An Absence of Light

“Of course, but my point is that Art wasn’t that far into it yet He wasn’t near anything. You’ve seen his contact reports. He was just beginning with this informant. The guy had potential, but Art was having to work his ass off to develop it. But he didn’t know enough yet to get him killed.”

“That you know about.”

“Well, yeah,” Burtell conceded, “that I know about.”

“He wasn’t working on anything else that had the potential of turning nasty?”

Burtell shook his head and stared away toward the night beyond the windows. “The three other targets he was working…” His voice trailed off and again he seemed to let his thoughts drift on to something else. For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Burtell continued, his gaze still directed outside, “…with me, they were pretty much on idle.” He shifted his eyes back to Graver. “I don’t know,” he said. It was a statement of puzzlement, not ignorance.

Graver studied Burtell. He had expected him to be shocked, to be sobered, even stunned by the news of Tisler’s death, but he had no idea that Burtell would be affected like this, that he would be so… disturbed.

“Okay,” Graver said. He had heard enough. Maybe Burtell would have a new perspective on it in the morning. “Look, maybe I should go on over there and tell Peggy myself. Or I could go with you…”

“No, it’s all right,” Burtell said, shaking his head. “I really ought to. Ginny and I.” He looked over at his glass as if he expected there might be something there to drink. He looked at Graver.

“Tomorrow was supposed to be the first day of my vacation,” he said. “Guess I’ll hold up on that.”

Graver had forgotten. “Were you leaving town?”

“No, not the first week. Ginny couldn’t get away just now. But we were going away the second week.”

“Maybe we can clear this out in a couple of days.”

“What about Besom? He can’t be reached can he?”

“No, but I think he’s supposed to be back in the city late tomorrow, though he’s not scheduled to return to the office for another week.”

“This is going to be a stunner for him.”

“I’ll try to get him as soon as he’s back in town.”

“Westrate, what about him?”

“I haven’t talked to him,” Graver said.

“He’s going to shit.”

“Probably.”

Graver wasn’t surprised by the question. Jack Westrate kept so much pressure on the Division that every time something happened out of the ordinary, every time there was an administrative or budgetary change or an investigation became “sensitive,” everyone wondered how Jack Westrate was going to react. No one ever believed he would go to the wall for them. Westrate was consistent; he always put himself and his own concerns first. Every time there was a ripple in the water his first thought was how was it going to affect his own little boat Arthur Tisler’s self-centered act of despair would be an enormous annoyance for Westrate’s own self-centered preoccupations.

Graver watched Burtell absently wind his watch. It was a dress watch, the classic kind that didn’t have a battery. You had to wind it regularly. Graver guessed it wasn’t even water-resistant, that kind of a dress watch. Burtell fidgeted with the band, a leather band with a gold buckle. You didn’t see much death in the kind of work they did. You never really got much of an opportunity to see how people would react to it.

Chapter 5

As he walked outside and retraced his way along the gently curving sidewalk to his car, Graver thought the night air seemed even more oppressive than before. Feeling uneasy, he unlocked his car and got in, started the engine, and looked toward Burtell’s house as he turned on the headlights. There wasn’t much to see through the staggered, straight silhouettes of the pines, only glimpses of the lighted windows in the chalky black haze.

He pulled away from the curb and drove out of the cul-de-sac. Burtell, he thought, had reacted pretty much as Graver had expected. And then again he hadn’t. Though Burtell was indeed shocked at the news of Tisler’s death, shocked even that it had been suicide, his reaction seemed, somehow, to exceed the import of this grim news. It wasn’t that he had behaved inappropriately or ingenuously, or that his reaction was emotive. Burtell was not given to melodrama. It was just that his response was more inclusive, as though there were another dimension to the news, and that he was understanding more than Graver had told him. Graver didn’t doubt anything he saw. He simply had seen more than he was expecting.