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.
Chapter 15
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
