An Absence of Light

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.

“My God,” he said. Paula had done exactly what an analyst was supposed to do. She had stepped back a little way from the trees, and she had seen the forest Slowly Arthur Tisler’s death slipped out of the bright light of forensic surety and receded once again into the murky margins of doubt Graver straightened up in his chair and leaned his forearms on the desk. “What else?”

She shrugged. “Nothing else.” For the first time she looked drained.

“Son of a bitch,” Graver said. He felt light-headed, maybe even slightly claustrophobic.

“They developed the cases too easily,” Paula said, her voice portraying an awkward combination of caution and conviction. “Too slick. Those sources are tainted, Marcus. Somehow. Maybe they lied. Maybe they set up somebody.” She shook her head. “It beats me.”