An Absence of Light (12 page)

“Graver.”

He started, but wasn’t surprised that the voice he recognized was Paula’s.

“I thought I was the only one here,” she said, leaning against the door frame, a manila folder dangling from her hand.

“Come in,” he said, sitting back in his chair. He was glad to see her, glad to have someone to talk to. “Sit down.”

Paula pulled herself away from the door frame and sat in one of the chairs in front of Graver’s desk, crossing her long legs and looking out the windows. Across the bayou the reflection of the falling sun ignited the skyscrapers like molten pillars against the cobalt sky.

Paula frowned at the burning glass escarpments thinking, unhurried, absorbed in her thoughts which were, he imagined, so unlike everyone else’s thoughts, so singularly faceted, that if he read them in an anthology of thoughts he would recognize their style immediately. Normally Paula’s acerbic sense of humor was very much in evidence, and her attitude and conversation were sprinkled with wit heavily laced with sarcasm. Not a personality to everyone’s choice. But Graver liked her; and he liked the woman she was hiding. At the moment, however, he sensed a distinct sobriety.

“What do you think about all this?” she asked, turning to him and raising the folders in her hand, her bracelets clacking on her wrist.

“There’s something new on that,” Graver said. He told her about the call from Westrate.

“No shit?” She was frowning.

“Surprised?”

“I don’t know. I just…” She shrugged. “Then I guess that takes the pressure off.”

“It does, but we’ve got to write an assessment report anyway.” He rubbed his eyes, wiped his hand over his face, and leaned his elbows on the desk “What do I think? I scanned Tisler’s investigations on the computer. Most of them were pretty much in overdrive it seemed to me. Except the Alan Seldon opening. Everything was taking a back seat to that.”

Paula nodded, and though she said nothing, he could tell she had something on her mind.

“What about you?”

She leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. Paula’s spontaneity sometimes made her seem ten years younger than her age. He could see her eyes fixed on the acoustic tile above them. She swallowed, and her Adam’s apple rose and fell the length of her long throat Finally she raised her head and straightened up in the chair, turned a little more squarely to him.

“You know, five years ago when I first came here, Tisler was a mediocre investigator,” she said bluntly, getting right down to business. “Actually, less than mediocre. His track record was lousy. But about eighteen months ago things changed. He had two long investigations in succession—Probst and Friel. Remember them?”

“Sure. They were good operations.”

“Oh, yeah,” Paula said. “They both netted big-time results when we turned them over to operations. Now, with this Seldon thing, it looks like he was onto another big one.” She paused and looked squarely at Graver. “I know I was supposed to be reviewing only the five open investigations Tisler was working with Dean, but I happened to think of those other two cases and went to the archives and pulled them. As I read over those two operations—and the beginnings of the Seldon business—one question kept popping into my mind over and over: How in the hell did he get so good all of a sudden?”

Graver had settled back, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair.

“I don’t know that he was suddenly all that good, was he?” he asked. “Probst and Friel were outstanding collection efforts, no doubt about it, but Tisler had eight or ten other targets whose progress was anything but exemplary.”

“Okay, fine, but to my way of thinking that makes Probst, Friel, and Seldon all the more… curious,” Paula persisted. “They’re outstandingly atypical.”

Graver watched her closely.

“All day I’ve been reading over the reports of these three investigations,” Paula went on. “They share some interesting commonalities: an extraordinarily lean and orderly collection plan, big results, Dean as the analyst, and… all the contributors were sources.”

“All of them?”

“All that mattered,” she said. “There were a couple of informants thrown in, but they provided only incidental take. Think about it. We’d be lost in this business without informants, right? Even with all their detrimental baggage. But what we’d really like to have are sources. Sources have no criminal histories for defense attorneys to parade out to discredit the witness. Sources have no plea bargains to arrange in exchange for their testimony. Sources have no messy criminal personalities to baby-sit and fret over. They’re just well-informed, conscientious citizens, clean and smelling of soap, eager and willing to help law enforcement with their little bits of invaluable information. Right?”

Graver nodded.

“Well, it seems that in these three investigations Tisler stumbled onto an embarrassment of riches. Suddenly he had nothing but sterling silver sources. These are the only three of his investigations in all his years in CID in which this has happened. The rest of the time he had to make do with a pretty shoddy line-up of informants.”

She paused to let this soak in, and then her crossed leg began swinging. Something changed in her expression too, a slight adjustment in her mouth, a tightening at the corners of her eyes. She seemed to be hesitating before making her next point But she went on.

“The initial leads in these things—all three of them—may have been Tisler’s,” Paula said, tapping the folders on her lap with an index finger. “But from then on he would have worked closely with Dean. It’s a sure bet Dean guided the investigations and constructed the format for collecting the information. And Besom, of course, as Tisler’s squad supervisor, would have followed every bit of this step-by-tep.”

Graver straightened up in his chair. He leaned forward with his forearms on his desk, picked up a pencil, and began bouncing the eraser end of it off the top of the old, iron-gray cobblestone. He was interested.

Paula turned her chair sideways and pulled another chair around to face her. She kicked off her shoes and propped her feet on the horizontal brace that supported the legs and used her inclined thighs as a lap desk. She flipped to the first page of her legal pad.

“First, just a quick overview of two cases where Tisler’s sources did such an extraordinary job for him. Okay?”

Graver nodded, watching her. Paula was quite capable of becoming obsessive about an investigation. It was one of the characteristics that made her a superior analyst.

“The Probst investigation,” she said, looking at her notes. “Ray Probst owned a temporary employee service that specialized in providing temps to banks and insurance companies. He used his temps as spies to acquire information on persons who had sizable personal incomes. Using their computers, the temps targeted the homes and even the items there that could be easily stolen, certain kinds of PC’s, televisions, jewelry, art work, silver, everything. After the thefts, all the stuff was warehoused in small outlying airports and eventually flown to Mexico and points south for resale in the black market.

“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.

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.