The Dark Tide

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, Ronald Torbor generally took his lunch at home. Those days Mr. Carty, the senior bank manager, covered his desk from one to three.

As assistant manager of the First Caribbean Bank on the isle of Nevis, Ronald lived in a comfortable three-bedroom stone house just off the airport road, large enough to fit his own family-his wife, Edith, along with Alya and Peter and Ezra, and his wife’s mother, too. At the bank, people came to him to open accounts, apply for loans-the position came, to the view of his fellow locals, with a certain air of importance. He also took pleasure in catering to the needs of some of the island’s wealthier clientele. Though he had grown up kicking around a soccer ball on dirt fields, Ronald now liked golf on the weekends over on St. Kitts. And when the general manager, who was soon to be transferred, went back home, Ronald felt sure he had a good chance of becoming the bank’s first local-born manager.

That Tuesday, Edith had prepared him his favorite-stewed chicken in a green curry sauce. It was May. Not much going on at the office. Once the tourist season died, Nevis was basically a sleepy little isle. These kinds of days, other than waving to Mr. Carty that he was back, he felt there was no urgency to hurry back to his desk.

At the table, Ronald glanced over the paper: the results from the Caribbean cricket championships being held in Jamaica. His six-year-old, Ezra, was home from school. After lunch, Edith was taking him to the doctor. The boy had what they called Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism. And on Nevis, despite the rush of new money and developers, the care wasn’t very good.

“After work you can come watch Peter play soccer,” said Edith, seated in the chair next to Ezra. The boy was playing with a toy truck, making noise.

“Yes, Edith.” Ronald sighed, enjoying his peace. He focused on the box score. Matson, for Barbados, wrong-foots Anguilla for six!

“And you can bring me back some fresh-baked roti from Mrs. Williams, if you please.” Her bakery was directly across from the bank, best on the island. “You know the kind I like, onion and-”

“Yes, mum,” Ronald muttered again.

“And don’t be ‘mumming’ me in front of your boy like I’m some kind of schoolmarm, Ronald.”

Ronald looked up from the paper and flashed Ezra a wink.

The six-year-old started to laugh.

Outside, they heard the sound of gravel crunching, as a car drove up the road to their house.

“That is probably Mr. P.,” Edith said. Paul Williams, her cousin. “I said he could come by about a loan.”

“Jeez, Edith,” Ronald groaned, “couldn’t you have him just come by the bank?”

But it wasn’t Mr. P. It was two white men, who got out of the Jeep and stepped up to the front door. One was short and stocky, with wraparound sunglasses and a thick mustache. The other was taller, wearing a light sport jacket with a colorful beach shirt underneath with a baseball cap.

Ronald shrugged. “Who’s this?”

“I don’t know.” Edith opened the door.

“Afternoon, ma’am.” The mustached man politely took off his hat. His eyes drifted past her. “Mind if we speak to your husband? I can see he’s at home.”

Ronald stood up. He’d never seen them before. “What’s this about?”

“Banking business,” the man said, stepping around Ronald’s wife and into the house.

“Banking hours are closed-for lunch.” Ronald tried not to seem unfriendly. “I’ll be back down there at three.”

“No.” The mustached man lifted his glasses and smiled. “I’m afraid the bank is open, Mr. Torbor. Right here.”

The man shut the door. “Just look at these as extra hours.”

A shudder of fear rippled through Ronald’s body. Edith met his gaze as if to find out what was going on, then moved back around to the table, next to her son.

The mustached man nodded to Ronald. “Sit down.”

Ronald did, the man flipping a chair around and pulling it up to him, smiling strangely. “We’re really sorry to interrupt your lunch, Mr. Torbor. You can get back to it, though, once you tell us what we need.”

“What you need…?”

“That’s right, Mr. Torbor.” The man reached into his jacket and removed a folded sheet. “This is the number of a private account at your bank. It should be familiar. A sizable amount of money was wired into it several months back, from Tortola, the Barclays bank there.”

Ronald stared at the number. His eyes grew wide. The numbers were from his bank, First Caribbean. The taller man had pulled up a chair next to Ezra, winking and making mugging faces at the boy, which made him laugh. Ronald glanced fearfully toward Edith. What the hell are they doing here?

“This particular account is no longer active, Mr. Torbor,” the man with the mustache acknowledged. “The funds are no longer in your bank. But what we want to know, and what you’re going to help us find out, Mr. Torbor, if you hope to ever get back to your lunch and this happy little life of yours, is precisely where the funds were wired-once they left here. And also under what name.”

Perspiration was starting to soak through Ronald’s newly pressed white shirt. “You must know I can’t give out that kind of information. That’s all private. Covered by banking regulations-”

“Private.” The mustached man nodded, glancing toward his partner.

“Regulations.” The man in the beach shirt sighed. “Always a bitch. We sort of anticipated that.”

With a sudden motion, he reached over and jerked Ezra up out of his chair. Surprised, the child whimpered. The man put him on his lap. Edith tried to stop him, but he just elbowed her, knocking her to the floor.

“Ezra!” she cried out.

The small boy started crying. Ronald leaped up.

“Sit down!” The mustached man grabbed him by the arm. He also took something out of his jacket and placed it on the table. Something black and metallic. Ronald felt his heart seize as he saw what it was. “Sit down.”

Frantic, Ronald lowered himself back into the chair. He looked at Edith helplessly. “Whatever you want. Please, don’t hurt Ezra.”

“No reason to, Mr. Torbor.” The mustached man smiled. “But no point beating around the bush. What you’re going to do now is call in to your office, and I want you to have your secretary or whomever the fuck you talk to down there look up that account. Make up whatever excuse or justification you need. We know you don’t get those kinds of funds in your sleepy little bank very often. I want to know where it went, which country, what bank, and under what name. Do you understand?”

Ronald sat silent.

“Your father understands what I mean, doesn’t he, boy?” He tickled Ezra’s ear. “Because if he doesn’t”-his eyes now shifted darkly-“I promise that your lives will not be happy, and you will remember this little moment with regret and anguish for as long as you live. I’m clear on that, aren’t I, Mr. Torbor?”

“Do it, Ronald, please, do it,” Edith pleaded, pulling herself up off the floor.

“I can’t. I can’t,” he said, trembling. “There are procedures for this sort of thing. Even if I agreed, it’s governed by international banking regulations. Laws…”

“Back to those regulations again.” The mustached man shook his head and sighed loudly.

The taller man holding Ezra removed something from his jacket pocket.

Ronald’s eyes bulged wide.

It was a tin of lighter fluid.

Ronald dove out of the chair to stop him, but the mustached man hit him on the side of the head with the gun, sending him sprawling onto the floor.

“Oh, Jesus Lord, no!” Edith screamed, trying to wrench the man off her son. He elbowed her away.

Then, smiling, the man holding Ezra took the crying boy by the collar and began to douse him with fluid.

Ronald launched himself again, but the mustached man had cocked his gun and raised it to Ronald’s forehead. “I keep remembering asking you to sit down.”

Ezra was bawling now.

“Here’s your cell phone, Mr. Torbor,” pushing Ronald his phone from across the table. “Make the call and we just go away. Now.”

“I can’t.” Ronald held out trembling hands. “Jesus God in heaven, don’t. I…can’t.”

“I know he’s a bit off, Mr. Torbor.” The man shook his head. “But he’s just an innocent boy. Shame to hurt him in this way. For a bunch of silly regulations…Anyway, not a pretty thing at all for your wife to witness, is it?”

“Ronald!”

The man holding Ezra took out a plastic lighter. He flicked it, sparking up a steady flame. He brought it close to the child’s damp shirt.

“No!” Edith shrieked. “Ronald, please, don’t let them do this! For God’s sake, do whatever the hell they’re asking. Ronald, please…”

Ezra was screaming. The man holding him drew the flame closer. The man with the mustache pushed the phone in front of Ronald and looked steadily at him.

“Exactamente, Mr. Torbor. Fuck the regulations. It’s time to make that call.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Karen rushed to drop Alex off at the Arch Street Teen Center that Tuesday afternoon, for a youth fund-raiser for the Kids in Crisis shelter in town.

She was excited when Hauck had called. They agreed to meet in the bar at L’Escale, overlooking Greenwich Harbor, which was virtually next door. She was eager to tell him what she’d found.

Hauck was sitting at a table near the bar and waved when she came in.

“Hi.” She waved, folding her leather jacket over the back of her chair.

For a moment she moaned about how traffic was getting crazy in town this time of day. “Try to find a parking space on the avenue.” She rolled her eyes in mock frustration. “You have to be a cop!”

“Seems fair to me.” Hauck shrugged, suppressing a smile.

“I forgot who I was talking to!” Karen laughed. “Can’t you do anything about this?”

“I’m on leave, remember? When I’m back, I promise that’ll be the very first thing.”

“Good!” Karen nodded brightly, as if pleased. “Don’t let me down. I’m relying on you.”

The waitress came over, and it took Karen about a second to order a pinot grigio. Hauck was already nursing a beer. She’d put on some makeup and a nice beige sweater over tight-fitting pants. Something made her want to look good. When her wine came, Hauck tilted his glass at her.

“We ought to think of something,” she said.

“To simpler times,” he proposed.

“Amen.” Karen grinned. They touched glasses lightly.

It was a little awkward at first, and they just chatted. She told him about Alex’s involvement on the Kids in Crisis board, which Hauck was impressed with and called “a pretty admirable thing.”

Karen smiled. “Community-service requirement, Lieutenant. All the kids have to do it. It’s a college application rite of spring.”

She asked him where his daughter went to school and he said, “ Brooklyn,” the short version, leaving out Norah and Beth. “She’s growing up pretty fast,” he said. “Pretty soon I’ll be doing the community-service thing.”

Karen’s eyes lit up. “Just wait for the SATs!”

Gradually Hauck grew relaxed, the lines between them softening just a little, suddenly feeling alive in the warm glow of her bright hazel eyes, the cluster of freckles dotting her cheeks, the trace of her accent, the fullness of her lips, the honey color of her hair. He decided to hold back what he’d learned about Dolphin and Charles’s connection to it. About Thomas Mardy and how he’d been at the hit-and-run that day. Until he knew for sure. It would only hurt her more-send things down a path he would one day regret. Still, when he gazed at Karen Friedman, he was transported back to a part of his life that had not been wounded by loss. And he imagined-in the ease of her laugh, the second glass of wine, how she laughed at all the lines he had hoped she would-she was feeling the same way, too.

