An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

Westrate didn’t answer immediately, but when he turned around Graver was disconcerted to see that his wrath had physically altered his features. His eyes were puffy, and pasty swags of flesh were forming beneath them; his cheeks, normally taut with obesity, now appeared swollen with a scattering of unhealthy, livid blotches. He unhurriedly closed the door to his office and came over and gave a quick jerk to the other chair in front of his desk and sat down in it facing Graver, his short log-like legs spread out.

  “What do you think about all this?” he asked. His voice was uncharacteristically quiet, and for the first time ever Graver saw an expression on his face that conveyed, however slightly, a vague vulnerability.

  Graver braced himself. He could see that Westrate was at his wit’s end, and he guessed the assistant chief was beginning to imagine, to see the foreshadowing of plots against him, against his career. What Westrate wanted was for Graver to say it first. He wanted to hear Graver say that something was wrong here.

  “I think Tisler killed himself,” Graver said. “And I doubt if we’ll ever know why. And, until another autopsy proves otherwise, I’m going to assume Besom had a heart attack.”

  Westrate’s face fell. “That’s it?”

  “That’s what I think,” Graver said.

  “These two deaths are exactly what they appear to be?” His voice rose with incredulity.

  “I’ve got to think so in the absence of any evidence that indicates otherwise.”

  “But just the fact that they died so close together… that doesn’t make you suspicious?”

  “As a matter of fact it does…” Graver said.

  Westrate’s eyebrows lifted in anticipation.

  “…but I think we’ve got to be careful, Jack. I think we’ve got to be suspicious of our suspicions. It would be too damn easy to read something into these events that the facts don’t support” He paused and looked at Westrate. “You ever heard of ‘Occam’s razor’?”

  Westrate stared at him.

  “William of Occam was a fourteenth-century English philosopher who stated a kind of commonsense principle regarding lines of inquiry into the truth of a situation. It was stated in Latin, but translated it means: ‘Plurality must not be posited without necessity.’ A modern rendering might be, ‘An explanation of the facts should be no more complicated than necessary,’ or ‘Among competing hypotheses, favor the simplest one.’ Occam’s razor advocated cutting away all the unnecessary considerations that can clutter up a line of inquiry and sticking to the simplest theory consistent with the facts.”

  Westrate’s expression portrayed a disgruntled impatience.

  “I’ve got a lot of data that tells me Tisler committed suicide,” Graver elaborated. “The simplest explanation is that he did. I’ve got a lot of data that tells me Ray Besom had a heart attack. The simplest explanation, consistent with the facts, is that he did. So, unless we obtain other facts, facts that are inconsistent with the explanation, then the weight of my suppositions will have to fall with the simplest explanation.”

  “Give me a break, Graver,” Westrate snapped, his small nostrils flaring with agitation at Graver’s professorial anecdote. “I’ve got four divisions to manage here.”

  That sounded like a non sequitur to Graver. He wasn’t sure what Westrate meant, but it was clear he was sweating pearls over this. If he had suspicions that something was terribly wrong in CID, he sure as hell wasn’t going to say so now. He was too sly for that If he did express such a belief and it turned out that Besom did indeed have a heart attack, Westrate would end up sounding like a conspiracy theorist and an alarmist—one of my men kills himself, another one has a heart attack, ergo the CID is riddled by spys and cabalists. No, Westrate wasn’t going to risk that with anyone, especially not with Graver. But he believed it.

  Once again the pager on Graver’s belt vibrated. Without looking down he turned it off.

  “Is there something you want me to do?”

  “No,” Westrate said, getting up quickly.

  “Does Hertig know this?”

  “Goddamn right he knows it. I called him.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “What do you mean—he goddamned couldn’t believe it Wants some answers… just like the rest of us,” he said pointedly. He waited a beat “It’s only a matter of hours before the media’s going to catch on to this. CID’s going to get some publicity. They’re going to call you spies, secret police, all those kinds of liberal shit buzz words.” He thrust his head forward. “Any suggestions?”

  “Yeah,” Graver fired back. “You handle it. Put whatever spin you want on it.”

  Westrate came to his feet and glared at Graver. Managing to get the best of his tongue, he stalked around behind his desk again. He fumbled in the debris there and found a cigar box, opened it, and took out a cigar. He jammed it in his mouth without lighting it and stood there, looking at Graver, mouthing the cigar, hands once again thrust deep into the pockets of his wrinkled trousers.

  “Let’s put it this way, Graver,” he said, talking around the cigar. “You’d better get all over this situation like a sailor on a whore. If there’s something to these ‘coincidences,’ if there is, and you don’t snap to it until it’s too goddamned late…” He took the cigar out of his mouth and said calmly, “…I’m gonna be so far up your ass you’ll have to shit through your nose for the rest of your life.”

  Ray Besom’s death was indeed a potential disaster for them, but Graver didn’t think you should try to damage-control a disaster by letting your brain explode. Westrate was going to have to get a grip on himself if he was going to handle the media intelligently. But Graver couldn’t do anything about that. He imagined Westrate and Chief Hertig’s public relations crew would convene early in the morning. They would start putting together something that would be palatable and would effectively cover up the panic. Then they were going to turn to Graver.

