The Dark Tide

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The morning was clear and bright, the suburban New Jersey road practically deserted of traffic, except for about thirty bikers cruising in unison in their colorful jerseys.

Coasting near the front of the pack, Jonathan Lauer cast a quick glance behind, searching out the bright green jersey of his friend Gary Eddings, a bond trader at Merrill. He caught a glimpse of him, boxed in. The perfect chance! Crouching into a tuck, Jonathan began to pump his legs and weave a path through the maze of lead riders of the peloton. When a path opened up in front of him, he broke free.

Lauer, the imaginary announcer exclaimed in his head, a bold, confident move!

While for the most part they were just a bunch of thirty-something dads sweating off a few carbs on a Sunday morning, privately he and Gary had this game. More than a game, a challenge. They always pushed each other to the limit. Raced each other in the final straightaway. Waited for the other to make the first move. The winner got to brag for a week and wear the pretend yellow jersey. The loser bought the beers.

Calves pistoning, leaning over the handlebar of his brand-new carbon-fiber LeMond, Jonathan built a margin of about twenty yards, then coasted freely into the curve.

The finish line, the bend after the intersection with 287, was a half mile ahead.

Looking back, Jonathan caught a glimpse of Gary trying to free himself from the pack. His blood started to pump, accelerating as the country road turned into a perfect straightaway in the last half mile. He’d moved at the right time!

Pedaling fiercely now, Jonathan’s thighs were burning. He wasn’t thinking about the new job he had started just a few weeks before-on the energy desk at Man Securities, one of the real biggies-a chance to earn some real numbers after the mess at Harbor.

Nor was he thinking about the deposition he had to make that week. With that auditor from the Bank of Scotland and the lawyer from Parker, Kegg forcing him to testify against his former company after taking the attractive payout deal that had been offered him when the firm shut down.

No, all that was in Jonathan’s mind that morning was racing to that imaginary line ahead of his friend. Gary had maneuvered out of the pack and had made up some distance. The intersection was just a hundred yards ahead. Jonathan went at it, his quads aching and his lungs on fire. He snuck a final peek back. Gary had pulled up. Game over. The rest of the pack was barely in sight. No way he could catch him now.

Jonathan coasted underneath the 287 overpass and cruised around the bend, raising his arms with a triumphant whoop.

He’d dusted him!

A short time later, Jonathan was pedaling home through the residential streets in Upper Montclair.

The traffic was light. His mind drifted to some complex energy index play someone had described at work. He was relishing his win and how he could tell his eight-year-old son, Stevie, how his old dad had smoked everyone today.

As he neared his neighborhood, the streets turned a little winding and hilly. He coasted down the straightaway on Westerly, then turned up, Mountain View, the final hill. He huffed, thinking how he’d promised he’d take Stevie to buy some soccer shoes. His house was just a quarter mile away.

That was when he spotted the car. More like a large black façade, a Navigator or an Escalade or something with a shiny chrome grille.

It was heading right for his path.

For a second, Jonathan Lauer was annoyed. Hit the brakes, dude. It was a residential street. There was plenty of distance between them. No one else was around. It flashed through his head that maybe he had taken the turn a little wide.

But Jonathan Lauer didn’t hear the sound of brakes.

He heard something else.

Something crazy, his annoyance twisting into something else. Something horrifying, as the SUV’s grille came closer and closer.

He heard acceleration.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Over the next few days, Karen must have watched that two-second clip a hundred times.

Horrified. Confused. Unable to comprehend what she was seeing.

The face of the man she had lived with for eighteen years. The man she’d mourned and missed and cried over. Whose pillow she still sometimes crept over to at night and hugged, whose name she still whispered.

It was Charlie, her husband, caught in an unexpected freeze-frame as the camera randomly swept by.

Outside Grand Central. After the attack.

How the hell can that be you, Charlie…?

Karen didn’t know what to do. Whom she could possibly tell? She went for a jog with Paula out on Tod’s Point, and listened to her friend going on about some dinner party she and Rick had attended, at this amazing house out on Stanwich, when all the while she just wanted to stop. Face her friend. Tell her: I saw Charlie, Paula.

The kids? It would shatter them to see their father there. They would die. Her folks? How could she possibly explain? Until she knew.

Saul? The person he owed everything to. No.

So she kept it to herself. She watched the captured moment, over and over, until she was driving herself crazy. Confusion hardening into anger. Anger into hurt and pain.

Why? Why, Charlie? How can that be you? How could you have done this to us, Charlie?

Karen went over what she knew. Charlie’s name had been on the Mercedes dealer’s transit sheet. They had found the remnants of his briefcase blown apart, the charred slip of paper from his notepad she had received. He’d called her! 8:34. It didn’t make any sense to Karen.

He was there on that train!

At first she tried to convince herself that it couldn’t be him. He would never, ever do this to her. Or to the kids. Not Charlie… And why? Why? She stared at him. People look alike. Eyes, hopes-they can play crazy tricks. The picture was a little fuzzy. But every time she went back to that screen, replayed the image she had saved for maybe the thousandth time-there it was. Unmistakable. The sweats coming over her. Accusation knifing up in her belly. Her legs giving out like jelly.

Why?

Days passed. She tried to pretend to be herself, but the experience made her so sick and so confused, all Karen could do was hide in her bed. She told the kids she had come down with something. The anniversary of Charlie’s death. All those feelings rushing back at her. One night they even brought dinner up to her. Chicken soup they had bought at the store, a cup of green tea. Karen thanked them and looked into their bolstering eyes. “C’mon, Mom, you’ll be fine.” As soon as they left, she cried.

Then later, when they were asleep or at school, she’d go around the house, studying her husband’s face in the photos that were everywhere. The ones that meant everything to Karen. All she had. The one of him in his beach shirt and Ray-Bans that they’d blown up for the memorial. Of him and Karen dressed in black tie at her cousin’s wedding. The personal items she had never cleared off his dresser in his closet: business cards, receipts, his watches.

You couldn’t do this to me, could you, Charlie? To us…

Not you…

It had to be some kind of coincidence. A freakish one. I trust you, Charlie… I trusted you in life, and I’m goddamned going to trust you now. In a million years, he would never hurt her this way.

Karen kept coming back to the one thing she still had of him. The torn sheet from his notepad someone had found in Grand Central. From the Desk of Charlie Friedman.

She felt him there. Trust had to win out here. The trust of eighteen years. Whatever she saw on that screen, she knew damn well in her heart just who her husband was.

For the first time, Karen looked at the note sheet. Really looked at it. Not just as a keepsake. Megan Walsh. The random name scrawled there in Charlie’s barely legible script. The scribbled phone number: 964-1650. And another number, underlined in his bold, broad strokes:

B1254.

Karen closed her eyes.

Don’t even go there, she admonished herself, suspicion snaking through her. That wasn’t Charlie. It couldn’t be.

But suddenly Karen stared wide-eyed at the scribbled numbers. The doubts kept tearing at her. Seeing his face up on that screen. It was like a piece of his past, a link to him-the only link.

Crazy as it is, you’ve got to go ahead and call, Karen.

If only to stop yourself from totally going insane.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It took everything Karen had to do it.

In a way it made her feel like she was cheating on him, on his memory. What if that wasn’t even him up on that screen? What if she was making all this up, over someone who simply looked like him?

Her husband had been dead for over a year!

But she dialed, secretly praying inside that the number wasn’t to some hotel and B1254 a room there, and this was how she would have to think of him. The weirdest doubts crossed Karen’s mind.

“JP Morgan Chase. Fortieth and Third Avenue branch,” a woman on the line answered.

Karen exhaled, relief mixed with a little shame. But as long as she’d gone this far, she might as well go all the way. “I’d like to speak with Megan Walsh, please.”

“One moment, please.”

It turned out Megan Walsh was the manager in charge of the Private Banking Department there. And after she’d explained that her husband was now deceased and that Karen was the sole beneficiary of his estate, B1254 turned out to be a safe-deposit box that had been opened at the branch a year before.

In Charlie’s name.

Karen drove into town the following morning. The bank was a large, high-ceilinged branch, only a few blocks from Charlie’s office. Megan Walsh was an attractive woman in her thirties, with long dark hair and dressed in a tasteful suit. She took Karen back to her cubicle office along a row with the other managers.

“I remember Mr. Friedman,” she told Karen, her lips pressed tightly in sympathy. “I opened the account with him myself. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“I was just piecing through some of his things,” Karen said. “This wasn’t even listed as part of his estate. I never even knew it existed.”

The bank manager perused Karen’s copy of Charlie’s death certificate and the letter of execution from the estate. She asked her a couple of questions: First, the name of their dog. Karen smiled. (It turned out he had listed Sasha.) His mother’s maiden name. Then she took Karen back into a private room near the vault.

“The account was opened about eighteen months ago, last September.” Ms. Walsh handed Karen the paperwork. The signature on the box was plainly Charlie’s.

Probably just business stuff, Karen assumed. She’d see what was in there and turn whatever it was over to Saul.

Megan Walsh excused herself and returned shortly with a large metal container.

“Feel free to take as much time as you need,” she explained. She placed it on the table, unlocking the clasp in Karen’s presence with her own duplicate key. “If there’s anything you need, or if you’d care to transfer anything into an account, I’ll be happy to help you when you’re done.”

“Thank you.” Karen nodded.

She hesitated over it for a few moments, after the door had closed and she was left alone with this piece of her husband he had never shared with her.

There was the shock of seeing his face up on that screen. Now this box that had never been mentioned as part of the estate or even come up in any of Charlie’s business files. She ran her hand a little cautiously along the metal sides. What could he be keeping from her in here?

Karen drew open the large container from the top and peered inside.

Her eyes stretched wide.

The box was filled with neatly arranged bundles of cash. Wrapped packets of hundred-dollar bills. Bearer-bond notes bound with rubber bands with denominations scrawled on the top sheet in Charlie’s handwriting: $76,000, $210,000. Karen lifted a couple of packets, catching her breath.

There’s at least a couple of million dollars here.

She knew immediately this wasn’t right. Where would Charlie get his hands on this kind of cash? They shared everything. Numbly, she let the packets of bundled cash drop back into the case. Why would he have kept all this from her?

Her stomach knotted. She flashed back to the two men from Archer two months before. A considerable amount of money missing. And the incident with Samantha in her car. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. This was only a fraction of that amount.

She was still gaping at the contents of the box-it started to scare her. What the hell is going on, Charlie?

Toward the bottom of the container, there was more. Karen dug around and came out with a manila envelope. She unfastened the clasp and slid out what was inside. She couldn’t believe what she saw.

A passport.

New, unused. Karen flipped through it. It had Charlie’s face inside.

Charlie’s face-but with a completely different name. A fake one.

Weitzman. Alan Weitzman.

In addition, she slid out a couple of credit cards, all made out to the same false name. Karen’s jaw fell slack. Her head started to ache. What are you hiding from me, Charlie?

Confused, Karen sank back into the chair. There had to be some reason for all this that would make sense. Maybe the face she’d seen on that screen was not really Charlie’s.

But here it was… Suddenly it seemed impossible to pretend anything else. She ran her eyes down the activity sheet again. The box had been opened two years before. October 24. Six months before he died. Charlie’s signature, plain as day. All the entries had been his. A couple shortly after the box was opened. Then once or twice a month, seemingly like clockwork, almost as if he were preparing for something. Karen skimmed to the bottom, her gaze locking on the final entry.

There was Charlie’s signature. His quick, forward-leaning scrawl.

But the date…April 9. The day of the Grand Central bombing.

Her eyes fastened on the time-1:35 P.M. Karen felt the sweats come over her.

That was four and a half hours after her husband had supposedly died.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Karen held back the urge to retch.

She felt dizzy. Light-headed. She grabbed onto the edge of the table to steady herself, unable to free her eyes from what she saw on that sheet.

