An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  “Two sources and an informant The take from the informant was insignificant. The two sources made the case, but they never had to testify because Tisler and Dean turned over so much corroborating information to operations that they were able to make the case without the sources’ testimonies. In orchestrating the collection process Burtell seemed to intuit precisely the right information needed to open another facet of the case. Even more astonishing, Tisler’s sources could always get it for him. Very clean. A model investigation.”

  Graver swung his chair around almost sideways to his desk. Leaning back, his elbow resting on the top of the desk, he started toying with the cobblestone, turning it clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise.

  Paula flipped another page of her notepad, her bracelets rattling.

  “The Friel investigation. Lawrence Friel was in the business of transporting illegal drugs. He didn’t buy, didn’t sell, just got the stuff from one place to the next He used his computer to plug into the computerized schedules of trucking companies originating out of Houston and going all over the country. His men would load the drugs into specially-made magnetic boxes which they would then piggyback somewhere on the truck’s chassis. From that point on people never touched the stuff again. His men followed these vehicles in another car, and when the product reached its destination they contacted the receiving party and watched while they picked it up at a truck stop or warehouse or trucking yard. Then Friel’s men picked up the pay.

  “Again, the operation developed quickly, almost as if Dean and Tisler were using a blueprint of the operation. Two sources, no informants. Again, neither source had to testify because our boys came up with a bumper crop of corroborating information making it unnecessary.”

  She looked at Graver as she flipped another sheet of her legal pad. He could tell by her expression that she was wondering if he was getting the drift of where she was taking this. She needn’t have worried. He was following it all too well.

  “Now this brings us to Tisler’s active Seldon case. So far, one source”—she reached out and tapped the two folders turned crossway to the others on the front of Graver’s desk—”still developing. According to lister’s source, Alan Seldon owns a chemical waste disposal business. Tisler’s source says he has proof that Seldon is buying off EPA inspectors. Seldon is dumping the stuff on ranch land in Starr County in South Texas, way out in the boonies, on the border. According to the source the ranch is owned by a man fronting for a group of drug runners who put up the money for the ranch. The source is telling Tisler he can give him chapter and verse on how all this is happening, but has yet to put names to any of the parties involved, except Seldon’s. But the guy’s super touchy. Very careful.”

  “Jesus Christ…” Graver said.

  “Wait a second,” Paula interrupted him, tossing her legal pad on the desk. “There’s more, but before you say anything I’ve got to pee, wash my face. I need a drink.” She stood. “I’ll be back in a second,” she said, and walked out of his office.

  Chapter 14

  Graver got up and stepped to the windows. The sun reflecting on the skyscrapers had burned to a deeper and duller shade of brassy fire and then, as he watched, with one last, laser-like dazzle, it dropped behind the horizon, extinguishing the conflagration inside the millions of square feet of tinted plate glass and transforming them into palisades of lifeless gray.

  He looked back at the scattered files on his desk. Paula was laying out a scenario that was alive with implication. He guessed that she did not have to go to the bathroom so much as she had to collect herself. Graver was afraid she was going to be giving him some bad news, and she wasn’t altogether sure how he was going to take it He wasn’t sure either and tried to ignore the warm, wandering nausea beginning to move about in his abdomen.

  “What do you think?” Paula asked. She was standing in the doorway, wiping her face and neck with a damp paper towel. She was barefooted, having left her shoes by her chair.

  Graver looked at her. “I’m ready to hear the rest of it,” he said, and walked back to his desk and sat down again.

  Paula pinched the placket on the front of her dress and fanned it lightly. “Fine,” she said.

  She tossed the wadded paper towel into the trash and sat down. She had brushed out her hair, and he noticed a few damp wisps on either side at her temples as she picked up the legal pad again.

  “Okay, because all these contributors are sources, new sources, this means there’s a lot of information we don’t have.”

  “No ‘track record,’ “Graver said. He already had seen it coming. “No parole records or probation tracking data. Since they weren’t trading information for plea bargaining leverage, there’s no prosecutor’s contract. And they weren’t selling their information so there’s no paperwork—or additional commitments—for that It also means there is no history of reliability. We know only that their information was good in this one case.”

  “Exactly.” Paula tapped her legal pad with the back of her hand and shook her head. “As a matter of fact,” she said, crossing her arms on her lap, “we can’t even be sure anyone has ever met these sources other than Tisler.” She lifted her arms to look down at her notes again. “Aside from your review signature, the operational documents were all signed by Tisler, as the control officer, and witnessed by Besom.”

  Paula, typically, had surprised him. As a creative analyst she rivaled Burtell. Even though she was meticulously limning the framework of a nightmare, he could not help but admire her ability to intuit the invisible. She looked at him and, using her middle finger and thumb of one hand, combed along the center part of her hair to get the sides of it out of her face.

  “Now”—she nodded at the folders on Graver’s desk—”those contributor ID documents indicate they were updated five months ago, in January, as per operational directives. According to the updates, two of the five sources changed addresses this year, two last year. One in each of the Probst and Friel cases each year. Nice and neat Balanced.”

