An Absence of Light

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.