1:35 P.M.

Suddenly, there was very little that made sense to Karen in that moment. But one thing did, flashing back to his grainy image from that handheld camera up on that screen.

Her husband was definitely alive.

Reeling, Karen ran through the contents of the safe-deposit box once again, accepting in that moment that everything she had felt and taken for granted over the past year, every shudder of grief and loss, every time she’d wondered empathetically what Charlie must have felt, every time she’d crawled over to his side of the bed at night and hugged his pillow, asking, Why…why?-it had all been nothing but a lie.

He had kept it all from her. He had planned this.

He didn’t die there that day. In the blast. In the hellish flames.

He was alive.

Karen’s mind shot back to that morning…Charlie hollering to her over the dryer, about taking in the car. In her haste, words she had barely heard.

He’s alive.

Then to the shock that had gripped her at the yoga studio as, glued to the screen, panic taking over her, she slowly came to accept that he was on that train. His call-the very last sound of his voice-about bringing home dinner that night. That was 8:34 A.M. The blown-apart top piece of the briefcase with his initials on it. The sheet from his notepad that someone had sent.

It all came tumbling back-deepening with the force of a storm circling in her mind. All the pain and anguish she had felt, every tear…

He was there. On that train.

He just hadn’t died.

At first it was like the cramp of a stomach flu forcing her insides up. She fought back the urge to gag. She should be jubilant. He was alive! But then she just stared blankly at the cash and the fake passport. He hadn’t let her know. He’d let her suffer with the thought all the past year. Her confusion turned to anger. She sat there staring at the fake passport photo. Weitzman. Why, Charlie, why? What were you devising? How could you do something like this to me?

To us, Charlie?

They had loved each other. They had a life together. A family. They traveled. They talked about things they were going to do once the kids were gone. They still made love. How do you fake that? How do you possibly do this to someone you loved?

Suddenly Karen felt jelly-legged. All that money, that passport, what did it mean? Had Charlie committed some kind of crime? The room began to close in on her.

She felt she had to get out of there. Now.

Karen clasped the box shut and called outside. In a moment Megan Walsh came back in.

“I’d like to just leave this here if I could for now,” Karen said, brushing the perspiration off her cheeks.

“Of course,” Ms. Walsh replied. “I’ll just give you my card.”

Karen asked her, “Did anyone else have access to this box?”

“No, just your husband.” The bank official looked back quizzically. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” Karen lied. She took her purse but before running out requested a copy of the activity sheet. “I’ll be back in a few days to decide what to do.”

“That’s fine, Mrs. Friedman, just let me know.”

Out on the street, Karen sucked a breath of cooling air into her lungs. She steadied herself against a signpost. Slowly, her equilibrium began to return.

What the hell is going on here, Charlie? She turned away from people passing by on the sidewalk, afraid they would think her a lunatic to be reeling around in such a distraught state.

Didn’t I take care of you? Wasn’t I good to you, baby? I loved you. I trusted you. I mourned you, Charlie. It tore me fucking apart when I thought you were dead.

How can you possibly be alive?

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Saul Lennick’s office was close by, on the forty-second floor of one of those tall glass office towers on Forty-seventh and Park.

Karen hurried over, without even calling, praying he was there. His secretary, Maureen, came out and immediately saw the distress and nerves all over Karen’s face.

“Can I get you anything, Ms. Friedman?” she asked solicitously. “A glass of water?”

Karen shook her head.

“Please come on back. Mr. Lennick’s available. He can see you now.”

“Thank you.” Karen exhaled with relief. Thank God!

Saul Lennick’s office was large and important-looking, filled with a collection of African masks and Balinese burial artifacts, with a view of the Manhattan skyline and, to the north, Central Park.

He had just hung up from a call, and he stood with a look of concern as Maureen rang Karen in.

“Karen?”

“Something’s going on, Saul. I don’t know what it is. But Charlie’s done something…in his business.”

“What?” Lennick inquired. He came around and pulled out a chair for her in front of his large desk, then sat back down.

She was about to blurt out everything she knew and had discovered-starting with seeing Charlie’s face in the documentary. And that he was alive!

But she managed to catch herself at the last second, worried that maybe Saul might think he was talking to a raving lunatic, and decided to tell him only what she’d seen today.

“I came across something, Saul. Something Charlie wrote out before he died. I don’t know how to even begin to explain, but I do know it fits into all these crazy things that have been happening. Those people from Archer. Samantha. I didn’t know what to do with it, Saul.”

“With what?”

Agitated, Karen told him about finding the safe-deposit box. The cash and bonds. The passport. Charlie’s photograph next to the fake name.

“At first I thought maybe it was another woman, but it wasn’t another woman, Saul. It’s worse. Look at me, Saul, I’m a goddamn wreck.” She took in a breath. “Charlie’s done something. I don’t know what. He was my husband, Saul. And I’m scared. I feel like those people are going to come back. People are coming after us, and now I find this box full of cash and a false ID. I’m not going to put my kids in danger, Saul. Why would Charlie be hiding this stuff from me? I know you know something. What the hell’s going on here? You owe that much to me, Saul-what?”

Lennick rocked back in his leather chair. Behind him the vast skyline of New York spread out like a giant panoramic photo.

He exhaled.

“All right, Karen. I was hoping I’d never have to bring this up. That it had somehow all gone away.”

“What, Saul? That what had gone away?”

He leaned forward. “Did Charles ever mention someone by the name of Coombs? Ian Coombs?”

“Coombs?” Karen shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t recall.”

“What about an investment outfit called Baltic Securities? Did he ever mention them?”

“Why are you asking me all these things, Saul? I didn’t exactly get involved in my husband’s business. You of all people know that.”

“I do know that, Karen, it’s just that…”

“It’s just that what, Saul? Charlie’s not here. All of a sudden, everybody’s making these innuendos about him. What the hell has my husband done?”

Lennick stood up, dressed in a navy pinstripe suit with gold cuff links at his wrists. He came around the desk in front of Karen and sat back down on a corner of it. “Karen, by any chance did Charlie ever mention any other accounts he might have been managing?”

“Other accounts?”

Lennick nodded. “Completely separate from Harbor. Maybe offshore-the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, perhaps? Things aren’t governed by the SEC or the U.S. accounting laws down there.” His gaze was measured, serious.

“You’re scaring me a little, Saul. Charlie was a stand-up guy. He didn’t keep things from anyone. Least of all you.”

“I know that, Karen. And I wouldn’t have brought it up. Except…”

She stared. “Except…?”

“Except you found what you found, Karen. The cash, that passport. Which together don’t look exactly stand-up to me.”

Karen tensed. Her thoughts flashed to the face on that screen. Their entire lives together, they had shared pretty much everything. Stuff with the kids, their finances. When they were angry with each other. Even what was going on with the dogs. That was how they did things. It was a matter of trust. Now, in the pit of her stomach, Karen felt this doubt. Chilling her. Over Charlie. It was a feeling she’d never had before.

“Whose money are we talking about, Saul?”

He didn’t answer. He simply pressed his lips together and brushed back his thinning gray hair.

“Whose money?” Karen stared at him directly.

Her husband’s mentor let out a breath. His fingers drummed on the top of his walnut desk like a funeral dirge.

He shrugged. “That’s the trouble, Karen. No one’s exactly sure.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Karen was frantic. The next few days, she barely dragged herself out of bed, not knowing what the hell to do. Samantha was starting to act concerned. It had been almost a week since Karen hadn’t been herself, since she’d seen Charlie on that screen. Her daughter’s eyes reflected that they knew that something wasn’t right. “What’s going on, Mom?”

As much as she wanted to, how could Karen possibly tell her?

That the person she admired most in the world, who had always provided for her and kept her strong, had deceived them in this way. What had Saul said? Setting up accounts. Running money, for people she didn’t know. Offshore?

What kind of people?

All that money, it terrified Karen. What was it for? She began to think that maybe Charlie had committed some kind of crime. Did Charlie ever mention any other accounts he might be managing?

No, she had told him. You know Charlie, he was an honest guy. He fretted over nickels and dimes for his clients.

Had she been kidding herself all these years?

A few more days went by. Karen was driving herself half crazy, thinking about Charlie being out there somewhere, what all this meant. It was late one night. The kids’ lights had long been turned off. Tobey was asleep on her bed. Karen went downstairs to the kitchen to make herself some tea.

Charlie’s photo was on the counter. The one from the memorial: in his white polo shirt and khaki shorts, Topsiders and aviator Ray-Bans. They had always thought it was vintage Charlie, kicking back on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean -a cell phone stapled to his ear.

You knew him, Saul…

Karen picked it up, for the first time restraining an urge to shatter it in anger against the wall. But then the strangest memory came to mind. From deep in the vault of their life together.

Charlie-waving.

It had been the end of a glorious week in the Caribbean, sailing. St. Bart’s. Virgin Gorda. They ended up in Tortola. The kids had to be back to school the following day.

Then, strangely, Charlie announced he needed to stay on. A change of plans. Someone he had to see down there.

Out of the blue?

So he accompanied them to the local airport, the little twelve-seater shuttling them back to San Juan. It had always made Karen a bit nervous to fly those tiny planes. On takeoff and landing, she always held Charlie’s hand. Everyone made a little fun of her…

Why was all this coming back now?

Charlie said good-bye to them at the makeshift gate, more like a glass door leading out onto the tarmac. “You’ll be fine,” he told her with a hug. “I’ll be back up north in two days.” But buckling herself in, in the two-engine plane, Karen felt an inexplicable jolt of fear shoot through her-like she might never see him again. She had thought, Why aren’t you with me, Charlie? a flash of being alone, reaching out for Alex’s hand.

As the plane’s propellers whirred, Karen’s eyes went to the window, and she saw him, on the balcony of the tiny terminal, in his beach shirt and Ray-Bans, his eyes reflecting back the sun.

Waving.

Waving, with his cell phone stapled to his ear, watching the tiny plane pull away.

Offshore, Saul had said to her. Tortola or the Cayman Islands.

Now that same fear rippled through Karen, staring at his photo. That she somehow didn’t really know him. Not the way it mattered. His eyes dark now, not reflecting the sun but deeper, unfamiliar-like a cave that led to many chasms. Chasms she had never explored before.

It scared her. Karen put down the photo. She was thinking, He’s out there. Maybe thinking of her now. Maybe wondering, at this very moment, if she knew, if she suspected, felt him. It gave her the chills. What the hell have you done, Charlie?

She knew she couldn’t keep bottling this up forever. She’d go insane. She had to know. Why he had done this. Where he was.

Karen sank down on a stool at the counter. She put her head in her hands. She’d never felt so confused or so isolated.

There was only one place she could think to go.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Hauck headed back upstairs to his office from the holding cells down in the basement. He and Freddy Muñoz had just taken a statement from a scared Latino kid who was part of this group from up in Norwalk who had been heisting fancy cars from backcountry Greenwich homes, a statement that could now blow the case wide open. Joe Horner, a detective from the Norwalk police department, was holding on the phone for him.

As Hauck turned in from the hallway, Debbie, his unit’s secretary, flagged his attention.

“Someone’s here to see you, Ty.”

She was seated on the bench in the outer office, wearing an orange turtleneck and a lightweight beige jacket, a tote bag on the bench next to her. Hauck made no attempt to conceal that he was pleased to see her.

“Tell Horner I’ll get back to him in a minute, Deb.”

Karen stood up. She smiled, a little nervous to be here. Hauck hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, since that other situation, the people harassing her, had quieted down and they’d pulled the protection. He had called once or twice to make sure everything was okay. Smiling, he went up to her. Her face was pallid and drawn.

“You said I should call.” She shrugged. “If anything ever came up.”

“Of course.”

She looked up at him. “Something did.”

“Come on in my office,” he said, taking her by the arm.

