An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  He looked at the fire, which was close enough for him actually to see the flames, fed by the gasoline and oil from the boats. It was the first time he had ever had a friend die violently, and he was surprised at the disconnectedness of such an event. Somehow it seemed at once unreal and at the same time so real as to be nauseating.

  The voices of people on the other side of the hedges brought him back to the moment They were talking about the fire, speculating. Someone had a scanner and the crackle and scratch of transmissions came through the hedges more clearly than their voices.

  He turned and walked back to the house, easing along in the darkness of the hedges. At the back of the house there were several doors. The first one seemed to open into the garage. There were sliding glass doors that opened onto the broad patio and lakefront, common to most of the homes that opened onto the view of the water. Then, beyond that, there was a kind of courtyard enclosed on three sides by another set of dense hedges and another door. It looked as if it might be an outside entrance to a separate apartment or room.

  Neuman took the latex gloves out of his coat pocket and tugged them on and used his lock picks to open the door that he assumed gave access to the garage. He was right. Closing and locking the door behind him, he took a penlight from his pocket and shone it around the garage which was empty except for a motorcycle. He went over and felt the engine which was cold. Seeing nothing else of immediate interest, he went to a small workbench against one of the walls and selected several types of screwdrivers and put them in his coat pocket Another door near the one through which he had entered opened into a laundry and utility room where he paused to look through the cabinets for plastic garbage bags. He found them, took one out of the box, and then went through another door into the kitchen.

  Bruce Sheck’s house was a bit more lived in than Valerie Heath’s, though it reflected both the carelessness and selective habits of a bachelor’s life. The living room at the front of the house facing the street was practically ignored with a modicum of furnishings. There were three bedrooms. Two of them were like the living room, furnished with the bare necessities but otherwise entirely untouched. But the combination family room and kitchen was where he seemed to have spent all his time. The television was there and scattered around were a few nudie magazines, a pair of sweat clothes in the middle of the floor as if he had just stepped out of them, some fishing poles stacked in a corner near the patio doors along with a pair of old tennis shoes and a small ice chest There were some aviation maps lying on the kitchen table, the first thing Neuman had seen that he thought ought to go into the plastic bag.

  The kitchen was better furnished than Neuman had anticipated. Sheck had not been a gourmet There was an abundance of TV dinners in the refrigerator along with a good stock of beer, half a watermelon, orange juice, milk, and the miscellaneous makings for sandwiches. The pantry and cabinets held the expected staples and there were two old pizza boxes in the trash next to the electric range.

  Neuman moved into Sheck’s bedroom. The clothes in his closet ran to jeans and casual shirts, a few sport coats, and only three pairs of dress trousers. In the corner of the closet he found an expensive Weatherby deer rifle and shells, two extraordinarily expensive Italian-made shotguns and four or five boxes of shotgun shells along with two well-used bird sacks and an old set of deer horns tied together at the base with a short piece of cord lying on top of a pair of hunting boots. He checked the closet closely for hidden doors or compartments in the walls or under the carpet.

  He found no place anywhere in the house where it appeared that Sheck might have kept “paperwork,” and there was no evidence at all that indicated that anyone had been there before him.

  Walking back into the family room, he unlocked the patio doors and stepped outside and around to the door inside the small courtyard. Again he used his lock picks to open the door. The room looked as if at one time it might have been a makeshift office, but now it seemed largely unused. There was an old metal office desk like those in CID, a small sofa, and a couple of chairs. A coffee table in front of the sofa was scattered with an assortment of old issues of magazines, Texas Monthly, Commando, Aviator, and Sports Illustrated.

