fingernails, looking at them as though she could see what she was doing, though Last doubted she could in the pale, watery light. Then she looked up and went on.
“She was sobbing, distraught. I could tell that in her mind she had lost everything. I started talking to her. I said, look, relax, relax. Truth is, the marriage was over, and you were just the next in line. That’s okay, really. I admitted that I was angry but not because I loved the man. I was just angry at being used by him. And I said that, frankly, she should be angry about being used too. I said I wasn’t going to do anything with the videos. I said I didn’t think either of us would get what we deserved out of a nasty divorce battle. I calmed her down, got her to thinking. And then I said that we’d both be better off putting our heads together and try to come up with a way to earn ourselves a little security out of all this. I told her that neither one of us had any protection, any security for the future. We could both end up on the sidewalk tomorrow with nothing. Nothing. And it could happen so easy.” She paused. “I presented her with a proposition.”
As Rayner talked, Last sat with his back against the wall and slowly felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Surrounded by the aqueous light of Rayner’s peculiar world, he listened to a woman he had been cultivating for eight months, waiting for just the right opportunity to use her and their affair as a stepping-stone to his own fortune, only to have it slowly revealed to him that he had been thrusting in the moonlight with Morgan le Fay. As she talked his heart alternately hammered and started as he thought that at any moment she was going to blast him to hell for his many months of calculated intercourse. He felt as though this woman had been reading him like a newspaper, and she was about to deliver the coup de grace.
But it didn’t happen. Instead, he listened to the story of how two women, invisible in plain sight, had gathered enough information-about DataPrint… and related businesses called Concordia Investments and Hormann Plastics and Hermes Exports and Strasser Industries-to have the two of themselves killed on the spot. When she finally came to a stopping point, they sat in silence among the silk and glass and fragrance of heather and for the first time in his life Last didn’t know whether to scream in jubilation or horror. He had discovered either the mother lode of all his adventuring, or he had just listened to his own death warrant. He honestly could not place a bet on which it might be. The odds were skewed by the magnitude.
“Jesus… Mary… and Joseph,” he said.
She was looking at him as though she were awaiting his assessment She wanted to know what he thought.
“Rayner,” he swallowed, “listen to me.” His mouth was cottony. “This could get you killed… I mean, I cannot believe you’ve gone this far. Do you have any idea how… exposed, how vulnerable you are? Both of you.”
“Only in the last few months,” she said. “When we began to piece together the drugs part of it. That scared the shit out of us.”
Last looked at her. He thought he could sense the fear in her now, but at the same time he didn’t know why he hadn’t sensed it before. Who, exactly, had he been deceiving all these months? Her or himself?
“How long have you been doing this?” he asked.
“Nine months. We had to take it slow,” she said with unintended understatement. “We didn’t want to screw it up. You know, little by little, checking and double-checking, take a step and listen. Take another step and listen.”
He waited a moment, not wanting to seem too eager.
“You have documentation?”
“Of course. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
“But…” And then it dawned on him. “She-the secretary-continued her affair with Colin?”
Rayner nodded. “She had to. I don’t think this would have worked otherwise. Every time he took her, she took him.” She smiled. “Talk about poetic justice…”
“And she’s still sleeping with him?”
“I hope so.”
She was looking at him, her face only a few feet away from his, through the clear water. In the instant before she spoke he anticipated her.
“We’ve gone about as far as we can go,” she said, “without some help.” He could almost see her holding her breath, hoping she hadn’t made a mistake about him. “Do you want in on this?”
Chapter 53
Neuman could see the glow from the fire in the South Shore Harbor Marina even before he turned off NASA Road 1 into the Swan Lagoon development of Nassau Bay. Cars were slowing along the highway to puzzle over the orange light reflecting off the bottom of the Gulf clouds that were drifting inland, and when he turned into the neighborhood street that would take him to Sheck’s house, people were standing on their front lawns looking toward the fire.
Sheck’s house was a modern one-story bungalow on a winding street lined with palms and green lawns and in a price range not unlike Valerie Heath’s. Neuman parked in the front drive, hiding the car as best as he could behind a screen of oleanders, and got out, hardly noticed by the scattered clusters of people standing in their front lawns across the street looking in his direction. The back of Sheck’s house was right on the water and almost directly across the lagoon from the marina.
He didn’t go to the front door but casually walked around to the side of the house, found a wooden privacy fence with a gate and went into the back yard. From here the fire in the marina looked like a conflagration as it reflected from both the clouds and the surface of the bay water, the fire itself the brightest point between the two illuminations. The entire marina seemed to be burning.
Throwing a glance at the back of the house to make sure he didn’t miss the obvious-a light, someone standing at a window or door-he moved along the thick hedges that lined both sides of the back yard for privacy from the neighbors and stood near a pier at the edge of the water and looked across. He could hear sirens and bullhorns and the wailing of emergency vehicles, the cacophony hanging in the moist, still air as though the entire confusion were taking place in an amphitheater. As he stood there with his feet in the damp grass, it was hard for him to believe that Burtell was over there, burned up in a fire that no one understood yet. For a moment he wondered what it had been like for Burtell to be blasted into the next life.
He looked at the fire, which was close enough for him actually to see the flames, fed by the gasoline and oil from the boats. It was the first time he had ever had a friend die violently, and he was surprised at the disconnectedness of such an event. Somehow it seemed at once unreal and at the same time so real as to be nauseating.
The voices of people on the other side of the hedges brought him back to the moment They were talking about the fire, speculating. Someone had a scanner and the crackle and scratch of transmissions came through the hedges more clearly than their voices.
He turned and walked back to the house, easing along in the darkness of the hedges. At the back of the house there were several doors. The first one seemed to open into the garage. There were sliding glass doors that opened onto the broad patio and lakefront, common to most of the homes that opened onto the view of the water. Then, beyond that, there was a kind of courtyard enclosed on three sides by another set of dense hedges and another door. It looked as if it might be an outside entrance to a separate apartment or room.
Neuman took the latex gloves out of his coat pocket and tugged them on and used his lock picks to open the door that he assumed gave access to the garage. He was right. Closing and locking the door behind him, he took a penlight from his pocket and shone it around the garage which was empty except for a motorcycle. He went over and felt the engine which was cold. Seeing nothing else of immediate interest, he went to a small workbench against one of the walls and selected several types of screwdrivers and put them in his coat pocket Another door near the one through which he had entered opened into a laundry and utility room where he paused to look through the cabinets for plastic garbage bags. He found them, took one out of the box, and then went through another door into the kitchen.
Bruce Sheck’s house was a bit more lived in than Valerie Heath’s, though it reflected both the carelessness and selective habits of a bachelor’s life. The living room at the front of the house facing the street was practically ignored with a modicum of furnishings. There were three bedrooms. Two of them were like the living room,
