An Absence of Light

She was looking at him, her face only a few feet away from his, through the clear water. In the instant before she spoke he anticipated her.

“We’ve gone about as far as we can go,” she said, “without some help.” He could almost see her holding her breath, hoping she hadn’t made a mistake about him. “Do you want in on this?”

Chapter 53

Neuman could see the glow from the fire in the South Shore Harbor Marina even before he turned off NASA Road 1 into the Swan Lagoon development of Nassau Bay. Cars were slowing along the highway to puzzle over the orange light reflecting off the bottom of the Gulf clouds that were drifting inland, and when he turned into the neighborhood street that would take him to Sheck’s house, people were standing on their front lawns looking toward the fire.

Sheck’s house was a modern one-story bungalow on a winding street lined with palms and green lawns and in a price range not unlike Valerie Heath’s. Neuman parked in the front drive, hiding the car as best as he could behind a screen of oleanders, and got out, hardly noticed by the scattered clusters of people standing in their front lawns across the street looking in his direction. The back of Sheck’s house was right on the water and almost directly across the lagoon from the marina.

He didn’t go to the front door but casually walked around to the side of the house, found a wooden privacy fence with a gate and went into the back yard. From here the fire in the marina looked like a conflagration as it reflected from both the clouds and the surface of the bay water, the fire itself the brightest point between the two illuminations. The entire marina seemed to be burning.

Throwing a glance at the back of the house to make sure he didn’t miss the obvious-a light, someone standing at a window or door-he moved along the thick hedges that lined both sides of the back yard for privacy from the neighbors and stood near a pier at the edge of the water and looked across. He could hear sirens and bullhorns and the wailing of emergency vehicles, the cacophony hanging in the moist, still air as though the entire confusion were taking place in an amphitheater. As he stood there with his feet in the damp grass, it was hard for him to believe that Burtell was over there, burned up in a fire that no one understood yet. For a moment he wondered what it had been like for Burtell to be blasted into the next life.

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.