An Absence of Light (18 page)

“Casey?”

Neuman repeated essentially what he had told Graver the night before about his search of Tisler’s records, though he now went into more detail. As Paula had done, he said there was a lot more he could do, but a preliminary check of the records, with the view that Tisler might possibly have had financial difficulties, turned up no flags that would make him want to pursue the issue further.

Graver nodded and tapped the eraser of his pencil on the cobblestone. For a moment no one said anything. Neuman was studying the top of his soft drink can again, Paula was still looking straight at Graver, and Burtell had lifted his coffee mug and was straightening a document inside one of his folders.

“Okay. If no one has anything they want to add, then I’m going to go ahead and write a summary reflecting that we turned up nothing suspect in our audit, and as far as we’re concerned their judgment that Tisler had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound will go into his file. End of inquiry.”

He looked at Burtell again. “Dean, will you continue to follow up with Peggy Tisler? Lara’s going to get the details about when the family can claim the body. You can check with her on your way out. She’s also going to see to it that the necessary paperwork is put together regarding the suicide ruling. Tisler’s insurance company is going to want that. And there are a few other things… arrangements for a memorial service… whatever.”

Burtell nodded. “Okay, sure, be glad to.”

“Now, let’s see, the next thing I want to get out of the way is deciding the best way to move ahead on the Seldon investigation.”

There was a quick stirring behind Burtell’s eyes.

“It looked to me like it was on track, a fast track,” Graver said.

“Well, yeah”—Burtell straightened up in his chair, trying to move smoothly past his surprise—”it was. But Art… on this one his source was the linchpin to the investigation. In fact, the guy was all there was to it.”

“Okay, all the more reason to get right back on it. Are you the alternate controlling officer?”

Burtell nodded, but it seemed tentative. Graver couldn’t quite read it.

“Good,” Graver said. “I’d like Casey to work with you on this. I know we don’t normally do this, but under the circumstances I’d rather you didn’t continue the case alone.” Graver was too close to Burtell. He had no idea how he was carrying this off, if the incredible tension he was feeling was showing through his feint. “From the looks of it there’s the potential that it could mushroom, and I think you ought to team up on it again. You think the guy will go for that?”

Burtell involuntarily shot a look at Neuman and then back to Graver. He shifted in his chair. “Jesus, I, uh, I don’t know, Marcus. He’s already paranoid, and Art was really having to massage him, coax him along. When he finds out Art’s dead… I don’t know. I just don’t see how we can.”

Graver looked at Burtell and hesitated as if he was trying to figure out just exactly what it was Burtell was getting at.

Burtell went on, putting the best face on it that he could muster.

“This guy… was having a hard time believing we could keep his identity confidential. I know that’s a routine concern, but… he’s not a routine source.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“What do you mean?” Graver asked, but he wasn’t sure his tone of voice conveyed what he had intended.

Burtell looked around at each of them. Had Graver unintentionally betrayed something? Paula and Neuman both met Burtell’s glance. Then everything turned, and it seemed to Graver that at that moment Burtell realized there was no way he was going to be able to finesse this. Graver could see it coming. As he had predicted, Burtell was about to pull the plug.

“We need to go into this, Marcus,” Burtell said. Suddenly his tone was brittle, clinical. “Just the two of us.”

Neuman and Paula didn’t even have to be asked. They simply got up and walked out of the office.

When the door closed behind them, Burtell stood, putting his files and his coffee mug down on the corner of Graver’s desk. Though he tried to appear composed, something that normally came easily to him, his agitation was apparent, just beneath the surface. He stepped to the windows and looked out at the city which was hard and bright in the clear morning, collecting his thoughts. A handsome man, well dressed… and composed. Almost.

“The damn case wasn’t that healthy.” he began, leaning one shoulder against the glass wall, one hand in his pocket. “You saw yourself there aren’t that many documents in the folder. Not that much corroborated information.” He looked outside again, squinting into the eastern skyline. “Art had only three meetings with this guy.”

Graver looked down at the opened folder on his desk. “Nieson.”

Burtell nodded, not bothering to hide a look of disgust.

