An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

“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.”

  “But he knows you.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. She put her coffee cup between her thighs and raised her hands to fluff her hair. “He does.”

  “What kind of business are your people working in?” Neuman asked.

  “I got people in two banks, a few law offices, a maintenance service, and an executive secretarial service. The maintenance service guy is the biggest moneymaker.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because this guy isn’t really a janitor. He’s a computer freak, a hacker. The business he works for has the janitorial contract for one of the biggest buildings downtown. There are oil company offices in there, law offices, stockbrokers, real estate people, international businesses. This guy has access to all these offices all night, every night. Don has more laundry lists for this guy than anyone.”

  “Do all of your people have the same expertise?” Neuman was making notes frantically, not even looking up to ask the question. “I mean, are they all employed in the same kind of job?”

  “No. That’s the thing about this,” Heath said, looking at Lara again. “All of them are fairly low-level. Secretaries, data input clerks. Desk types. That’s why it works. Everybody’s in low-paying jobs and always need the money, but they have access to records. Computers. They can get whatever it is you want on those damn computers. They have all this access, but they aren’t getting paid shit Everybody like that’s strapped for money. It’s easy to buy them. Cash. That’s the thing. I mean, they don’t have any loyalty to those companies. They know damn well if things get tight they’re going to be the first ones to go. They’re not kidding themselves. Big shots—they always think, you know, the average person is dim-witted. Those big companies. It’s like the government Average person gets a chance, they’re going to screw them ’cause they know the company would do the same to them if their profits started suffering. That’s what this shitty economy has taught a lot of people, if nothing else. Cover your ass.”

  Valerie polished off her coffee and looked around, waiting for the next question.

  Graver asked, “Have you ever heard of a company called DataPrint?”

  Valerie Heath pursed her mouth a second and then shook her head. “No.”

  “Have you ever heard of a guy named Bruce Sheck?”

  Again she gave it a little thought and shook her head. “No.”

  “What was the deal with Colleen Synar?” Graver asked.

  “That, Jesus. It wasn’t anything. One day Don tells me, Look, if anyone calls you and asks for a Colleen Synar, tell them she moved away a long time ago. I said, What? He said, somebody might call you about her, just tell them she moved away and that’s all you know. That pissed me a little. I didn’t say he could do that, give my number to somebody. He didn’t explain any more than that. I was pissed, but I didn’t say anything else. I was afraid of losing my situation. At that time the money was already coming in big-time. I’d never had anything like that before. I didn’t want to lose it. I worried about it a long time, was scared every time the phone rang. But when nobody ever called I forgot about it… until she called,” she said, nodding at Paula.

  “When you want to get in touch with Don, how do you do it?” Graver was leaning back against the headboard of the bed. His tie was undone.

  “Telephone number. I call it, leave a message, he calls me back. The number changes every four or five weeks.”

  “What’s the number?” Neuman asked.

  “Forget it,” she said. “I called him yesterday and the thing’s dead. And I haven’t heard from him.”

  “Do you think Don has other people like you, buying information from several sources?”

  “Oh, sure he does. He told me. In so many words, anyway.”

  “How many other people do you think there are?”

  “No idea. He just said this was a big operation. And he had this system down pretty good. Rules. Sometimes when we meet he says something like, well, he’d better get going and run his ‘other’ traps. Gives me the impression I’m not the only one he’s feeding money to and collecting information from.�
� She thought a moment “To tell you the truth, sometimes I think there might be other people like Don, too. You know, working for this ‘client’”

  “Have you ever heard of the name Panos Kalatis?” Graver asked.

  She shook her head. “No, I think I’d remember that one.”

  “Have you ever heard Don speak of a Greek guy?”

  “Greek?” She frowned then shook her head again. “No Greek.”

  They talked to Valerie Heath for more than an hour. Twice Lara went downstairs to get her more coffee and once Heath had to stop to go to the bathroom. Though Lara said nothing during all this, Paula, Neuman, and Graver went over and over the information, approaching it from different angles, rephrasing her answers into new questions that put a slightly different perspective on the subject Heath’s responses never wavered, and she responded as candidly as she had thrown off the sheets in front of Neuman and Graver. It seemed that having once decided to give it all up, she did so without reservation. At times it even seemed to Graver that she was oddly relieved to do it. And he noticed, too, that she was responding to the very human emotion of being flattered to be the center of attention.