Hauck called to Debbie that he’d ring the Norwalk detective back, then led Karen past the row of detectives’ desks through the glass partition into his office. He pulled out a cheap metal chair at the round conference table across from his desk. “Sit down.”

It was clear she was upset. “You want something? Some water? A cup of coffee?” She shook her head. Hauck pulled another chair around and sat, facing her, arms across the back. “So tell me what’s going on.”

Karen sucked in a breath and pressed her lips tightly together, then reached inside her purse, the expression on her face somewhere between grateful and relieved. “Do you have a computer in here, Lieutenant?”

“Sure.” Hauck nodded, wheeling around to a credenza by his desk.

She handed him a small DVR disc. “Can you put this in?”

He reached down and inserted it into the computer beneath the credenza. The disc kicked in and came to life, some kind of TV show or news report in mid-airing on the screen. A mass of people on the streets of New York. In unrest. Amateur footage, a handheld camera in the crowd. It became immediately clear he was watching the aftermath of the Grand Central bombing.

Karen asked him, “Did you happen to watch that documentary, Lieutenant? Last Wednesday night?”

He shook his head. “I was working. No.”

“I did.” She brought his attention back to the disc: people running out of the station onto the street. “It was very hard for me. A mistake. It was like living the whole thing all over again.”

“I can understand.”

Karen pointed. “Just about here I couldn’t watch it anymore. I went to turn it off.” She stood up and came behind his back, leaning over his shoulder, facing the screen. “It was like I was going crazy inside. Watching Charlie’s death. All over.”

Hauck didn’t see where this was heading. She reached her hand across him for the mouse. She waited, letting the action on the screen unfold, people staggering up onto the street out of a remote entrance to the station, gagging, coughing out smoke, faces blackened. The handheld camera jiggled.

“That’s when I saw it.” Karen pointed.

She positioned the mouse on the toolbar and clicked. The picture on the screen came to a stop. 9:16 A.M.

The frame captured a woman reaching out to comfort someone on the street who had collapsed. In front of her was someone else, a man, his jacket dusty, his face slightly averted from the camera, rushing by. Karen’s eyes fixed on the screen, something almost steely about them, hardened, yet at the same time, Hauck couldn’t help but notice, sad.

“That’s my husband,” she said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. She looked him in the eye. “That’s Charlie, Lieutenant.”

Hauck’s pulse came to a stop. It took a second for it to fully sink in just what she meant. Her husband had died there. A year ago. He had been to her home, to the memorial. That much was clear. He turned again to the screen. The features seemed a bit familiar from the photos he’d seen at her house. He blinked back at her.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I mean,” Karen said. “He was on that train-that much I’m sure. He called me from it, just before the blast. They found pieces of his briefcase in the wreckage…” She shook her head. “But somehow he didn’t die.”

Hauck pushed back from the desk, his eyes intent on the screen again. “A hundred people might look like that. He’s covered in ash. There’s no way you can be sure.”

“That’s what I told myself,” she said. “At first. At least it’s what I was hoping.” Karen moved back to the table. “Over the past week, I must have looked at that scene a thousand times.”

She reached in and drew a sheet of paper out of her bag. “Then I found something. It doesn’t matter what. All that matters is that it led me to this safe-deposit box at a bank in Manhattan that I never knew my husband had.”

She slid the sheet across the table to Hauck.

It was a photocopy of an account-activation form from Chase. For a safe-deposit box and, attached, what appeared to be an account history. There was a lot of activity, going back a couple of years. All the entries bore the same signature.

Charles Friedman.

Hauck scanned down.

“Check out the last date,” Karen Friedman told him. “And the time.”

Hauck did, and felt a sharp pain stick him in the chest. His eyes flashed back at her, not understanding. Can’t be…

“He’s alive.” Karen Friedman met his eyes. Her pupils glistened. “He was there, at that bank, four and a half hours after the bombing. Four and a half hours after I thought he was dead.

“That’s Charlie.” She nodded to him, glancing at the screen. “That’s my husband, Lieutenant.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“Who have you told?”

“No one.” She stared back at him. “How could I? My kids…after what they’ve been through, it would kill them, Lieutenant. How could they even begin to understand? My friends?” She shook her head, glassy-eyed. “What am I possibly supposed to say to them, Lieutenant? That it was all some kind of crazy mistake? ‘Sorry, Charlie’s not really dead. He’s just been fucking deceiving me over the past year. Deceiving all of us!’ At first I thought maybe you hear about people who come out of these life-altering situations, you know, affected…” She placed her finger on the bank forms. “But then I found these. I thought about taking everything to Saul Lennick. Charlie was like a second son to him. But I got scared. I thought, what if he’s really done something? You know, something bad. What if I was doing the wrong thing…? How it would affect everybody. I got all scared. Do you understand what I mean?”

Hauck nodded, the stress clear in her voice.

“So I came here.”

Hauck picked up the bank papers. Because he was a cop, he had learned over the years to withhold his reactions. Gather the facts, be a little circumspect, until a picture of the truth becomes clear. He looked at the bank form. Charles Friedman was there.

“What is it you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.” Karen shook her head in consternation. “I don’t even know what he’s done. But it’s something… Charlie wouldn’t just do this to us. I knew him. He wasn’t that kind of man, Lieutenant.” She pushed a wisp of hair out of her face and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, tears smearing. “The truth is, I don’t have any fucking idea what I want you to do.”

“It’s okay,” he said, squeezing her arm. Hauck stared back at the screen. He ran through the usual responses. Some crazy shock reaction-amnesia-from the bombing. But the bank form dismissed that one fast. Another woman? Embezzlement? He flashed to the scene in the parking lot with Karen’s daughter. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. Yet Saul Lennick had assured him Charles’s hedge fund was perfectly intact.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what did you find in there?” Hauck asked, pointing to the record for the safe-deposit box.

“Money.” Karen exhaled. “Lots of money. And a passport. Charlie’s picture, with a totally assumed name. A few credit cards…”

“He left this all behind?” A year ago. “This may have been just some kind of backup.” Hauck shrugged. “I guess you understand, this wasn’t unpremeditated. He was planning this.”

She nodded, biting her lower lip. “I realize that.”

But what Charles could never have planned, Hauck knew, was how he would execute this. Until the moment came.

His thoughts settled on another name. Thomas Mardy.

“Listen.” Hauck swiveled to her. “I have to ask, did your husband have any history of…you know…”

“Did he what?” Karen stared at him. “Did he play around? I don’t know. A week ago I would have said that was impossible. Now I’d be almost happy to hear that’s what it was. He had that passport, those cards… He was planning all this. While we were sleeping in the same bed. While he was rooting for the kids at school. He somehow managed to get away from that train in the midst of the chaos and say, ‘Now it’s happening. Now’s the time. Now’s the time I’m going to walk out on my entire life.’”

For a few seconds, there was only silence.

Hauck pressed his lips together and asked again, “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know. Part of me wants to just put my arms around him and tell him that I’m happy he’s alive. This other part…I opened that box and realized he’s kept a whole part of his life secret from me. From the person he supposedly loved. I don’t know what the hell I want to do, Lieutenant! Slap him in the face. Throw him in jail. I don’t even know if he’s committed a crime. Other than hurting me. But it doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m here.”

Hauck wheeled his chair closer. “Why are you here?”

“Why am I here?” Tears rushed into her eyes again. She clenched her fists and tapped them helplessly against the table. Then she looked back up at him. “Isn’t it pretty obvious? I’m here because I can’t think of anywhere else to go!”

Hauck went over to her as she just folded, weightlessly, into his arms. She buried her head on his shoulder and dug her fists into him. He held her, feeling her trembling in his grasp, and she didn’t pull away.

“He was dead! I mourned him. I missed him. I agonized on whether his last thoughts were about us. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t wish I just could have talked to him one last time. To tell him I hoped that he was okay. And now he’s alive…”

She sucked back a breath, wiping the tears off her dampened cheeks. “I don’t want him hunted down. He did what he did, and he must have had some reason. He’s not a bastard, Lieutenant-whatever you might think. I don’t even want him back. It’s too late now. I have no idea what I even feel…

“I guess I just want to know…I just want to know why he did this to me, Lieutenant. I want to know what he’s done. I want to see his face and have him tell me. The truth. That’s all.”

Hauck nodded. He squeezed her arms and let go. He kept a tissue box by his desk. He pulled a couple for her.

She sniffled back a smile. “Thanks.”

“Part of the job. People always seem to be crying in here.”

She laughed and dabbed her eyes and nose. “I must be like a goddamn train wreck to you. Every time you see me…”

“No.” He winked. “Anything but. However, you do seem to present some intriguing situations.”

Karen tried to laugh again. “I don’t even know what the hell I’m asking you to do.”

“I know what you want me to do,” he replied.

“I’m not sure where else to turn, Lieutenant.”

“It’s Ty.”

What he said seemed to take her by surprise. For a second they just stood there, drawn to each other. She brushed a wave of auburn hair away from her still-raw eyes.

“Okay.” She sucked in a breath and nodded. “Ty…”

“And the answer’s yes.” He sat back on the edge of his desk and nodded. “I’ll help.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

He’d said yes. Hauck went over the scene again.

Yes, he would help her. Yes, he knew what she needed him to do. Even though he knew in that instant it could never be accomplished with him on the job.

He took the Merrily out on the sound that night. He sat in the dark with the engines off, the water calm, the lights of downtown Stamford flickering on the shore.

Why? he asked himself.

Because he couldn’t get the image of her out of his mind? Or the feel of her softness when she leaned into him. Her sweet scent still vibrant in his nostrils, every hair on his arm on edge, every nerve awakened from its long slumber.

Was that what it was, Ty? Is that all?

Or maybe it was the face that crept into his head as he sat with his Topsiders up on the gunnels, drinking a Harpoon Ale. A face Hauck had not brought into mind for months but that now once again came back to life for him, frighteningly real.

Abel Raymond.

The blood trickling out from under his long red hair. Hauck kneeling over him, promising he’d find out who had done this.

Charles Friedman hadn’t died.

That changed everything now.

Thomas Mardy. He’d been a supervisor at a credit-checking business. He’d gotten on the 7:57 that day out of Cos Cob and had died on the tracks in Grand Central, in the blast.

Yet somehow one of his credit cards had been used for a limo ride up to Greenwich three hours later.

Now Hauck knew how.

He wondered, could the Mustang just have been a coincidence? Charlie’s Baby… It had thrown him off. It would have thrown anyone off.

But now, seeing Charlie’s face on the screen, he knew-more clearly than Karen Friedman could ever know-just how her husband had spent the hours between being caught by that camera coming out of that station and ending up hours later in the vault of that bank.

The son of a bitch hadn’t died.

That afternoon Hauck had run Charlie’s name through the NCIC system. The usual asset check-credit cards, bank accounts, even immigration. Freddy Muñoz brought it back, knocked on the door wearing a quizzical expression. “This guy’s deceased, LT. On April ninth.” His look sort of summed it up. “In the Grand Central bombing.”

Nothing. But Hauck wasn’t surprised.

Charles Friedman and AJ Raymond had been connected. And not by the copper Mustang. That much he now knew. They had lived different lives, a universe apart. Yet they had been connected.

What the hell could it be?

Hauck drained the last of his IPA. The answer wasn’t here. The kid had family. Pensacola, right? His brother had come up to claim his things. His father was a harbor captain. Hauck remembered the old man’s photo among AJ’s things.

Yes, he would help her, he had said. Hauck pulled himself up out of the chair. He started the ignition. The Merrily coughed to life.

He’d help her. He only hoped she wouldn’t regret whatever he found.

“CARL, I’M GOING to need a little time.” Hauck knocked on his boss’s door. “I have a bunch built up.”

