An Absence of Light

Graver looked away, toward the hallway floor just outside the double doors. A solitary lamp in the entrance hall was throwing a gleam across the polished hardwood floor like the trail of the moon on water. There was more than just an air of desperation in Westrate’s manner and that made Graver cautious. Suspicious and cautious. He reached over to his desk and got a notepad off the top along with his old green fountain pen. He unscrewed the cap from the pen and made a few notes on the tablet, only doodles, but Westrate couldn’t see that. He took his time, underlined a few things.

“Let’s just talk worse case, here,” Graver said, looking up. “How are you going to handle this if it’s a homicide?”

Westrate’s face changed from sober to grim at this question. He clearly had been thinking about this.

“Nobody gets into the file,” he said. “Not without written and verbal approval from me.”

Westrate was no clumsy buffoon despite his streetwise, bully-boy manner. The man could play power politics with as much sophistication as the best of them, which was precisely why he was sitting here now. Inside maneuvering was as second nature to him as his bluster. But even though Graver disliked him, he had to admit sympathy with Westrate’s situation. He was going to have to make some decisions for which there were no clear precedents, an agonizing position for a bureaucrat. Tisler’s death was going to require a criminal inquiry and, naturally, the investigations he was involved in would be central to the inquiry. And therein lay the problem.

Westrate had to consider not only how best to protect the integrity of the CID files, but he had an additional concern. As assistant chief in charge of Investigative Services, he was responsible not only for CID, but also for Homicide, Narcotics, Auto Theft, and the Crime Lab. Tisler’s death had put Westrate in the unenviable position of having his left hand (Homicide) investigate his right hand (CID), a situation which was made even worse by the fact that his right hand was the most secretive Division in the department and never opened its file to anyone.

So Graver asked the next sticky question. “What about IAD?”

Westrate shook his head slowly, emphatically. “I’m going to deal with that I’ve already talked with Hertig, before I came over here.”

No surprise there.

“Are you going to try to restrict them?”

“Damn right I am,” Westrate snapped, his eyes boring in belligerently as if Graver himself had challenged him. “Nobody wants to relive that shit in the seventies. I’m not going to have anything like that on my watch.”

“That was an altogether different situation, Jack. They were using the CID to compile dossiers on political enemies. It was stupid. They should have expected to have their files seized. They had nobody to blame but themselves.”

“That may be,” Westrate said. “But Lukens is going to have to climb over my dead goddamned body to get to that file.”

Graver capped his fountain pen. “That may be wrongheaded thinking,” he said.

Westrate looked at him. “What?”

Westrate was bowing his neck at this hint of anything less than total endorsement.

“Come on, Jack. An intelligence officer’s death complicates the question of confidentiality,” Graver said. “We can’t very well refuse to turn over material evidence. I think we can argue for some editing of what they see, but I don’t know how we can refuse to let them see anything.”

“If Tordella determines this is a suicide, that’s great, best case,” Westrate said evasively. “No formal investigation. I’ll handle the administrative wars… you memorize Arthur Tisler.” He pointed the two index fingers of his clasped hands at Graver. “If somebody throws a question at you about that guy, I want you to be able to answer it with documentation, if there is any. I don’t want anybody to know anything about Arthur Tisler that you don’t already know about Arthur Tisler.”

Westrate was still sitting forward, the soles of his shoes planted flat on the floor, his forearms anchored to his knees, the shoulders of his suit hunched and rumpled, a physical reflection of his emotional disconcertion-and determination. The lighting in the living room was not all that good, but Graver clearly could see the moisture glistening on Westrate’s contentious upper lip. A lot was at stake, careers, and at least one man’s entire psychology. It seemed that Westrate was convinced-or knew-that a scandal was about to break. He seemed to be developing a siege mentality, to be taking his concern way beyond a prudent anticipation of events.

“Why did you come to me like this?” Graver asked after a moment. “You could have told me all this in the morning.”