  “If we needed to talk to Don,” Graver said, “how would we get in touch with him?” As he asked this, he took Bruce Sheck’s contributor ID record out of a manila folder and held his picture up in front of her.

  “Damned if I know,” she said. “Just that phone number.” Her eyes went to the photograph. She stared at it Slowly her expression changed. “Well, I’ll be damned.” She started nodding slowly, a smile almost forming on her mouth. “That’s him. That’s ol’ Don C. himself.”

  Chapter 48

  Graver was walking around the kitchen with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows pulling sandwich meat and cheese out of the refrigerator, pickles and olives and onions out of the pantry, bread from the bread box, handing a knife to Neuman and indicating to him to start slicing. He was talking to Paula who was sitting at the table taking notes.

  “I want you to drain every little detail out of her,” he was saying. “What companies these people were in; what were their exact positions; what kind of data they were providing; what kinds of businesses Don wanted information from; what kinds of information; the names of the firms this computer hacker pulled information from; who was his shift supervisor—the supervisor was probably being paid off since he had to know the hacker wasn’t cleaning offices. Everything you can think of that could help us later when we start piecing this together.”

  He took another knife out of the holder on the cabinet and started slicing the onion.

  “All in all it wasn’t a bad call,” Graver said. “She did put Sheck in place for us, and there’s a load of detail to be mined from those sources in each of those five companies.”

  “Sheck’s going to be harder to get our hands on than Valerie was,” Neuman said, stacking the bread slices on a plate. “It seems to me he’s a pretty savvy operator, an old hand at this sort of thing.”

  “I think you’re right” Graver finished the onion and started slicing tomatoes. “He has all the earmarks of a professional. Heath even used the term ‘running’ for Sheck’s handling of his sources. She got that from him. The guy’s got an intelligence background. And that brings us to Kalatis. This guy belongs to Kalatis.”

  “With Mossad? He sounds American to me.”

  “I don’t think it makes any difference anymore,” Graver said. He was frustrated and angry. “Boundaries are disappearing everywhere. For people like this, loyalties don’t have anything to do with where you’re born or where you live or with family or homeland. Their loyalties don’t operate under flags. They put their lives on the line for international monetary units: the dollar, the deutsche mark, the pound, the yen.”

  He put the slices of onions and tomatoes on a large platter with pickles and olives, but left the cold cuts in the brown butcher’s paper the way Lara had brought them from the grocery.

  “The problem is,” he said, “we haven’t made a hell of a lot of progress on the big picture here.” He opened a sack of potato chips and a sack of corn chips and then went to the refrigerator again and took out a bottle each of mayonnaise and mustard. “You guys want regular mustard or that other, the spicy kind?”

  “Regular,” Neuman said.

  “Spicy,” Paula said.

  Graver put them both on the cabinet.

  “There’s beer and soft drinks in the refrigerator,” he said and started putting together a sandwich while Paula began clearing the table of its collection of notepads and Heath’s assortment of forged identities. When Graver finished the sandwich, he cut it in half diagonally, put it on a plate with both kinds of chips and some olives, and got a beer from the refrigerator. He opened it, put the plate and the beer on a tray with a napkin and walked out of the kitchen.

  They were sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed like a couple of schoolgirls, the cards between them.

  “Jesus Christ!” Valerie said, walling her eyes from beneath her shock of parched, black hair. “Look at the butler, will ya. You make that yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Graver said, putting the tray down on the floor beside Lara.

  “Thanks,” Lara said.

  “You don’t have a wife?” Heath asked. “You divorced or what?”

  “You sure you don’t want something?” he asked her.

  “Well… not a sandwich.” She grinned, running her eyes over him.