Carl Fitzpatrick, Greenwich ’s chief of police, was at his desk, preparing for an upcoming meeting. “Sure, Ty. C’mon in, sit down.” He swiveled his chair around his desk and came back with a scheduling folder. “What are we talking about, a few days?”

“A couple of weeks,” Hauck said, unconfiding. “Maybe more.”

“Couple of weeks?” Fitzpatrick gazed at him over his reading glasses. “I can’t authorize that kind of time.”

Hauck shrugged. “Maybe more.”

“Jesus, Ty…” The chief tossed his glasses on his desk, looked at him directly. “What’s going on?”

“Can’t say. Things are pretty clean right now. Whatever comes up, Freddy and Zaro can cover. I haven’t taken more than a week in five years.”

“Is everything all right, Ty? This isn’t something about Jess, is it?”

“No, Carl, everything’s fine.” Fitzpatrick and he were friends, and he hated being vague. “It’s just something that’s come up I have to see through.”

“Couple of weeks…” The chief scratched the back of his head. He pieced through the file. “Gimme a few days. I’ll shuffle things around. When did you need to leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.” Fitzpatrick’s eyes stretched wide. “Tomorrow’s impossible, Ty. This is totally out of the blue.”

“To you, maybe.” Hauck slowly stood up. “To me it’s long overdue.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The doorbell rang. Barking, Tobey scampered to the door. Alex was at a friend’s, studying for an exam. Samantha was on the phone in the family room, her legs dangling over the back of the couch, Heroes on the TV.

“Can you get that, Mom?”

Karen had just finished up cleaning in the kitchen. She tossed down the cloth and went to answer the door.

When she saw who it was, she lit up in surprise.

“There’s a couple of things you can do for me,” the lieutenant said, huddled in a beige nylon jacket against a slight rain.

“My daughter’s at home,” Karen said, glancing back into the family room, not wanting to involve her. She grabbed a rain jacket off the bench and threw it over her shoulders and stepped outside. “What?”

“You can look through any of your husband’s personal belongings. Notes from his desk. Canceled checks, credit-card receipts. Whatever might still be around. Are you still able to access his computer?”

Karen nodded. She’d never had the urge to remove it from his study. It had never been quite the right time. “I think so.”

“Good. Go through his old e-mails, any travel sites he may have visited before he left, phone records. What about his work-related things? Are they still around?”

“I have some stuff of his that was given back to me in a box downstairs. I’m not sure where his office computer ended up. What am I looking for?”

“Anything that might prove useful in determining where he might go. Even if it ends up it’s not where he is now, it could at least be a starting point. Something to go on…”

Karen covered her head against the raindrops. “It’s been over a year.”

“I know it’s been a year. But there are still records. Get in touch with his ex-secretary or the travel agency he used to use. Maybe they sent him brochures or made some reservations that no one would have even thought were important then. Try to think yourself, where would he go? You lived with him for eighteen years.”

“You don’t think I haven’t already racked my brain?” The rain intensified. Karen wrapped her arms against the chill. “I’ll look again.”

“I’ll help you arrange to get some of it done if you need,” Hauck said, “when I get back.”

“When you get back? Back from where?”

“ Pensacola.”

“ Pensacola?” Karen squinted at him. “What’s down there? Is that for me?”

“I’ll let you know,” Hauck said with a smile, “as soon as it’s clear to me. In the meantime I want you to go through whatever you can find. Think back. There’s always some clue. Something someone’s left behind. I’ll be in touch when I get back.”

“Thank you,” Karen said. She placed her hand against his slicker, rain going down her face. Her eyes suddenly full.

It had been a long time since she’d felt the presence of someone in her life, and here was this man, this man she barely knew who had come into her life in the mayhem after Charlie had died, and he’d seen her, rootless as a craft foundering in the waves of a storm. And now he was the one person she could cling to in this world, the one anchor. It was strange.

“I’m sorry I dragged you into all this, Lieutenant. I’m sure you have enough to do in your job.”

“You didn’t drag me into it.” Hauck shook his head. “And anyway, I’m not doing this on the job.”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t want this out in the open, did you? You didn’t want me to have to deal with whatever came back. I’d never be able to do that if I was there.”

She looked at him, confused. “I don’t understand.”

“I took a few weeks,” he said, rain streaming down his collar. Then he winked. “Don’t worry about it. I had no idea what to do with the time anyway. But it’s only me. No badge. No one else.” His blue eyes glimmered in a soft smile. “I hope that’s okay.”

Was it okay? Karen didn’t know what she was expecting when she went to him. Maybe only someone to listen to. But now her heart melted a bit at what he was willing to do.

“Why…?”

He shrugged. “Everybody else-they were either really busy or just needed the paycheck.”

Karen smiled, gazing back at him, a warming, grateful sensation filling up her chest. “I meant, why are you doing this, Lieutenant?”

Hauck shifted his weight from one foot to another. “I don’t really know.”

“You know.” Karen looked at him. She pushed back a lock of wet hair that had fallen into her eyes. “You’ll let me know when it’s time. But thank you anyway, Lieutenant. Whatever it is.”

“I thought we went through that one already,” he said. “It’s Ty.”

“All right, Ty.”

A glow of grateful warmth came into her gaze. Karen held out her hand. He took it. They stood there like that, rain pelting down on them.

“It’s Karen.” Her eyes met his. “I’m happy to meet you, Ty.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Gregory Khodoshevsky gunned the engine on his three-wheeled, seventy-thousand-dollar T-Rex sport cycle, and the three-hundred-horsepower vehicle shot over the makeshift course he had set up on the grounds of his twenty-acre Greenwich estate.

Trailing close behind, his fourteen-year-old son, Pavel, in his own bright red T-Rex, gamely tried to keep up.

“C’mon, boy!” Khodoshevsky laughed through the helmet mike as he maneuvered around a cone, passing his son back on the other side. “You’re not going to let an old starik like me take you, are you?”

Pavel cut the turn sharply, almost flipping his machine. Then he righted himself and sped up to almost sixty miles per hour, going airborne over a knoll.

“I’m right behind you, old man!”

They sped around the man-made pond, past the helicopter pad, then bounced back onto a long straightaway on Khodoshevsky’s vast property. On the rise, his eighteen-thousand-square-foot redbrick Georgian stood like a castle with its enormous fountained courtyard and sprawling eight-car garage. Which Khodoshevsky filled with a Lamborghini Murciélago, a yellow Hummer that his wife, Ludmila, paraded around town, and a customized black Maybach Mercedes complete with bulletproof windows and a Bloomberg satellite setup. That cost him over half a million alone.

Though he was only forty-eight, the “Black Bear,” as Khodoshevsky was sometimes known, was one of the most powerful people in the world, though his name would not be found on any list. In the kleptocracy that became the privatization spree in Russia of the 1990s, Khodoshevsky convinced a French investment bank to buy a run-down automotive-parts plant in Irkutsk, then leveraged it into a controlling seat on the board of Tazprost, Russia’s largest-and ailing-automobile manufacturer, which, upon the sudden demise of two of its more uncompliant board members, dropped in Khodoshevsky’s lap at the age of thirty-six. From there he obtained the rights to open Mercedes and Nissan dealerships in Estonia and Latvia, along with hundreds of Gaznost filling stations all over Russia to fill them up.

Under Yeltsin the Russian economy was carved up by a handful of eager kapitalisti. One big fucking candy store, Khodoshevsky always called it. In the free-for-all that became the public finance sector, he opened department stores modeled after Harrods that sold pricey Western brands. He bought liquor distributorships for expensive French champagnes and wines. Then banks, radio stations. Even a low-cost airline.

Today, through a holding company, Khodoshevksy was now the largest single private landlord on the Champs-Élysées!

In the course of growing his empire, he had done many questionable things. Public ministers on Putin’s economic trade councils were on his payroll. Many of his rivals were known to have been arrested and imprisoned. More than a few had been disposed of, suffering untimely falls from their office windows or unexplained car accidents on the way home. These days Khodoshevsky generated more free cash flow than a medium-size economy. In Russia today what he could not buy, he stole.

Fortunately, his was not a conscience that kept him troubled or awake at night. He was in touch daily through emissaries with a handful of powerful people-Europeans, Arabs, South Americans-whose capital had become so vast it basically ran the world. Wealth that had created the equivalent of a supereconomy, keeping real-estate prices booming, luxury brands flourishing, yacht makers busy, Wall Street indices high. They developed economies the way the International Monetary Fund once developed nations: buying up coal deposits in Smolensk, sugarcane fields for ethanol in Costa Rica, steel factories in Vietnam. However the coin fell, theirs always ended up on top. It was the ultimate arbitrage Khodoshevsky had crafted. The hedge fund of hedge funds! There was no way to lose.

Except maybe, as he relaxed a bit on the accelerator, today, to his son.

“C’mon, Pavel, let me see what you’re made of. Gun it now!”

Laughing, they sped into the final straightaway, then did a lap around the massive fountain in the courtyard in front of the house. The T-Rexes’ superheated engines spurted like souped-up go-carts. They bounced over the Belgian cobblestones in a father-son race to the finish.

“I’ve got you, Pavel!” Khodoshevsky called, pulling even.

“Believe it, old man!” His determined son gunned the engine and grinned.

In the final turn, they both went all out. Their wheels bumped together and scraped. Sparks flew, and Khodoshevsky lurched into the basin of the gigantic baroque fountain they had brought over from France. His T-Rex’s fiberglass chassis caved in like crepe paper. Pavel threw up his hands in victory as he raced by. “I win!”

Stiffly, Khodoshevsky squeezed himself out of the mangled machine. A total loss, he noted glumly. Seventy thousand dollars down the drain.

Pavel jumped out of his and ran over. “Father, are you all right?”

“Am I all right?” He took off his helmet and patted himself around to make sure. He had a scrape on his elbow. “Nothing broken. A good pass, boy! That was fun, eh? You’ll make a race driver yet. Now, help me drag this piece of junk into the garage before your mother sees what we’ve done.” He mussed his boy’s hair. “Who else has toys like this, eh?”

That was when his cell phone rang. The Russian reached in and pulled his BlackBerry out of his jeans. He recognized the number. “I’ll be with you in a second.” He waved to Pavel. “I’m afraid it’s business, boy.” He sat on the edge of the stone fountain and flipped open his phone. He ran a hand through his tousled black hair.

“Khodo here.”

“I just want you to know,” the caller, a private banker Khodoshevsky knew, began, “the assets we spoke of have been transferred. I’m bringing him the final shipment myself.”

“That’s good.” Khodoshevsky snorted. “He must have pictures of you, my friend, for you to trust him after that mess he made of things last year. You just be sure you explain to him the price of doing business with us. This time you see to it he fully understands.”

“You can be certain I will,” the German banker said. “I’ll remember to pass along your best regards.”

Khodoshevsky hung up. It wouldn’t be the first time, he thought, he had gotten his hands dirty. Surely not the last. The man was a good friend. Khodoshevsky had shared many meals with him, and a lot of good wine. Not that it mattered. Khodoshevsky clenched his jaw. No one loses that kind of money of theirs and doesn’t feel it.

No one.

“Come, boy.” He got up and went over to pat Pavel on the back. “Help me drag this piece of shit into the garage. I have a brand-new one in there. What do you say, maybe you’d like to give your old man another turn?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“Mr. Raymond?”

Hauck knocked at the small white, shingle-roofed home with a cheap green awning over the door in a middle-class section of Pensacola. There was a small patch of dry lawn in front, a black GMC pickup with an EVEN JESUS LOVED A GOOD BEER bumper sticker parked in the one-car garage.

The door opened, and a dark, sun-flayed man peered back. “Who’re you?”

“My name’s Hauck. I’m a lieutenant with the police department up in Greenwich, Connecticut. I handled your son’s case.”

