An Absence of Light (13 page)

“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.”

“They didn’t lie,” Graver said. He was tired too, and shaken. “Everything the sources provided was good, the take was corroborated by second, sometimes third parties. There were
convictions
, for Christ’s sake.”

“But they’re shielding the sources. Besom probably. But for sure Tisler… and Dean.”

An EMS siren warbled on the expressway, its lights flashing in the dusk as it moved past them on one of the turns heading north. Graver stared out the wall of glass long after the ambulance had disappeared.

“Jesus, Paula,” Graver said, “I…”

He couldn’t believe it, and he had just come within a hairsbreadth of blurting his disbelief at Burtell’s involvement It was easy to entertain the idea of Tisler’s corruption. He was dead, and Graver had no personal attachments to him anyway. And Besom was one of his least favorite people on earth, one of Westrate’s buddies whom the assistant chief had foisted onto Graver. But to see this kind of incriminating evidence against Burtell was stunning.

He stared at the cobblestone. The implications of her analysis were undeniable. He stood and stepped to the windows. There wasn’t enough air in the room; his heart labored with little effect.

Paula nervously toyed with her bracelets, clacking them back and forth on her wrist. Graver knew it was clear to her what he was going through. Christ The world had not stopped, but it had slowed suddenly and dramatically.

“Okay,” he said, staring out the window but seeing nothing beyond the glass. “Then what do we have? Let’s say they’re protecting sources. Why would they do that? I mean, to what purpose?”

“Maybe the sources aren’t legitimate,” Paula said. “Maybe they… What if there’s only one source and this thing is being run from the outside, not from here.”

“That would be asking a lot,” Graver said. “It’s not like these three operations had much in common.”

“They wouldn’t have to. The common denominator would be the motive of whoever’s outside. It’s not likely we’d see a connection from this side of the picture.”

Graver knew she was right She obviously had given this a lot of thought before bringing it to him. He anticipated where her logic had taken her next.

“This has been going on a long time,” he said, turning around and coming back to his desk. “And it’s been working well. By now all the kinks have been worked out of it. We’re not likely to find anything to connect these investigations in the documentation. No frayed ends.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“We can’t confront Besom or Dean,” Graver said finally, sitting down behind his desk again. “At the first hint that we suspect something, this entire thing will evaporate.”

“When is Besom supposed to be back from his fishing trip?”

“Day after tomorrow… Wednesday.” Graver was getting a headache. “But he’s got another week of vacation. He’s not due to be back in the office until a week from Wednesday.”

“You think Dean can get in touch with him?”

Graver shrugged. He stared at the cobblestone, forcing himself to move on, to push Burtell’s image out of his mind, to think in the abstract about the logistics of Paula’s discoveries. The implications were mushrooming in his mind.

“I’ve got to cut Tisler’s inquiry short,” he said.

“What?”

“Wrap it up as quickly as possible,” he said. “I won’t take the week I told Westrate it would require. Casey’s going to come up empty-handed on that background check. I’m sure of that now. Dean’s not going to ‘find’ anything. I’ll close it out, write a clearance paper and put it to bed. That’s all Westrate wants anyway, a tidy ending. We’ll give it to him.”

“Then what?” Paula was frowning, uncertain where he was taking this.

“If Tisler wasn’t murdered,” Graver said, “then his suicide is likely to have caught them by surprise, just as much as it did us. They’ve got to be off balance, probably worried that he’s left something behind that would blow this wide-open. It could be that whatever drove Tisler to kill himself is also bringing pressure to bear on the others. Maybe something’s unraveling and Tisler couldn’t face the consequences. His suicide can only have made things worse. I’ve got to avoid spooking them. It would be better if we made it look like we’re buying the suicide and want to sweep it under the rug as quickly as possible.”

“What about the Seldon investigation?”

Graver shook his head wearily. “I’ll have to replace Tisler. It’s got to go on… routinely, as if we have no suspicions.”

“Christ. How will they handle that? You don’t think they’ll actually go ahead with a bogus ‘source,’ do you?”

“No.” Graver shook his head emphatically. “They won’t do that. I think… I think when I put it to Dean he’ll say the source has dropped out of sight. Vanished. Tisler’s suicide is definitely a good-enough reason for a ‘source’ to spook and disappear. He’d be wary, unsure of what was ‘really’ happening. That would be entirely logical under the circumstances.”

Paula said nothing, waiting.

Graver reached up with one hand and pressed his fingers into the base of his neck where the muscle had been tensing tighter and tighter all evening.

“But I’ve got to get something more to substantiate our suspicions,” he said. “They’re going to rely on Dean to be their first line of defense, the one to know if anything’s amiss. We’ve got to be careful with him.” The words almost stuck in his throat. “Maybe this thing goes laterally and other investigators and analysts are involved. Maybe it’s vertical, goes higher up…”

He stopped and shook his head slowly. This was goddamned unbelievable. And, on a personal level, it was excruciatingly painful.

Ray Besom had been walking fifteen or twenty minutes when he saw the wooden hull of the old wreck emerge above the dune grass a hundred yards ahead of him. Unconsciously he quickened his step, his excitement almost making him forget about the weight of the tackle box and rods and bait bucket he had been lugging for the last three quarters of a mile from the point where the hired skiff had dropped him off. The guy would be back at nine o’clock, well after dark, to take him back to Port Isabel. Boca Chica was the end of the line. You couldn’t get any farther south. If he walked another mile and a half he would come to the broad sand flats where the Rio Grande emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, and then on the other side of that nasty hemorrhage—maybe two hundred yards—was Mexico. That’s why he came here. Except for an occasional wanderer, it was isolated.

