An Absence of Light

The Criminal Intelligence Division was located on the top floor of a doleful, three-story building at the back of the police headquarters compound on the northwestern edge of downtown. Separated from the architectural splendors of Houston’s building-boom years by the thundering concrete maze of ramps, piers, girders, and abutments of the Gulf Freeway, the homely, cement building had the peculiar distinction of having its single front door face outward from the back of the police compound rather than inward as did the other buildings. As a result, its ground floor had a marvelous view of the underbelly of the expressway where Buffalo Bayou screwed its way under the concrete superstructure, and the sticky weeds of summer grew out of control.

Graver parked in a small parking lot across the alley-like driveway that circled the building, and which was surrounded by a jungle of weeds that grew higher than his head and crowded right up to the lot’s margins. He got out of the car, locked the door, and inhaled the musty odors that emanated from the oozing and fetid cocoa waters of the bayou fifty yards away on the other side of the weedy embankment.

Lara Casares was always the first person in the office every morning. Always. She had been Graver’s secretary since the first day he stepped into the captain’s position four years earlier when he had pulled her from the stenographer’s pool where she had been a wasted talent Nearly everything about Lara was a surprise, beginning with her appearance. She was an attractive thirty-three-year-old Latina with an astonishingly fine figure, which included a bust of admirable proportions and killer hips which she thrice weekly Jazzersized and pounded to a white-hot firmness. She wore her clothes the way musclemen wore tight shirts, self-aware and lustily pleased with the whole damn thing. Though she had only a high school education, Graver guessed that her IQ must have been off the charts. She was everything a first impression might have suggested she wasn’t, dependable, discreet in a position where discretion was paramount, organized like a computer, always two jumps ahead of his every request, considerate, and sober as a nun when it came to her work, though she was something of a raucous lady on a personal level. Graver relied on her without reservation.

Beyond that, they shared a mutual attraction that had gone unacknowledged for longer than either of them ever would have predicted. Despite her strong personality, Graver knew that Lara was too smart to be the first one to openly address their attraction, which they both knew was loaded with potential problems. This was one instance in which she would not take the lead. As for Graver himself, his shattered marriage had not had the same effect on him that it might have had on most men. He was not more prone to fall into an affair. Rather, for reasons he did not allow himself to examine too closely, he was determined to keep his feelings for Lara at arm’s length, though now that the divorce was final he had to admit that there really was no longer any reason to do so. In fact, the truth was that at this time in his life he was probably closer to Lara than to anyone else.

When he walked into the office late, at half past eight, he said good morning to the receptionist and looked down the bare, narrow hallway to his left where the Division’s offices opened off both sides of the corridor, a series of identical doors, their facades appearing increasingly narrow as they progressed to the opposite end of an exceedingly long hall.

Nowhere were the strapped finances of the city’s budget more apparent than in these quarters. All of the offices, with the exception of his own, could not be described as anything more than cubicles. The offices on the right side of the hall were the more desirable ones because of the enormous advantage of being on the exterior wall of the building and therefore having small windows. On the other side of the hall the cubicles were like Cappadocian caves dug into the inside of the building. They were little more than coffins.

The door to the communications room was open and one of the printers was hammering away, dumping a roll of paper on the floor which was already littered with paper from reports that had come in over the weekend. The computers stayed alive around the clock to receive “contributions” from police officers-patrolmen and detectives-anywhere in the city.

Graver turned and walked past Lara’s office and stuck his head in. She was on the telephone, and he pointed to his office and went on. By the time he had settled behind his desk and made a couple of notes, Lara came in the door with his Charlie Chan mug full of fresh coffee. She set the mug in front of him with a napkin, straightened up, and tugged once sharply on the hem of her red suit jacket.

“You left this on your desk over the weekend-with coffee in it. There was mold in it this morning,” she said pointedly.