  Even though it seemed infrequently used, the room seemed to Neuman the most likely one in which Sheck might have been inclined to hide any code sheets or cipher paraphernalia. So, taking the screwdrivers out of his pocket, he set to work dismantling anything that could be taken apart He went into the small bath first, covering one wall at a time, and then worked his way into the larger room doing the same methodical one-wall-at-a-time approach. Air-conditioning vents, electrical plates around plugs and switches. Lamp bases. The legs on the sofa and coffee table. Zippers on the sofa cushions; the upholstery curtain covering the entire bottom carriage. The desk was a project all unto itself. At the end of half an hour he had nothing, and was facing the daunting task of having to do the same thing to the larger house.

  Leaving the room disheveled, he locked the door behind him and went back into the house through the patio door. Standing in the family room just off the kitchen, he decided to try to eliminate some of the more attractive sites that he might normally search. If he had wanted to hide something of irreplaceable value, something that his life might some day depend on, he would want to make sure that the object would not fall victim to the vagaries of chance, the most obvious of which was common theft. He would not use anything that could possibly be stolen. Stereo, television, appliances, the motorcycle, tools, furniture. He would begin by confining his search to the house structure itself. And he would begin in the room that normally would be considered the most personal. He started in Sheck’s bedroom. Everything came apart, just as it had in the room outside off the patio, but nothing surfaced.

  This was disappointing, but not altogether unexpected. If Sheck had been the kind of professional that they expected him to be, he was not going to leave anything significant lying around the house. Neuman guessed that Sheck was a survivalist and was proud to be a man who lived—who stayed alive—by his own wits.

  He went to the other two bedrooms and did the same kind of search, even taking apart the thermostat in the hallway. Nothing.

  As he was walking out of the second bedroom, he stopped. The showers. He hadn’t looked in any of the showers. The showerheads. Not in Sheck’s bedroom, because it was used regularly, but the other two were never used, or seldom used it seemed. He went back into the bedroom he had just come out of and went into the shower stall. The showerhead was a big fat one, large enough for a canister of 35mm film or something of similar size. He unscrewed it Nothing. He went into the second bedroom. Same kind of showerhead. Nothing. He stood with the showerhead in his hand. Jesus. The shower was never used. He looked down at his feet… at the drain. He laid down the showerhead, took the Phillips screwdriver out of his pocket and undid the two screws from the chrome-plated grill over the drain. Nothing. He left them there and went back to the second bedroom, stepped into the shower, and looked at the drain. He got down on his knees and looked at the chrome grate that covered it There appeared to be a piece of lint stuck to the lip of one of the little round holes. He looked closer, putting the penlight and his face nearer to the drain. It wasn’t a piece of lint.

  His blood pressure shot up instantly as he fumbled with the screwdriver and undid the two Phillips screws. Carefully he removed the grate from its seat and felt the tug, like a gentle nudge of a bite on a fishing line. He lifted the grate and saw the string, which actually was not a string but a length of clear monofilament fishing line, tied through one of the holes on the grate. The knot of the colorless line was almost invisible. He put the penlight in his mouth, carefully raised the grate with one hand, and grasped the line with the other. The monofilament was only three inches long and was tied through the eyelet of a threaded cap screwed onto a plastic, waterproof canister about five inches long, the kind of ribbed container in which an outdoorsman might keep matches to protect them from moisture.
r />   Neuman’s heart was racing. He couldn’t believe his luck. He couldn’t believe he had thought of this, of the goddamned drain. Gripping the canister in one hand, he stepped out of the shower and leaned against the vanity counter. Holding the canister up to his face he looked at it in the beam of his penlight. It was army green with a thick rubber seal between the screw cap and the case. It looked like the kind of heavy-duty equipment he would have expected of Sheck. He shook it gently and heard nothing. He wanted to open it in the worst way, but was afraid it might contain film that needed to be opened in a darkroom, and his fear of ruining such hard-won evidence canceled all thought of satisfying his burning curiosity.

