furnished with the bare necessities but otherwise entirely untouched. But the combination family room and kitchen was where he seemed to have spent all his time. The television was there and scattered around were a few nudie magazines, a pair of sweat clothes in the middle of the floor as if he had just stepped out of them, some fishing poles stacked in a corner near the patio doors along with a pair of old tennis shoes and a small ice chest There were some aviation maps lying on the kitchen table, the first thing Neuman had seen that he thought ought to go into the plastic bag.
The kitchen was better furnished than Neuman had anticipated. Sheck had not been a gourmet There was an abundance of TV dinners in the refrigerator along with a good stock of beer, half a watermelon, orange juice, milk, and the miscellaneous makings for sandwiches. The pantry and cabinets held the expected staples and there were two old pizza boxes in the trash next to the electric range.
Neuman moved into Sheck’s bedroom. The clothes in his closet ran to jeans and casual shirts, a few sport coats, and only three pairs of dress trousers. In the corner of the closet he found an expensive Weatherby deer rifle and shells, two extraordinarily expensive Italian-made shotguns and four or five boxes of shotgun shells along with two well-used bird sacks and an old set of deer horns tied together at the base with a short piece of cord lying on top of a pair of hunting boots. He checked the closet closely for hidden doors or compartments in the walls or under the carpet.
He found no place anywhere in the house where it appeared that Sheck might have kept “paperwork,” and there was no evidence at all that indicated that anyone had been there before him.
Walking back into the family room, he unlocked the patio doors and stepped outside and around to the door inside the small courtyard. Again he used his lock picks to open the door. The room looked as if at one time it might have been a makeshift office, but now it seemed largely unused. There was an old metal office desk like those in CID, a small sofa, and a couple of chairs. A coffee table in front of the sofa was scattered with an assortment of old issues of magazines, Texas Monthly, Commando, Aviator, and Sports Illustrated.
Even though it seemed infrequently used, the room seemed to Neuman the most likely one in which Sheck might have been inclined to hide any code sheets or cipher paraphernalia. So, taking the screwdrivers out of his pocket, he set to work dismantling anything that could be taken apart He went into the small bath first, covering one wall at a time, and then worked his way into the larger room doing the same methodical one-wall-at-a-time approach. Air-conditioning vents, electrical plates around plugs and switches. Lamp bases. The legs on the sofa and coffee table. Zippers on the sofa cushions; the upholstery curtain covering the entire bottom carriage. The desk was a project all unto itself. At the end of half an hour he had nothing, and was facing the daunting task of having to do the same thing to the larger house.
Leaving the room disheveled, he locked the door behind him and went back into the house through the patio door. Standing in the family room just off the kitchen, he decided to try to eliminate some of the more attractive sites that he might normally search. If he had wanted to hide something of irreplaceable value, something that his life might some day depend on, he would want to make sure that the object would not fall victim to the vagaries of chance, the most obvious of which was common theft. He would not use anything that could possibly be stolen. Stereo, television, appliances, the motorcycle, tools, furniture. He would begin by confining his search to the house structure itself. And he would begin in the room that normally would be considered the most personal. He started in Sheck’s bedroom. Everything came apart, just as it had in the room outside off the patio, but nothing surfaced.
This was disappointing, but not altogether unexpected. If Sheck had been the kind of professional that they expected him to be, he was not going to leave anything significant lying around the house. Neuman guessed that Sheck was a survivalist and was proud to be a man who lived-who stayed alive-by his own wits.
He went to the other two bedrooms and did the same kind of search, even taking apart the thermostat in the hallway. Nothing.
As he was walking out of the second bedroom, he stopped. The showers. He hadn’t looked in any of the showers. The showerheads. Not in Sheck’s bedroom, because it was used regularly, but the other two were never used, or seldom used it seemed. He went back into the bedroom he had just come out of and went into the shower stall. The showerhead was a big fat one, large enough for a canister of 35mm film or something of similar size. He unscrewed it Nothing. He went into the second bedroom. Same kind of showerhead. Nothing. He stood with the showerhead in his hand. Jesus. The shower was never used. He looked down at his feet… at the drain. He laid down the showerhead, took the Phillips screwdriver out of his pocket and undid the two screws from the chrome- plated grill over the drain. Nothing. He left them there and went back to the second bedroom, stepped into the shower, and looked at the drain. He got down on his knees and looked at the chrome grate that covered it There appeared to be a piece of lint stuck to the lip of one of the little round holes. He looked closer, putting the penlight and his face nearer to the drain. It wasn’t a piece of lint.
His blood pressure shot up instantly as he fumbled with the screwdriver and undid the two Phillips screws. Carefully he removed the grate from its seat and felt the tug, like a gentle nudge of a bite on a fishing line. He lifted the grate and saw the string, which actually was not a string but a length of clear monofilament fishing line, tied through one of the holes on the grate. The knot of the colorless line was almost invisible. He put the penlight in his mouth, carefully raised the grate with one hand, and grasped the line with the other. The monofilament was only three inches long and was tied through the eyelet of a threaded cap screwed onto a plastic, waterproof canister about five inches long, the kind of ribbed container in which an outdoorsman might keep matches to protect them from moisture.
Neuman’s heart was racing. He couldn’t believe his luck. He couldn’t believe he had thought of this, of the goddamned drain. Gripping the canister in one hand, he stepped out of the shower and leaned against the vanity counter. Holding the canister up to his face he looked at it in the beam of his penlight. It was army green with a thick rubber seal between the screw cap and the case. It looked like the kind of heavy-duty equipment he would have expected of Sheck. He shook it gently and heard nothing. He wanted to open it in the worst way, but was afraid it might contain film that needed to be opened in a darkroom, and his fear of ruining such hard-won evidence canceled all thought of satisfying his burning curiosity.
Putting the canister in his coat pocket-still attached to the monofilament and drain grate-he walked out of the bedroom, down the hallway to the kitchen and into the family room. Through the sliding glass doors that looked out onto the lawn, he had a perfect view of the burning marina across the lake. He was aware of an acidy, hollow feeling in his stomach as he thought that the night before Sheck might well have been standing where he was standing now, looking across at the bright display of lights that shone every night from the marina, lights strung on poles along the docks, lights running up and across the masts of the sailboats and around the cabins of the cruisers. Lights two times themselves, reflected upon the surface of the water.
Chapter 54
1:25 A.M.
Graver sat at Arnette’s library table with Cheryl and Arnette as Cheryl rewound the tape for the third time.
“You want to hear it again?*’ Arnette asked.
Graver shook his head. He was not likely to forget anything he had heard in Dean Burtell’s last conversation. It was an eerie recording with its wavering beginnings as Cheryl zeroed in on the range and the frequency followed by a remarkably clear reception. Bruce Sheck’s voice was whiskey raw and surly, and it was easy to imagine him after what Valerie Heath had already said about him. Good-looking, athletic, more savvy for sure than Valerie Heath could have imagined, an element of meanness sulking just beneath the surface.
But listening to Burtell was like listening to a brother. Graver didn’t have a brother, but he imagined that Burtell could have been one and to know that with each word he spoke he was another syllable closer to imminent, violent death was a painful thing to experience. They were so unsuspecting. True, Sheck did say he thought they were in danger, but clearly it was a danger he had every intention of being able to deal with, and neither of them thought they were in danger then, at that moment. And then too, the entire conversation was almost a monologue by Sheck. It seemed that he had been drinking for some time, which had made him loquacious. Burtell spoke very little on the tape and when he did speak it was brief, an indication, it seemed to Graver, that he was either tense or angry or maybe even cautiously uneasy. But, the fact was, the few words he did speak were all the more painful to