“Right, Parnell Nieson. At each meeting Nieson wore a wig, an expensive one. Art thought it was a hairpiece after the first meeting, but he couldn’t be positive. Second meeting he was satisfied it was. Nieson… always had several days’ growth of beard, though Art said it didn’t hide the fact that he was obviously an executive type, expensive clothes,
manicured
nails, obligatory Rolex, all the stuff. He wore blue contact lenses. Art said he didn’t try to pretend he wasn’t disguised, though the alterations in his appearance were subtle enough, well done. Art never saw him drive anything. The guy always arrived at the meeting sites after Tisler, and he always left first.”

“What?” Graver zeroed in on the irregular procedure.
“Every
time?”

“I know, I know.” Burtell nodded, placating. “I jumped him about this. I told him he was crazy to let the guy dictate the terms of the meetings, that he was violating the basic rules of handling contributors. But Art smelled something big, and he argued that compromising on the meeting arrangements was insignificant compared to what he stood to get from the guy. He said he would humor him on that point He didn’t want to risk alienating him right from the beginning by insisting on something that, at this stage of the game, Art thought was trivial.”

Burtell paused, stepped over to Graver’s desk, and picked up his coffee mug. He sipped the coffee tentatively and returned to the window. Graver didn’t take advantage of this hiatus to speak. He didn’t want to relieve any of the pressure Burtell was feeling, or give him an extra moment to collect his thoughts. He let all the silence fall on Burtell’s shoulders.

With his free hand still in his trousers pocket, Burtell bent his head in thought and continued.

“Nieson told Art from the beginning that he hated Seldon. He knew that much, that Art would be looking for a legitimate motive, and he gave him an ‘honest’ one. They were competitors in the same business and Seldon had burned him once, burned him big-time. Nieson wanted to see him hurt.” He nodded to the folder opened before Graver. “You can see from the contact reports that he gave Art a lot of information relating to Seldon’s business, detailed information that he knew Art could corroborate. He knew what he was talking about But he never named names other than Seldon’s, never gave away a piece of geography that Art could work from—the ranch for instance—never mentioned relationships we could draw inferences from, never… well, shit, never gave us anything we could work back on. If we went any further with this, he was going to have to take us there.”

Graver turned a couple of pages in the folder before him.

“What about the information on the contributor’s ID record? What did you find when you checked into that?”

Burtell nodded, knowing this question was coming, and he clearly wasn’t looking forward to it.

“Yeah, I went into it” Pause. “None of it checked out.”

“None of it?” Graver was genuinely surprised. The Seldon investigation was losing blood with every revelation.

“None.”

“How long have you known this?” Graver flattened his tone. He wanted to sound cold, not worked up, as if he had gone past agitation to something more serious.

“After the first meeting we corroborated everything he’d told us about Seldon personally,” Burtell said. “After the second meeting, we corroborated everything he told Art about Seldon’s business. It was all checking out This was looking good, both of us could see the potential of these relationships considering the enormous price tag on the chemical industry here in Houston. The drug business speaks for itself. It was checking out It was solid. I have to admit, we were both getting worked up over this one.”

Burtell was good, aligning himself with Tisler and hoping to avoid the appearance that he was foisting all the blame for the investigation onto a dead man who couldn’t defend himself. He was putting just enough
mea culpa
into his explanation to keep Tisler from being a total scapegoat He took a deep breath and exhaled. The deceit was painful for Graver to watch. Burtell did it so well, with just the right nuance of uncertainty to make it look like he was defending himself—or admitting to poor judgment.

“Third meeting,” Burtell continued, “he gives us information about the actors on the drug end of the deal. We check it out through DEA, it’s good. But he doesn’t give us too much, not enough for us to initiate anything on our own. He still held the key to the relationships. He also finally gave Art his name and showed him an ID. That was two weeks ago. When Art came back and filled out the paperwork I got right on it There is in fact a Parnell Nieson who is an executive with Rochin and Leeds Chemicals. But Tisler’s source was not Parnell Nieson. I found a picture of Nieson in Rochin and Leeds’s most recent annual report Showed it to Tisler. Wasn’t him.”

“And Tisler confronted the source with this?”

“Yeah, four days later. Guy just laughed. He said we’d worked a lot faster than he’d thought we would.”