Raymond was strongly built, of medium height, with a rough gray stubble. Hauck figured him for around sixty. His gnarled, cedar-colored skin looked more like a hide of leather and offset his clear blue eyes. He had a faded blue and red military tattoo on his thick right arm.

“Everyone knows me as Pappy,” he grunted, throwing open the door. “Only people who want money call me Mr. Raymond. That’s why I wasn’t sure.”

Hauck stepped through the screen door into a cramped, sparely furnished living room. There was a couch that looked like it had been there for forty years, a wooden table with a couple of Budweiser cans on it. The TV was on-a CSI rerun. There were a couple of framed pictures arranged on the wall. Kids. In baseball and football uniforms.

Hauck recognized one.

“Take yourself a seat,” Pappy Raymond said. “I’d offer you something, but my wife’s at her sister over in Destin, so there’s nothing here but week-old casserole and warm beer. What brings you all the way down here, Lieutenant Hauck?”

“Your son.”

“My son?” Raymond reached for the remote and flicked off the TV. “My son’s been dead over a year now. Hit-and-run. Never solved. I understood the case was closed.”

“Some information’s come out,” Hauck said, stepping over a pile of newspapers, “that might shed some new light on it.”

“New light…” The old man bunched his lips together and mocked being impressed. “Just in fucking time.”

Hauck stared at him. He pointed to the wall. “That’s AJ over there, isn’t it?”

“That’s Abel.” Raymond nodded and released a breath.

“He played defensive backfield, huh?”

Raymond took a long time before saying, “Listen, son, I know you came a long way down here and that somehow you’re just trying to help my boy-” He stopped, looked at Hauck with hooded eyes. “But just why in hell are you here?”

“Charles Friedman,” Hauck answered. He moved a stack of local sports pages off the chair and sat down across from Raymond. “Any chance you know that name?”

“Friedman. Nope. Never heard it before.”

“You’re sure?”

“Said it, didn’t I? My right hand’s got a bit of a tremor in it, but not my brain.”

Hauck smiled. “Any chance AJ…Abel ever mentioned it?”

“Not to me. ’Course, we weren’t exactly in regular conversation over the past year after he moved up north.” He rubbed his face. “I don’t know if you know, but I worked thirty years down at the port.”

“I was told that, sir. By your other son when he came to claim AJ’s things.”

“Rough life.” Pappy Raymond exhaled. “Just look at me.” He picked up a photo of himself at the wheel of what appeared to be like a tug and handed it to Hauck. “Still, it provided some. Abel got what I never got-meaning a little school, not that he ever had cause to do much with it. He chose to go his own way… We all make our choices, don’t we, Lieutenant Hauck?” He put the photo down. “Anyway, no, I don’t think he ever mentioned the name Charles Friedman to me. Why?”

“He had a connection to AJ.”

“That so?”

Hauck nodded. “He was a hedge-fund manager. He was thought to have been killed at the bombing at Grand Central Station in New York last April. But that wasn’t the case. Afterward, I believe he found a ride up to Greenwich and contacted your son.”

“Contacted Abel? Why?”

“That’s why I’m here. To find out.”

The father’s eyes narrowed, circumspect, a look Hauck knew. He laughed. “Now, that’s a pickle. One dead man going to meet another.”

“AJ never mentioned being involved in anything before he was killed? Drugs, gambling-maybe even some kind of blackmail?”

Raymond brought back his legs off the table and sat up. “I know you came down here a long way, Lieutenant, but I don’t see how you can go implying things about my boy.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Hauck said. “I apologize. I’m not interested in whatever he may have done, except if it sheds any light on who killed him. But what I am interested in is why a man who’s just gone through a life-threatening situation and whose life is a world apart from your son’s finds his way up to Greenwich and gets in touch with your boy directly after.”

Pappy Raymond shrugged. “I’m not a cop. I expect the normal course would be to ask him.”

“I wish I could,” Hauck said. “But he’s gone. For over a year. Disappeared.”

“Then that’s where I’d be putting my best efforts, son, if I were you. You’re wasting your time here.”

Hauck handed Pappy Raymond back the photo. Stood up.

“You think that man killed Abel?” Pappy Raymond said. “This Charles Friedman? Ran him down.”

“I don’t know. I think he knows what happened.”

“He was a good boy.” Raymond blew out air. A gleam showed in his clear blue eyes. “Headstrong. Did things his own way. Like you-know-who. I wish we’d had more time.” He drew in a breath. “But I’ll tell you this: That boy wouldn’t have harmed the wings on a goddamn fly, Lieutenant. No reason…” He shook his head. “No reason he had to die like that.”

“Maybe there’s someone else I could ask,” Hauck pressed. “Who might know. I’d like to help you.”

“Help me?”

“Solve AJ’s killing, Mr. Raymond, ’cause that’s what I damn well feel it was.”

The old man chuckled, a wheezy laugh escaping. “You seem like a good man, Lieutenant, and you’ve come a long way. What’d you say your name was?”

“Hauck.”

“Hauck.” Pappy Raymond flicked on the TV. “You go on back, Luh-tenant Hauck. Back to wherever you’re from. Connecticut. ’Cause there ain’t no way in hell, whatever ‘new light’ you may have turned up, sir, that it’s ever gonna be of any help to me.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Pappy Raymond was holding back. Why else would he push Hauck away so completely? Hauck also knew the old guy would be a tough one to crack.

He went back to the Harbor Inn hotel overlooking Pensacola Bay, where he was staying, stopped in the gift shop to buy a T-shirt for Jess that said PENSACOLA ROCKS, then fished out a Seminole beer from the minibar and threw himself onto the bed, turning on CNN.

Something had happened. An explosion at an oil refinery in Lagos, Nigeria. Over a hundred people killed. It had spiked the price of oil all day.

He reached over and fished out the number of AJ Raymond’s brother, Pete, who had come up to Greenwich after the accident to take possession of his things.

Hauck called him. Pete said he would meet him at a bar after his shift the next day.

The Bow Line was down near the port, where Pete, who had come out of the Coast Guard two years before, was a harbor pilot like his father.

“It was like something just turned off in Pop,” Pete said, drawing from a bottle of Bud. “AJ was killed. No one ever called my dad a teddy bear, but one day he went to work, wanting to do everything he could about what happened. The next day it was like it was all in the past. Off-limits to even bring it up. He never shared what he was feeling.”

“You think part of it’s guilt?”

“Guilt?”

Hauck took a swig of beer. “I’ve interviewed my share of people, Pete. I think he’s holding something back.”

“About AJ?” Pete shrugged, pushed back his hair under a Jacksonville Jaguars cap. “Something was going on… People who he talked to tell me he had this thing-this cover-up he’d stumbled into. Some ships he thought were falsifying their cargo. Like some big national-security thing. He was all worked up.

“Then the thing with AJ happened. And that was it. It was over for him.” He snapped his finger. “Lights out. Whatever it was, I never heard squat about it ever again. It was as if the whole thing just got buried the next day.”

“I don’t mean to push it,” Hauck said, tilting his beer. “All I want to do is find your brother’s killer, which is precisely what I believe it was. Anyone you know who can tell me any more on this?”

Pete thought a moment. “I could give you a few names. His old pals. I’m not sure what makes you think it’s all related, though.”

Hauck tossed a couple of bills on the counter. “That would be a big help.”

“Thirty years…” Pete got up and drained the last of his beer. “Pop was like a god down there in the harbor. There was nothing went on he didn’t know about or hadn’t done. Now look at him. He was always a hard man, but I would never call him bitter. He took it rough, what happened to my brother. Rougher than I would expect. Given that they never saw eye to eye for a goddamned second while AJ was alive.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY Hauck made the rounds at the docks. A couple of large freighters had come in early that morning. Huge unloading trestles and hydraulic lifts were hissing, off-loading massive containers.

He found Mack Tyler, a sunburned, broad-chested tug’s mate at the pilots’ station. He had just come in from a launch.

Tyler was a bit guarded at first. People protected their own down there, and here was this cop from up north asking all kinds of questions. It took a little finesse for Hauck to get him to open up.

“I remember I was out with him one day,” Tyler said. He leaned against a retaining wall and lit up a cigarette. “He was about to board some oil tanker we were bringing in. Pappy was always going on about these ships he’d seen before, making false declarations. How they were riding so high in the water, no way they could possibly be full, like their papers said. I think he even snuck down into the holds of one once.

“Anyway”- Tyler blew out smoke-“this one time we had pulled up alongside and the gangway was lowered to us, and Pappy was getting ready to go aboard. And he gets this cell-phone call. Five in the fucking A.M. He takes it, and all of a sudden his legs just give out and his face gets all pale and pasty-it was like he was having some kind of heart attack. We called in another launch. I had to bring the old man in. He wouldn’t take any medical attention. Just a panic attack, he claimed. Why, he wouldn’t say. Panic attack, my ass.”

“You remember when that was?” asked Hauck.

“Sure, I remember.” The big sailor exhaled another plume of smoke. “It wasn’t too long after the death of his boy up there.”

Later, Hauck met with Ray Dubose, one of the other harbor pilots, at a coffee stand near the navy yard.

“It was getting crazy,” said Dubose, a big man with curly gray hair, scratching the bald spot on his head. “Pappy was going around making all kinds of claims that some oil company was falsifying its cargo. About how these ships were riding so high in the water. How he’d seen them before. The same company. Same logo-some kind of a whale or shark, maybe. Can’t recall.”

“What happened then?”

“The harbormaster told him to back off.” Dubose took a sip of coffee. “That’s what happened! That this was one for customs, not us. ‘We just pull ’em in, Pappy.’ He’d pass it along. But Pappy, God bless, he just kept on pushing. Raised a big stink with the customs people. Tried to contact some business reporter he knew from the bar, like it was some big national-security story he was uncovering and Pappy was Bruce Willis or someone.”

“Go on.”

Dubose shrugged. “Everyone kept telling him just to back off, that’s all. But Pappy was never one to listen. Stubborn old fool. You know the type? Came out of the womb that way. I miss the son of a bitch, though. Pretty soon after his boy died up there, he packed it in with his thirty years and called it quits. Took it hard.

“Funny thing, though…” Dubose crumpled his cup and tossed it into a trash bin against a wall. “After that happened, I never heard another peep out of him about those stupid tankers again.”

Hauck thanked him and drove back to the hotel. For the rest of the afternoon, he sat around on the small balcony overlooking the beautiful Gulf blue of Pensacola Bay.

The old man was hiding something. Hauck felt it for sure. He’d seen that haunted face a hundred times before. There’s nothing you can do that’s gonna help me now…

It might only be guilt, that he had pushed his youngest son away. And what happened afterward.

Or it could be more. That the hit-and-run up north hadn’t been so accidental after all. That that was why they were unable to ever find anything resembling the SUV the witnesses had described. Why no one else ever saw it. Maybe someone had deliberately killed Pappy Raymond’s son.

And Hauck felt sure those tankers were connected.

He nursed a beer. He thought about placing a call to Karen to see what she had found.

But he kept coming back to the hardened look in the old sailor’s eyes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Karen went back through all of Charlie’s things as Hauck had asked her. She opened the cartons she had kept piled in the basement, doing her best to avoid the attention of the kids. Heavy, boxed-up files that Heather, his secretary, had sent with a note: You never know what’s in them. Maybe something you’ll want to keep. Brochures for trips they had taken as a family. The ski house they rented one year at Whistler. Letters. A kazillion letters. A bunch of things on the Mustang, which Charlie had asked her in the will he left not to sell.

Basically, the sum of their lives together. Stuff Karen had never had the heart to go through. But nothing that helped. At some point she sat in frustration with her back against the concrete basement wall and silently swore at him. Charlie, why the hell did you do this to us?