At a lull, Karen put down her wine. “So you said you made a little headway down there?”

He nodded. “You remember that hit-and-run that happened the day of the bombing, when I came by?”

“Of course I remember.”

Hauck put down his beer. “I found out why the kid died.”

Her eyes widened. “Why?”

He had thought carefully about this before she arrived, what he might say, and he heard himself retelling how some company was carrying on a fraud of some kind down there, a petroleum company, and how the kid’s father-a harbor pilot-had stumbled right into the middle of it.

“It was a warning”-Hauck shrugged-“if you can believe it. To get him to back off.”

“It was murder?” Karen said, a jolt of shock shooting through her.

Hauck nodded. “Yeah.”

She sat back, stunned. “That’s so terrible. You never thought it was an accident. My God…”

“And it worked.”

“What do you mean?”

“The old man stopped. He buried it. It never would have come out if I didn’t go down.”

Karen’s face turned pallid. “You said you went down there for me. How does this relate to Charles?”

How could he tell her? About Charles, Dolphin, the empty ships? Or how Charles had been in Greenwich that day? How could he hurt her more, more than she’d already been, until he knew? Knew for sure.

And being with her now, he knew why.

“The company,” Hauck said, “the one that was doing this down there, had a connection to Harbor.”

The color drained from Karen’s face. “To Charlie?”

Hauck nodded. “Dolphin Petroleum. You know the name?”

She shook her head.

“It may have been part of a group of investments he owned.”

Karen hesitated. “What do you mean, investments?”

“Offshore.”

Karen put a hand to her mouth and looked at him. It only echoed what Saul had said. “You think Charles was involved? In this hit-and-run?”

“I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, Karen.”

“Please don’t protect me, Ty. You’re thinking he was involved?”

“I don’t know.” He exhaled. He held back the fact that Charles had been up there that day. “There are still a lot more leads I have to run down.”

“Leads?” Karen sat back. Her eyes had a strange, confused look to them. She pressed her palms together in front of her lips and nodded. “I found something, too, Ty.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but it’s scaring me a little-like you are now.”

She described how she’d been going through some of Charles’s old things, as he’d asked, his old files, had spoken to his old secretary and travel agent but been unable to find anything.

Until she came across a name.

“The guy had called me a couple of times, just after Charles died. Someone who worked for him.” She described how Jonathan Lauer had tried to contact her, the cryptic messages he’d left. Some things you ought to know…“I just couldn’t deal with it back then. It was too much. I mentioned them to Saul. He said it was just personnel stuff and he’d take care of it.”

Hauck nodded. “Okay…”

“But then I thought of it in light of all that’s come up, and it began to gnaw at me. So I went out to see him while you were gone. To New Jersey. To see him. I didn’t know where he worked now, and all I had was this address from when he worked for Charles, with a private number. I just took a chance. His wife answered the door.” Karen’s eyes turned glassy. “She told me the most horrible thing.”

“What?”

“He’s dead. He was killed. In a cycling accident, a few months back. What made it all a little creepy was that he’d been scheduled to give a deposition in some matter related to Harbor later in the week.”

“What kind of matter?”

“I don’t know. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way he was killed. Coupled with the way your Raymond kid was killed, who had Charlie’s name on him.”

Hauck put down his glass, his antennae for these sorts of things beginning to buzz.

“A car hit him,” Karen said. “Just like your guy. It was a hit-and-run.”

A group of office people seated next to them suddenly grew louder. Karen leaned forward, her knees pressed together, her face a little blank.

“You did good,” Hauck said, showing he was pleased. “Real good.”

Some of the color returned to her cheeks.

“You hungry?” Hauck asked, taking a chance.

Karen shrugged, casting a quick glance at her watch. “Alex has a ride home with a neighbor. I guess I have a little time.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

On the way home, Hauck rang up Freddy Muñoz.

“LT!” his detective exclaimed in surprise. “Long time no hear. How’s vacation?”

“I’m not on vacation, Freddy. Listen, I need a favor. I need you to get a copy of the file on an unsolved homicide in New Jersey. Upper Montclair. The victim’s name is Lauer. L-A-U-E-R, like Matt. First name Jonathan. There may be a parallel investigation by the Jersey State Police.”

Muñoz was writing it down. “Lauer. And what do I say is the reason we need it, LT?”

“Similar pattern to a case we’ve been looking at up here.”

“And which case is that, Lieutenant?”

“It’s an unsolved hit-and-run.”

Muñoz paused. In the background there was the sound of young kids shouting, maybe the Yankees game on TV. “Jesus, Ty, this becoming an MO with you now?”

“Have someone drop it off at my home tomorrow. If I was active, I’d do it myself. And Freddy…” Hauck heard the sound of Freddy’s son, Will, cheering. “This stays just between us, okay?”

“Yeah, LT,” the detective answered. “Sure.”

NEW LEADS, HAUCK was thinking.

One definitely ran through Charlie Friedman’s trustee, Lennick. Karen trusted him. Almost like a member of the family. He would have known about Lauer. Did he know about Dolphin and Falcon, too?

Did Charlie ever mention he was managing any accounts offshore?

The other ran through New Jersey, this second hit-and-run. Hauck had never been one to have much faith in coincidences.

As he drove, his thoughts kept straying back to Karen. Off the top of his head, he came up with ten good, solid reasons he should stop now, before things went any further between them.

Starting with the fact that her husband was alive. And how Hauck had made a pledge to find him. And how he didn’t want to cause her any more needless hurt by holding things back than she had already been through.

And how she was rich. Used to different things. Traveled in a totally different league.

Jesus, Ty, you’re not exactly playing the strongest hand here.

Still, he couldn’t deny that he felt something with her. The electricity when their hands brushed once or twice at dinner. The same sensation coursing through his veins right now.

He pulled his Bronco off the exit of 95 back in Stamford. It occurred to him why he couldn’t tell her. Why he was holding back the whole truth. That Charles had returned to Greenwich after the bombing. That he had a hand in killing that boy. Maybe the other one, too.

Why he didn’t want to bring the police into the matter. Get other people involved.

Because Hauck realized that for the last four years he’d been essentially rootless, alone. And Karen Friedman was the one thing he felt connected to right now.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

There was a knock on the door the following afternoon, and Hauck went over to answer.

Freddy Muñoz was there.

He handed Hauck one of those large, string-bound interoffice envelopes. “Hope I’m not bothering you. Thought I’d bring it up to you myself, Lieutenant, if that’s okay?”

Hauck had just come back from a run. He was sweaty. He was in a gray Colby College T-shirt and gym shorts. He had spent most of the morning working on the computer.

“You’re not bothering me.”

“Place looks nice.” The detective nodded approvingly. “Needs a bit of a woman’s touch, don’t you think? Maybe make a little sense of that kitchen over there?”

Hauck glanced at the dishes piled in the sink, a few open containers of takeout on the counter. “Care to volunteer?”

“Can’t.” Muñoz snapped his fingers, feigning disappointment. “Working tonight, Lieutenant. But I thought I’d just hang around a minute while you took a look through that, if that’s okay?”

Buoyed, Hauck opened the envelope’s flap and slid the contents on the coffee table, while Muñoz threw himself into a cushy living-room chair.

The first thing he came upon was the incident report. The report of the accident by the lead officer on the scene. From the Essex County PD. Details on the deceased. His name, Lauer. Address: 3135 Mountain View. DOB. Description: white male, approximately thirty, wearing a yellow biking uniform, severe body trauma and bleeding. Eyewitness described a red SUV, make undetermined, speeding away. New Jersey plates, number undetermined. Time: 10:07 A.M. Date. Eyewitness report attached.

It all seemed to have a familiar feel.

Hauck glanced through the photos. Photostats of them. The victim. In his biking jersey. Hit head-on. Severe blunt trauma to the face and torso. There was a shot of the bike, which had basically been mangled. A couple of views in either direction. Up, down the hill. The vehicle was clearly heading down.

Tire marks only after the point of impact.

Just like AJ Raymond.

Next Hauck leafed through the medical examiner’s report. Severe blunt-force trauma, crushed pelvis and fractured vertebrae, head trauma. Massive internal bleeding. Dead on impact, the medical examiner presumed.

Hauck paged through the detectives’ case reports. They had mapped out the same course of action Hauck had up in Connecticut. Did a canvass of the area, notified the state police, checked with the body shops, tried to trace back the tread marks for a tire brand. Interviewed the victim’s wife, his employer. “No motive found” to assume it might not have been an accident.

Still no suspects.

Muñoz had gotten up and gone over to a canvas Hauck was working on by the window. He lifted it off the easel. “This is pretty good, Lieutenant!”

“Thanks, Freddy.”

“May get to see you at the Bruce Museum yet. And I don’t mean waiting in line.”

“Feel free to help yourself to any you like,” Hauck muttered, flipping through the pages. “One day they’ll be worth millions.”

It was frustrating-just like his. The Jersey folks had never found any solid leads.

It just came down to a coincidence, a coincidence Hauck didn’t believe, one that didn’t lead anywhere.

“Strike you as reasonable, Freddy?” Hauck asked. “Two separate 509s? Two different states. Each with a connection to Charles Friedman.”

“Keep at it, Lieutenant,” Muñoz said, flopping back over the arm of the heavy chair.

All that was left was the detail of the eyewitness depositions. Deposition. There was only one.

As Hauck opened it up, he froze. He felt his jaw drop open, his eyeballs pulled like magnets to the name on the deposition’s front page.

“See what I’m seeing?” Freddy Muñoz sat up. He swung his legs off the chair.

“Yeah.” Hauck nodded and took a breath. “I sure do.”

The lone eyewitness to Jonathan Lauer’s murder had been a retired New Jersey policeman.

His name was Phil Dietz.

The same eyewitness as at AJ Raymond’s hit-and-run.

CHAPTER FIFTY

He had slipped up. Hauck read over his testimony once, twice, then again.

He had slipped up big-time!

Immediately Hauck recalled how Pappy Raymond had described the guy who’d met him outside the bar and put the pressure on him. Stocky, mustached. In the same moment, it became clear to Hauck just who had taken those pictures of AJ Raymond’s body in the street.