  Putting the canister in his coat pocket—still attached to the monofilament and drain grate—he walked out of the bedroom, down the hallway to the kitchen and into the family room. Through the sliding glass doors that looked out onto the lawn, he had a perfect view of the burning marina across the lake. He was aware of an acidy, hollow feeling in his stomach as he thought that the night before Sheck might well have been standing where he was standing now, looking across at the bright display of lights that shone every night from the marina, lights strung on poles along the docks, lights running up and across the masts of the sailboats and around the cabins of the cruisers. Lights two times themselves, reflected upon the surface of the water.

  Chapter 54

  1:25 A.M.

  Graver sat at Arnette’s library table with Cheryl and Arnette as Cheryl rewound the tape for the third time.

  “You want to hear it again?*’ Arnette asked.

  Graver shook his head. He was not likely to forget anything he had heard in Dean Burtell’s last conversation. It was an eerie recording with its wavering beginnings as Cheryl zeroed in on the range and the frequency followed by a remarkably clear reception. Bruce Sheck’s voice was whiskey raw and surly, and it was easy to imagine him after what Valerie Heath had already said about him. Good-looking, athletic, more savvy for sure than Valerie Heath could have imagined, an element of meanness sulking just beneath the surface.

  But listening to Burtell was like listening to a brother. Graver didn’t have a brother, but he imagined that Burtell could have been one and to know that with each word he spoke he was another syllable closer to imminent, violent death was a painful thing to experience. They were so unsuspecting. True, Sheck did say he thought they were in danger, but clearly it was a danger he had every intention of being able to deal with, and neither of them thought they were in danger then, at that moment. And then too, the entire conversation was almost a monologue by Sheck. It seemed that he had been drinking for some time, which had made him loquacious. Burtell spoke very little on the tape and when he did speak it was brief, an indication, it seemed to Graver, that he was either tense or angry or maybe even cautiously uneasy. But, the fact was, the few words he did speak were all the more painful to listen to because they were so few. Graver found himself leaning toward the tape recorder on the table, hoping to hear Burtell say something, anything, at length.

  Graver looked at Cheryl. “Thank you,” he said. He saw a flicker of surprise in her eyes, but that was all right He didn’t mind that his gratitude must have sounded a little odd to her. He was grateful for this last audible witness.

  Arnette made a little gesture with her hand, and Cheryl snapped off the recorder, stood up, and left the room.

  “That was a hell of a thing to have to listen to,” Arnette said, reaching for her cigarettes that lay on the table in front of her. “I’m sorry you had to do it I’m sorry it happened, baby.”

  Graver’s stomach was a knot of queasiness and anger. He could hardly believe… any of it. It was outrageous, even grotesque. The events of the last two days seemed to be evidence of the unraveling of all that was sane and reasonable.

  “That was pretty damn crude of Kalatis,” she said. “I think it signals a major change in the game.”

  “You’re convinced it was Kalatis.”

  Arnette flicked her lighter and looked at Graver over the flame, lit the cigarette and laid the lighter on the table.

  “Think about it, baby,” she said. “Or do you know something you haven’t told me?”

  Graver shook his head. “No, I know so damn little if I knew something it wouldn’t be much.”

  “Christ, Sheck practically narrated his own death. He was pointing his finger at Kalatis when he blew up.”

  “What about the man at the fountain?”

  Arnette looked as though she dreaded giving him any more bad news.

  “The pictures have been rolling in here over the computers ever since I told you I was going to look. But he’s not in there,” she said. “I don’t know who the hell he is. But that doesn’t mean he’s not government. It just means my source may not be as good as it used to be, or he’ll be in the next batch that comes through.”

  “Or that he’s not government.”

  “Okay,” she conceded, her elbow resting on the table, the cigarette up in the air.

  “I just don’t understand why Kalatis would use a bomb, for God’s sake,” Graver said. “After he’d gone to all the trouble of making veiled hits on Tisler and Besom.” He tilted his head at the recorder. “Dean obviously thought Tisler killed himself because of the photographs.”

