  “Yeah, he’s right. That’s it.”

  Ollie grinned silently.

  “Can you cut your lights, Ollie?”

  The old man did.

  “Can you dock at the very end? Not pull all the way up in back of the house?”

  The old man nodded and did as Graver asked. It was almost completely dark, and his task was not all that easy. In a moment they felt the prow nudge the dock and the old man cut the engine. He quickly stepped out of the cabin and walked the gunwale to the prow and got out onto the dock.

  “I want you to go around front,” Graver said, turning to Neuman. “Just ring the doorbell. When she answers and recognizes you, identify yourself. Let her know immediately you’re a police officer—but be sure to get in, at gunpoint if you have to. Don’t let her lock you out. Then let me in from back here. I’ll try to get in behind her if the door back here is unlocked.”

  No one said anything more as Graver and Neuman got onto the dock and stepped a few feet into the bushes at the back of the small lawn. There were lights on in the house, a dim one in the kitchen where Valerie had burned her food the night before and then lights on in what must have been the back bedroom. Everything else was dark, some of the soft light in the kitchen felling onto the stone patio just outside the sliding glass door.

  Graver nodded when he was satisfied, and Neuman made his way around one side of the house and disappeared. Easing to the side of the back door, Graver peered into the kitchen and dining room for a moment and then backed up and put his ear next to the wall outside her bedroom where the light was. He could hear water running. Was she bathing? Would she hear the doorbell? He went to the patio door and tried it He was startled to find it unlocked. Slowly he slid it open, praying there wasn’t an alarm system, and stepped inside. He waited a moment, then moved across the family room to a short hallway that he guessed led to the lighted bedroom. He paused at the doorway. Now he could clearly hear the shower. Good. He hurried down the entrance hall to the front door and opened it to a surprised Neuman.