Besom looked at his watch and then looked into the wind, out to the Gulf. The water was a dull, grayish brown with an occasional hint of pale turquoise and sometimes even a paler blue in the curls of the breakers. The Gulf oi Mexico was not a pretty thing, not in the traditional sense that someone thinks of coastal waters as being pretty. But to him that characteristic, unlovely color of the warm Gulf Stream was beautiful, even exotic, and nothing at all in his experience compared to the tangy smell of these salt-laden breezes which, if you caught them at just the right time early in the morning or late in the evening, like now, carried with them the smoky aura of Mexico.

This was his sixth and last afternoon. His brother-in-law, who had driven down with him from Houston, had gotten sick on the second day and had flown back home. That was fine with him. The guy wasn’t much of a fisherman, really, and he didn’t like to hang around the bait shops and bars and icehouses when the dead tides made the fishing bad. But those were the places you learned things, those little dives where old farts with beer bellies, burned skin, and bad teeth laid up in the shadows in the heat of the day. These guys could tell you a thing or two about how to handle yourself if the tides were right and you wanted to get a hook into a redfish or speckled trout or flounder. This was the one week that he lived for during the other fifty-one.

He checked his watch again as he walked up to the old hull of the shrimp boat that had washed onto the beach seven years ago. He had checked the tide tables and in half an hour he wanted to be in the water. The sun was way behind him, going down somewhere in Mexico. He had a good two hours to fish before dark. But first, just to enjoy the moment, he dropped his equipment next to the hull and sat down in the sand. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and lighted it, and then he reached for the waders he had been carrying, put his hand down into one of the legs and pulled out a single bottle of beer. He popped the cap on the sweaty, amber bottle and sat back against the bleached hull of the shrimper. Seagulls slid across the sky above him, squeaking, hovering, dipping down to look at him. If this could last forever you wouldn’t hear any complaints from him.

When the cigarette gave out, Besom tossed it away and tucked the bottom of the beer bottle into the sand. He reached for his waders and began pulling them on, stopping a couple of times to work on the beer before it got warm. Standing, he finished buckling the waders and then reached down for the beer and finished it, tossing the bottle in the sand near the hull. He picked up the largest of the two rods—Go for it, he told himself—and checked the shimmering green Ambassador 5500 casting reel. Opening his tackle box he surveyed the trays of lures, having already decided against the shrimp tails in the bucket He selected a Gold Spoon, rigged it, and walked across the beach to the water.

Wading into the water until it was just above his crotch and just below his waist, he spread his legs slightly for balance and began casting. It was a hell of a pleasure, a real pleasure like sex, to hear the reel whine in the casting, to let the lure settle a second and then begin bringing it in, feeling the tug and nuzzle on the line as the surf pulled and pushed at his pelvis.

He had been fishing a little over half an hour with only one bite, something that hit the spoon and screamed away with it and then spat it out, something playing with him, making his adrenaline squirt and his heart hammer as his imagination created a monster redfish way out past the sandbar, when he saw the girl.

She was coming toward him from up the beach, coming from civilization. He caught her out of the corner of his eye as he was casting, and when the lure hit the water and he started reeling in, he looked back at her. A dog was with her, of all things, a greyhound. When he was a kid living on Baffin Bay before the development of Riviera Beach, he used to have a greyhound, him and his best friend, a greyhound each. They would sneak into the King Ranch with them and chase coyotes and jackrabbits in the limitless, empty brush country that stretched all the way to Laguna Madre.

Besom couldn’t see her face, but in the softening light of evening he could see that she had long black hair and that she was damn near naked. It was a bikini, of course, but from where he stood in the surf she was all thighs and bosom, moving along the beach toward him, eating something. Actually she was sauntering, that was the word for it, sauntering, walking leisurely, her long legs as long in proportion to her body as her greyhound’s legs were to his, two graceful creatures coming along the beach as if this were not as deserted a stretch of sand as he could find.

By the time he had cast a couple more times, she was within shouting distance of him, and she had stopped at the edge of the water and was watching him, her head tilted a little, the dog loping around her, in and out of the sand and water like a racehorse. When he reeled in the next cast, he turned and looked at her. She was smiling at him. It was a red bikini… and more tight, tanned flesh than he could ever remember seeing.

“Any luck?” she shouted above the surf. The wind was blowing her black hair, and she shook her head, shook it out of her face.

“Not a hell of a lot, no,” he shouted back. He hesitated, thought better of it, and turned back to the water. Casting again, as far as he could toss the spoon, he began reeling. He tried to be patient with it, tried to concentrate on the action of the lure far out in the gray water, but more than that, he wanted to turn around and look at the girl again. He could feel her still back there.

When the line was back to him, he turned. The girl was closer now and had waded a little way into the water to watch. He smiled at her.

“You like fishing?”

“I like watching,” she said. “They’re not biting, huh?”

“Not yet.”

She had a slight accent. Not Mexican. Something else. Some kind of cute little accent.

She held up what she had in her hand. “Want a few slices of orange?”

Slices of orange? Oh, Mother Machree. Besom cut his eyes up the beach. Not a soul in sight. He hesitated. Shit. He shrugged “why not” to her, nodded, and turned slowly in the water and headed toward her. By the time he got to her she had backed up a little, and the edge of the surf was swirling around her ankles.

“How long you been out there?” she asked as he walked up to her.

He looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”

“What are you fishing for?” she asked, breaking off nearly half of what she had left of the orange and handing it to him.

She was a little older than a college girl, he saw, now that he was close. Her hair was thick with the humidity of the salt air, and she had that lusty weathered look about her that gave him the impression that she had been on the beach most of the afternoon. The girl had an incredible body, and he just couldn’t help looking at her. She tossed her hair off her shoulders with the back of a bent wrist and when she did her breasts wobbled heavily behind the two small patches of her bikini top.