“What happened then?”

“Art finally went out on a limb. He told the guy we wouldn’t be able to work with him. Told him he wasn’t reliable, that we couldn’t deal with him because we had to have a dependable relationship in order to assemble a proper investigation. Art gambled and just walked away from it, which was pretty gutsy considering how much he wanted this to work. He was betting the guy wanted it as bad as we did.”

“And when was that?”

Burtell calculated. “Ten days ago, I guess.”

“That was a fourth meeting. Why wasn’t that meeting recorded in the folder? There’s no contact report on that.”

The question was disingenuous. Graver knew exactly what was happening, or he would have known if any of this had actually taken place. Contrary to by-the-book regulations, the working relationship between analysts and investigators commonly involved a mutual agreement to relax the rules of the game. This was especially likely when a new investigation was being developed and an investigator, and/or the analyst, wanted to massage a reluctant contributor long past the time when a prudent superior would have advised them to walk away from it.

Such was the situation here. Tisler’s source was proving to be reliable as far as the information he was providing was concerned, but his actual identity was crucial, and if he wasn’t willing to provide it, working with him was going to be difficult to justify. Tisler and Burtell wanted more time to try to bring the man around. It was a cat-and-mouse game everyone was used to playing. To buy more time, they agreed to pretend the last meeting never happened.

At least, this was the scenario Burtell was offering. Despite a growing disgust at Burtell’s egregious lying, Graver was fascinated. Burtell was incredible. If he was in fact fabricating all of this to cover for the nonexistent investigation—which Graver was sure he was doing—then he was even inventing a subtext for Graver to discover, knowing that as an old hand Graver would know how these things “really” worked. This was a deception within a deception within a manipulation. The full realization of the sophistication of Burtell’s betrayal began to work its way to the surface of Graver’s understanding, and for the first time he sensed something eerie creeping into the equation.

“We thought we could work it out,” Burtell continued. “Art didn’t want to file another daily report that would reflect that he’d come up empty-handed again. I agreed to go along with it” He looked at his coffee and decided not to drink any more of it. It was probably cold. “Art waited a week, and sure enough the guy called him. He was ready to do it Everything. He swore. They were supposed to have met Saturday night.”

“Do you know if they did?”

Burtell shook his head. “No, I don’t know.”

“Jesus Christ, Dean,” Graver said, making his voice portray disappointment now, rather than impatience or anger. “And Tisler was the only one who knew what he looked like?” This was the central point of the entire game here; this was going to be Burtell’s “explanation.”

Burtell looked at him. “That’s right.”

Even in this, Burtell was playing his role perfectly. His eyes met Graver’s as though he was admitting his fault like a man. He would courageously swallow the medicine, admit that he had let the investigation get away from him. Graver felt like he was in a theater group. His next question was calculated to see if Burtell could keep this up.

“Did Ray know you were pushing this?”

At this there was a slight bobble in Burtell’s demeanor and in what had been, up to this point, a smoothly-played hand. Now Burtell had to ask himself some quick, tough questions. Should he drag Besom into the deception? Should he expand the cast of characters? Burtell’s answer demonstrated how well he could balance on the wire.

“No, he didn’t know. Art and I were skating this on our own.”

Graver reached out and gave the cobblestone a few thoughtful turns.

“Did you ever get the impression from Art that there was anything… sinister about Nieson? Do you think there’s even the slightest reason to suspect that he killed Art?”

“No, honestly I don’t,” Burtell said. “I’ve been over and over that too, Marcus, don’t think I haven’t But… I just can’t see it.”

“Did he ever call Art here?”

“Yes.”

Graver stared at the Seldon documents in front of him. That was it Burtell had not hesitated to commit himself wholeheartedly to a course of action that was a clear abandonment of everything that Graver, at least, had thought he stood for. Burtell was embracing a deception that could not be explained away. If he ever had an inclination to get out of it he had to know that now was the moment to do so and that Graver was his best hope for effecting an extrication. He had to know this, and yet Burtell did not hesitate to step over the line that would separate them for a certainty. For Graver it was a truly painful display of hypocrisy. Graver felt as if Burtell had walked up to him and hit him in the stomach.