Then she went through the computer that was still sitting at his desk. She turned it on for the first time since the incident. It felt weird, invasive-as if she were prying into him. His signature was everywhere. In a million years she would never have done this when he was alive. Charlie never kept a password. Karen was able to get right in. What on earth had there ever been to hide?

She scrolled through his stored Word documents. Mostly they were letters he’d written from home-to industry people, trade publications. The draft of a speech or two he’d given. She went on his AOL account. Any e-mails he might’ve written before he disappeared had probably long since been wiped away.

It felt futile. And dirty, going through his things. She sat there at his desk, in the messy study, much of it still just as he’d left it a year before, where he’d paid the bills and read over his trade journals and checked his positions, the desk still piled with trade sheets and prospectuses.

There was nothing. He didn’t want to be found. He could be anywhere in the fucking world.

And the truth was, Karen had no idea what she was gong to do if she even found him.

She contacted Heather, who was working at a small law firm now. And Linda Edelstein, whom Karen still occasionally used as a travel agent. She asked them both to think back on whether Charlie had made any unusual purchases (“a condo somewhere, as crazy as that sounds, or a car?”) or booked any travel plans in the weeks before he died. She concocted this inane story about discovering something in his office about a surprise trip he’d been planning, an anniversary thing.

How in the world could she possibly tell them what was really in her mind?

As a friend, Linda scrolled back through her travel computer. “I don’t think so, Kar. I would have remembered at the time. I’m sorry, hon. There’s nothing here.”

This was insane. Karen sat there among her husband’s things at her wits’ end, growing angry, wishing she never had watched that documentary. It had changed everything. Why would you do this to us, Charlie? What could you possibly have done?

Tell me, Charlie!

She picked up a stack of loose papers and went to throw them against the wall. Just then her gaze fell to a memo from Harbor that was still there from a year before. Her eye ran down the office distribution list. Maybe they knew. She spotted a name there-a name that hadn’t crossed her mind in months.

Along with a voice. A voice she had never responded to, but one that now suddenly echoed in her ears with the same ringing message:

I’d like to speak with you, Mrs. Friedman… There are some things you ought to know.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The address was 3135 Mountain View Drive, a hilly residential road. In Upper Montclair, New Jersey.

Karen found Jonathan Lauer’s address in one of Charlie’s folders. She checked to make sure it was still valid. She didn’t want to talk with him on the phone. It was a Saturday afternoon.

There are some things you ought to know…

Saul had said it was just a matter of personnel issues, compensation. Karen had never heard from him again. And it wasn’t that she didn’t trust Saul. It was just that if they were turning over every stone, the way Ty wanted to, she thought she might as well hear it from Lauer directly. She had never called him back. It had been an awfully long time.

But suddenly Charlie’s trader’s cryptic words took on a more important meaning.

Karen pulled into the driveway. There was a white minivan parked in the open two-car garage. The house was a cedar and glass contemporary with a large double-story window in the front. A kid’s bike lay on the front lawn. Next to a portable soccer net. Rows of pachysandra and boxwood flanked the flagstone walkway leading up to the front door.

Karen felt a little nervous and embarrassed, after so much time. She rang the bell.

“I got it, Mommy!”

A young girl in pigtails who appeared around five or six opened the door.

“Hey.” Karen smiled. “Is your daddy or mommy at home?”

A woman’s voice called out from inside, “Lucy, who’s there?”

Kathy Lauer came to the door, holding a rolling pin. Karen had met her once or twice-first at an office gathering and, later, at Charlie’s memorial. She was petite, with shoulder-length dark hair, wearing a green Nantucket sweatshirt. She stared at Karen in surprise.

“I don’t know if you remember me-” Karen started in.

“Of course I remember you, Mrs. Friedman,” Kathy Lauer replied, cradling her daughter’s face to her thigh.

“Karen,” Karen replied. “I’m sorry to bother you. I know you must be wondering what I’m doing here, out of the blue. I was just wondering if your husband might be at home.”

Kathy Lauer looked at her a bit strangely. “My husband?”

There was a bit of an awkward pause.

Karen nodded. “Jon called me a couple of times, after Charlie-” She stopped herself before she said the word. “I’m a little embarrassed. I never got back to him. I was all caught up then. I know it’s a while back. But he mentioned some things…”

“Some things?” Kathy Lauer stared. Karen couldn’t quite read her reaction, nervousness or annoyance. Kathy asked her daughter to go back into the kitchen, said she’d be along in a second to finish rolling the cookie dough with her. The little girl ran off.

“Some things about my husband’s business,” Karen clarified. “By any chance is he around? I know it’s a little strange to be coming here now…”

“Jon’s dead,” Kathy Lauer said. “I thought you knew.”

“Dead?” Karen felt her heart come to a stop and the blood rush out of her face. She shook her head numbly. “My God, I’m so sorry… No…”

“About a month ago,” his wife said. “He was on his bike coming back up the road, up Mountain View. A car ran into him. Just like that. A hit-and-run. The guy who hit him never even stopped.”

CHAPTER FORTY

Dock 39 was a dingy, nautical-style bar in the harbor, not far from the navy yard. A shorted-out Miller sign flickered on and off in the window, while a carving of a ship’s bow hung above the entrance on the wooden façade. From the street Hauck could see a TV on inside. A basketball game. It was playoff time. A crowd of people gathered whooping around the bar.

Hauck stepped inside.

The place was dark, smoky, jammed with bodies fresh from the docks. A noisy throng at the bar was following the game. The Pistons versus the Heat. People were still in their work clothes, blowing off steam. Dock workers and seamen. No office crowd here. Ray Dubose had told Hauck that this was where he could find him.

Hauck caught the barman’s eye and asked him for a Bass ale. He spotted Pappy, huddled with a few guys drinking beer down at the end of the bar. The old man seemed disinterested in the game. He stared ahead, ignoring the sudden shouts that occasionally rang out or the jab of his neighbor’s elbow when someone made a play. At some point Pappy turned around and noticed Hauck, Pappy’s eyes narrowing balefully and his jaw growing tight. He picked up his beer and stood up, pushing himself away from his crew.

He came over to Hauck, pushing through the crowd. “I heard you been asking about me. I thought I told you to head back to where you came.”

“I’m trying to solve a murder,” Hauck told him.

“I don’t need you to solve no murder. I need you to leave me alone and go back home.”

“What did you stumble into?” Hauck asked. “That’s why you won’t talk to me, isn’t it? That’s why you quit your job-or were pressured to. Someone threatened you. You can’t keep pretending it’s going to go away. It won’t go away now. Your son is dead. That’s what that ‘accident’ up in Greenwich was about, wasn’t it? Why AJ was killed.”

“Get the hell away from me.” Pappy Raymond pushed away Hauck’s arm. Hauck could see he was drunk.

“I’m trying to solve your son’s murder, Mr. Raymond. And I will, whether you help me or not. Why don’t you make it easy and tell me what you found?”

The more Hauck said, the more the anger seemed to build in Pappy Raymond’s eyes. “You’re not hearing me, are you, son?” He thrust his beer mug into Hauck’s chest. “I don’t want your help. I don’t need it. Go on out of here. Go back home.”

Hauck grabbed his arm. “I’m not your enemy, old man. But letting your son’s death eat away at you by doing nothing is. Those ships were falsifying something. They were empty, right? There was some kind of fraud going on. That’s why AJ was killed. It wasn’t any ‘accident’ up there. I know it-you know it, too. And I’m not backing off. You don’t tell me, someone will. I’ll pitch a tent on your goddamn lawn until I know.”

A roar went up from the bar. “C’mon, Pappy!” one of his buddies yelled to him. “Wade just hit a three. We’re back down by six.”

“This is the last time I’m telling you.” Pappy glared. His gaze burned into Hauck’s eyes. “Go on home.”

“No.” Hauck shook his head. “I’m not.”

That was when the old guy raised his arm and took a swing at him. A wild one, his fist catching on the shoulder of a man nearby, but the punch of a man who was used to throwing them, and it surprised Hauck, catching him on the side of his face. The mug shot out of his hands, crashing to the floor, spilling beer.

People spun around to them. “Whoa…!”

“What is it you want from me, mister?” Pappy grabbed Hauck by the collar. He raised his fist again. “Can’t you just go back to wherever the hell you’re from and let what’s happened here die out? You want to be a hero, solve someone else’s crime. Leave my family alone.”

“Why are you protecting these people? Whoever they are, they killed your son.”

Pappy’s face was barely an inch away from Hauck’s, the smell of beer and anger all over him. He raised his fist back again.

“Why?” Hauck stared at him. “Why…?”

“Because I have other children,” Pappy said, anguish burning in his eyes. His fist hesitated. “Don’t you understand? They have children.”

Suddenly the wrath in the old man’s eyes began to diminish, and what was left there, in his hot, tremoring irises, was something else. Helplessness. The desperation of someone boxed in, with nowhere to turn.

“You don’t know.” Pappy glared at him, lowering his fist, releasing Hauck’s collar. “You just don’t know…”

“I do know.” Hauck met the old man’s eyes. “I know exactly. I lost a child, too.”

Hauck pressed something into Pappy’s hand as a couple of his friends finally came over and pulled him away, saying the old man had had one too many, offering to buy Hauck another beer. They dragged him back to the bar, where he sat, his face flushed with alcohol and incoherence, amid the hollering and smoke.

Dejected, Pappy opened his fist and stared. His eyes widened. Then he looked back at Hauck.

Please, his expression said, this time with desperation. Just go away.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“Mom?”

Samantha knocked on the bedroom door.

Karen turned. “Yes, hon.”

Karen was on the bed with the TV going. She didn’t even know what she was watching. The whole ride back to Greenwich, it beat on her-Jonathan was dead. Struck by a car coming down from the hill while cycling back to his home. Charlie’s trader had been trying to tell her something. He had a family, two young kids. And just like that boy who had Charlie’s name in his pocket, who had died in Greenwich the same day Charlie disappeared-Jonathan had died the same way. A hit-and-run. If she hadn’t had the thought to go and see him, she would never have known.

Samantha sat beside her. “Mom, what’s going on?”

Karen turned down the volume. “What do you mean?”

“Mom, please, we’re not idiots. You haven’t been yourself for over a week. You don’t exactly have to have a medical degree to see that you don’t have the flu. Something’s going on. Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m okay, honey.” Karen knew that her face was saying something different. How could she possibly tell her daughter this?

Sam stared. “I don’t believe you. Look at you. You’ve barely left the house in days. You haven’t been working out or gone to yoga. You’re pale as a ghost. You can’t keep things from us. If they’re important. You’re not sick, are you?”

“No, baby.” Karen reached for her daughter’s hand. “I’m not sick. I promise.”

“So what is it, then?”

What could she possibly say? That things were starting to piece together that were really scaring her? That she had seen her husband’s face after he’d supposedly died? That she had come upon phony passports and money? That he may have been doing something illegal? That two people who might’ve shed some light on it were dead? How do you drag your children into the truth that their father had deceived them all in such a monstrous way? Karen asked herself. How do you unleash that kind of hurt and pain onto someone you love so much?

“Pregnant, then?” Sam pressed her, with a sheepish grin.

“No, honey”-Karen smiled back-“I’m not pregnant.” A tear built up in her eye.

“Are you sad about me going off to college? Because if you are, I won’t go. I could go somewhere local. Stay here with you and Alex…”

“Oh, Samantha.” Karen pulled her daughter close and squeezed. “I would never, ever do that to you. I’m so proud of you, hon. How you’ve dealt with all this. I know how hard it’s been. I’m proud of both of you. You’ve got lives to live. What’s happened to your father can’t change that.”

“So what is it then, Mom?” Sam curled up her knee. “I saw that detective here the other night. The one from Greenwich. You guys were outside in the rain. Please, you can tell me. You always want honesty from me. Now it’s your turn.”

“I know,” Karen said. She lifted the hair out of Sam’s eyes. “I’ve always asked that from you, and you’ve given it, haven’t you?”