Dietz.

His heart slammed to a stop.

Hauck thought back to his own case. Dietz had described himself as being in the security business. He’d said he’d run down to the crash site after the accident. That he never got a good look at the car, a white SUV, out-of-state plates, as it sped away up the road.

Good look, my ass.

He’d been planted there.

That’s why they’d never been able to locate any white SUV with Massachusetts or New Hampshire plates. That’s why the New Jersey police couldn’t find a similar vehicle there.

They didn’t exist! It had all been set up.

It was a thousand-to-one shot anyone would have ever connected the two incidents, if Karen hadn’t seen her husband’s face in that documentary.

Hauck grinned. Dietz was at both sites. Two states apart, separated by over a year.

Of course, that meant Charles Friedman was connected, too.

Hauck looked back up at Muñoz, a feeling that he was finally getting somewhere buzzing in his veins. “Anyone else know about this, Freddy?”

“You said keep it between us, Lieutenant.” The detective shrugged. “So that’s what I did.”

He looked back up at Freddy. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Muñoz nodded.

“I want to go over the Raymond file again. You get me a copy up here today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hauck stared at the image of the gregarious, mustached face-an ex-cop-now morphed into the calculating countenance of a professional killer.

The two cases hadn’t merged, they had basically crashed together. Head-on. And this time there were other people to see. His blood was racing.

You screwed up, he said to Dietz. Big-time, you son of a bitch!

THE FIRST THING Hauck did was forward a photo of Dietz’s face to Pappy, who a day later confirmed that that had been the same man who’d been in Pensacola. That alone was probably enough to arrest Dietz right now for conspiracy to murder AJ Raymond, and maybe Jonathan Lauer, too.

But it didn’t take things through to Charles Friedman.

Coincidence didn’t prove anything. With a good lawyer, it could be argued that being at both crash sites was just that. He’d given his word to Karen to find out about her husband. Charles had been in Greenwich. Lauer worked for him. They both led to Dolphin. Dietz was in it, too. Hauck wasn’t liking at all where this was leading. Tying Charles to Dietz would be a start. Right now he was afraid that if he blew the lid off everything, who knew where any of it would lead?

You should go back to Fitzpatrick, a voice in him said. Swear out a warrant. Let the feds figure this out. He had taken oaths. His whole life he’d always upheld them. Karen had uncovered a conspiracy.

But something held him back.

What if Charles was innocent? What if he couldn’t tie Charles and Dietz together? What if he hurt her, Karen, her whole family, after vowing to help her, trying to make his case, not hers? Bring him in. Put the pressure on Dietz. He would roll.

Or was it her? Was it what he felt himself falling into, these cases colliding together. Wanting to protect her just a little longer until he knew for sure. What stirred so fiercely in his blood. What he lay awake thinking of at night. Conflicted. As a cop, knowing his feelings were leading him astray.

He called her later that day, staring at Dietz’s file. “I’m heading down to New Jersey for a day. We may have found something.”

Karen sounded excited. “What?”

“I looked through the file on Jonathan Lauer’s hit-and-run. The only eyewitness there, a man named Dietz-he was one of the two witnesses to AJ Raymond’s death, too.”

Karen gasped. In the following pause, Hauck knew she was putting together just what this meant.

“They were set up, Karen. This guy, Dietz, he was at both accidents. Except they weren’t accidents, Karen. They were homicides. To cover something up. You did good. No one would ever have put any of this together if you hadn’t gone to visit Lauer.”

She didn’t reply. There was only silence. The silence of her trying to decide what this meant. In regard to Charles. For her kids. For her.

“What the hell am I supposed to think, Ty?”

“Listen, Karen, before we jump…”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Karen said. “I’m sorry about these people. It’s terrible. I know this is what you were always thinking. But I can’t help thinking that there’s something going on here, and it’s starting to scare me, Ty. What does all this mean about Charles?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Find out how, Ty? What are you going to do?”

There was a lot he had withheld from her. That Charles had a connection to Falcon. To Pappy Raymond. That he was sure Charles was complicit in AJ Raymond’s death-and maybe Jonathan Lauer’s, too. But how could he tell her any of that now?

“I’m going to go down there,” he said, “to Dietz’s home. Tomorrow.”

“You’re going down there? What for?”

“See what the hell I can find. Try and figure out what our next step is.”

“Our next step? You arrest him, Ty. You know he set those poor people up. He’s responsible for their deaths!”

“You wanted to know how this connected to your husband, Karen! Isn’t that why you came to me? You wanted to know what he’s done.”

“This man’s a murderer, Ty. Two people are dead.”

“I know that two people are dead, Karen! That’s one thing you don’t have to remind me of.”

“What are you saying, Ty?”

The silence was frosty between them for a second. Suddenly Hauck felt sure that by admitting he was not going down to bring Dietz in he was somehow giving away everything that was in his heart: the feelings he carried for her, the braids of red hair that had pushed him here, the echo of a distant pain.

Finally Karen swallowed. “You’re not telling me everything, are you, Ty? Charles is tied to this, isn’t he? Deeper than you’re letting on?”

“Yes.”

“My husband…” Karen let out a dark chuckle. “He always bet against the trends. A contrarian, he called himself. A fancy name for someone who always thinks he’s smarter than everybody else. You better be careful down there, Ty, whatever you’re planning.”

“I’m a cop, Karen,” Hauck said. “This is what cops do.”

“No, Ty, cops arrest people when they’re implicated in a crime. I don’t know what you’re going to do down there, but what I do know is that some of it is about me. And that’s scaring me, Ty. You just make sure you do the right thing, okay?”

Hauck flipped open the file and stared at Dietz’s face. “Okay.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Something strange crept through Karen’s thoughts that night. After she hung up from Ty.

About what he’d found.

It lifted her at first. The connections between the accidents. That she’d actually helped him.

Then she didn’t know what she felt. An uneasiness that two people linked to her husband had been killed to cover something up-and the suspicion, a suspicion Ty wasn’t clearing up for her, that Charlie was involved.

Jonathan Lauer worked for him. The fellow who was run over in Greenwich the day he disappeared had had Charlie’s name in his pocket. The safe-deposit box with all that cash and the passport. The tanker that had a connection to Charlie’s firm. Dolphin Oil…

She didn’t know where any of this led.

Other than that her husband of eighteen years had been involved in something he’d kept from her and that Ty wasn’t telling her all he knew.

Along with the fact that much of the life she’d led the last eighteen years, all those little myths she’d believed in, had been a lie.

But there was something else burrowing inside her. Even more than the fear that her family was still at risk. Or sympathy for the two people who had died. Deaths, Karen was starting to believe, against her will, that were inextricably tied to Charles.

She realized she was worried for him, Hauck. What he was about to do.

It had never dawned on her before, but it did now. How she’d grown to rely on him. How she knew by the way he’d looked at her-that day at the football game, how his eyes lit up when he saw her waiting at the station, how he had taken everything on for her. That he was attracted to her.

And that in the most subtle, undetected way Karen was feeling the same way, too.

But there was more.

She felt certain he was about to do something rash, way outside the boundaries. That he might be putting himself in danger. Dietz was a killer, whatever he had done. That he was holding something back-something related to Charlie.

For her.

After he called, she stayed in the kitchen heating up a frozen French-bread pizza in the microwave for Alex, who seemed to live on those things.

When it was done, Karen called him down, and she sat with him at the counter, hearing about his day at school-how he’d gotten a B-plus on a presentation in European history that was half his final exam and how he’d been named co-chair of the teen Kids in Crisis thing. She was truly proud of that. They made a date to watch Friday Night Lights together in the TV room later that evening.

But when he went back upstairs, Karen stayed at the counter, her blood coursing in a disquieted state.

Strangely, inexplicably, there had grown to be something between them.

Something she couldn’t deny.

So after their show was done and Alex had said good night and had gone back upstairs, Karen went into the study and picked up the phone. She felt a shifting in her stomach, school-girlish, but she didn’t care. She dialed his number, her palms perspiring. He answered on the second ring.

“Lieutenant?” she said. She waited for his objection.

“Yes?” he answered. There was none.

“You just be careful,” she said again.

He tried to shrug it off with some joke about having done this a million times, but Karen cut him short.

“Don’t,” she pleaded. “Don’t. Don’t make me feel this all over again. Just please be careful, Ty. That’s all I’m asking. Y’hear?”

There was a silence for a second, and then he said, “Yeah, I hear.”

“Good,” she said softly, and hung up the phone.

Karen sat there on the couch for a long time, knees tucked into her chest. She felt a foreboding worming through her-just as it had on the small plane that day as the propellers whirred in Tortola, Charlie waving from the balcony, the sun reflecting off his aviators, a sudden sensation of loss. A tremor of fear.

“Just be careful, Ty,” she whispered again, to no one, and closed her eyes, afraid. I couldn’t bear to lose you, too.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

The interstate that ran barely a mile from where Hauck lived in Stamford, I-95, turned into the New Jersey Turnpike south of the George Washington Bridge.

He took it, past the swamps of the Meadowlands, past the vast electrical trellises and the warehouse parks of northern New Jersey, past Newark Airport, over two hours, to the southern part of the state, north of the Philadelphia turnoff.

He got off at Exit 5 in Burlington County, finding himself on back roads that cut through the downstate-Columbus, Mount Holly, sleepy towns connected by wide-open countryside, horse country, a universe away from the industrial congestion back up north.

Dietz had been a cop in the town of Freehold. Hauck checked before he left. He’d put in sixteen years.

Sixteen years that had been cut short by a couple of sexual-harassment complaints and two rebukes for undue force, as well as some other issue that didn’t go away involving an underage witness in a methamphetamine case where Dietz had been found to apply excessive pressure for her testimony, which sounded more like statutory rape.

Hauck had missed all this. What reason had there ever been to check?

Since then Dietz was self-employed in some kind of security company, Dark Star. Hauck had looked them up. It was hard to figure out just what they did. Bodyguards. Security. Private contract work. Not exactly installing exclusive security systems, or whatever he had said he’d been doing in the area when AJ Raymond was killed.

Dietz was a bad guy.

