to her basin, pausing to look at her through the glass door, her arms raised, her eyes closed, her hands buried in her hair piled with a lather of shampoo. She was leaning back to keep her head out of the shower’s spray. He noticed she had laid out only one towel on the little bench near the shower door, and he stepped over to the cabinets and got out another. Dore had always used two, one to wrap her hair in, one to dry with. He put the additional towel on the bench, and then went to his own basin, turned on the water, and began shaving.
They maneuvered through the next half hour of bathing and dressing with a collaborative naturalness that seemed more like a resumption of old ways than a first-time experience. For Graver it was very much a healing activity, like something had been set right in his life that had been wrong for a long time.
She was wearing only a bra and panties and was bent over drying her hair when he finished dressing and, catching her eye in the mirror, motioned to her that he was going downstairs. Unlocking the front door, he stepped outside and got the paper off the front lawn. The coastal clouds were already clearing, and the day promised to be clear and blistering. The hottest days of the year had arrived with their unrelenting swelter and humidity. Unfolding the paper as he walked back into the house, he saw that the explosion at the marina had commanded a banner headline.
Tossing the paper onto the kitchen table, he set about making breakfast. He took out the toaster and bread and quickly made a couple of pieces of toast, took some strawberry jam out of the refrigerator, and sat down at the table with a fresh cup of coffee to read the coverage. There wasn’t much to it, interviews with people who worked at the hotel and marina, with a couple of people who owned boats that were destroyed, with the fire chief who didn’t want to speculate whether it was a bomb or a gas leak, with several people who were staying in the hotel and had a bird’s-eye view of the scene. A lot of photographs. A boxed story on the background of the marina’s development, whom it catered to, NASA people, well-to-do people who had summer homes in the area. A story about the estimated dollar figure on the damage.
The telephone rang on the near end of the kitchen counter, and he got up and grabbed it.
“This is Olmstead, Captain. I’ve got some interesting information for you.” He paused.
“Okay, go ahead.”
“First of all, they finally got the fire out about an hour ago. That gave us a chance to get a little closer and start estimating the slip positions. Close to ground zero, or pretty damn close to it, is a boat slip rented by a guy named Max Tiborman. On the rental papers he gives his address as Lake Charles, Louisiana. But the telephone company in Lake Charles has no listing for Tiborman. We got the police down there to go by and check the address on the papers. Turns out it’s a U-Haul rental company. So we check out the boat registration number. That turns out to be in the name of Mrs. Ginette Sommer.”
Olmstead paused. Graver said nothing. Olmstead continued.
“On a boat registration you have to give your home address, but on this form there was only a post office box number. I don’t know how that happened.” Another pause. “Now, Captain, I don’t know, this could be an absolute fluke, but I happen to know that Dean Burtell’s wife’s name is Ginette, and I know her maiden name is Sommer. I know because I had a good friend with the same last name and that came up at a Division Christmas party one time and we talked about it…”
He stopped, his point made.
“Goddamn,” Graver said. “What’s the slip number?”
“Forty-nine.”
Shit Anybody else know about this?” Graver meant anyone else on the HTTF, anyone in the FBI. Olmstead knew what he meant.
“Well, no. I mean, this is a little unusual, and I just kept my mouth shut when the registration fax came through. I didn’t know… I thought maybe you guys had something working, an investigation cover set up or something. Thought I’d better run it by you.”
Graver’s mind was racing. He couldn’t let Burtell’s involvement surface so soon. It had to be staunched at this moment, at this point.
“Ben, we do have something out there,” Graver said. “It’s touchy, very touchy. Hell of a coincidence. Let me get with the people involved and see if we can agree on a way to handle this, who to bring into it, at what level. Dean’s on vacation so it might take me a while to get to him, but I’ll get right on it You handled it right, Ben. Exposure now would have cost us the operation, a lot of time and work and money. It’s been a long time in the making. Hold on to this, and I’ll get back to you on it.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Was anyone hurt out there?”
“God, we don’t know. The fire’s only been out about an hour, like I said, and everything’s hot as hell. The Arson Squad and Bomb Squad people are just now beginning to pick their way into all the debris. You know, moving around in boats. The smoke’s still hanging over the water. The docks are all unstable. It’ll be slow going.”
“Okay, Ben. Thanks. I’ll be going into the office in another half hour. Let me know if anything else comes up.”
“Will do. See you later.”
Graver put down the telephone and looked up. Lara was standing just inside the kitchen watching him. She probably had heard the whole thing, his pretense at assuming that Burtell was still alive.
“They’ve already found out who owns the boat,” Graver said, going over to the table to get his coffee cup for a refill.
Lara came over to the cabinet too and refilled her own cup.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said.
“Sure.”
They both leaned back against the cabinet.
“They… haven’t found anything?” she asked.
“You mean bodies, or what’s left of them? No.”
“What happens now?”
“I hate to ask you to do this, Lara, but Ginette’s going to have to be looked after somehow until this mess comes together.” He hesitated. “I mean, we’ve got to make sure she doesn’t contact anyone else with the police department She thinks everyone’s going to be devoting a lot of energy to finding out whether or not Dean’s alive, and no one there even knows that he’s ‘missing.’”
“What about her family?”
“When I get to the office, I’ll look in Dean’s personal file and get her family information. I’ll call them, get somebody here as soon as I can.”
Lara sipped her coffee, and Graver waited for her to say something.
“Do you want us to stay here?”
“Why, what do you mean?”
“Practicalities. She doesn’t have any clothes. She’s going to need some.”
“Christ” His first thought was of their safety. Would Kalatis consider Ginette Burtell a risk? But Graver had had no similar fear for Besom’s wife or Peggy Tisler. He couldn’t allow himself to lose perspective. “Okay. Just don’t stay there long, Lara. I’d feel better if she were here.”
The telephone rang again, and Graver reached around and picked it up. It was Neuman calling from Arnette’s computer room.
“I thought I’d try to catch you before you went to the office and bring you up to date,” he said. “We’re getting tons of stuff from Sheck’s microfiche. It’s going to be a lot of fun just deciding the best way to use it Sheck’s outlined this operation from the grass roots to the top. Goes into a lot of detail. We may want to keep some of these people running, see if we can’t turn some of them. Sheck’s infiltrated so many businesses and institutions it seems to me there ought to be a way to use his system. We need to talk about that Anyway-we’ve got enough on Faeber to close him down.”
“Is there anything there on any of our people?”
“Yeah. It looks like it started with Besom, a couple of years ago. He was selling investigation information to Faeber. Faeber wanted more. Besom couldn’t do it by himself and brought Tisler into it The money was just too good. Besom made a couple of hundred thousand his first year. Tisler over a hundred. Right now I’m reading about the kind of CID information Faeber was asking for. So far Dean hasn’t come into the picture yet.”
“And what about Dean’s tapes?”