“Pretty much.” Samantha shrugged. “I’ve held a few things back.”

“Pretty much.” Karen smiled again, looking in her daughter’s eyes. “That’s about all I could ask for, isn’t it, honey?”

Samantha smiled in return.

“I know it’s my turn, Sam. But I just can’t tell you, honey. Not just yet. I’m sorry. There are some things-”

“It’s about Dad, isn’t it? I’ve seen you looking through his old things.”

“Sam, please, you have to trust me. I can’t-”

“I know he loved you, Mom.” Samantha’s eyes shone brightly. “Loved all of us. I just hope that in my life I’m lucky enough to find someone who loved me the same way.”

“Yes, baby.” Karen held her close. Tears wound their way down her cheeks as they clung to each other there. “I know, baby, I know-”

Then in mid-sentence she stopped. Something unsettling crossed her mind.

Lauer’s wife had said he was set to testify regarding Harbor the week he was killed. Saul Lennick would have known that. Let me handle it, Karen… He had never told her anything.

All of a sudden, Karen wondered, Did he know?

Did he know Charlie was alive?

“Yes, baby…” Karen kept brushing her daughter’s hair. “I hope to God one day you do.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Saul Lennick waited on the Charles Bridge in Prague overlooking the Vltava River.

The bridge teemed with tourists and afternoon pedestrians. Artists sat at easels capturing the view. Violinists played Dvořák and Smetana. Spring had left a festive mood in the city. He looked up at the Gothic spires of St. Vitus and Prague Castle. This was one of his favorite views.

Three men in business attire stepped onto the span from the Linhart Ulice entrance and paused underneath the east tower.

The sandy-haired one, in a topcoat and brown felt hat, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, and with a ruddy, cheerful face, came forward holding a metal briefcase, while the others waited a few steps behind.

Lennick knew him well.

Johann-Pieter Fichte was German. He had worked in the private banking departments of Credit Suisse and the Bundesbank. Fichte possessed a doctorate in economics from the University of Basel. Now he was a private banker, catering to the highest financial circles.

He was also known to represent some of the most unsavory people in the world.

The banker was what was known in the trade as a “money trafficker.” His particular skill was to be able to shift sizable assets from any part of the world in no matter what form: cash, stones, arms-even drugs on occasion-until they emerged in a completely different currency as clean and perfectly investable funds. He did this through a network of currency traders and shell corporations, a labyrinthine web of relationships that stretched from the dark corners of the underworld to boardrooms across the globe. Among Fichte’s less visible clients were Iraqi clerics and Afghani warlords who had looted American reconstruction funds; a Kazakh oil minister, a cousin of the president, who had diverted a tenth of his country’s reserves; Russian oligarchs, who dealt primarily in drugs and prostitution; even the Colombian drug cartels.

Fichte waved, angling through the crowd. His two associates-bodyguards, Lennick assumed-stayed a few paces behind.

“Saul!” Fichte said, embracing Lennick with a broad smile, placing his case at Lennick’s feet. “It’s always a pleasure to see you, my friend. And for you to come all this way.”

“The price of a service job.” Lennick grinned, grasping the banker’s hand.

“Yes, we are only the high-priced errand boys and accountants of the rich”-the banker shrugged-“available at their beck and call. So how is your lovely wife? And your daughter? She’s still up in Boston, is she not? Lovely city.”

“All fine, Johann. Thank you for asking. Shall we get on?”

“Ah, business.” Fichte sighed, turning to face the river. “The American way…His Excellency Major General Mubuto sends you his highest regards.”

“I’m honored,” Lennick said, lying. “And you will return them, of course.”

“Of course.” The German banker amped up his smile. Then, in a soft voice, staring ahead, as if his gaze were tracking a far-off bird that had landed on the Vltava, he explained. “The funds we discussed will be in the form of four separate deliveries. The first is already on account at Zurich Bank, ready to be transferred upon your say-so to anywhere in the world. The second is currently held at the BalticBank in Estonia. It is in the form of a charitable trust designed to sponsor UN grain shipments to needy populations in East Africa.”

Lennick smiled. Fichte always had a cultivated sense of irony.

“I thought you’d appreciate that. The third delivery is presently in non-cash form. Military hardware. Some of it your own, I am told. It should be leaving the country within the week. The general is quite insistent on the timing.”

“Why the rush?”

“Pending the status of the Ethiopian military buildup on the Sudanese border, it’s conceivable His Excellency and his family may be forced to leave the country at fairly short notice.” He winked.

“I’ll see to it the funds don’t sit unproductive for too long,” Lennick promised with a smile.

“That would be greatly appreciated.” The German bowed. Then his tone turned businesslike again. “As discussed, each of the deliveries will be in the amount of two hundred and fifty million euros.”

Well over a billion dollars. Even Lennick had to marvel. It crossed his mind just how many heads had had to roll and thousands of fortunes wiped out to assemble such a sum.

The banker said, “I think we’ve already gone over the general agreement.”

“The mix of products is quite diversified and fully transparent if need be,” Lennick replied. “A combination of U.S. and worldwide equities, real-estate trusts, hedge funds. Twenty percent will be retained in our private equity fund. As you know, we’ve been able to achieve a twenty-two and a half percent average portfolio return over the past seven years, net of any unforeseen fluctuations, of course.”

“Fluctuations…” The German nodded, the warmth in his blue eyes suddenly dimmed. “I assume you’re speaking of that energy hedge fund that collapsed last year. I hope it won’t be necessary to revisit my clients’ unhappiness over that development, will it, Saul?”

“As said”-Lennick swallowed a lump, trying to redirect the subject-“an unforeseen fluctuation, Johann. It won’t happen again.”

The truth was, with the amount of capital available in today’s world, Lennick had learned to make money in every conceivable market environment. In times of economic strength or stagnation. Good markets or bad. Even following acts of terrorism. The panic after 9/11 would never occur again. He had billions invested on all sides of the economic ledger, impervious to the vagaries of whoever won or lost. Today geopolitical trends and shifts were merely hiccups in the global transfer of capital. Yes, there were always blips-blips like Charlie, betting on the price of oil so stubbornly and unable to cover his spots on the way down. But behind that, all one had to do was look at the vast Saudi and Kuwaiti investment funds, the world’s greatest oil producers, hedging their bets by buying up all the ethanol-producing sugarcane fields in the world.

It was the greatest capital-enlarging engine in the world.

“So it doesn’t bother you, my friend?” the German banker suddenly asked. “You are a Jew, yes, and yet you know that this money you take regularly finds its way into the hands of interests that are unfriendly to your own race.”

“Yes, I’m a Jew.” Lennick looked at him and shrugged. “But I learned a long time ago that money is neutral, Johann.”

“Yes, money is neutral,” Fichte agreed. “Still, my client’s patience is not.” His expression sharpened again. “The loss of over half a billion dollars of their funds does not sit easily with these kinds of people, Saul. They asked me to remind you-your daughter has children up in Boston, does she not?” He met Lennick’s eye. “Ages two and four?”

The blood seeped from Lennick’s face.

“I was asked to inquire as to their general health, Saul. I hope they’re well. Just a thought, my old friend, from my own employers. Please, do not dwell. Still…” His smile returned with an affable tap of Lennick’s arm. “A small incentive to keep those-how was it you phrased it?-fluctuations to a minimum, yes?”

A cold bead of sweat traveled down Lennick’s back underneath his six-hundred-dollar Brioni pinstripe shirt.

“Your man lost us a considerable amount of money,” Fichte said. “You shouldn’t be so surprised, Saul. You know who you’re playing with here. No one is above accountability, my friend-even you.”

Fichte put on his hat.

Lennick felt a constriction in his chest. His palms, suddenly slick with sweat, pressed deeply onto the bridge’s railing. He nodded. “You spoke of four new deliveries, Johann. Two hundred and fifty million euros each. So far you’ve only mentioned three.”

“Ah, the fourth…” The German banker smiled and patted Lennick briskly on the back. He drew his gaze to the metal case at his feet.

“The fourth I’m giving you today, Herr Lennick. In bearer bonds. My men will be happy to escort you to wherever you would like it placed.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

By morning the welt on Hauck’s face had gone down a bit. He had packed his bags, set to check out in a couple of minutes. There was no need to press the old man any longer. He had other ways to find out what he needed to know. He glanced at his watch. He had a ten o’clock plane.

When he opened the door to leave, Pappy Raymond was leaning on the outside railing.

The old man’s face was haggard, eyes bloodshot and drawn. He looked like he’d spent the night curled up in some alley. Or like he’d been in a street fight with a ferret. And the ferret had won!

“How’s the eye?” He looked at Hauck. Somewhere in his tone was the hint of an apology.

“Works.” Hauck shrugged, rubbing the side of his face. “I was a little peeved about the beer, though.”

“Yeah.” Pappy smiled sheepishly. “Guess I owe you one of those.” The blue in his hooded eyes shone through. “You heading home?”

“Somehow I got the sense you’d be okay with that.”

“Hmphh,” Pappy snorted. “How’d I ever give you that idea?”

Hauck waited. He set down his bags.

“I was a fool my whole life,” Pappy said finally. He eased off the railing. “Stubborn with the best of them. Problem is, it takes getting old to find that out. Then it’s too late.”

From his coverall pocket, he took out the Orange Bowl ticket stub Hauck had placed in his hand the night before. He bunched up his lips. “We drove all day to see that game. Might as well have been the Super Bowl for all my son cared. It was to him. Seminoles were always his team.” He scratched his head, suddenly clear-eyed. “I guess I should say thanks. I remember last night you said…”

“My daughter was four.” Hauck gazed back at him. “She was run over by our car, in our own driveway. Five years ago. I’d been driving. I thought I’d left it in park. I was bitter, after the pain finally eased. My ex-wife still can’t look me in the eyes without seeing it all over. So I know… That’s all I meant to say.”

“Never goes away, does it?” Raymond shifted his weight on the railing.

Hauck shook his head. “Never does.”

Raymond let out a breath. “I watched those goddamn tankers come in three, four times. From Venezuela, the Philippines, Trinidad. Twice I even brought ’em in myself. Even a fool could see those ships were riding way too high. Didn’t have a lick of oil. Even snuck inside the holds once to see for myself.” He shook his head. “Clean as a baby’s ass. It’s not right what they were trying to do…”

Hauck asked, “You took it to your boss?”

“My boss, the harbormaster, the customs people…No duty on oil, so what the hell do they care? No telling who was getting paid. I kept hearing, ‘You just bring ’em in and park ’em, old man. Don’t stir it up.’ But I kept stirring. Then I got this call.”

“To push you to stop?”

Pappy nodded. “‘Don’t make waves, mister. You never know where they might fall.’ Finally I got this visit, too.”

“You remember from whom?”

“Met me outside the bar, just like you. Square jaw, dark hair, mustache. The kind of SOB who looked like he meant trouble. Mentioned my boy up north. Even showed me a picture. AJ and some gal up there with a kid. I knew what he was telling me. Still I kept at it. Called up this reporter I knew. I said I’d get him proof. That’s when I went aboard. A week later they sent me this.”

Pappy dug into his trousers, the kind of navy blue work pants he’d worn on the job, and came out with his cell phone, scanning it until he found a stored call. He handed it to Hauck.

A photo. Hauck exhaled. AJ Raymond lying in the road.

Pappy pointed. “You see what they wrote to me there?” SEEN ENOUGH NOW?

A screw of anger and understanding tightened in Hauck’s chest. “Who sent this to you?”

Pappy shook his head. “Never knew.”

“You take this to the police?”

Another shake of the head. “They won. No.”

“I’d like to send this picture to myself, if that’s okay?”

“Go ahead. I’m not standing by any longer. It’s yours now.”

