An Absence of Light (46 page)

“Yeah, okay,” he said, and then he had to clear his throat “I’ll get there as soon as I can.” He put down the receiver. “God… damn…”

Paula and Neuman exchanged glances.

“That was… the surveillance. They followed Dean out to Clear Lake, to the marina at South Shore Harbor. He went down to the boats. The team got a room in the hotel there… the audio specialist photographer… The audio operator finally located him in the cabin of one of the sailboats in the marina. He was talking to Bruce Sheck.”

“I’ll be damned,” Neuman said.

Graver could feel Paula’s eyes fixed on him. She knew instinctively this was not the shock to which Graver was reacting.

Graver looked at his watch. “A little less than fifteen minutes ago… the boat blew up.”

Silence.

“The surveillance team said… it was a hell of an explosion. Blew up, maybe, half a dozen other boats… set fire to that many more. They said… they’d be surprised if there’s enough left to make an ID on either one of them.”

Both Paula and Neuman were dumbfounded and said nothing. Graver almost could feel their racing pulses, the constriction in their chests. The room was thick with the paralyzing concussion of shock. Graver thought of Ginette Burtell. She would stay up all night waiting for Dean to come home, and by morning she would be in a state of panic. The odds were good that she would call Graver. Or maybe Dean had told her something that would turn her first efforts elsewhere. Dean had not, after all, ever returned Graver’s call. Maybe she knew more than Graver suspected. There was no way to know, but he could at least make the assumption that she would not have expected this.

“This is sickening,” Paula said shakily. “This is out of control… way out of control.”

“What about the surveillance team?” Neuman asked. They were talking softly, almost whispering. “Did they get anything on tape, any of their conversation?”

Graver nodded. He didn’t want to talk to them. He wanted to be somewhere else.

“Apparently so,” he managed to say. “I didn’t… I don’t know what. Just that there was something to listen to. My contact was still on the line to the surveillance team in the hotel room. They were frantically packing their stuff, trying to get out of there.” He shook his head. “Jesus… Christ.”

“How did they know it was Sheck?” Neuman asked.

“Dean used his name.”

“Oh, this is horrible.” Paula was sitting on the sofa with her feet on the floor, her legs together, her arms together, hands clasped and resting atop her thighs as she leaned forward. She looked up at Graver. “We didn’t have any idea that Sheck had a boat, did we? A plane. A car. But not a boat.”

Graver shook his head.

“Maybe it was Dean’s,” Neuman said.

“We never checked on that, I guess,” Paula said. She looked up at Graver. “What are you going to do about Ginette?”

“Nothing,” he said. It was possibly the hardest single word he had ever had to say.

Paula frowned at him. It was almost a flinch, a reproach.

“We don’t know anything.” Graver insisted. “We have to remember that. Dean’s death will come to us—if it comes to us—from forensics. It’ll be up to Ginette to report him missing. We’ll deal with it then.” He shook his head. “We’re just damned lucky the surveillance team caught them in time, and that Dean wasn’t as good at this business as they were. We’re lucky we’ve got the recording.”

Paula stared at Graver in dismay. “How twisted can this get?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Graver had been asking himself the same thing. He stood stiffly, deferring a little to his tired back, and put his hands in his pockets. He walked toward the entrance hall doorway and looked at the soft sheen of muted light on the burnished hardwood floor. It was impossible to stop thinking about the explosion, the actual chemistry of it… the impact, the heat, the instant tornadic destruction of it. He had seen explosions on film before, assassinations. The target never reacts at all because the firestorm happens faster than human reflexes are capable of responding. For a millisecond the target can be seen simply sitting immobile in the conflagration, burning alive like the Buddhist monks who set themselves afire in the sixties to protest the Vietnam War. An upright human torch, knowing in that instant they were aflame in hell but being too stunned to react. Then the impact of the explosion, and in the next instant they vanished in a shuddering mist. The rest of it was a mystery, whatever it was like to die.

Graver was too numb even to sob, though he felt it in his throat, a soft, choking lump of grief and anger and dismay. He was light-headed, but he stood very still drawing deep breaths, struggling for control, resolving not to give in… to anything. Not a damned bloody thing.