  Paula shook her head, her eyes fixed on Graver. “Not so. This afternoon I made four telephone calls. On the first one, Bruce Sheck, I got an answering machine that told me I’d reached the number I’d dialed and to leave a message. At the number of the second source, Colleen Synar, a woman answered. She said that Synar had shared rent with her and another woman several years ago, but that she hadn’t heard from her in over two years. At the other two numbers, I reached people who’d never heard of the person named in the file. They’d both had their present numbers for years.”

  They stared at each other. Graver was trying to swallow a growing anxiety.

  “I didn’t make any calls on the Seldon investigation,” she said. “I didn’t want to risk screwing it up.”

  “Who signed the audits?” Graver asked. “Besom?”

  Paula nodded soberly. “You got it.”

  Graver’s mind was still, the kind of breathless still you experienced in that first moment when you realized that the unbelievable was inevitable and was about to happen.

  “My God,” he said. Paula had done exactly what an analyst was supposed to do. She had stepped back a little way from the trees, and she had seen the forest Slowly Arthur Tisler’s death slipped out of the bright light of forensic surety and receded once again into the murky margins of doubt Graver straightened up in his chair and leaned his forearms on the desk. “What else?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing else.” For the first time she looked drained.

  “Son of a bitch,” Graver said. He felt light-headed, maybe even slightly claustrophobic.

  “They developed the cases too easily,” Paula said, her voice portraying an awkward combination of caution and conviction. “Too slick. Those sources are tainted, Marcus. Somehow. Maybe they lied. Maybe they set up somebody.” She shook her head. “It beats me.”

  “They didn’t lie,” Graver said. He was tired too, and shaken. “Everything the sources provided was good, the take was corroborated by secon
d, sometimes third parties. There were convictions, for Christ’s sake.”

  “But they’re shielding the sources. Besom probably. But for sure Tisler… and Dean.”

  An EMS siren warbled on the expressway, its lights flashing in the dusk as it moved past them on one of the turns heading north. Graver stared out the wall of glass long after the ambulance had disappeared.

  “Jesus, Paula,” Graver said, “I…”

  He couldn’t believe it, and he had just come within a hairsbreadth of blurting his disbelief at Burtell’s involvement It was easy to entertain the idea of Tisler’s corruption. He was dead, and Graver had no personal attachments to him anyway. And Besom was one of his least favorite people on earth, one of Westrate’s buddies whom the assistant chief had foisted onto Graver. But to see this kind of incriminating evidence against Burtell was stunning.

  He stared at the cobblestone. The implications of her analysis were undeniable. He stood and stepped to the windows. There wasn’t enough air in the room; his heart labored with little effect.

  Paula nervously toyed with her bracelets, clacking them back and forth on her wrist. Graver knew it was clear to her what he was going through. Christ The world had not stopped, but it had slowed suddenly and dramatically.

  “Okay,” he said, staring out the window but seeing nothing beyond the glass. “Then what do we have? Let’s say they’re protecting sources. Why would they do that? I mean, to what purpose?”

  “Maybe the sources aren’t legitimate,” Paula said. “Maybe they… What if there’s only one source and this thing is being run from the outside, not from here.”

  “That would be asking a lot,” Graver said. “It’s not like these three operations had much in common.”

  “They wouldn’t have to. The common denominator would be the motive of whoever’s outside. It’s not likely we’d see a connection from this side of the picture.”

  Graver knew she was right She obviously had given this a lot of thought before bringing it to him. He anticipated where her logic had taken her next.

  “This has been going on a long time,” he said, turning around and coming back to his desk. “And it’s been working well. By now all the kinks have been worked out of it. We’re not likely to find anything to connect these investigations in the documentation. No frayed ends.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment.

  “We can’t confront Besom or Dean,” Graver said finally, sitting down behind his desk again. “At the first hint that we suspect something, this entire thing will evaporate.”

  “When is Besom supposed to be back from his fishing trip?”

  “Day after tomorrow… Wednesday.” Graver was getting a headache. “But he’s got another week of vacation. He’s not due to be back in the office until a week from Wednesday.”

  “You think Dean can get in touch with him?”

  Graver shrugged. He stared at the cobblestone, forcing himself to move on, to push Burtell’s image out of his mind, to think in the abstract about the logistics of Paula’s discoveries. The implications were mushrooming in his mind.

  “I’ve got to cut Tisler’s inquiry short,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Wrap it up as quickly as possible,” he said. “I won’t take the week I told Westrate it would require. Casey’s going to come up empty-handed on that background check. I’m sure of that now. Dean’s not going to ‘find’ anything. I’ll close it out, write a clearance paper and put it to bed. That’s all Westrate wants anyway, a tidy ending. We’ll give it to him.”

  “Then what?” Paula was frowning, uncertain where he was taking this.

  “If Tisler wasn’t murdered,” Graver said, “then his suicide is likely to have caught them by surprise, just as much as it did us. They’ve got to be off balance, probably worried that he’s left something behind that would blow this wide-open. It could be that whatever drove Tisler to kill himself is also bringing pressure to bear on the others. Maybe something’s unraveling and Tisler couldn’t face the consequences. His suicide can only have made things worse. I’ve got to avoid spooking them. It would be better if we made it look like we’re buying the suicide and want to sweep it under the rug as quickly as possible.”