  “Anything else?” Graver asked, standing.

  Westrate jabbed the cigar into his mouth again and sat down in his chair. “No,” he said, and started pawing around in the mayhem of his desk.

  Graver walked out into the semidarkness of the reception area and paused long enough beside a table lamp to look at his pager. The number was Paula’s. She was still at the office.

  He took the elevator downstairs to the lobby and went straight to the pay phones. He called Kepner, told her what had happened. She didn’t have to be told anything else. After hanging up, he walked back through the lobby and out the back door and through a covered driveway that led in one direction to the motor pool, and in the other to the squat, smog-begrimed building where the CID occupied the southeast corner of the third floor.

  Chapter 29

  Graver stared at the darkness just in front of him as he followed the crumbling asphalt drive around to the back side of the compound. He had been shaken by the news of Ray Besom’s death, though Westrate had not realized it, so preoccupied was he with his own over-the-top performance. It was hard to believe Besom had had a heart attack, especially in light of what Graver knew about Tisler and Besom’s involvements. No, he didn’t think it was a heart attack. But that was instinct His judgment reminded him that if the Besom/Tisler/Burtell conspiracy—whatever it was—was indeed coming apart, it would be logical that the fear of the consequences would be exacting a severe toll on the participants. Weren’t heart failure and stress undeniably linked? So what the hell was he supposed to think? The grim fact was, he still didn’t know much of anything.

  He stopped in the spartan lobby beneath the CID offices and called Paula on the pay phone. “I’m downstairs,” he said. “Catch the security system for me, will you?”

  She met him just as he approached the receptionist’s glass booth and reactivated the security system after he came through.

  “Were you on your way here when I called?” she asked.

  “Kind of,” he said, pushing past her and walking straight to his office.

  She followed him and sto
od in the doorway and waited as he sat down behind his desk and quickly jotted down a couple of notes.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  He looked up at her and saw that she was barefooted, and her hair was pulled back in a bun, much of it working loose from the few pins she had holding it together. “You’ve been here all this time?”

  “Yeah, me and Casey. We think we may have something.”

  “Good. Get him in here. Is there any coffee in there?”

  “Yeah, we made a fresh pot about half an hour ago.” She was staring at him with a puzzled frown, knowing something was wrong.

  She stepped out into the hall and called Neuman from her office down at the other end as Graver went across to the coffee room and poured half a mug of the Division’s stout generic coffee. When he came back, he took off his suit coat and hung it on the hat rack in the corner and then sat down behind his desk. As Paula and Neuman came in, he was taking his first sip of coffee. Paula sat down, but Neuman remained standing, his arms folded, a notebook sticking out from under his elbow as he twisted his waist and shoulders. He had already had enough sitting.

  “You guys had anything to eat?” The air-conditioning seemed not to be working well, and Graver loosened his tie.

  “We brought in sandwiches,” Paula said.

  Graver nodded. “Look, before we get started, there are two developments. First, when I got to Tisler’s rent house I found a computer setup. Nobody lives there, apparently, but it looked like Tisler must have spent quite a bit of time there. It was a fairly good-sized computer. I wasn’t able to get in, but I did manage to copy the hard drive.”

  “My God.” Paula looked as if she had been given another clue to the location of the Holy Grail. “So where is it?” Neuman took a step forward.

  “I’ve got someone working on it.”

  Paula was incredulous. She started to speak, but Graver quickly preempted her.

  “And some worse news,” he said. “Ray Besom has been found dead down near Port Isabel.”

  Paula gasped as if she had been punched in the stomach, and Neuman unfolded his arms and walked behind her to the windows.

  “Holy shit.” Neuman looked outside, then turned and walked back to where he had been standing.

  “Heart attack,” Graver explained quickly, “according to the autopsy. Apparently he died while he was surf fishing.”

  “Oh God, Marcus,” Paula said, placing the flat of her hand on her forehead, her bracelets rattling, “I’m not going to believe that.” She dropped her hand. She shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe that.”

  Graver looked at her.

  “We know too much… just too damn much to swallow that,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

  “There’s going to be another autopsy,” Graver said. “Here.”

  Paula was still shaking her head. “It doesn’t matter, even if the Harris County ME says it was a heart attack—”

  “Wait a minute,” Neuman interrupted. He was moving back and forth between the windows and the door again, his eyes darting back and forth between Paula and Graver. “The thing is, if Besom was killed somehow—in whatever way—it was meant to be disguised as a natural death, wasn’t it? If we believe that, if that’s true, then this is… this is definitely a high-octane situation. I mean… what kind of people do shit like that?”

  Neuman, of course, had quickly closed on the central question. Each of them knew at this point that even they, with all their suspicions, had probably underestimated what they had stumbled upon. And Graver suspected all three of them were turning their suspicions in the same direction.

  “What about Dean?” Paula asked quickly. “Maybe he’s in danger.”

  “Or maybe he isn’t”—Graver shook his head—”which is even scarier.” Now he had confirmation that he hadn’t overreacted by going to Arnette Kepner. He thought a moment and then he said, “I’ve got to call him.”

  “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 t
hat 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.