“This is sickening,” Paula said shakily. “This is out of control… way out of control.”
“What about the surveillance team?” Neuman asked. They were talking softly, almost whispering. “Did they get anything on tape, any of their conversation?”
Graver nodded. He didn’t want to talk to them. He wanted to be somewhere else.
“Apparently so,” he managed to say. “I didn’t… I don’t know what. Just that there was something to listen to. My contact was still on the line to the surveillance team in the hotel room. They were frantically packing their stuff, trying to get out of there.” He shook his head. “Jesus… Christ.”
“How did they know it was Sheck?” Neuman asked.
“Dean used his name.”
“Oh, this is horrible.” Paula was sitting on the sofa with her feet on the floor, her legs together, her arms together, hands clasped and resting atop her thighs as she leaned forward. She looked up at Graver. “We didn’t have any idea that Sheck had a boat, did we? A plane. A car. But not a boat.”
Graver shook his head.
“Maybe it was Dean’s,” Neuman said.
“We never checked on that, I guess,” Paula said. She looked up at Graver. “What are you going to do about Ginette?”
“Nothing,” he said. It was possibly the hardest single word he had ever had to say.
Paula frowned at him. It was almost a flinch, a reproach.
“We don’t know anything.” Graver insisted. “We have to remember that. Dean’s death will come to us-if it comes to us-from forensics. It’ll be up to Ginette to report him missing. We’ll deal with it then.” He shook his head. “We’re just damned lucky the surveillance team caught them in time, and that Dean wasn’t as good at this business as they were. We’re lucky we’ve got the recording.”
Paula stared at Graver in dismay. “How twisted can this get?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Graver had been asking himself the same thing. He stood stiffly, deferring a little to his tired back, and put his hands in his pockets. He walked toward the entrance hall doorway and looked at the soft sheen of muted light on the burnished hardwood floor. It was impossible to stop thinking about the explosion, the actual chemistry of it… the impact, the heat, the instant tornadic destruction of it. He had seen explosions on film before, assassinations. The target never reacts at all because the firestorm happens faster than human reflexes are capable of responding. For a millisecond the target can be seen simply sitting immobile in the conflagration, burning alive like the Buddhist monks who set themselves afire in the sixties to protest the Vietnam War. An upright human torch, knowing in that instant they were aflame in hell but being too stunned to react. Then the impact of the explosion, and in the next instant they vanished in a shuddering mist. The rest of it was a mystery, whatever it was like to die.
Graver was too numb even to sob, though he felt it in his throat, a soft, choking lump of grief and anger and dismay. He was light-headed, but he stood very still drawing deep breaths, struggling for control, resolving not to give in… to anything. Not a damned bloody thing.
He turned around.
“Okay,” he said, taking his hands out of his pockets and wiping his face with both hands. He waited a moment “Here’s what we’ve got to do.” He swallowed. “This will in no way affect the CID, not for a few days, not… until the Bomb Squad’s forensic team has had a chance to do their work. And maybe not even then.” He walked a few steps into the living room. “First, Ginette will report him missing. When that happens, the CID will be brought back into it. I don’t think even Jack Westrate will be able to scoff away the disappearance of another CID officer.” He crossed his arms, took a few more steps, his head down, thinking. “All hell will break loose. If the newspapers were going to run something on Tisler and Besom, it will be bumped off the front page by this explosion. There’s no way to anticipate if the reporters on the other stories will make any connections here. Again, they won’t know who was on the boat It’ll probably take them a day even to determine which slip was the center of the explosion. So… we’ve got a little time.”
He looked at his watch. He felt the flesh of his face sagging with exhaustion. It seemed to require every gland in his body to produce enough juice to keep him standing.
“As far as I’m concerned… there’s only one rear son for any of this now… to focus everything… on Panos Kalatis.”
Graver actually was having to make an effort to control a nearly hysterical frustration at being so completely at a disadvantage. He could hardly contain his grief for Burtell’s death or his rage at Kalatis’s silent, anonymous audacity. He was forcing himself, at considerable expense to his nervous system, to be controlled and methodical and logical.
“Paula,” he went on, “I want you to debrief Valerie Heath just as we discussed. Tonight, as soon as we get through here. Before you do, tell her what happened. Tell her Sheck was just killed by a bomb with another CID agent… no, just another man. When you’re through, blindfold her again-I sure as hell don’t want her to know where she’s been-and you and Lara take her car and another one and drive her somewhere-a parking garage-and release her. Give her her keys and tell her to get the hell out of the state. Then both of you come back here and wait.”
He walked a few paces into the room and addressed Neuman.
“Sheck lives in Nassau Bay?” he asked.
Neuman nodded. “Yeah, just across the lake from South Shore Harbor.”
“You need to get over there, Casey, and pick the place apart Take a garbage sack and fill it up with anything remotely informative.” He hesitated. “There’s going to be a lot of action over there. Spectators standing around in their back yards watching the excitement across the water. That’s good for you. But be careful. Kalatis’s people are going to want to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind. They may have already been there. Or they may get there ahead of you and still be there. If not, they might walk in on you. Just watch your ass. Okay? But take the place apart. Unscrew air-conditioning grates, wall plugs. Shit like that And call in every half hour… on the secure handsets. And wear latex gloves.”
Neuman nodded eagerly. He was wired, ready to do it.
“I’m going to meet the surveillance people and listen to what they picked up. When I’m through, I’ll get right back here. We’ll go from there.” He looked at each of them. “Don’t use my telephone and don’t answer it. I’ll leave the answering machine on. It’s important,” he said, “that we keep in touch. But use the handsets.”
Chapter 52
Victor Last lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, his right arm hanging off the side of the bed holding a champagne glass. He was naked. The sheets were a pale tea rose silk. His left hand held one of Rayner Faeber’s very generous, very jiggly breasts. She lay with her blond head tucked up under his arm, and when he looked down he could see her other breast with its peachy aureole, her so very white and nearly plumpish body, and her splayed legs-she liked to splay her legs-with her dusty pubis at their apex. She smelled of a kind of bath oil that she said she could buy only at this one small shop in the Rue du Bourg-Tibourg. It smelled like… heather. He loved the stuff, which he told her once and so she always put a dash of it in her bathwater when she knew they were going to be together.
He looked to his left, out through one of the bedroom’s glass walls and through an atrium, through another glass wall and into the living room. Beyond that was another glass wall, another atrium… all of it washed in the wan light of a city night as though he were in Atlantis, looking through houses of water, the light refracting in undulations of aqua so pale and anemic as to be almost colorless. It was, he had to admit, the perfect environment for Rayner. She was almost translucent herself. So much so, that sometimes when he had sex with her in this watery glass world, he half-expected to see her inner parts working, expected, even, to see his own erect self in her in flashes of clarity that illuminated them like flashes of lightning.