An Absence of Light

Graver pulled up to the same wall, but parked several spaces away. As the two of them got out of the car and closed their doors, Last looked at him over the top of the car.

“Oh yeah. I said your name was Gray.”

“Gray?”

“Yeah. G-r-a-y.”

“Forget that. Don’t use a name at all,” Graver said, and they walked over to the BMW. Last motioned for him to get into the back seat behind the passenger while he walked around behind the car to the driver’s side. Graver waited until Last opened his door first and then followed his lead.

When they closed their doors, Graver found himself very close to two attractive women who were turned half around in their seats, looking at him intently with professionally cosmeticized faces. The BMW was purring softly, its air conditioner whispering a gentle current of chill air. These were women who did not believe that just because you were conspiring to extort millions of dollars you had to subject yourself to the tortures of sweating through your dress in a Houston parking garage. The air conditioner, therefore, was a necessity. Graver was grateful for it. The heavily padded interior was a cool, quiet world that smelled of secrets, of questionable intent, and of expensive perfume.

“Rayner,” Last said, indicating the strawberry blonde in front of him. “And Connie,” he said, indicating the woman in front of Graver. “This is the man I was telling you about,” he said to the women.

They both nodded and said hello. Rayner looked at Graver as though she might have thought he was a professional killer, an assessment which she seemed to find pretty damn interesting. She was probably in her early forties, full-bodied, and wearing a dress that accommodated the white, liquidy cleavage Last had so precisely described. She was indeed a pretty woman, and Graver could see why Last had had no trouble seeing things from her point of view. She wore a collection of diamonds on one hand and an emerald cabochon on the other. She kept wanting to smile, but never quite managed to do it.

Connie was considerably more professional. In her early thirties, she was stylishly thin with frosted shoulder-length hair. She wore a double-breasted, black and white business suit, and her hazel eyes drilled into Graver as though she fully intended to see the bullshit in him before he even opened his mouth and revealed it himself.

“You said you had gotten some telephone numbers from Faeber,” Last said, looking at Connie.

She hesitated, her eyes still on Graver.

“Wait a minute,” Graver said. “I think I should set a few things straight first, so that we understand our situation more clearly.” He looked back and forth between the two women. “Victor has told me that you might have a certain amount of access to a man named Panos Kalatis through Colin Faeber. I have business with Kalatis. For various reasons I’ve lost contact with him. I don’t know anything about your intended business, and all you know about mine is that I want access to Kalatis-and that’s all you need to know. But given that, I’m here to see if there’s some way we might be able to help each other.”

When he finished that brief statement, both women were looking at him with wide-eyed absorption. They were silent.

“I told him about the telephone numbers,” Last said.

“Do you know about the deaths?” Connie asked abruptly. Her eyes had never moved from Graver.

“Which ones?”

He thought she winced.

“A guy named Tisler.” She waited, but Graver didn’t react. “A guy named Burtell.” She waited. Graver didn’t say anything. “And Besom and Sheck and Gilbert Hormann.”

On this last one her voice cracked, and it was Graver’s turn to wince. Jesus Christ.

“Yes,” he said. “I know about them. How do you know about them?”

“Colin told me about them this morning,” she said shakily. “I didn’t know anything about any of that.” She cut her eyes at Last and Rayner. “Nobody told me anything about any of that.”

“Where is Faeber?”

“I thought you were only interested in Kalatis?” she said.

“I thought the idea was that we’d do what we could to help each other,” Graver responded. “Faeber could help me get to Kalatis.”

“Not anymore,” Connie said. For the next few minutes she explained what had happened that morning, leaving out the part about sending Faeber to her condo.

Graver watched Rayner and from the look on her face she was hearing this for the first time too. Connie had played her cards very close to the vest. Several times during her explanation Rayner and Last exchanged glances. Graver kept his eyes on Connie. She was nervous, almost testy.

“When Faeber called those numbers,” Graver said, after she had finished, “what was the procedure?”

“He called the number and left a message. They would call him back.”