An Absence of Light

Graver sat at his desk holding the telephone in stunned silence as Arnette explained what had happened. Paula and Neuman watched him from the sofa and one of the armchairs. They had cleaned up in the kitchen and had moved to the living room where they were continuing their discussion of what course they should follow next When the telephone rang Graver had expected it to be Arnette, but he hadn’t expected to hear what she had to say.

“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.