An Absence of Light

“I haven’t read the Seldon documents,” Neuman went on, “but I’d like to. Dean’s been helping me develop the Darley investigation, that protection racket stuff. In the past month it’s been moving fast, very fast, and Dean’s been pushing me to move quicker, collect a wider variety of information, move, move, move… I’ve been chasing the damn ball from one side of the court to the other, just barely keeping up. But at the same time Art’s Seldon operation has been really cooking too, and sometimes Art and I were in and out of Dean’s office on a revolving-door basis. Documents flying back and forth, stuff breaking that couldn’t wait. We got a little sloppy, I guess, leaving raw data notes, report drafts, stuff like that, on each other’s desks instead of hand-to-hand delivery… not being too careful, or careful enough, anyway.”

Neuman paused and swallowed, a shake of the keys.

“About a month, no, three weeks ago, I was working through the lunch hour to complete a report before I had to leave for a one-thirty meeting with an informant Dean had my folder on that particular informant and was writing up notes for me, things he wanted me to watch for, things he wanted me to get if I could. I was actually meeting two informants that day, and Dean said he’d leave the contributor folders for both of them, along with his notes for me, on his desk. He was hurrying out to meet his wife for lunch.

“When I was finished, I ran across the hall to his office. His desk was a mess. I grabbed the two folders and took them back to my office. I flipped open the first one, read his notes, flipped open the second one. The documents were out of order. The most recent reports should have been at the front, Dean’s notes on top. Instead, it was all scrambled. I leafed through the typed reports and found Dean’s handwritten notes buried almost at the back. But when I started reading them, they didn’t make sense. I didn’t recognize anything. In fact these were not pre-interview notes at all, but a post-interview contributor contact report It didn’t take me but a second to realize that what I had was a Seldon case document.”

“Then it was Art’s handwriting, not Dean’s.”

“No. It was Dean’s handwriting.”

“What? You’re sure?”

“Positive. I see it every day.”

“Was the typed report in the folder with it?”

“No,” Neuman said. “It wasn’t.” His voice was flat, and he actually had to clear his throat, a gesture that made Graver heartsick. “That’s the deal. At the top right-hand corner of the first page Dean had written in the date, underlined it and circled it This was on… a Thursday. The report was dated for Friday-of the next week.”

“You’re sure?” Graver asked again. He had to. It was hard to believe that Neuman wasn’t making a mistake. His heart was pounding.

“Oh, yeah. I had a calendar right there, and I checked. I kept reading. There were references to events that ‘had’ occurred on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the coming week-I checked those dates too. The whole thing was written in the past tense, as if the events had already happened.”

“Incredible,” Graver said.

“Yeah.” Neuman nodded, looking at him. “Pretty wild.”

Graver looked away. An occasional car had passed by on the street while they were standing there, and as his eyes took notice of yet another one, he realized that it was at that moment accelerating. Had it been stopped across from them? Had it only slowed? Was it something he should have noticed? He turned back to Neuman.

“So what did you do?”

“I, uh, I quickly looked at the other documents in the folder. It was in my folder all right, my CI. This thing had just gotten in there by accident.”

Neuman shook his keys. Graver could tell that he was pained by having to come out with this.

“I took the folder and ran back to Dean’s office,” Neuman continued, after taking a deep breath. “I picked through the pile of papers and folders there, trying not to disturb them. I played a hunch and went to the bottom, and sure enough I found another contributor contact folder. There was a two-digit difference in the contributor control number between this folder and mine. A transposition. It was a Seldon case folder. I found Dean’s handwritten notes to me about my CI inside the folder, right on top where I’d expected to find it I switched the handwritten pages to their proper folder, put the Seldon folder back on the bottom of the pile where I’d found it and got the hell out of there.”

“Afterward,” Graver asked, “did Dean ever indicate to you that he suspected something might have been disturbed?”

“No. It was just dumb luck that I realized what had happened and that I actually found the Seldon contributor folder at the bottom of the pile. But then, I guess that accounts for Dean’s misplacement of his notes in the first place.”