An Absence of Light

Chapter 58

By the time Graver got home, Ginette Burtell was sitting quietly with Lara on the sofa in the living room, each turned slightly to the other, their knees just touching as they talked. Lara, who had a softer touch than Paula and with whom Ginette was more familiar because she saw her every time she came into the office to see Dean, had a natural ability to communicate on a visceral level and a manner that was immediately discernible as genuine and without calculation. It was the kind of candid compassion that Ginette needed at that moment, and Lara apparently had been able to calm her.

When Graver walked into the room Ginette stood up immediately.

“Marcus,” she said. “Thank God.” She wore no makeup to hide the fact that her eyes were red and swollen, and her fashionable skirt and blouse were wrinkled as if she had been wearing them too long and had no interest in their condition.

“We’ve got to talk,” she said quickly, her voice cracking on the last word. Her face wrinkled as Graver came over to her and took her hands, which were twisting a tissue.

“Okay, Ginny, it’s okay,” he said, getting her to sit down again with him as Lara stood and started to leave the room. “Ginny,” Graver said, “you don’t mind if Lara stays, do you?”

She shook her head and buried her face in the tissue, grabbing others from the box on the sofa. Graver glanced at Lara.

“Ginny, I know you’ve got something to say that you feel is important,” Graver said. “I don’t want to miss anything. This is all very complicated. I’m going to ask Paula to come back in too. We need all the help we can get on this, and of course Paula… works with Dean”-he almost said “worked”-”and needs to hear this.”

She nodded again and Graver again looked at Lara, who left to get Paula from the kitchen where Graver had found her a few moments earlier nursing a cup of coffee and looking thoroughly uncomfortable. Graver had paused only a moment to speak to her when he came in the back door. She quickly had told him of his messages and handed a piece of paper with the calls on it: Westrate and Olmstead as Graver had guessed, each a couple of times-Graver deliberately had turned off his pager when he had left the house earlier-and Victor Last.

“Do you want anything to drink?” Graver asked. He was turned toward her on the sofa.

“No, I… no,” she said, wiping her nose and putting all of her energy into an effort to gain control of herself. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to be,” Graver said. “If you’ll just try to think of everything… every detail, it’ll help us get to the bottom of this.”

As Lara and Paula came back into the room and found chairs, Graver told Ginette to start from the beginning, to take her time, and not to be disconcerted if he had to interrupt her a number of times to ask questions.

“God, I don’t know how to start,” she said. “I saw the news bulletin… South Shore Harbor. We keep a sailboat out there and I think… I think that’s where Dean was going when he left the house tonight.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because he had a meeting… with someone. When he had meetings he used the boat sometimes.”

“How do you know?”

“He let it slip one time, a reference. Something hadn’t been cleaned up when we went out there to go sailing, and he said oh he’d forgotten to take care of it after the last meeting. I saw him cringe, you know, kind of. I guessed it had something to do with work, so I didn’t say anything further. I tried not to quiz him. That’s always hard, trying to ignore all the… inexplicable things.”

“But there are a lot of boats out there, Ginny,” Graver said. “Why do you think Dean was on the boat that blew up?”

“Was he?” She looked at him, visibly bracing herself. It was a brave question, and one that revealed that she believed Graver already knew the truth.

“I don’t know anything about what’s happened out there,” Graver lied. “The Department’s gotten a ton of calls about it, but I doubt if I’ll know much of anything until tomorrow. I understand it’s chaos out there.”

“The boat was in slip forty-nine,” she said, stiffening.

“Ginny, we don’t know that kind of detail yet I’m pretty eager to know myself, and when I do find out something I’ll let you know immediately.”

He paused, and she continued to stare at him. He thought she might be seeing right through him, but he plunged on.

“Dean was officially on vacation, Ginny,” he said. “He wouldn’t be going to meet someone now, would he?”

She sat staring at the tissue she was kneading. “I, uh, I said to, Paula, that… Jesus”-she looked up and away toward the windows, her eyes batting back the tears-”Dean’s… Dean’s had something else going on… besides work… I mean CID work… something else…”

She stopped, finding it difficult to broach the subject.

