“What?” Paula was lost “What the hell for?”
“It’s what I would do,” Graver said. “If I didn’t know about all this other I’d call him to let him know about Besom.”
“I hope you’ve got good people on this,” Paula said. “When Dean hears about this he’s going to freak out, he’s going to do something.”
“Unless he already knows,” Neuman said.
Graver was a little surprised at Neuman’s remarks. He was quick to see a deeper, meaner undercurrent here, and Graver thought he was justified. Graver also guessed that each of them was feeling a sudden trepidation at the realization that the water was deeper and far more treacherous than they ever had expected.
Picking up a pencil from his desk, Graver tapped the cobblestone a couple of times.
“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.”
“Then push it,” Graver said. “Keep in mind: unfortunately, except for Dean, she and Sheck are the only two people we know about who might give us access to the bigger picture here-if there is a bigger picture. Keep checking in with me. I don’t want to have to wonder where you are or what you’re doing.”
They walked out of his office without saying a word, and Graver went back to his desk and sat down. He stared at the cobblestone. Jesus Christ The single feeling that weighed most heavily on him now was one of urgency.
Graver was used to taking suspicions seriously, but everything that came to mind to explain what was, and had been, going on right under his nose seemed so radical that he doubted his own abilities to read the meager facts with any clarity.
Within a few minutes Neuman and Paula came by the office again and gave Graver one of the three handsets. Paula’s first pass through the computers had yielded exactly what Neuman had predicted. Nothing. Valerie Heath seemed to live a life as tenuously attached to society as did Bruce Sheck.
They coordinated the radio frequencies, and Graver followed them to the outside door, reset the security system behind them, and then returned to his office. He sat down at his desk and turned to his own computer. With a few clicks on the keys he brought up his internal report regarding Tisler’s death. Actually he was already through with it, but he wanted to read it over very carefully a few times before he turned it in for Westrate’s approval in the morning. When he was satisfied, he printed out the final document, put it in a departmental envelope, stamped it Confidential, and put it in the locked distribution drawer so that it would be hand-delivered to Westrate’s office first thing in the morning.
Returning to his desk, he picked up the telephone and dialed Burtell’s number. Graver waited as the telephone rang two, three, four times, nervously hoping he would be able to discern something informative from Burtell’s reaction to the news. On the fifth ring Ginette Burtell answered.
“Ginny, this is Graver,” he said.
“Oh, hello,” she said, and for some reason he was surprised at the animation in her voice. Before he could speak again she said, “Oh, if you’re wanting to speak to Dean, I’m afraid you’ve just missed him.”
“Yeah, I did need to talk to him.”
“I’m sorry, but he left not four or five minutes ago.”
“You don’t happen to know how I could get in touch with him, do you?”
“No, actually, I don’t even know where he was going.”
Graver was surprised by this. How often did this happen? She must have sensed his surprise.
“Uh, he got a telephone call… and… he said he had to go out for a while.”
Graver waited.
