An Absence of Light (40 page)

Graver checked a quick response, something passionless and flavorless—and dishonest—right out of the knee-jerk guidebook. They stared at each other over the desk. She did not blink. Her expression did not convey that she had offered him a challenge. She simply had asked an honest question and was waiting for him to give her—and himself—an honest answer.

“No,” he said finally, slumping back in his chair. “I haven’t ruled it out And that’s… a very good reason why I probably should have turned this over to someone else.” He paused, but she said nothing. “I haven’t even admitted to myself what I’m doing. No, I’m not buying it yet. But if it’s true,” he said, his own eyes moving thoughtfully to the cobblestone, “if he’s dirty… I want to be the one to deal with that. I guess that’s part of the irrationality of… attachments, of a friendship. It feels like… as if it would be cowardly of me, maybe it seems it would even be cruel of me, to let someone else deal with this. If it turns out badly, I ought to be the one to handle it. I mean, entirely aside from my job, on a personal level, I ought to be the one to pull the switch.”

His choice of words surprised him. Jesus. As Freudian slips go, that was a grim one.

She continued staring at him, her eyes almost losing their focus as she thought She stopped toying with the button, and her hand dropped to her lap.

“I don’t know if I could do it the way you’re doing it,” she said, “but I can see how you would want to.”

“How
I
would want to?”

“After what you’ve been through… with your wife”—she looked him squarely in the eyes as if she were saying she was not going to dodge the hard issues anymore, the personal issues—”I’m not really surprised you’d want to see this resolved in a way that would allow you to have control over it.”

“Why is that?” He could tell she was getting at something.

“If you turned it over to someone else, that would almost be like having another relationship dissolve without your having had anything to say about it I can see why you’d want to be involved in this no matter how painful it was for you.”

Graver was speechless at this observation. This wouldn’t have occurred to him in a million years. Was this a valid line of speculation? Could something so deeply contained, so personal, as Dore’s leaving him really affect the way he was handling this investigation? Jesus Christ. Unwittingly, Lara had raised once again the issue of his greatest fear. Whether it dealt with Dore and his failed marriage, or whether it dealt with his relationship with Dean Burtell and this case, or whether it even dealt with his relationship to her, the issue of self-deception nagged at Graver like an obsession, and he wondered if Lara had seen how thoroughly it had come to preoccupy him.

There was a knock on the door, and Paula pushed her way in with Neuman immediately behind her.

“Oh.” She started, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Sorry, I thought everyone was gone.”

Graver and Lara were looking around at her, obviously having been engaged in a conversation that was not entirely business.

“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 several 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.

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.”