An Absence of Light

“I sure do,” Lukens said, looking deliberately at Graver and then back at Hertig. “That all sounds wonderful and well thought out… and prepared. But it doesn’t discount the circumstances, and I have to say that I just don’t buy this coincidence scenario.”

Lukens was tense, having to work hard to control his voice. He straightened himself in his chair. “Graver’s little lecture sounds very neat, but all of you know damn well that if we always waited for substantial evidence to initiate an investigation in this business, we could cut our personnel by half. If something’s going on in CID, the people involved aren’t going to provide us with ‘evidence.’”

He turned to Westrate. “You’ve got better people than that over there, don’t you, Jack?”

Then back to Hertig. “That’s an absurd prerequisite for suspicion, and an absurd prerequisite for initiating an investigation or inquiry.” Lukens squared on Graver. “And I’m surprised to hear it coming from you, Graver. That was facile footwork, but I don’t believe a word of it, and I don’t even think you do.”

Back to Hertig. “If something’s gone wrong over there, Charlie, it’s not going to hit us over the head. I think what we’ve got here is a break, and if we don’t recognize that we’re screwing ourselves. Jesus. Even if I’m wrong, we ought to audit the situation just to satisfy ourselves that I am wrong. Or let’s just talk about PR, then. That’s the worst possible reason for doing something, but it is another reason nonetheless. Tonight Besom’s death is going to be on the news, and it’s only a matter of time before you’re going to find yourself having to explain these two deaths to those reporters who are always hoping to get a byline over another story of an HPD screw-up. Suicide? Heart attack? Trust us?” He paused. “At the very least we ought to be able to tell them a ‘routine inquiry’ is under way.”

Graver was cringing inside, waiting for Westrate to explode, but much to his surprise it didn’t happen. Westrate was a gamesman even more than he was a hothead, and he sensed that it was to his advantage right now not to do the obvious. But he had to say something, and though his face was livid, his tone was even.

“Routine inquiry, Ward? How do you do a routine inquiry into a heart attack? We’ve already got a report on Tisler. Why don’t we tell them, ‘Well, it’s a hell of a deal, boys, but one killed himself and one died of a heart attack. Shit happens.’ If there’s no inquiry they’ve got a message right there that says there’s just nothing to inquire about Nothing to explain.”

“That’s your interpretation of what it would ‘say,’ Jack,” Lukens rebutted. “To somebody else it might ‘say’: cover-up.”

Everyone fell silent for a moment Hertig was nodding, but he was looking at the calendar on his desk. Graver knew he did not want to have to tell the media that the Organized Crime Squad of the Criminal Intelligence Division was being audited following the deaths of two of its officers within the last forty-eight hours. That was like striking a match to gasoline. He practically would be writing the headlines himself. Lukens knew that too, but Graver guessed he figured his own angle was worth a try. He might get lucky. But he didn’t.

Hertig leaned forward in his chair, rested his forearms on his desk, and looked at Lukens.

“Ward, I can’t see committing all that manpower and time-which is money-to this,” he said. “I think we’ve just got to call it hard luck, bad timing, a hell of a coincidence. I don’t think we can justify it I just don’t.”

That was the end of it. They were dismissed. Westrate had the good sense to simply walk out of the office without gloating, though Graver guessed he was cackling inside. He didn’t even hang back to talk to Graver who was the last one out of the office. Each of them went back to their offices in silence.

It was hard to call which way the scales would go from one day to the other when it came to interdepartmental rivalries. Graver guessed that this time the well-known tug of war between Westrate and Lukens had worked to Lukens’s disadvantage. Somehow his arguments for an inquiry seemed specious in light of his long-standing antagonism with Westrate. The next time it might go the other way. That was the kind of decision that men in Hertig’s position had to make sometimes, and Graver wondered how comfortable Hertig actually was with his ruling. He wouldn’t have been surprised to know that he had gotten no satisfaction out of it at all.

Certainly Graver himself felt decidedly frustrated. He had argued precisely in opposition to his own feelings, which were much closer to Lukens’s. It galled Graver that he had had to be so helpful to Westrate. But if he hadn’t argued as he did, the decision might have gone the other way, and to have had his Division invaded by Internal Affairs investigators would have wreaked havoc on his own operation. Even so, Graver felt a little queasy about what he had just done.

Chapter 39