  “What about the Seldon investigation?”

  Graver shook his head wearily. “I’ll have to replace Tisler. It’s got to go on… routinely, as if we have no suspicions.”

  “Christ. How will they handle that? You don’t think they’ll actually go ahead with a bogus ‘source,’ do you?”

  “No.” Graver shook his head emphatically. “They won’t do that. I think… I think when I put it to Dean he’ll say the source has dropped out of sight. Vanished. Tisler’s suicide is definitely a good-enough reason for a ‘source’ to spook and disappear. He’d be wary, unsure of what was ‘really’ happening. That would be entirely logical under the circumstances.”

  Paula said nothing, waiting.

  Graver reached up with one hand and pressed his fingers into the base of his neck where the muscle had been tensing tighter and tighter all evening.

  “But I’ve got to get something more to substantiate our suspicions,” he said. “They’re going to rely on Dean to be their first line of defense, the one to know if anything’s amiss. We’ve got to be careful with him.” The words almost stuck in his throat. “Maybe this thing goes laterally and other investigators and analysts are involved. Maybe it’s vertical, goes higher up…”

  He stopped and shook his head slowly. This was goddamned unbelievable. And, on a personal level, it was excruciatingly painful.

  Chapter 15

  Ray Besom had been walking fifteen or twenty minutes when he saw the wooden hull of the old wreck emerge above the dune grass a hundred yards ahead of him. Unconsciously he quickened his step, his excitement almost making him forget about the weight of the tackle box and rods and bait bucket he had been lugging for the last three quarters of a mile from the point where the hired skiff had dropped him off. The guy would be back at nine o’clock, well after dark, to take him back to Port Isabel. Boca Chica was the end of the line. You couldn’t get any farther south. If he walked another mile and a half he would come to the broad sand flats where the Rio Grande emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, and then on the other side of that nasty hemorrhage—maybe two hundred yards—was Mexico. That’s why he came here. Except for an occasional wanderer, it was isolated.

  Besom looked at his watch and then looked into the wind, out to the Gulf. The water was a dull, grayish brown with an occasional hint of pale turquoise and sometimes even a paler blue in the curls of the breakers. The Gulf oi Mexico was not a pretty thing, not in the traditional sense that someone thinks of coastal waters as being pretty. But to him that characteristic, unlovely color of the warm Gulf Stream was beautiful, even exotic, and nothing at all in his experience compared to the tangy smell of these salt-laden breezes which, if you caught them at just the right time early in the morning or late in the evening, like now, carried with them the smoky aura of Mexico.

  This was his sixth and last afternoon. His brother-in-law, who had driven down with him from Houston, had gotten sick on the second day and had flown back home. That was fine with him. The guy wasn’t much of a fisherman, really, and he didn’t like to hang around the bait shops and bars and icehouses when the dead tides made the fishing bad. But those were the places you learned things, those little dives where old farts with beer bellies, burned skin, and bad teeth laid up in the shadows in the heat of the day. These guys could tell you a thing or two about how to handle yourself if the tides were right and you wanted to get a hook into a redfish or speckled trout or flounder. This was the one week that he lived for during the other fifty-one.

  He checked his watch again as he walked up to the old hull of the shrimp boat that had washed onto the beach seven years ago. He had checked the tide tables and in half an hour he wanted to be in the water. The sun was way behind him, going down somewhere in Mexico. He had a good two hou
rs to fish before dark. But first, just to enjoy the moment, he dropped his equipment next to the hull and sat down in the sand. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and lighted it, and then he reached for the waders he had been carrying, put his hand down into one of the legs and pulled out a single bottle of beer. He popped the cap on the sweaty, amber bottle and sat back against the bleached hull of the shrimper. Seagulls slid across the sky above him, squeaking, hovering, dipping down to look at him. If this could last forever you wouldn’t hear any complaints from him.

  When the cigarette gave out, Besom tossed it away and tucked the bottom of the beer bottle into the sand. He reached for his waders and began pulling them on, stopping a couple of times to work on the beer before it got warm. Standing, he finished buckling the waders and then reached down for the beer and finished it, tossing the bottle in the sand near the hull. He picked up the largest of the two rods—Go for it, he told himself—and checked the shimmering green Ambassador 5500 casting reel. Opening his tackle box he surveyed the trays of lures, having already decided against the shrimp tails in the bucket He selected a Gold Spoon, rigged it, and walked across the beach to the water.

  Wading into the water until it was just above his crotch and just below his waist, he spread his legs slightly for balance and began casting. It was a hell of a pleasure, a real pleasure like sex, to hear the reel whine in the casting, to let the lure settle a second and then begin bringing it in, feeling the tug and nuzzle on the line as the surf pulled and pushed at his pelvis.

  He had been fishing a little over half an hour with only one bite, something that hit the spoon and screamed away with it and then spat it out, something playing with him, making his adrenaline squirt and his heart hammer as his imagination created a monster redfish way out past the sandbar, when he saw the girl.