An Absence of Light

“Whatever this is, it’s coming apart,” he said. “We may be getting here just in time to see its back going out the door.”

“Marcus, maybe we ought to go ahead and confront Dean,” Paula said.

Graver rubbed his face with his hands. “Our only leverage is that they don’t know we’re onto them. That’s not much, but we sure as hell can’t give it up.”

“God,” Neuman said, “can you imagine what must be at stake here for them to have risked killing Besom within twenty-four hours of Tisler? They’ve got to know, no matter what kind of evidence there is to support natural causes, that it’s going to look suspicious to a lot of people.”

“What are the odds Tisler was killed too?” Paula asked.

It was a moment before Graver looked up. “Good, I think now,” he said. “Pretty damn good.” He looked at her. “What did you call me about?”

“Oh,” she said, looking down at the notepad in her lap, remembering. She moistened her lips. Everyone’s thoughts had been derailed. “We’ve made some progress. Uh, in the Friel case, apparently the entire source documentation is bogus. All the contributors listed there are in the same category as Tisler’s tenant Lewis Feldberg. They came off the vital statistics records. It’s total bullshit.”

“What about the Probst sources?”

“Real people… we think. Bruce Sheck-he’s the guy who’s supposed to have flown Probst’s stolen goods to Mexico and Central America. Remember yesterday I only got an answering machine when I called his number. We started checking him out Essentially everything in the Contributor Identification Records is accurate. His TDL photo matches the ID records photograph. As far as it goes. He’s not on the computers, no aliases. He lives in Nassau Bay in a home that’s in his name, no lien. He pays his utility bills with money orders, for Christ’s sake, so there’s no bank to follow up on. No traffic tickets. No military record. Not registered to vote. No marriage record in Harris County. Owns a 1993 Honda, no lien. We checked with the FAA. He has a pilot’s license and owns a plane-no lien-which he hangars at Houston Gulf Airport, not far from his home. The guy lives a very unincumbered existence.”

“What about Synar?”

“Absolutely nothing. Again, nowhere on the computers, everything the same as Sheck… no traffic violations, not registered to vote, all that,” Paula said. “I called her old roommate again. She said Colleen wasn’t from Houston, thought Los Angeles was her home. She remembered Colleen referring to a cousin in New York who was also a Synar. But there were no Synars with telephone numbers in either Los Angeles or New York.”

“You know what,” Neuman said, stepping over and picking up the contributor’s ID record sheet from Paula’s lap, “I’ve been thinking. That’s a bullshit name.” He held up the sheet and pointed to the small photograph of Colleen Synar in the lower right corner. “This is not Colleen Synar. No way. But I’ll tell you what you do. You drive over to that address right now and talk to that woman who said she was her roommate… What was her name?”

“Valerie… Heath,” Paula said, looking down at her notes.

“Yeah, you talk to Valerie Heath, and I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you’ll be talking to ‘Colleen Synar.’ I don’t know where they came up with that name-Synar-but that woman took a flyer when she gave you her ‘lead,’ the two biggest cities in the country. That was right off the top of her head. She probably thought there ought to be Synars in those cities if there were going to be any anywhere, and by the time we ran them all down she would have bought some time.”

Paula stared at him.

“In fact,” Neuman said,” we ought to run a computer check on her right now. My hunch is her stats are going to look like Sheck’s-bare bones.”

“I think you’d better do it,” Graver said to Paula.” If he’s right, if they used that name only for this one reason, then it’s a trip wire, and they’re already on to us. If they’re as finely tuned as we think, they’ll know we’ve found a loose thread and are pulling on it I don’t know if we could have done it a better way, but it’s too late now for us to go at this as if we were doing background checks on these two. We’ve got to go right to them. So run the computer check on Heath right now.”

“Casey,” he said, getting up and walking to the safe cabinet, “I want you to go down to the tech room and get three radios with secure frequencies.” He opened the safe and got a key and tossed it to Neuman.

He looked at the two of them, Paula now standing and looking apprehensive, quite a different expression on her face than when she was so hungry to pin Burtell to the wall with her research findings. Neuman, on the other hand, looked like he had been born to the task; he was ready to hunt.

“After you’ve run the computer check, the two of you go out to Heath’s place and talk to her.”

Paula looked at her watch. “It’s almost ten-thirty.”

“It’ll take you, what, thirty minutes to drive out there?”

Neuman nodded. “If we push it.”