As he drove along backcountry stretches, Hauck’s mind wandered. He had been a cop for almost fifteen years. Basically, it was all he knew. He’d risen fast through the bureaucracy that was the NYPD. He’d made detective. Been assigned to special units. Now he ran his own department in Greenwich. He’d always upheld the law.

What was he going to do when he got there? He didn’t even have a plan.

Outside Medford, Hauck found County Road 620.

On each side there were gently sloping fields and white fencing. There were a few signs for stables and horse farms. Merry-vale Farms-home to Barrister, “World’s Record, quarter mile.” Near Taunton Lake, Hauck checked the GPS. Dietz’s address was 733 Muncey Road. It was about three miles south of town. Middle of nowhere. Hauck found it, bordering a fenced-in field and a local firehouse. He turned down the road. His heart started to pick up.

What are you doing here, Ty?

Muncey was a rutted blacktopped road in dire need of a repaving. There were a few houses near the turnoff, small clapboard farmhouses with trucks or the occasional horse van in front and overgrown, weeded yards. Hauck found a number on a mailbox: 340. He had a ways to go.

At some point the road turned into dirt. Hauck bounced along in his Bronco. The houses grew farther apart. At a bend he came upon a cluster of RD mailboxes, 733 written on one of them. The postal service didn’t even come down any farther. A tremor shot through Hauck as he knew he was near. Boundaries, he knew he’d left them behind long ago. He didn’t have a warrant. He hadn’t run this by the office. Dietz was a potential co-conspirator in two homicides.

What the hell are you doing down here, Ty?

He passed a red, fifties-style ranch house: 650. A film of sweat had built up on his wrists and under his collar. He was getting close.

Now there was a huge distance between homes this far down. Maybe a quarter mile. There was no sound to be heard, other than the unsettling crunch of gravel under the Bronco’s wheels.

Finally it came into view. Around a slight bend, tucked away under a nest of tall elms, the end of the road. An old white farmhouse. The picket fence in front was in need of repair. A loose gutter was hanging down. What lawn there was looked like it hadn’t been mowed in months. Except for the presence of a two-seater Jeep with a plowing hitch attached in the driveway, it hardly looked as if anyone even lived here. Hauck slowed the Bronco as he drove by, trying not to attract attention. A Freehold Township Police sticker was on the back of the Jeep. A number on the column of the front porch confirmed it:

733.

Bingo.

The dilapidated two-car garage was shut. Hauck couldn’t see any lights on inside the house. Cars would be few and far between down here. He didn’t want to be spotted driving by again. About fifty yards past, he noticed a turnoff, more of a horse trail than a road, barely wide enough for his car, and he took it, bouncing over the uneven terrain. Partway in, he cut a left through a field of dried hay, his path concealed by the tall, waist-high brush. A couple of hundred yards behind, Hauck had a decent view of the house.

Okay, so what happens now?

From a satchel Hauck removed a set of binoculars and, lowering the window, took a wide scan back at the house. No movement. A shutter hung indolently from one of the windows. No indication that anyone was there.

From the same satchel, Hauck took out his Sig automatic, safety off, checking that the sixteen nine-millimeter rounds were loaded in the clip. He hadn’t drawn his gun in years. He recalled running into an alley, firing off three rounds at a suspect fleeing from a building, who had sprayed his TEC-9 at Hauck’s partner in a weapons bust as he was running away. He’d hit the guy in the leg with one shot. Brought him in. Received a commendation for it. That was the only time he had ever fired his gun on the job.

Hauck rested the gun on the seat next to him. Then he opened the glove compartment and took out the small black leather folder that contained his Greenwich shield. He didn’t quite know what to do with it, so he placed it in the pocket of his jacket, and took out a two-liter bottle of water and drank a long swig. His mouth was dry. He decided not to think too hard on what he was doing here. He took another sweep on the house with the binoculars.

Nothing. Not a fucking thing.

Then he did what he’d done a hundred times in various stakeouts over the years.

He uncapped a beer and watched seconds tick off the clock.

He waited.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

He watched the house all night. No lights ever went on. No one ever drove up or came home.

At some point he looked up the phone number Dietz had given him along with his home address and dialed it. After four rings the answering machine came on. “You’ve reached Dark Star Security… Please leave a message.” Hauck hung up. He turned the radio to 104.3 Classic Rock and found the Who. No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man… His eyes grew heavy, and he dozed off for a while.

When he woke, it was light. Nothing had changed.

Hauck tucked the gun into his belt. Stretched on a pair of latex gloves. Then he grabbed a Maglite and his cell phone and stepped out of the Bronco. He pushed his way through the dense hayfield until he found the trail.

He decided that if Dietz was somehow there, he’d arrest him. He’d call in the Freehold police and work out the details later.

If he wasn’t, he’d take a look around.

He made his way down the dirt road to the front of the dilapidated house. There was a sign on the scrabbly lawn: PRIVATE PROPERTY. BEWARE OF DOG. He climbed up the steps, his heart beginning to pound in his chest, his palms slick with perspiration. He stood to one side of the door and peeked in through a covered window. Nothing. He drew a breath and wondered if he was doing something crazy. Here goes… He put a hand on the grip of his automatic. With the other he took his Maglite and knocked on the front door.

“Anyone home?”

Nothing.

After a few moments, he knocked again. “I’m looking for some directions… Anybody home?”

Only silence came back.

The porch was a wraparound. Hauck decided to follow it around the side. On the lawn, just off the dirt driveway, he spotted a condenser box hidden in a bush and went over and lifted the metal panel. It was the main electrical feed to the house. Hauck pulled it, disabling the phone line and the alarm. Then he went back to the porch. Through the window he could see a dining room with a plain wooden table inside. Farther along he came upon the kitchen. It was old, fifties tile and linoleum, hadn’t been updated in years. He tried the back door.

It was locked shut as well.

Suddenly a dog barked, the sound penetrating him. Hauck stiffened, swallowing his breath, feeling exposed. Then he realized that the bark had come from a neighboring property, a faraway woof that rifled through his bones, hundreds of yards off. Hauck looked out at the obstructed fields. His blood calmed. Nerves…

He continued around the back of the house. He passed a locked shed, a lawn mower with a protective tarp covering it, a few rusted tools scattered about. There was a step up to a cedar back porch. An old Weber grill. A bench-style outdoor table. Two French doors led to the back of the house. The curtains were drawn.

Hauck stepped carefully and paused for a moment, hidden by the curtains, in front of the door. It was locked as well. Panels of divided glass. A bolt drawn. He took his Maglite and tapped on one of the panels near the doorknob. It jiggled in its frame. Loose. He knelt down and hit the panel one more time, hard. The panel split and fell in.

Hand on his gun, he held there for a moment, waiting for any noise. Nothing. He doubted that Dietz had a security tie-in to the local police. He wouldn’t want to take the chance of anybody needlessly poking around.

Hauck reached in through the open panel and wrapped his hand around the knob. He flicked the bolt back and twisted.

The door opened wide.

There was no alarm, no sound emanating. Cautiously, Hauck stepped inside.

He found himself in some kind of shabbily decorated sunroom. Faded upholstered chairs, a wooden table. A few magazines scattered on the table. Forbes. Outdoor Life. Security Today.

Heart pounding, Hauck took hold of his gun and went back through the kitchen, the floorboards creaking with each step. The house was dark, still. He looked into the living room and saw a fancy new Samsung flat-screen.

He was in. He just had no idea what he was searching for.

Hauck found a small room between the living room and the kitchen that was lined with bookshelves. An office. There was a small brick fireplace, a countertop desk with papers strewn about, a computer. A bunch of photos on the wall. Hauck looked. He recognized Dietz. In uniform with other policemen. In fishing clothes holding up an impressive sailfish. Another on some kind of large black-hulled sailing ship with a bare-chested, dark-haired man.

Hauck sifted through some of the papers on the desk. A few scattered bills, a couple of memos with Dark Star letterhead on them. Nothing that seemed to shed any light. The computer was on. Hauck saw an icon on the home page for Gmail, but when he clicked on it, up came a prompt asking for a password. Blocked. He took a shot and clicked the Internet icon, and the Google News homepage came on. He pointed the mouse and looked around to see what sites Dietz had previously logged on to. The last was the American Airlines site. International travel. Several seemed like standard trade sites. Farther down was something called the IAIM. He clicked-the International Association of Investment Managers.

Hauck felt his blood stir.

Harbor Capital, Charles Friedman’s firm, had been queried in.

He sat in Dietz’s chair and tried to follow the search. A Web file on the firm came up. A description of their business, energy-related portfolios. Assets under management, a few performance charts. A short history of the firm with a bio page of the management team. A photo of Friedman.

That wasn’t all.

Falcon Partners, the investment partnership out of the BVIs, had been queried, too.

Now Hauck’s blood was racing. He realized he was on the right track. The IAIM page merely provided a listing for Falcon. There was no information or records. Only a contact name and address in Tortola, which Hauck copied down. Then he swung around to the papers on Dietz’s desk. Messages, correspondence, bills.

There had to be something here.

In a plastic in-box tray, he found something that sent his antennae buzzing. A photocopy of a list of names, from the National Association of Securities Dealers, of people who had received licenses to trade securities for investment purposes. The list ran on for pages, hundreds of names and securities firms, from all across the globe. Hauck scanned down-what would Dietz be looking for?

Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to him just what was unique about the list of licenses.

They had all been granted within the past year.

As Hauck paged through it, he saw that several names had been circled. Others were crossed out, with handwritten notes in the margins. There were hundreds. A long, painstaking search to narrow them down.

Then it hit him, like a punch in the solar plexus.

Karen Friedman wasn’t the only person who thought her husband was alive!

There was a printer-copier on the credenza adjacent to the desk, and Hauck placed the security list along with Dietz’s notes in it. He kept looking. Amid some scattered sheets, he found a handwritten note on Dark Star stationery.

The Barclays Bank. In Tortola.

There was a long number under it, which had to be an account number, then arrows leading to other banks-the First Caribbean Bank. Nevis. Banc Domenica. Names. Thomas Smith. Ronald Torbor. It had been underlined three times.

Who were these people? What was Dietz looking for? Hauck had always assumed that Charles and Dietz were connected. The hit-and-runs…

That’s when it struck him. Jesus…

Dietz was searching for him, too.