“Did he tell you this?”

She shook her head.

“No, of course not,” she said. “He wouldn’t have done that” She took a deep breath. “Uh, about a year ago… or a little less… he began going out at night again. I got used to that when he was an investigator, but that was years ago. As an analyst it was pretty rare that he would do that But it got to be he’d go out at least one night almost every week. I finally asked him about it, I said what’s the deal with this going out? You don’t have to do that” She dropped her eyes. “I thought… I thought he was seeing another woman. I blew up. He sat me down and said there was a special investigation under way and that everyone was having to put in extra time. It was a big project, a long one, and that this would have to go on for a while. After that he was very… sensitive about it, never tried to hide it or make it mysterious. But he reminded me that if I ever spoke to any of you, you know, when I came to see him at the office, that I must never mention that he’d been working late, that it wouldn’t look good if it seemed that he’d been talking about his work at home.”

Ginette reached a hand up and wiped it across her brow, brushing aside a wisp of her short, jet hair. She sighed heavily, exhausted from the tension that was eating every bit of her strength.

“About four or five months ago Dean began to change. He seemed… stressed. He grew kind of broody, irritable. I’d seen this before when he was an investigator, if something he was working on wasn’t going right. And in those days he’d talk about it after a while, if I insisted. But this time”-she shook her head-”this time he just got angry when I tried to draw him out. He made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that it wasn’t something we could talk about.

“Then he began going out more often at night. Sometimes I think he was going to meet Art. Sometimes Art would come by here, or he’d call and come over, and they’d stand outside in the drive and talk. So I knew it was business, not another woman. But it was eating him up. He couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up in the night, and he wouldn’t be in bed. I’d find him sitting out in the courtyard, or in the living room. Or I’d wake up suddenly, and he’d just be lying there, staring at the ceiling… or… or just be staring at me.”

She stopped and swallowed and, though she didn’t sob, tears rolled out of her eyes so that she had to stop and use more tissue. Graver glanced at Lara, whose large, dark eyes were fixed on him with sober concern. Again Ginette got herself under control and went on.

“Sunday night when you came over and told him about Art-God, it seems like a month ago-it was terrible. After you left Dean came in and told me. He told me we had to get over to Peggy’s and break the bad news to her. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door. In a few minutes I heard him vomiting. He stayed in there a long time. I went ahead and changed clothes, and he was still in there. He, uh, he was sick until there was nothing left… uh, I, uh, could hear him in there just, you know, coughing and coughing.”

She started crying again, covering her face in the wad of tissues. Lara quickly got up and came over to the sofa and sat down on the other side of her, putting her arm around her. She took the wet tissues out of Ginette’s hands and gave her dry ones and hugged her and said something to her.

Graver sat there helplessly, the image of Burtell vomiting playing over and over in his mind. Paula was sitting near Graver’s desk with a pen and notepad, staring at Ginette with a drawn face. Graver saw that she hadn’t written down a word.

It was a few minutes before Ginette was able to continue, and when she did her voice was thin and without strength. This time Lara stayed at her side.

“We went over and stayed Sunday night with Peggy,” she went on. “We got a sedative for her and finally, about three in the morning, she went to sleep. Neither Dean nor I slept a minute. When Peggy’s folks came in from Corpus Christi about five-thirty the next morning, we went home. We both bathed, cleaned up and went to work. But Monday night was miserable. Dean wasn’t able to sleep at all. Tuesday morning the loss of sleep was killing me, and I called in sick. Dean got up and went to work as usual. I slept through the day and got up late in the afternoon. Dean had left a note on the kitchen table saying that he had left the office early, that, you know, you had let him start his vacation, and that he would be home again later.

