An Absence of Light

Tisler had been sitting behind the steering wheel when the shot was fired, but his upper body was now laying over on the passenger side, his blasted head partially submerged in the black syrup that had pooled in the depression of the seat His right leg was twisted awkwardly under the steering wheel column, his left one stretched full-length, sticking out the door. His right arm was flung out, hanging over the edge of the seat, and under it on the floor was a handgun, an automatic. There was a world of blood, and Graver could smell it, an oddly precise odor, a kind of musty sweetness, like something that had been stored in a dank cellar, something old. It was, he thought, an odor that probably had not changed in all the millennia of human history, that surely had smelled exactly like this ever since the day that Cain became the first man to breathe it.

Tordella pointed at the inside of the doorjamb, at the button that allowed the light to come on when the door was opened.

“He wedged a wooden match next to the button to keep it pushed in,” he said. “I guess maybe he sat here a while before he did it and didn’t want to attract attention.” He gestured toward the dashboard. “Radio’s on, but the volume’s turned down. You wonder why he didn’t just turn it off.”

“And the door was open like this?”

“Yeah, just like this. And look.” Tordella leaned across in front of Graver and pointed to the edge of the open door. “I think the damned bullet nicked the door frame. That’s what we’re looking for in the grass there, the slug.”

“There’s no note?”

“We haven’t found one”-Tordella shrugged, nibbling at his mustache-”but we haven’t gone through all of his clothes yet, or the car.”

He shone his flashlight around inside the car. A pair of trousers on a coat hanger covered with clear plastic was hanging behind the passenger’s side in the back; a pink laundry slip was stapled to the plastic. There was nothing else in the back seat, no litter, no clutter, no overlooked gum wrappers.

“Was he a neat person, like this?” Tordella nodded at the back seat.

“He was neat,” Graver said.

“Somebody might’ve cleaned it up. Or I guess he might’ve. You know, the way they do sometimes.”

There were a lot of myths about suicides, about how they often carefully planned their deaths, about their oddly scrupulous behavior before they died, about the strange logic of their dementia. But Graver never had been impressed by any of that. He did not find such generalities particularly convincing because he did not think of suicides as a single, peculiar species with specific, identifiable characteristics. Mentally disturbed people committed suicide. Intelligent, well-balanced people committed suicide. Cowards committed suicide and heroes too. Richard Cory killed himself, as did Judas. And Socrates. Graver saw very little in such a diversity that lent itself to generalization. He was invariably suspicious of simple, formulaic explanations to anything; axioms made him uneasy.

A small, twin-engine aircraft came whining down the tarmac toward them and lifted off so low over their heads that Graver could feel the props rumbling in his chest. Everyone turned and looked up at it, toward the sound of it, lifting up into the darkness.

“I guess we’ll get started, then,” Tordella said, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, popping the latex at his wrists. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas about this.”

Graver shook his head. “Not a clue. His squad supervisor is Ray Besom. Normally he would know if Tisler was working tonight, but he’s on vacation, a fishing trip down near Port Isabel. And I imagine Dean Burtell might know.”

“Burtell?”

“He’s the analyst who works with Tisler most of the time.”

Tordella nodded some more, studiously avoiding Graver’s eyes as he interlaced the fingers of his hands and tamped the gloves tight.

“Okay. Well, look, stop us if you want to see something or have questions or anything,” he said, flicking a glance at Graver. “Otherwise, considering who we got here, I’m going to work it up in detail.”

Graver turned and walked back to his car, out of the white glare of the headlights. Pio Tordella was only the first in a long line of people who were going to be looking over Graver’s shoulder on this one. The unexplained death of an intelligence officer had the effect of producing the maximum amount of suspicion with the least hope of having it resolved. There was no way to avoid the immediate assumption by others that something had gone terribly wrong in the Division where secrets were the stock in trade.