Hauck picked up a scrawled sheet of paper from the tray, some kind of travel itinerary. American Airlines. Tortola. Nevis. His skin started to feel all tingly.

Dietz was ahead of him. Did he possibly already know where Charles was?

He placed in a copy of the same sheet in the printing bay and pressed. The machine started warming up.

Then suddenly there was a noise from outside the window. Hauck’s heart slammed to a stop.

Wheels crunching over gravel, followed by the sound of a car door slamming.

Someone was home.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Hauck’s blood became ice. He went over to the window and peeked through the drawn curtains. Dietz’s office faced the wrong direction; there was no way to determine who it was. He removed the Sig 9 from his belt and checked the clip. He was completely out of bounds here-no warrant, no backup.

Inside, Hauck was just praying it wasn’t Dietz.

He heard a knock at the door. Someone shouting out, “Phil?” Then, after a short pause, something that made his pulse skyrocket. The sound of a key being inserted in the front door, the lock opening. A man’s voice calling.

“Phil?”

Hauck hid behind the office door. He wrapped his fingers around the handle of the Sig and stood pressed against the door. He had no way out. Whoever it was had already come inside.

Hauck heard the sound of footsteps approaching, the creak of bending wood on the floorboards. “Phil? You here?”

His heart started going wild. Panicked, his mind flashed to whether or not his Bronco might have been seen. He realized that sooner or later whoever this was, if he made his way around the house, would notice the smashed rear windowpane. Would find his way back to the office. Whoever this was had access. On the other hand, Hauck was there totally unlawfully. He had no warrant. He hadn’t notified the local police. He would be cited just for bringing in his gun. The footsteps came closer. He wasn’t sure what to do. Only that he’d gotten himself into a sizable amount of shit, and it was getting deeper by the second. The man was walking around the house. Should he make a run for it?

Then something happened that sent Hauck’s pulse into a frenzy.

The fucking printer began to print.

The pages Hauck had fed into the tray, they were suddenly going through. The hum of the machine was like an alarm bell.

“Phil!”

The footsteps got closer. Behind the door Hauck gripped his Sig, pressing the muzzle up against his cheek. The machine continued to print. He couldn’t stop it! Think, think, what to do?

Hauck froze at the creak of a nearby floorboard as whoever it was came around the corner. He peeked inside the office. Hauck held, rigid as a board.

“Phil, I didn’t know you were here…”

The man paused, remaining in the doorway. The pages continued to feed into the machine one by one.

Hauck held his breath. Shit…

A second later the heavy office door slammed into his chest, taking him by surprise, the Sig flying out of his hand.

Hauck’s eyes darted after the gun, the door barreling into him again, striking him in the side of the head, dazing him, the gun clattering across the floor.

The man crashed the door into Hauck one more time, this time following it into the room, mashing Hauck’s right hand in the hinge. Hauck finally threw the brunt of his weight against it and rammed it back with all his might, sending the man reeling into the room.

The man had close-cropped hair and a large nose, his cheek bloodied from the blow. He glared at Hauck. “What the hell are you doing here? Who the fuck are you?”

Hauck stared back. He realized he had seen him before.

The second witness. The guy in a warm-up jacket at AJ Raymond’s hit-and-run. A track coach or something.

Hodges.

Their eyes met in a stunned, glaring gaze.

Hodges’s eyes were equally as wide. “You!”

Hauck’s glance darted toward the gun on the floor, as Hodges took the nearest thing available, a decorative scrimshaw horn Dietz kept on a side table, and lunged in Hauck’s direction, slashing the sharp point of the horn through Hauck’s sweatshirt and tearing into his skin.

Hauck cried out. The horn dug through his chest, his ribs on fire.

Hodges slashed at him again, Hauck flailing desperately for the other man’s arm to block the blow, pinning it back, while Hodges pushed with all his might with his other hand against Hauck’s neck.

He kneed Hauck sharply in the side of his chest, his wound.

“Aaagh!”

“What are you doing here?” Hodges screamed at him again.

“I know,” Hauck grunted back. “I know what’s happened.” Blood seeped through the ripped, damp fabric of his sweatshirt. “It’s over, Hodges. I know about the hit-and-runs.”

Straining, Hauck forced back his attacker’s fingers, reaching for the handle of the horn. It fell, skidding away.

Hauck faced him, clutching his side. “I know they were set up. I know they were done to protect Charles Friedman and Dolphin Oil. The police are on the way.” He was still dazed from the first blows, short of breath. His neck was raw and throbbing where Hodges had squeezed it. “You’re done, man.”

“Police…” Hodges echoed skeptically. “So who the fuck are you, the advance guard?”

Eyes ablaze, he darted to the fireplace and grabbed an iron poker there and swung it at Hauck as hard as he could, narrowly missing his head by inches and striking into the wall behind him, shards of dug-out plaster splintering over the floor.

Hauck dove headfirst into him, knocking Hodges back against the desk, heavy books and photos tumbling all over them, the printer crashing down from the shelf.

They rolled onto the floor, Hodges coming up on top. He was strong. Maybe a few years back Hauck could’ve taken him, but he was still dazed from the body blows of the door and the gash on his side. Hodges fought like he had nothing to lose. He kneed Hauck deeply in the groin, sending the air rushing out of him, and grabbed the iron poker lengthwise with both hands, pinned it across Hauck’s chest like a vise, forcing it into the nook of his neck.

Hauck gagged, sucking in a desperate breath.

“You think we did it to protect him?” Hodges said, squeezing him, his face turning red. “You don’t know a fucking thing.” He continued to press the poker into the cavity of Hauck’s neck. Hauck felt his airway closing on him, a clawing tightness taking over his lungs. Intensifying. He tried to roll his attacker off, knee him, but he was pinned and the iron rod was squeezing the life out of him. He felt the blood rush into his face, his strength waning, his lungs about to burst.

Hodges was going to kill him.

Straining, he tried with everything he had to push the poker back. His breath was desperate, his lungs clutching for blocked air. The blood was almost bursting through his head.

That’s when he felt the hard mound of the gun pressing sharply into his back. Hodges had him pinned, but somehow Hauck forced a shoulder up and reached, one arm dangling back, the other vainly trying to pry Hodges’s grip away from his throat. Fingers grasping, Hauck found the warm steel of the muzzle, spun it around under his body for the grip.

“Stop,” he gasped, “lemme talk. Stop.”

“How did you get here?” Hodges shouted at him. “How did you find out?” It was as if an iron hoe were being clawed inside Hauck’s throat. Finally he managed to wrap his fingers around the Sig’s handle. With the gun still underneath his body, he maneuvered it around.

“How?” Hodges demanded, pinning Hauck’s legs with his thighs and pressing the last gulps of air out of his chest.

All Hauck could do was raise himself ever so slightly, creating the tiniest space for him to slide his gun hand around, as Hodges now saw what he was attempting. And so, exerting himself even harder, he pinned Hauck’s arm back with his knee, jamming the poker tighter into his larynx.

Hauck’s lungs were about to explode.

His shoulder was pressed back so tightly there was no way he could aim. He managed to wrap his finger around the trigger, but the muzzle was jammed in against his body. He had no idea where it was even pointed, only that his strength was waning, his air disappearing… No more time.

He braced for the explosion in his side.

And fired-a muffled, close-in pop.

Hauck felt a jolt. The concussive shock seemed to reverberate inside both of their bodies. He tensed, expecting the rush of pain.

None came.

On top of him, Hodges grimaced. The iron rod was still pressed into Hauck’s neck.

There was a sharp smell of cordite in Hauck’s nostrils. Slowly, the pressure on his throat released.

Hodges’s eyes went to his side. Hauck saw an enlarging flower of red oozing from under his shirt there. Hodges straightened, his hand reaching to his side, and drew it back, smeared with blood.

“Sonofafucking bitch…” he groaned.

Hauck pushed his legs, and, glazy-eyed, Hodges rolled off him. Heaving, Hauck gulped precious, needed air deep into his lungs. His side felt on fire. There was blood all over him-whose, he wasn’t sure. Hodges crawled his way to the door.

“It’s over,” Hauck gasped, staring over at him, barely able to point his gun.

Clumsily, Hodges dragged himself up. A damp scarlet blotch seeped out of his shirt. He clamped it with his hand. “You don’t have a fucking clue,” he said, coughing back a heavy laugh.

He winced. Stood there, waiting for Hauck to pull the trigger. Exhausted, Hauck could barely raise the gun.

“You’re dead! You don’t know it yet, but you’re dead.” Hodges glared at him. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with!”

Hunched over, he staggered out of the room. Hauck could do nothing to stop him. It took everything he had just to pull himself up, coughing air back into his obstructed air pipe, his clothes drenched in sweat. He lurched outside after Hodges, clutching his ribs. Everything had gone wrong. He heard the sound of Hodges’s truck starting up, spotted droplets of blood leading off the porch to the driveway.

“Hodges!” Hauck came down the steps and leveled his gun at the truck. It backed out of the driveway and sped off down the road. Hauck took aim at the rear tires, his finger pulsed. “Stop!” he called after him. Stop. He didn’t even hear his own voice.

But he just held there, watching the truck ramble down the road, his gun aimed into the retreating cloud of dust.

It took everything Hauck had to focus on a single thought.

That he was involved in something-something that had blown up in his face.

And that he was no longer representing anything. Not all the oaths, not the truth, not even Karen.

Only his own base desire to know where it led.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

His side was on fire.

His neck was swollen twice its size. He could barely swallow.

Every time he breathed, his ribs ached like he’d been through ten rounds with a heavy weight. His chest was covered with a bright red welt.

He didn’t know what he had done.

He’d gone back in and grabbed the papers he’d copied out of the copier. Then he headed to his car.

As he drove back, Hauck’s first thoughts centered on Jessica-how lucky he was just to be alive.

Stupid, Ty, just plain stupid. He tried to size up the situation. Everything he’d done had been outside his jurisdiction. Breaking into Dietz’s house. Taking in his gun. Not informing the local authorities. And Hodges…he would live. But, Hauck realized, that wouldn’t be the half of it. Dietz would know-and so would whoever he worked for. This thing could explode. Of course, they had no way to know he was doing this on his own. Or, the thought calmed him slightly, that Karen was in any way involved.