  “Dean was mistaken,” Arnette said coldly. “I don’t have any doubt about that. Tisler’s death may have caught you people by surprise, but I can assure you it wasn’t a surprise to Panos Kalatis. What we’re seeing here is a methodical burning of bridges, an elimination of liabilities. Kalatis is distancing himself from the little guys who’ve been doing his dirty work in this operation. I think Sheck was right about that.”

  “And do you also think he was right about Kalatis bringing something to culmination here?”

  Arnette tapped her cigarette on the edge of the glass ashtray.

  “It looks like it,” she said. She read his thoughts and shook her head. “Forget it What are you going to do? Go to the feds with what you’ve got? You don’t even have enough… I mean actual documentation… to get them to stop him from leaving the country. And if you did find some goof who would authorize it for you, Kalatis’s lawyers would shred it, and in twenty-four hours he’d be gone for good.”

  She stood up and crossed her arms, her cigarette lofted in the air next to her face as she paced to one end of the room and then back, stopping across the desk from him, leveling her eyes at him.

  “You know what’s happened here, baby?” she asked. “Misfortune. You got in on the tail end of a god-awful operation. You may never know what happened. Ever. You lost two dirty cops, and you gotta face it, maybe three. If there’s more, odds are you’ll never know. The bad guys were organized so far over your head that all you got was a glimpse of hell before they slammed the gates closed. Consider yourself lucky.”

  She smoked her cigarette and looked at him through the acrid haze. It was a brutal assessment and probably accurate, and Graver guessed there was a good reason why she had delivered it with so little finesse.

  “But your instincts were right about one thing,” she said. “Somebody else hasn’t stepped out of the shadows yet. I’m guessing, too, that Tisler, Besom, and Dean could have ID’d that somebody else, and he, whoever he is, has benefited from their deaths as much as Kalatis has. Maybe he’s safe now. Unless you come up with something.”

  She gestured at him with her cigarette.

  “You can do two things. Bury it as long as you can while you keep hammering away at it on your own. Or write a goddamned elaborate, thesis-sized document about everything that’s happened in the last three days since Arthur Tisler turned up dead.” She stopped. “You did keep a personal log.”

  Graver nodded.

  “Okay, good. Write it just exactly the way it happened, detailing what you did and why—leaving me out, of course—giving them everything in chronological order. Bypass Westrate and give it to Hertig. Let him decide for you. That’s his goddamned job.”

/>   She stared at him, a small, wiry woman of dusky complexion and murky past, who at too young an age had had to learn to make hard choices, not the least of which was to remain in a profession that demanded hard choices of her as a matter of course. Having done so, she had discovered too late that living with such decisions was altogether another proposition from making them. It was the former that had aged her. But for a long time now she no longer flinched at having to make gut-wrenching decisions. She made them and then did battle with her conscience afterward and in private. These were the true ugly confrontations, she once admitted to him, facing yourself, being your own judge and jury—and, someday, if it became necessary, hangman.

  “We did some checking into Gulfstream Bank,” she said, interrupting Graver’s silence. “Did you know the bank is only six years old? I’d guess that maybe seven years ago Kalatis conducted a kind of market survey of Southern cities. I don’t know what his criteria might have been, but Houston seems to have fit the bill for whatever it was he wanted to do. Now that’s long-term planning. When you think about it, this ‘project’ has consumed the greater part of a decade of Kalatis’s life. That gives you some indication of the volume of money at stake here. It’s got to be colossal.”

  She shook her head, staring at Graver, studying him though her thoughts were wandering.

  “You know, more and more this business scares the shit out of me. Guys like Kalatis and Strasser, there are no limits, just no damn limits. They’re like a rogue government that commands a fortune but has no physical territory, has no constituency except its victims, no raison d’etre except greed.” She paused. “Makes you wonder if this is the future… bigger and bigger appetites, rapacious avarice.” She smiled cynically. “But I’m forgetting my history, aren’t I. All the way back to King Menes the Fighter.”

  “Hermes Exports,” Graver said, as if he hadn’t been listening to her.