  Graver walked out of the room and looked at his watch. Arnette had called well over an hour ago. Something should have happened by now. As he passed his bedroom he glanced in the open door and stopped. He stepped inside. His bed had been made and Lara’s off-white linen suit was spread out on it. An open suitcase was on the other side of the bed. He walked over and looked in the suitcase. There were slips, a couple of silk blouses. Lingerie. The cups of the bras tucked into each other, the panties folded once. There was the familiar fragrance of fading perfume that lingered in women’s suitcases, even when they were empty. He walked to Dore’s closet and opened the door. There were three dresses hanging there, isolated in the empty space that echoed even in the silence. He closed the door and walked back into the bedroom, pausing once again at the opened suitcase. He stared at the lingerie and resisted an impulse to reach down and touch the lace on the upper parts of the bras, the slippery silk. He turned away and quickly walked out of the room.

  Downstairs Paula and Neuman were sitting at the kitchen table eating and talking, a steno pad and ballpoint pen lying beside Neuman’s plate. Graver went to the cabinet and started making a sandwich for himself.

  “Okay, let me run this by you,” Neuman said, wiping his mouth with a napkin and picking up the pen as he leaned over his notes. “Sheck is somewhere higher up in the chain for whoever’s buying the information. It’s a pretty good bet Sheck knows Dean, or at least Dean knows him since Sheck’s name is in the Probst file. Kalatis is in the picture only because Dean mentioned his name when he met with the Unknown at the Transco Fountain.”

  “That’s right,” Graver said, slicing his sandwich. “And, incidentally, that telephone call earlier was from our surveillance people. Dean’s been on the move for about an hour.”

  “Jesus,” Paula said. She threw a look of incredulity at both of them. “Jesus, this is just wild.”

  “And there’s Faeber. We connect him with Kalatis through Brod Strasser who bought controlling interest in DataPrint and who was mentioned as a Kalatis associate in the Raviv file.”

  “Just for the record,” Graver put in, “I don’t think it was a coincidence that it was at Faeber’s house that my informant overheard the conversation where Tisler and Besom’s names came up.”

  Paula nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “And I don’t think it’s too much of a leap in logic to assume that Faeber’s company, or at least someone inside his company, is buying the take from Bruce Sheck’s little data acquisition operation.”

  Graver opened a beer for himsel
f, leaned back against the kitchen counter with his legs crossed at the ankles, and began eating his sandwich, looking across the kitchen at them.

  “Which speaks also to Sheck’s ‘expertise,’ “Neuman said. He ate a potato chip and drank a couple of sips of his soft drink. He looked at Graver as he wiped his mouth again. “And which makes me wonder about your informant Do you… are you fairly sure…”

  “You mean, am I sure he’s not a plant?” He shook his head. “No. His timing—coming out of nowhere just now—is suspicious and his ‘good luck’ at Faeber’s party strains credulity.” Graver shook his head. “No, I’m not comfortable with it at all. But the one thing that doesn’t jibe with his being a plant is his deliberately bringing Faeber’s name into it Why would they volunteer anybody’s name? Especially the name of a key player.”

  “You said he seemed surprised to hear of their deaths,” Paula said. “Maybe he wasn’t told everything. Maybe he was just supposed to try to find out how much you knew, if you knew anything, and when he learned of the deaths that caught him off guard, he panicked, and gave up Faeber’s name.”

  “No.” Neuman was shaking his head. “People like Kalatis, this Strasser, they never would have let someone at an informant’s level get close enough to them and run the risk of him doing something like that They just wouldn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, I guess I agree with that,” Graver said, “and that’s precisely the point that makes me want to believe him. His story is just too… clumsy. I can’t see them deliberately setting up something like that. I just can’t imagine what they would have thought they could gain by having him do what he’s done.”

  “Let’s say he’s telling the truth,” Paula said. “Who did he overhear? Sheck? You think Bruce Sheck is the kind of guy who would be at a tony party like Faeber’s?”

  None of them, of course, believed a “stud” who frequented the kinds of bars where he could have picked up the likes of Valerie Heath would also have been at a party in the polite company of a Tanglewood crowd like the one Last had described. They fell silent Graver ate his sandwich as Neuman studied his notes again, and Paula stared at the kitchen floor. Graver didn’t know what they were thinking, but he was increasingly aware that this thing was all over the place. What in the hell did he expect to accomplish? It would take an enormous task force and a lot of time to investigate this properly. He didn’t have either the task force or the time. And even as he was thinking this, Paula was ahead of him.