That was the only fucking thing about any of this that was good.

It took him over three hours to drive back home. He got back in the early afternoon. He threw himself on his couch in exhaustion and examined his side, his head rolled back, trying to make sense of what he had done. He had broken laws. A shitload of them. He had put Karen in danger. The oaths he had taken in his life, to uphold the law, to do the right thing, they were all pretty much shattered now.

Hauck peeled off his bloodstained clothes and tossed them in a ball in the pantry. Just lifting his arms made him feel incredibly sore. The gash on his side had caked with blood, the skin torn where Hodges had slashed him. Bright red welts were all over his neck and chest. He looked in the mirror and winced. He didn’t know if he needed medical attention. His head was heavy. He just wanted to sleep. He felt alone. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to do.

He eased himself back onto the couch. There was just one person he could think of to call.

“Ty…?”

“Karen, listen, I need you,” he huffed. “Up here.” It was more of a plea than a statement. He caught his breath and sucked in air.

“Ty, are you all right?” Karen’s voice was alarmed. “I was worried. I tried calling you. You didn’t answer.”

“Karen, something happened… Just come on up. Please.” In close to a daze, he told her where he lived.

“I’m on my way. You don’t sound good, Ty. You’re scaring me. Just tell me, is there anything you need?”

“Yeah.” He exhaled, his head falling back. “Disinfectant. And a whole lot of gauze.”

HAUCK STAGGERED TO the door when he heard her knock. In a pair of gym shorts and a robe to conceal his wounds. He grinned, pale, his expression saying something like, I’m really sorry for getting you into this. Then he sort of leaned into her.

She looked at him, horrified. “What the hell’s happened, Ty?”

“I found Dietz’s place. I staked it out all night. I didn’t think anyone was there. This morning I went in.”

“He was there?”

“No.” Hauck took the bag of medical supplies he’d requested out of her hands-disinfectant, tape, and gauze. He stepped back over to the couch with a bit of a limp, eased himself down. “Hodges was, though.”

Her eyes screwed up. “Hodges?”

“He was the other witness at AJ Raymond’s hit-and-run. I guess they were in this together. Partners.”

“Together in what?”

That was when Karen’s gaze focused on the welts on Hauck’s neck, and she gasped. “My God, Ty, what have you done?” She drew back the collar of his terry robe, eyes wide, gently running her fingers across the bruised skin, inspecting the torn knuckles, aghast, carefully taking his hands in hers.

“This side’s worse.” Hauck shrugged, guiltily, letting his robe fall open to reveal the matted blood and tracks of torn flesh underneath his arm.

“Oh, my God!”

“It was all set up,” he said, trying to explain. “Abel Raymond. Lauer. Those accidents, they were hits. Dietz and Hodges killed them both. To cover it all up.”

“What!?” There was a pall of confusion on Karen’s face, but also something deeper-fear, knowing that somehow what he wasn’t totally divulging related back to her. That Charlie was involved.

“What happened to Hodges?” she asked, grabbing the disinfectant and ripping open the box of gauze.

His expression was stonelike. “Hodges was shot, Karen.”

“Shot?” She put the things back down, the color draining from her face. “Dead…?”

“No. At least I don’t think so.”

He told her everything. How he had gone inside the house figuring it was safe, and how Hodges came in, surprising him, in Dietz’s office. How they’d struggled, Hodges slashing him with the horn, clamping the iron poker across his neck, how Hauck thought he was dying. How he’d shot Hodges.

“Oh, my God, Ty…” Karen’s eyes were wide and empathetic. The consternation on her face had turned to real fear. “What did the police say? It has to be self-defense, right? He was trying to kill you, Ty.”

Hauck kept his gaze trained on her. “I didn’t call in the police, Karen.”

She blinked. “What…?”

“I had no right to be there, Karen. The whole thing was illegal from the start. I didn’t have a warrant. There isn’t an open case against them. I’m not even on goddamn duty, Karen.”

“Ty…” Karen’s hand shot to her mouth as she started to realize the situation. “You can’t just pretend this didn’t happen. You shot someone.”

“This man tried to kill me, Karen! You want me to call the police? Don’t you understand? Your husband was in bed with these people, Karen. Dietz, Hodges. When Charlie left Grand Central that morning, he made his way up to Greenwich. He stole the credit card off of someone who died on the tracks. There was a call to AJ Raymond, Karen, from the diner across the street. Charlie made that call, Karen. Your husband. Either he was directly involved in the murder of AJ Raymond or he damn well helped set it up.”

“Charlie…?” Karen shook her head. “You can’t think Charlie’s some kind of killer, Ty. No. Why?”

“To cover up what Raymond’s father stumbled onto in Pensacola. That they were falsifying shipments of oil in one of the companies Charlie controlled.”

Karen shook her head again defiantly.

“It’s true. Have you ever heard of Dolphin Oil, Karen? Or something called Falcon Partners?”

“No.”

“They’re subsidiaries, owned by his company. Harbor. Offshore. You want me to call in the police, Karen? If I do, they’re going to issue an immediate warrant for his arrest. There are ample grounds-fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to commit murder. Is that what you want me to do, Karen? To you and your family? Call in the police? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”

Karen put a hand to her forehead and shook her head reflexively. “I don’t know.”

“Charlie was tied to them. Through the investment companies he controlled. Through Dietz. He’s tied in to both murders, Karen-”

“I don’t believe it! You can’t expect me to believe my husband’s a murderer, Ty!”

“Look!” Hauck reached over and grabbed the papers he had taken from Dietz’s office and put them in front of her face. “His name is all over the place. Two people are dead, Karen. And now you have to listen to me and make a decision, because there may be more. This guy Dietz, he’s looking for Charlie, too. I don’t know who the hell he is or who he’s working for, but he’s out there, Karen, and somehow he knows Charlie’s alive, just like we do, and he’s searching for him, too-I found the trail! Maybe they’re trying to shut him up, I don’t know. But I guarantee you if he finds him, Karen, before we do, it won’t be to tearfully look him in the eyes and ask how he could’ve possibly done this to you.”

Karen nodded haltingly, a tremor of confusion rattling her. Hauck reached over and took her hand. He wrapped his fingers around her tightened fist.

“So you tell me, Karen, is that what you really want me to do? Call in the police? Because the police are involved. I’m involved. And after today, with what’s happened, I can’t just reverse the clock and go back empty-handed anymore.”

Her eyes were filled, tears reflecting in them. “He’s the father of my kids. You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to kill him myself, but what you’re telling me…a murderer? No, I won’t believe it till I hear it from him.”

“I’ll find him for you, Karen. I promise I will. But just be sure that with what’s happened now, these people know I’m onto them. We’re in it now. If that’s something you don’t think you can face-and I’d understand it if it was-now’s the time to say so.”

Karen looked down. Hauck felt a finger wrap around his hand, her pinkie, cautious and tremulous. It squeezed. There was a frightened look in her eyes, but behind it something deeper, a twinkling of resolve. She looked at him and shook her head again.

“I want you to find him, Ty.”

Her face dipped, ever so slightly, close to his, her hair tumbling against his cheek. Her breath was close and halting. Their knees touched. Hauck felt his blood spark alive as the side of her breast brushed his arm. Their lips could have touched right there. It would have taken only a nudge, and she would have folded into him-and a part of him wanted her to, a strong part, but another part said no. The hair on his arms tingled as he listened to her breathe.

“You knew this all along,” she said to him. “About Charlie. That this led back to him. You held it back from me.”

“I didn’t want you to be any more hurt until I was sure.”

She nodded. She locked her fingers inside his hand. “He wouldn’t kill anyone, Ty. I don’t care how foolish it makes me look. I know him. I lived with him for close to twenty years. He’s the father of my kids. I know.”

“So what do you want to do?”

Karen gently eased open Hauck’s robe. He tensed. She ran her fingers along his chest. She reached for the bag of liniment she had brought. “I want to take a look at that wound.”

“No,” he said, catching her hand. “You know what I meant.”

She held a moment, their hands still touching.

“I want to hear from his lips what he’s done, why he walked away from us, from almost twenty years of marriage, his family. I want to find him, Ty. Find Charles. Something came up while you were down there. I think I may know how.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

It was the car.

She had already been through everything two times over, just as Ty had asked. Still, while he was down in Jersey, she felt she had to do something. To keep from worrying.

So Karen tore through Charlie’s things all over again-the old bills, the stacks of receipts he’d left in his closet, the papers on his desk. Even the sites he’d visited on his computer before he “died.”

A wild-goose chase, she told herself. Just like the one before.

Except this time some things came up. A file buried deep in his desk, hidden under a pile of legal papers. A file Karen had never noticed before. From before Charlie died. Things she didn’t understand.

A small note card still in its envelope-addressed to Charles. The kind that accompanied a gift of flowers. Karen opened it, a little hesitantly, and saw it was written in a hand she didn’t recognize.

It stopped her.

Sorry about the pooch, Charles. Could the kids be next?

Sorry about the pooch. Karen saw that her hands were shaking. Whoever wrote it had to be talking about Sasha. And what did that possibly mean, that the kids could be next?

Their kids…

Suddenly Karen felt a tightness in her chest. What had these people done?

And then, in that same hidden-away file, she came across one of the holiday cards they’d sent as a family before Charlie had died. The four of them sitting on a wooden fence at a field near their ski house in Vermont. A happy time.

She opened it.

She almost threw up.

The kids’ faces, Samantha and Alexander-they had both been cut out.

Karen covered her face with her hands and felt her cheeks flush with blood.

“What the hell is happening here, Charlie?” She stared at the card. What the hell were you involved in? What were you doing to us, Charlie? All of a sudden, the incident in Samantha’s car at school came hurtling back to Karen, her heart starting to race. Accusingly. She got up from the desk. She wanted to hit something. She touched her hand to her face. Looked around the room.

His room.

“Talk to me, Charlie, you bastard, talk to me!”

And then her eyes seemed to fall on it.

Amid the clutter of papers and prospectuses and sports magazines she had still never quite cleared from his office.

The stack. The neatly piled stack Charlie kept on the bookshelf. Every issue. A sure-as-hell fire hazard, Karen always called it. His little dream collection, dating back since he’d first acquired his toy, eight years earlier.

Mustang World.