“When he came in around nine o’clock that evening he looked terrible. He was carrying a computer backup tape which he said he’d tell me about later. We ate dinner and then about ten-fifteen he said he had to go to a meeting and would be back in a few hours. As soon as he left, you called. I was so glad to hear from you… I… almost told you I was seriously worried about him, but I rationalized. I thought, no he’s had this big investigation, then Art’s suicide. It’s just that it’s a terrible time for him. I didn’t want to be an alarmist Dean wouldn’t have wanted me to run whining to you about how much stress he was under. So I didn’t say anything to you about it He came in late that night… God, that was last night… and went straight to bed with a sick headache.

“This morning I went to work and let him sleep. He told me later that he had slept all day. When I got home this afternoon we had a few drinks, and he started talking.”

Ginette stopped and swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I could use a glass of water after all.” Paula got up, went into the kitchen, and brought one back to her. Ginette took several drinks and then held it in her lap as she went on.

“He started talking,” she said. “He said that he had been involved in an investigation that… you… didn’t know anything about. He said that six or eight months ago he began to suspect someone was selling CID intelligence. He said after a month or so of looking into it he was sure it was happening, and he brought Art in because he trusted him and needed some help. But he said he hadn’t involved you because… he said, you know, he didn’t know how high up it went…”

“He wasn’t sure if I was involved or not,” Graver said.

She nodded uncertainly and shrugged. “I guess.”

“He was right to do that, Ginny,” Graver said. “He did the right thing. Then he believed people above him were involved?”

“He said he had proof that Ray Besom was selling intelligence.”

“Proof?”

“Yes. He said he and Art had set up a separate computer system in a rent house that Art owns, and they had been putting everything they knew on that He said that yesterday he had gone over to Art’s rent house after he left the office and transferred everything on the computer to the backup tape he’d brought home. He said he then scrambled what was on the computer using special software for that purpose. He said he could use the same software to unscramble it later if he needed to, but the way it was now it was reduced to nonsense.”

“Why didn’t he just erase it after he’d copied it?” Graver asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“Okay,” Graver said. “Go on.”’

She took another sip of water.

“He said that in a little while he was going to have to go out to another meeting. He said that he was reasonably sure now that you weren’t involved in this thing, and that if anything should happen to him that I should give you the backup tapes.”

She stopped and drank some more water, using this to fight back the welling urge to break down again. It was killing Graver to see her going through this and to have to keep her at it until she had told him all she could. He felt cruel and, for some inexplicable reason, hypocritical.

“I just couldn’t believe he had said that. I went crazy. He promised me… promised me that there was nothing to be worried about. He said the only reason he said that was… it was just the same as having life insurance. Nobody expects to be killed in a car wreck, but you make arrangements just the same. I didn’t buy that,” she said, shaking her head. “We went on talking for quite a while. But eventually he had to go. He said he wouldn’t be late. That was around ten-thirty.”

She started breathing heavily, fighting the tears. “And then I was watching television… and they broke in…”

“Ginette,” Graver said, wanting to stop her before she began crying again. “Ginette, do you have the tape?”

But she was already sobbing. Still, she managed to point to her purse which was sitting under the coffee table in front of them. Graver reached down and picked it up, reached inside, felt around, found the tape, and held it up.

“Is this it, Ginny?”

She nodded, sobbing.

Graver patted her on the leg and got up and walked over to the telephone on his desk. He dialed Arnette’s number. When she answered, he quickly explained what he had. She was incredulous.

“You have the tape?” she asked.

“I’m holding it.”

“Can you get it over here now?”

“I can’t come. I’ve got an answering machine full of messages that can’t wait any longer. If it’s okay with you I’m going to send Paula.”

“Get her over here.”

“What about the microfiche?”

“We’ve got the first few pages. So far it’s a detailed record of how Faeber’s collection system is set up. It’s big, baby. They’re buying information you wouldn’t believe. We’ve got names, dates, places, codes. This is Kalatis’s work. It’s highly organized into cells. Compartmentalized. Backstops everywhere. From the looks of this Colin Faeber’s computers are full of some heavy stuff. And there’s CID information in there too. It’s a massive operation.”

“I’m sending her over,” Graver said.