Hauck forwarded the image to himself. Felt his phone vibrate.

“He was a good boy, my son.” Pappy looked Hauck in the eye. “He liked surfing and fishing. Cars. He’d never hurt a fly. He didn’t deserve to die like that…”

Hauck handed Pappy back the phone. He moved next to the old man on the railing. “These people, it was they that did this to him, not you. You were just trying to do what you thought was right.”

Pappy gazed at him. “Why are you doing all this, mister? You never showed me no badge. It can’t just be for AJ.”

“My daughter,” Hauck said, shrugging back at him, “she had red hair, too.”

“So we’re the same.” Pappy smiled. “Sort of. I was wrong, Lieutenant, the way I treated you. I was scared for Pete and my other boy, Walker, their families. Bringing all this up again. But you get them. You get those sons of bitches who killed my boy. I don’t know why they did. I don’t know what they were protecting. But whatever it was, it wasn’t worth this. You get them, you hear? Wherever this leads. And when you do”-he winked, a glimmer in his eye-“you don’t think about throwin’ ’em in no jail, you understand?”

Hauck smiled. He squeezed the man on the arm. “So what was the name?”

Pappy squinted. “The name?”

“Of the tanker?” Hauck asked.

“Some Greek word.” Pappy sniffed. “I looked it up. Goddess of the underworld. Persephone, it was called.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Vito Collucci could find anything, if the matter was about money. He made his living as a forensic accountant, tracking down the buried assets of philandering husbands for vengeful ex-wives. The hidden profits of large companies trying to fend off class-action suits. Before putting out a shingle, he had been a detective on the Stamford police force for fifteen years, which was where Hauck knew him from.

Vito Collucci could spot a bad seed in a sperm bank, he liked to say.

“Vito, I need a favor,” Hauck said over the phone, heading out to the airport for his flight from Pensacola.

These days Vito ran a good-size company. He was a frequent “guest expert” on MSNBC, but he had never forgotten how Hauck had thrown him cases when he first got started.

“When?” he asked. When Hauck called, Vito knew it usually involved information. Information that was hard to find.

“Today,” Hauck said. “I guess, tomorrow, if you need it.”

“Today’s fine.”

Hauck landed at two, taking his Bronco up from La Guardia. As he passed Greenwich heading to Stamford, the station a mile away, it occurred to him that he was getting deeper into something and a little further outside the law than he liked. He thought about giving Karen Friedman a call but decided to wait. There was a text message on his phone.

Usual place. From Vito. Three P.M. was fine.

The usual place was the Stamford Restaurant & Pizzeria, a no-frills cops’ haunt on Main Street, past downtown, close to the Darien border.

Vito was already there, at one of the long tables covered in checkered cloths. He was short, barrel-chested, with thick wrestler’s forearms and wiry graying hair. A plate of ziti with sauce was set before him, and a bowl of escarole and cannellini beans.

“I’d run up the check,” he said as Hauck came in, “but you’re lucky, Ellie’s got me on this cholesterol thing.”

“I can see.” Hauck grinned and sat down. He ordered the same. “So how’ve you been?”

“Good,” Vito said. “Busy.”

“You look thinner on TV.”

“And you don’t seem to age,” Vito said. “Except for that shiner you’re carrying. You gotta realize, Ty, you can’t tussle with the young dudes anymore.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Vito had a manila envelope beside him on the table. He pushed it over to Hauck. “Take a peek. I’ll let you know what I found.”

Hauck gazed at the contents.

“The ship was easy. I looked it up in Jane’s. Persephone, right?” Vito stabbed at a few ziti with his fork. “ULCC-class supertanker. Built in Germany, 1978. Pretty much outdated now. What’re you thinking, maybe of trading up to something a bit more seaworthy, Ty?”

“Might look good on the sound.” Hauck nodded. “Be a bit of a bitch to dock, though.” He scanned a photocopied page from the nautical manual that displayed an image of the ship. Sixty-two thousand tons.

“Been sold around a couple of times over the years,” Vito went on. “The last time to some Greek shipping company-Argos Maritime. That mean anything to you?”

Hauck shook his head.

“Didn’t think it would. So I kept at it. Pretended that I was a lawyer’s assistant to the company, tracking down a claim. The past four years this scrap heap’s been leased to some oil-exploration outfit I can’t bring up anything on anywhere. Dolphin Oil.”

Hauck scratched his head. “Who’s Dolphin?”

“Fuck if I know.” Vito shrugged. “Believe me, I checked. No record of them anywhere in the D &B. Then I tried a trade list of petroleum-exploration and-development companies, and it didn’t show up either. If Dolphin’s a player in the oil and gas business, they’re keeping it pretty much on the QT.”

“You think they’re a real company?”

“My thoughts exactly,” Vito said, pushing his plate away. “So I kept digging. I tried a directory of offshore-company listings. No record of them in Europe or Asia. I’m thinking, how does a company with no record in the industry lease a goddamn supertanker? Guess what came up? Feel free to turn the page.”

Hauck did.

Vito grinned widely. “Out of Tortola -in the BVIs…Whaddaya know about that-Dolphin fucking Oil!”

“In Tortola?”

Vito nodded. “A lot of companies are being set up there now. It’s like a mini-Cayman Islands. Avoids taxes. Keeps the funds out from under the eye of the U.S. government. As well as the SEC, if they’re public. Far as I can tell, and I’ve only been at it a couple of hours, Dolphin’s basically just a holding company. No revenues or profits of any kind. No transactions. A shell. The management seems to be just a bunch of fancy barristers down there. Check out the board-everybody’s got an LLC behind his name. Far as I can tell, it basically belongs to this investment company that’s situated down there as well. Falcon Partners.”

“Falcon…never heard of it.” Hauck shook his head.

“You’re not supposed to have heard of it, Ty. That’s why the hell it’s there! It’s some kind of private investment partnership. Or at least was. The fund was dissolved and the assets redistributed back to its limited partners earlier this year. Took me a while to figure out why. I was hoping to try to get a list of who the partners were, but it’s totally private-buttoned up. Whoever they are, the money’s probably long back to wherever it came from by now.”

Hauck scanned over the one-page company summary of Falcon. He knew in his gut he was getting close.

Whoever owned Dolphin had been engaged in some kind of cover-up. They had used empty tankers but declared that they were filled with oil. Pappy had stumbled onto it, and they’d tried to shut him up, but whatever they were hiding, he wasn’t the kind that shut up easily, and it had ended up costing him his son. Seen enough now? Dolphin led to Falcon.

Close enough, Hauck felt, the hairs raised expectantly on his arms. “How the hell do we get to Falcon, Vito?”

The detective was staring at him. “What’s the point of all this, Ty?”

“The point?”

Vito shrugged. “First time since I’ve known you you’re not up front with me. My spies tell me you’re on leave from the department.”

“Maybe your spies told you why.”

“Something personal, is all. Some kind of case that’s consuming you.”

“It’s called murder, Vito, no matter who I’m working for. And if this was all just so personal”-Hauck looked back at him, curling a smile-“I’d have called Match.com, not you.”

Vito grinned. “Just warning an old friend to stay within the boundaries, that’s all.”

The private investigator took out a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket and pushed it across the table. “Whoever Falcon is, Ty, they wanted to keep it secret. The board’s pretty much the same legal functionaries as Dolphin.”

Hauck scanned down the page. Nothing. Fucking close.

“One thing, though,” Vito added. “I mentioned that Falcon was comprised of a bunch of limited partners who want to remain secret. But the general partner is listed. In the investment agreement, plain as day. It’s the outfit who manages the funds.”

Hauck turned the page. Staring back at him, there was a name. Vito had highlighted it in yellow.

When Hauck’s gaze fell on it, his heart sank a little, as opposed to the leap he’d always imagined. He knew where this was about to lead.

Harbor Capital. The general partner.

Harbor was the firm that belonged to Karen Friedman’s husband.

“That what you’re looking for?” Vito asked, watching Hauck dwell on the page.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for, buddy.” Hauck sighed.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The man broke through the surface of the glistening turquoise water in the remote Caribbean cove.

No one around. Not even a name for this place, just a speck on the map. The only sounds were the caws of a handful of frigate birds as they tumbled out of the sky into the sea searching for prey. The man looked back at the perfect half circle of white sand beach, palm trees swaying in the languid breeze on the shore.

He could be anywhere. Anywhere in the world.

Why did he choose here?

Twenty yards away, his boat bobbed on the tranquil tide. What seemed like a lifetime ago, it occurred to him, he had told his wife he could spend the rest of his life in just such a place as this. A place without markets or indices. Without cell phones or TV. A place where no one looked for you.

And where there was no one to find you.

Every day that part of his life became a more distant part of his mind. The thought had a strange appeal to him.

The rest of his life.

He raised his face into the warm rays of the sun. His hair was cut short now, shaved in a way that might make his children roll their eyes, some old guy trying to appear cool. His body was fit and trim. He no longer wore glasses. His face was covered in a stubbly growth. He had a local’s tan.

And money.

Enough money to last forever. If he could manage it right. And a new name. Hanson. Steven Hanson. A name he had paid for. A name no one knew.

Not his wife, his kids.

Not those who might want to find him.

In this complicated world of computers and personal histories, he had simply gone, poof. Disappeared. One life ended-with remorse, regret, at the pain he knew he’d caused, the trust he’d broken. Still, he’d had to do it. It had been necessary. To save them. To save himself.

One life ended-and another sprang up.

When the moment had presented itself, he could not turn it down.

He hardly even thought of it now. The blast. One minute he had gone back from the front of the car to make a call, then flash! A black, rattling cloud with a core of orange heat. Like a furnace. The clothes burned off your back. Hurled against the wall. In a tangle of people screaming. Black smoke everywhere, the dark tide rushing over him. He was sure he was dead. He remembered thinking, through the haze, this way was best. It solved everything.

Just die.

When he came to, he looked at the ravaged train car. Every place he had been just a moment before was gone. Obliterated. The car in which he’d sat. The people around him, who were reading the paper, listening to their iPods. Gone. In a horrifying ocean of flame. He coughed up smoke. Got to get out of here, he thought. His brain was ringing. Numb. He staggered out, onto the platform. Horrible sights-blood everywhere, the smell of cordite and charred flesh. People moaning, calling out for help. What could he do? He had to get out, let Karen know he was alive.

Then it all became startlingly clear.

This was how. This was what had been presented to him.

He could die.

He stumbled over something. A body. Its face almost unrecognizable. In the chaos he knew he needed to be someone else. He felt around in the man’s trousers. In the smoke-filled darkness, the whole station black. He found it. He didn’t even look at the name. What did it matter? Then he began to run. His wits suddenly clearer than they’d ever been. This was how! Running, stumbling over the flow, not toward the entrance but to the other end of the tracks. Away from the flames. People from the rear cars were rushing there. The uptown entrances. Away from the flames. The one thing he had to do, resonating in his mind. Abel Raymond. He took a last look back at the smoldering car.

He could die.

“Mr. Hanson!” A voice suddenly brought him back, interrupting his dark memory. Leaning back in the water, Charles looked over at the boat. His Trinidadian captain was bending over the bow. “Mr. Hanson, w’ought to be pushing off about now. If we want to make it there by night.”

There. Wherever it was they were heading. Another dot on the map. With a bank. A rare-stone dealer. What did it matter?

“Right, I’ll be along in a moment,” he called back.

Treading water, he looked at the idyllic cove one last time.

Why had he come here? The memories only hurt him. The happy voices and recollections only filled him with regret and shame. He prayed she had found a new life, someone new to love her. And Sam and Alex…That was the only hope open to him now. We could spend the rest of our lives here, he had told her once.

The rest of our lives.

Charles Friedman swam toward the anchored boat, its name painted on the stern in gold script. The only attachment he allowed himself, the only reminder.

Emberglow.