An Absence of Light

“God, I don’t know… uh, at home,” he began. “I can’t imagine anything going on at home, between him and Peggy anyway, that was eating at him… enough… you know, for this. Honest to God, I don’t. Their marriage was… I don’t know,” he cleared his throat “It would seem boring I guess to some people. Art wasn’t… he didn’t play around. He didn’t hang out with a bunch of guys even. Peggy wasn’t a sports widow, anything like that. He went to work; he went home. They pretty well did everything together.

“They didn’t have any obvious troubles, serious ones anyway. Art was content with going to Peggy’s cat shows, helping her with that kind of shit That was actually their big ‘outside activity,’ her cat shows.”

He paused, his thoughts straying for a moment before he caught himself and shook his head. “I just don’t see anything there to kill yourself about. No lovers or crazy sex or frustrations.” He caught himself. “I mean… I never saw any evidence of that kind of stuff. All I’m saying is, Art and Peggy… you just never saw anything like that. Nothing extreme about either of them, nothing that was in danger of getting out of control.”

He laid his head back, twisted his neck in an effort to relieve the tension. He straightened up.

“What about their families,” Graver asked. “Any complications there? What about money? Debts?”

“Family worries,” Burtell said. “Art’s dad is dead, five or six years ago. His mom lives in Dallas, in a retirement community near his only sister. He’s never expressed any concern about any of them. I think Peggy’s parents live in Corpus Christi. I don’t really know anything about them.

“As for money problems, hell”-Burtell smiled thinly-”Art is ‘fiscally conservative.’ I doubt if he knew the definition of squander. He would have to be taught how to live beyond his means. One of the few people in the United States who operated on a cash basis. Really. I’d bet the only dime they owe is on their house…” He stopped. “In fact, Christ, I would have thought Tisler would be the last person in the world to kill himself, if for no other reason than it would cheat Peggy out of her insurance. He’s paid premiums for years… money down the tubes… that’s the way he’d see it He would have thought it was a damned stupid thing to do. I mean, it would have been the first item crossed off his list of options. He just wouldn’t have considered it… practical.”

“You think he didn’t kill himself?”

Burtell looked up. “No, that’s not what I meant at all. I’m not implying anything…” He stopped and stared at Graver, who remained silent “We’ve got to go into his investigations, is that it?”

“Regardless of what Homicide comes up with, we’re going to have to audit them for our own internal satisfaction,” Graver said. “We’ve got to make sure there’s no connection, you know that.”

Burtell swallowed and nodded. “Sure… I know.”

“Was he holding something?” Graver asked.

It was a legitimate question, and Burtell knew it. Intelligence investigators were no different from other people when it came to occasional judgment calls that crossed over the line. Though a proper intelligence organization used a voluminous paper-trail system to account for-and justify-its activities, and to” keep a firm rein on its investigators, there was no process that could anticipate acts of omission. For an infinite variety of reasons, there were occasions when investigators did not put everything they knew into the mountain of reports they were responsible for filing for each target they investigated. A good investigator had a side of him that was intensely private. He never told anyone everything he knew, not even his superiors who relied on his integrity. A good superior officer would know this, and he would know that there wasn’t anything he could do about it In this business secrets were the coin of the realm, and everyone had a few coins put away-just in case.

Ultimately, however, you had to believe the system would work because it was a system. You had to believe your investigators would not withhold information to the detriment of the operation or the Division, or to the detriment of the ideals inherent in the profession. In the end, as in all things, it came down to trust. It was an irony not lost on Graver. He knew from experience that the number of people any given intelligence officer would trust at any given time, inside or outside the business, would fall in the low single digits.

“Honest to God,” Burtell said. “You knew him well enough to know he didn’t have a loose tongue. If he was holding anything significant, he didn’t give me a clue about it. The Seldon operation was definitely on his mind. It was getting tougher, but I just can’t see how it would, even remotely, have a connection to something like this.”

“Jesus, Dean. You don’t think the combination of dumping toxic waste and drug trafficking held potential dangers?”