She went over to it-the stack of magazines piled high. She picked up one or two, the thought now forming in her brain.

This was it! The one thing about him he could never change. No matter what name he was under. Or who he was now.

Or where.

His stupid car. Charlie’s Baby. He read about the damn things in his spare time, checked out the prices, chatted about them online. They always joked how it was a part of him. His mistress that Karen just had to put up with. She called it Camilla, as in Camilla and Charles. Better than Camilla, Charlie always joked. “Better-looking, too.”

Mustang World.

He constantly put the car up for sale, then never sold it. In the summer he drove it in rallies. Monitored the online sites. She didn’t understand what these cards she’d found were about. They scared her. She didn’t know for sure what he’d done.

“But that’s the way,” Karen said to Hauck as she went to dress his wounds now.

She reached into her bag and dropped a copy of the magazine on the table. Mustang World.

“That’s how we find him, Ty. Charlie’s Baby.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

One Police Plaza was the home of the NYPD’s administrative offices in lower Manhattan, as well as of the Joint Inter-Agency Task Force that oversaw the city’s security.

Hauck waited in the courtyard in front of the building, looking out over Frankfort Street, which led onto the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a warm May afternoon. Strollers and bikers were crossing the steel gray span, office workers in shirtsleeves and light dresses on their lunchtime stroll. A few years back, Hauck used to work out of this building. He hadn’t been down here in years.

A slightly built, balding man in a navy police sweater waved to a coworker and came up to him, his police ID fastened to his chest.

“ New York ’s Finest.” The man winked, standing in front of Hauck. He sat down beside him and gave him a tap of the fist.

“Go, blue!” Hauck grinned back.

Lieutenant Joe Velko had been a young head of detectives in the 105th Precinct, and had gone on to receive a master’s degree from NYU in computer forensics. For years he and Hauck had been teammates on the department’s hockey team, Hauck a crease-clearing defenseman with gimpy knees, Joe a gritty forward who learned to use a stick on the streets of Elmhurst, Queens. Joe’s wife, Marilyn, had been a secretary at Cantor Fitzgerald and had died on 9/11. Back then it was Hauck who had organized a benefit game for Joe’s kids. Captain Joe Velko now ran one of the most important departments in the entire NYPD.

Watchdog was a state-of-the-art computer software program developed by the NCSA, powered by nine supercomputers at an underground command center across the river in Brooklyn. Basically what Watchdog did was monitor billions of bits of data over the Internet for random connections that could prove useful for security purposes. Blogs, e-mail messages, Web sites, MySpace pages-billions of bits of Internet traffic. It sought out any unusual relationships between names, dates, scheduled public events, even repeated colloquial phrases, and spit them out at the command center in daily “alerts,” whereupon a staff of analysts pored over them, deciding if they were important enough to act on or to pass along to other security teams. A couple of years back, a plot to bomb the Citigroup Center by an antiglobalization group was uncovered by Watchdog, simply because it connected the same seemingly innocent but repeated phrase, “renewing our driver’s license,” to a random date, June 24, the day of an event there highlighted by a visit from the head of the World Bank. The connection was traced to someone on the catering team, who was an accomplice on the inside.

“So what do I owe this visit to?” Velko turned to Hauck. “I know this isn’t exactly your favorite place.”

“I need to ask you a favor, Joe.”

A seasoned cop, Velko seemed to see something in Hauck’s face that made him pause.

“I’m trying to locate someone,” Hauck explained. He removed a thin manila envelope from under his sport jacket. “I have no idea where he is. Or even what name he might be using. He’s most likely out of the country as well.” He put the envelope on Velko’s lap.

“I thought you were going to give me a challenge.” The security man chuckled, unfastening the clasp.

He slid out the contents: a copy of Charles Friedman’s passport photo, together with some things Karen had supplied him. The phrases “1966 Emberglow Mustang. GT. Pony interior. Greenwich, Connecticut.” Some place called Ragtops, in Florida, where Charles had purchased it. The Greenwich Concours Rallye, where he sometimes showcased his car. A few of what Karen remembered as Charlie’s favorite car sites. And finally a few favorite expressions he might use, like, “Lights out.” Or “It’s a home run, baby.”

“You must think just because you elbowed a few firemen out of the crease who were trying to knock the shit out of me I really owe you, huh?”

“It was more than a few, Joe.” Hauck smiled.

“A ’66 Mustang. Pony interior. Can’t you just log onto eBay for one of these things, Ty?” Velko grinned.

“Yeah, but this is far sexier,” Hauck replied. “Look, the guy may be in the Caribbean, or maybe Central America. And Joe…this is gonna come out in your search, so I might as well tell you up front now-the person I’m looking for is supposedly dead. In the Grand Central bombing.”

“Supposedly dead? As opposed to really dead?”

“Don’t make me go into it, partner. I’m just trying to find him for a friend.”

Velko slid the paper back inside the envelope. “Three hundred billion bits of data crossing the Internet every day, the city’s security squarely in our hands, and I’m looking at an Amber Alert for a dead guy’s ’66 Mustang.”

“Thank you, guy. I appreciate whatever turns up.”

“A wide goddamn hole in the Patriot Act”-Velko cleared his throat-“That’s what the hell’s going to turn up. We’re not exactly a missing-persons search system here.” He looked at Hauck, reacting to the marks on his face and neck and the stiffness in his reach.

“You still skating?”

Hauck nodded. “Local team up there. Over-forty league now. Mostly a bunch of Wall Street types and mortgage salesmen. You?”

“No.” Velko tapped his head. “They won’t let me anymore. They seem to think my brain is good for something other than getting knocked around. Too risky on the new job. Michelle is, though. You should see her. She’s a goddamn little bruiser. She plays on the boys’ team for her school.”

“I’d like to,” Hauck said with a fond smile. When Marilyn died, Michelle had been nine and Bonnie six. Hauck had organized a benefit game for them against a team of local celebrities. Afterward Joe’s family came onto the ice and received a team jersey signed by the Rangers and the Islanders.

“I know I’ve said this, Ty, but I always appreciated just what you did.”

Hauck shot Joe a wink.

“Anyway, I better get on these, right? Top secret-specialized and classified. Joe stood up. “Is everything okay?”

Hauck nodded. His side still ached like hell. “Everything’s okay.”

“Whatever turns up,” Joe said, “I can still find you up at your office in Greenwich?”

Hauck shook his head. “I’m taking a little time. My cell number’s in the package. And Joe…I’d appreciate it if you kept this entirely between us.”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that.” Joe raised the envelope and rolled his eyes. “Taking a little time…” As Velko backed away toward the police building, he cocked Ty a wary smile.

“What the hell are you getting yourself involved in, Ty?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

After his meeting with Velko, Hauck went to the office of Media Publishing, located on the thirtieth floor of a tall glass building at Forty-sixth Street and Third Avenue.

The publishers of Mustang World.

It took Hauck’s flashing his badge first to the receptionist and then to a couple of junior marketing people to finally get him to the right person. He had no authority here. The last thing he wanted was to have to call in yet another old friend from the NYPD. Fortunately, the marketing guy he finally got him in front of seemed eager to help and didn’t ask him to come back with a warrant.

“We’ve got two hundred and thirty-two thousand subscribers,” the manager said, as if overwhelmed. “Any chance you can narrow it down?”

“I only need a list of those who’ve come aboard within the past year,” Hauck told him.

He gave the guy a card. The manager promised he’d get to it as soon as he could and e-mail the results to Hauck’s departmental address.

On the ride back home, Hauck mapped out what he would do. Hopefully, this Mustang search would yield something. If not, he still had the leads he’d taken from Dietz’s office.

The Major Deegan Expressway was slow, and Hauck caught some tie-up near Yankee Stadium.

On a hunch he fumbled in his pocket for the number of the Caribbean bank he’d found at Dietz’s. On St. Kitts. As he punched in the overseas number on his cell, he wasn’t sure just how smart this was. The guy could be on Dietz’s payroll for all he knew. But as long as he was playing long shots…

After a delay a sharp ring came on. “First Caribbean,” answered a woman with a heavy island accent.

“Thomas Smith?” Hauck requested.

“Please hold da line.”

After a short pause, a man’s voice answered, “This is Thomas Smith.”

“My name is Hauck,” Hauck said. “I’m a police detective with the Greenwich police force, in Greenwich, Connecticut. In the States.”

“I know Greenwich,” the man responded brightly. “I went to college nearby at the University of Bridgeport. How can I help you, Detective?”

“I’m trying to find someone,” Hauck explained. “He’s a U.S. citizen. The only name I have for him is Charles Friedman. He may have an account on record there.”

“I’m not familiar with anyone by the name of Charles Friedman having an account here,” the bank manager replied.

“Look, I know this is a bit unorthodox. He’s about five-ten. Brown hair. Medium stature. Wears glasses. It’s possible he’s transferred money into your bank from a corresponding bank in Tortola. It’s possible that Friedman is not even the name he’s currently using now.”

“As I said, sir, there is no account holder on record here by that name. And I haven’t seen anybody who might fit that description. Nevis is a small island. And you can understand why I would be reluctant to give you that information even if I did.”

“I understand perfectly, Mr. Smith. But it is a police matter. If you would maybe ask around and check…”

“I don’t need to check,” the manager answered. “I have already.” What he told Hauck made him flinch. “You are the second person from the States who’s been looking for this man in the past week.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Michel Issa squinted through the lens over the glittering stone. It was a real beauty. A brilliant canary yellow, wonderful luminescence, easily a C rating. It had been part of a larger lot he’d bought and was the pick of the litter. Hovering over the loupe, Michel knew it would fetch a real price from the right buyer.

His specialty.

Issa’s family had been in the diamond business for over fifty years, emigrating to the Caribbean from Belgium and opening the store on Mast Street, on the Dutch side of St. Maarten when Michel was young. For decades Issa et Fils had bought high-quality stones direct from Antwerp and a few “gray” markets. People came to them from around the world-and not just couples off the cruise ships looking to get engaged, though they catered to that, too, to keep up the storefront. But important people, people with things to hide. In the trade, Michel Issa was known, as his father and grandfather had been before him, as the kind of négociant who could keep his mouth shut, who had the discretion to handle a private transaction, no matter what its magnitude.