He turned around.

“Okay,” he said, taking his hands out of his pockets and wiping his face with both hands. He waited a moment “Here’s what we’ve got to do.” He swallowed. “This will in no way affect the CID, not for a few days, not… until the Bomb Squad’s forensic team has had a chance to do their work. And maybe not even then.” He walked a few steps into the living room. “First, Ginette will report him missing. When that happens, the CID will be brought back into it. I don’t think even Jack Westrate will be able to scoff away the disappearance of another CID officer.” He crossed his arms, took a few more steps, his head down, thinking. “All hell will break loose. If the newspapers were going to run something on Tisler and Besom, it will be bumped off the front page by this explosion. There’s no way to anticipate if the reporters on the other stories will make any connections here. Again, they won’t know who was on the boat It’ll probably take them a day even to determine which slip was the center of the explosion. So… we’ve got a little time.”

He looked at his watch. He felt the flesh of his face sagging with exhaustion. It seemed to require every gland in his body to produce enough juice to keep him standing.

“As far as I’m concerned… there’s only one rear son for any of this now… to focus everything… on Panos Kalatis.”

Graver actually was having to make an effort to control a nearly hysterical frustration at being so completely at a disadvantage. He could hardly contain his grief for Burtell’s death or his rage at Kalatis’s silent, anonymous audacity. He was forcing himself, at considerable expense to his nervous system, to be controlled and methodical and logical.

“Paula,” he went on, “I want you to debrief Valerie Heath just as we discussed. Tonight, as soon as we get through here. Before you do, tell her what happened. Tell her Sheck was just killed by a bomb with another CID agent… no, just another man. When you’re through, blindfold her again—I sure as hell don’t want her to know where she’s been—and you and Lara take her car and another one and drive her somewhere—a parking garage—and release her. Give her her keys and tell her to get the hell out of the state. Then both of you come back here and wait.”

He walked a few paces into the room and addressed Neuman.

“Sheck lives in Nassau Bay?” he asked.

Neuman nodded. “Yeah, just across the lake from South Shore Harbor.”

“You need to get over there, Casey, and pick the place apart Take a garbage sack and fill it up with anything remotely informative.” He hesitated. “There’s going to be a lot of action over there. Spectators standing around in their back yards watching the excitement across the water. That’s good for you. But be careful. Kalatis’s people are going to want to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind. They may have already been there. Or they may get there ahead of you and still be there. If not, they might walk in on you. Just watch your ass. Okay? But take the place apart. Unscrew air-conditioning grates, wall plugs. Shit like that And call in every half hour… on the secure handsets. And wear latex gloves.”

Neuman nodded eagerly. He was wired, ready to do it.

“I’m going to meet the surveillance people and listen to what they picked up. When I’m through, I’ll get right back here. We’ll go from there.” He looked at each of them. “Don’t use my telephone and don’t answer it. I’ll leave the answering machine on. It’s important,” he said, “that we keep in touch. But use the handsets.”

Victor Last lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, his right arm hanging off the side of the bed holding a champagne glass. He was naked. The sheets were a pale tea rose silk. His left hand held one of Rayner Faeber’s very generous, very jiggly breasts. She lay with her blond head tucked up under his arm, and when he looked down he could see her other breast with its peachy aureole, her so very white and nearly plumpish body, and her splayed legs—she liked to splay her legs—with her dusty pubis at their apex. She smelled of a kind of bath oil that she said she could buy only at this one small shop in the Rue du Bourg-Tibourg. It smelled like… heather. He loved the stuff, which he told her once and so she always put a dash of it in her bathwater when she knew they were going to be together.

He looked to his left, out through one of the bedroom’s glass walls and through an atrium, through another glass wall and into the living room. Beyond that was another glass wall, another atrium… all of it washed in the wan light of a city night as though he were in Atlantis, looking through houses of water, the light refracting in undulations of aqua so pale and anemic as to be almost colorless. It was, he had to admit, the perfect environment for Rayner. She was almost translucent herself. So much so, that sometimes when he had sex with her in this watery glass world, he half-expected to see her inner parts working, expected, even, to see his own erect self in her in flashes of clarity that illuminated them like flashes of lightning.

