An Absence of Light

Connie was a woman forty-two years old, a former detective in sex crimes with the Chicago Police Department. Three years ago she had moved to Houston when her husband’s employer, an engineering company, transferred him down to corporate headquarters. The mother of two high-schoolers, she had deep red hair, an Irish sense of humor, and a no-bullshit attitude about the jobs she worked for Arnette.

Murray was fifty-seven, retired four years from the army where he spent his entire career in numerous branches of the army’s Intelligence Services. Stocky but still muscular and athletic, Murray favored tennis shoes and jeans and white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled into tight cuffs that revealed his weight-lifter’s arms. He was balding, had striking blue-green eyes, and a clipped, graying mustache. He was the group leader once they were on the job.

Remberto was a thirty-two-year-old Bolivian who first came to the United States eight years earlier when he was part of a small, select contingent of Bolivian police officers who were brought to Virginia by the DEA for a special intelligence training course designed for drug agents. Remberto learned English quickly, spent three years undercover in La Paz and in the jungles of the Beni River valley radioing out information about the ever-shifting coca plantations that supplied the cartels in Colombia. He married a DEA agent’s daughter, and was now in the University of Houston law school.

Li was a twenty-eight-year-old Amer-Asian whose mother Arnette knew during one of her Vietnam tours. Li’s mother was killed in 1971, a fact Arnette did not know until 1978 when she tried to find them in the chaotic months after the U.S. pullout. When she finally found Li in a Catholic orphanage, she went through a year and a half of red tape to adopt her and then brought her to the United States. Li was educated mostly in Virginia public schools and was now working on a master’s degree in Art History at Rice University.

The two women were accompanied by passengers, Boyd, a photographer with Li, and Cheryl, a sound specialist, with Connie. Murray had been briefed about the target, but the others knew nothing about him except that he was thoroughly familiar with surveillance techniques, a fact that let them know that they couldn’t take anything for granted and a lack of watchfulness was likely to be detected.

Burtell left the condominium complex, passed through the entrance gates and turned east on Woodway, a curving, wooded street that eventually would go under the West Loop and merge with Memorial Drive just inside Memorial Park. Murray pulled out of a parking slot in front of another condominium, let a couple of cars get between him and Burtell, and then nosed into the traffic. The other three quickly entered the traffic stream from different streets a block away, Connie, Remberto, and Li. Murray was immediately on the radio.

MURRAY: “Okay, Connie, go ahead and get in front of him. If he goes for the Loop we’ll stay with him. You double back when you can. If he goes all the way into downtown peel away the first chance you get after the merge with Memorial.”

CONNIE: “Okay, here we go.”

She pulled out and passed Murray and then Burtell, getting in front of him before the next light and adjusting her speed so that she didn’t go through without him. When the light turned they went to the next one which they caught green and passed under the Loop, staying on Woodway as they entered the one-hundred-and-fifty-five-acre Memorial Park, its dense stand of loblolly pines turning the city-lighted night to a deeper darkness. Suddenly Burtell hit his brakes and turned off Woodway before it merged with Memorial Drive and entered the drive to the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center.

MURRAY: “Remberto. Li. Stay outta there. Don’t go in. This is a bullshit stop. It’s a dead end. He’s not going to meet anybody in there, not this early in the game. He’s trying to pull us off. Everybody watch for countersurveillance-they’re gonna see who panics. Remberto, turn off on Picnic Lane ahead and look to pick him up if he goes on to merge with Memorial when he comes out of there. Connie, Li, the three of us are going to spread out and start circling Memorial, North Post Oak, and the access road. We’ll pick him up if he comes out and heads west.”

For a minute there was silence on the radio as they each did as they were told, Connie, being the farthest away already coming back and beginning the first leg of her circle as the others turned around. It was still early enough in the night for the traffic to provide a moderate flow of headlights.

Burtell did not come out for fifteen minutes. When he did, it was Li who picked him up.

LI: “I’ve got him, Murray. He’s coming at me on Woodway.”

MURRAY: “Keep going. I’ll pick him up if he gets on the Loop. Remberto, come on in. Connie, turn off and wait for him. If he goes back west on Woodway one of you let me know who picks him up first.”