She took a deep breath to sigh and her breast rose and filled out under his hand. He liked that. He really did like it when she did that Rayner was sybaritic, as true to the concept as any woman he had ever met, and she had the money to indulge her nature. The first night they had been together in Veracruz—Colin, as usual, having left her alone to take a “business trip” to Mexico City—they had had sex on the beach. At one point during that extraordinary event, he had had the astonishing sensation that she had disappeared from beneath him, so alike had her flesh appeared to the water and the moon.

She raised one of her hands, which also held a champagne glass, and raised her head to meet it, the effort tightening the breast he held, and drank what was left of her champagne. Or almost all of it She held the glass above her and let the remainder dribble onto her. He could see the snail trail of its rivulet reflected in the sourceless light. She lowered her hand, and he heard the whisper of the glass falling on the carpet. In the next moment her champagne-cooled hand found its way between his legs. His stomach tightened reflexively.

“Victor,” she said, and she turned a little to him, her breast pulling out of his hand, and ran her tongue up the side of his rib cage. Again his gaze went to the partitions of glass walls, through light and water and light and water.

She suddenly sat up, her face right in the center of his line of sight. She wore no makeup—they had been at this a while, in and out of the pool, and at it again—so her face was only an apparition, though he could make out her wonderful mouth and her eyes that tilted upward on the outer edges.

“If you could have anything in the world,” she said, “what would it be?”

“All of Colin’s money,” he said without hesitation.

Rayner’s lips rose at the edges in a smile, and she was close enough for him to feel the little burst of breath as she gave a single voiceless laugh. Her hand toyed between his legs.

“All of his money,” she said, leaning over him, the weight of her pendulous breasts resting on his chest “And to that end, how are you progressing?”

“I’m not quite sure,” he said, and he wasn’t quite sure what in the hell she meant by the question, either. He turned his head, drank the rest of his own champagne and set the glass on the jade green marble of the small table beside the bed. He reached down to her breasts and kissed her forehead. “Not sure about the money,” he repeated, “but I’m having a dee-vil of a time with his wife.”

There were a few minutes of aggressive fondling and kissing which almost led to more heated action, but Last was able to avoid that without letting her know that he thought it was time to move on to precisely the issue he had just raised.

“Bloody champagne,” he said, giving one last tongue-flick to a peachy aureole before rolling over and sitting up on the side of the bed. “I’ve got to get some coffee or something. I won’t even be able to steer the bloody car.”

“Why don’t you spend the night?” she suggested, leaning on one elbow, facing his back.

“No, can’t do that,” he said, shaking his head and running his fingers through his hair. “We’ll get shot in bed one of these nights. A very bad end to a very good thing.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and he waited with his head in his hands, his eyes cut to the side, as if he were a hunter listening with held breath for the single thwick of a broken twig to betray the approaching prey.

“I want to go ahead and divorce him,” she said. “This is driving me nuts.”

“That’d be crazy, love,” Last said. “It’s not time yet. He’d know. He’d have me shot.”

“He doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t even suspect anything.” She put a hand on his back, two fingers straddling the ripple of his spine, kneading and massaging it “It’s been years since he’s noticed anything about me except whether or not I’m absent or present.”

“The man’s in the information business, Rayner. He knows. As a matter of fact, I’ve been half-thinking we’ve already pushed our luck too far. Something hasn’t seemed right in the last couple of weeks.”

Her hand stopped on his back. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know… exactly,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “Something’s going on with him. I can feel it.”

Her hand dropped, and she sat up in bed. “Turn around,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

Last turned around and sat with his back resting against the headboard. Rayner arranged herself beside him and facing him, her legs crossed yoga style, her hands straight down on either side of her for support as she leaned back slightly. This provided him a wonderful view of her bosom, which he loved to look at and which she loved to have him to look at. Her strawberry blond hair was tousled.