With the money trail between banks so transparent after 9/11, shifting assets into something tangible-and transportable-was a booming business these days. Especially if one had something to hide.

Michel put down the lens and transferred the premier stone back into the tray with the other stones. He placed them in his drawer and twisted the lock. The clock read 7:00 P.M. Time to close for the day. His wife, Marte, had an old-style Belgian meal of sausage and cabbage prepared for him. Later, on Tuesday nights, they played euchre with a couple of English friends.

Michel heard the outside door chime. He sighed. Too late. He had just sent his sales staff home. He didn’t flinch. There was no crime here on the island. Not this kind of crime. Everyone knew him, and, more to the point, they were on an island, surrounded by water. There was absolutely nowhere to go. Still, he reproved himself for having to be rude. He should have locked the door.

“Monsieur Issa?”

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Michel called. He glanced through the window into the showroom and saw a stocky, mustached man in sunglasses waiting by the door.

He twisted the lock of the security drawer a second time. When he went around into the shop, there were two men. The man who called out, sort of a circumspect smile in his dark features, stepped up to the counter. The other, tall in a beach shirt and a baseball cap, standing by the door.

“I’m Issa,” Michel said. “What can I do for you?” He placed his left foot near the alarm behind the counter, noticing the taller man still hovering suspiciously by the door.

“I’d like you to take a look at something, Monsieur Issa,” the mustached man said. He reached inside his shirt pocket.

“Stones?” Issa sighed. “This late? I was just preparing to leave. Is it possible we can reschedule for tomorrow?”

“Not stones.” The mustached man shook his head. “Photographs.”

Photographs. Issa squinted at him. The mustached man placed a snapshot of a man in business attire on the counter. Short, gray-flecked hair. Glasses. The photo looked like it had been cut out of some corporate brochure.

Issa put on his wire reading glasses and stared. “No.”

The man leaned forward. “This was taken some time ago. He may look different today. His hair may be shorter. He may not wear glasses anymore. I have a suspicion he may have come through here at some point, seeking to make a transaction. This transaction you would remember, Monsieur Issa, I’m sure. It would have been a large sale.”

Michel didn’t answer right away. He was trying to gauge who his questioners were. He tried to brush it off with a modest smile.

The mustached man smiled knowingly at him. But there was something behind it that Issa didn’t like.

“Police?” he questioned. He had arrangements with most of them. The local ones, even Interpol. They left him alone. But these men didn’t look the type.

“No, not police.” The man smiled coolly. “Private. A personal affair.”

“I’m sorry.” Michel shrugged his shoulders. “I have not seen him here.”

“You’re quite sure? He would have paid in cash. Or perhaps with a wire transfer from the First Caribbean Bank or the MaartensBank here on the island. Say, five, six months ago. Who knows, he may even have come back.”

“I’m sorry,” Michel said again, the specifics starting to alarm him, “I don’t recognize him. And I would if he had been here, of course. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to-”

“Let me show you this one, then,” the mustached man said, firmer. “Another photo. You know how these things sometimes work. It may freshen everything up again.”

The man pulled a second photo out of his breast pocket and laid it on the counter next to the first.

Michel froze. His mouth went dry.

This second photo was of his own daughter.

Juliette, who lived in the States. In D.C. She had married a professor at George Washington University. They’d just had a baby, Danielle, Issa’s granddaughter, his first.

The man watched Issa’s composure begin to waver. He seemed to be enjoying it.

“I was wondering if that refreshed your memory.” He grinned. “If you knew this man now. She’s a pretty woman, your daughter. My friends tell me there’s a new baby, too. This is a cause for celebration, Monsieur Issa. No reason they should ever be involved in nasty business like this, if you know what I mean.”

Issa felt his stomach knot. He knew precisely what the man meant. Their eyes locked, Michel sinking back on his stool, the color gone from his face.

He nodded.

“He’s American.” Michel looked down, and wet his lips. “As you said, he doesn’t look the same now. His hair is closely shaved to his head. You know, the way young people wear it today. He wore sunglasses, no spectacles. He came here twice-both times with local bank contacts. As you said, maybe six or seven months ago.”

“And what was the nature of the business, Monsieur Issa?” the mustached man asked.

“He bought stones, high quality-both times. He seemed interested in converting cash into something more transportable. Large amounts, as you say. I don’t know where he is now. Or how to reach him. He called me on his cell phone once. I didn’t take an address. I think he mentioned a boat he was living on. It was just those two times.” Michel looked at him. “I’ve never seen him again.”

“Name?” the mustached man demanded, his dark pupils urgent and smiling at the same time.

“I don’t ask for names,” Michel said back.

“His name?” the man said again. This time his hand applied pressure to Michel’s forearm. “He had a bank check. It had to be made to someone. You did a large transaction. You had to have a record of it.”

Michel Issa shut his eyes. He didn’t like doing this. It violated every rule he lived by. Fifty years. He could see who these people were and what they wanted. And he could see, by the intensity in this man’s gaze, what was coming next. What choice did he have?

“Hanson.” Issa moistened his lips again and exhaled. “Steven Hanson, something like that.”

“Something like that?” The man now wrapped his stocky fingers around Issa’s fist and squeezed. He was starting to hurt him. For the first time, Michel actually felt afraid.

“That’s what it is.” Michel looked at him. “Hanson. I don’t know how to contact him, I swear. I think he was living off his boat. I could look up the date. There must be a record of it at the harbor.”

The mustached man glanced back around to his friend. He winked, as if satisfied. “That would be good,” he said.

“So that makes everything okay, yes?” Michel asked nervously. “No reason to bother us again. Or my daughter?”

“Why would we want to do that?” The mustached man grinned to his partner. “All we came for was a name.”

STILL SHAKING, MICHEL closed up his shop and left shortly after. He locked the rear entrance to the store. That’s where he kept his small Renault, in a little private lot.

He opened the car door. He didn’t like what he’d just done. These rules had kept his family in business for generations. He had broken them. If word got out, everything they’d worked for all these years was shot.

As he stepped into the car and was about to shut the door, Michel felt a powerful force push at him from behind. He was thrown into the passenger seat. A strong hand pressed his face sharply into the leather.

“I gave you his name,” Michel whimpered, heart racing. “I told you what you wanted to know. You said you wouldn’t bother me anymore.”

A hard metal object pressed to the back of Issa’s head. The merchant heard the double click of a gun being cocked, and in his panic, his thoughts flashed to Marte, waiting for him at dinner. He shut his eyes.

“Please, I beg you, no…”

“Sorry, old man.” The pop of the gun going off was muffled by the Renault’s chugging engine. “Changed our minds.”

CHAPTER SIXTY

The first thing that came back was the data from Mustang World. The list of new subscribers Hauck had asked for.

Back at home, he glanced over the long list of names. One thousand six hundred and seventy-five of them. Several pages long. It was organized by mailing zip code, starting with Alabama. Mustang enthusiasts from every part of the globe.

From the bank trail he’d found at Dietz’s, it seemed a valid assumption Charles might be in the Caribbean or Central America. Karen told him they’d sailed around there. The bank manager on St. Kitts had told Hauck someone else had been looking for Charles. He’d also have to have access to these banks at some point.

But as he flipped through the long list, Hauck realized Charles could be anywhere. If he was even in here…

Slowly, he started to scan through.

THE NEXT THING that he got was a call from Joe Velko.

The Joint Inter-Agency Task Force agent caught Hauck on a Saturday morning just as he had put on a batch of pancakes for Jessie, who was up with him that weekend. When she asked about the red marks on his neck and the stiffness in his gait, Hauck told her he’d slipped on the boat.

“I pulled up some hits for you on that search,” Joe informed him. “Nothing great. I’ll fax it out to you if you want.”

Hauck went over to his desk. He sat in his shorts and T-shirt, holding a spatula as twelve pages of data came rolling in.

“Listen,” Joe told him, “no promises. Generally we might get a thousand positive hits for any one that could actually lead somewhere-and that means merely something we can pass along to an analyst’s desk. We call any correlations to key input ‘alerts’ and rank them by magnitude. From low to moderate to high. Most classify in the lower bracket. I’ve spared you most of the boilerplate and methodology. Why don’t you flip over to the third page?”

Hauck picked up a pen and found the spot. There was a shadowed box with the heading “Search AF12987543. ALERT.”

Joe explained, “These are random hits from some online newsletter the computer picked up. From something called the Carlyle Antique Car Auction in Pennsylvania.” He chuckled. “Real cloak-and-dagger stuff, Ty. You see how it says, ‘1966 Emberglow Mustang. Condition: Excellent. Low Mileage, 81.5. Shines! Frank Bottomly, Westport, Ct.’”

“I see it.”

“The computer picked up the car and the connection to Connecticut. This communication took place last year-basically just someone making a random query into buying one. You can see the program assigned a rating of LOW against it. There’s a bunch of other stuff like that. Idle chatter. You can go on.”

Hauck flipped through the next few pages. Several e-mails. The program was monitoring private interactions. Tons of back-and-forth chatter on classic-car sites, blogs, eBay, Yahoo.com. Whatever it picked up using the reference points Hauck had provided. A few hits on the Web site of the Concours d’Elegance in Greenwich. All were assessed as LOW. There was even a rock group in Texas called Ember Glow that opened for the singer Kinky Friedman. The priority against that hit was labeled “ZERO.”

There were twelve whole pages of this. One e-mail was literally a guy talking about a girl named Amber, with the comment, “She glows like an angel.”

No Charles Friedman. Nothing from the Caribbean.

Hauck felt frustrated. Nothing to add to the list from Mustang World.

“Dad?” An acrid smell penetrated Hauck’s nostrils. Jessie was standing by the stove in the open kitchen, her pancakes going up in smoke.

“Oh shit! Joe, hold on.”

Hauck ran back into the open kitchen and flipped the black pancakes off the skillet and onto a plate. His daughter’s nose turned up in disappointment. “Thanks.”

“I’ll make more.”

“Emergency?” Joe inquired on the line.

“Yeah, a thirteen-year-old emergency. Dad screwed up breakfast.”

“That takes precedence. Look, go through it. It’s only a first pass. I just wanted you to know I was on it. I’ll call if anything else comes in.”

“Appreciate it, Joe.”

CHAPTERER SIXTY-ONE

Karen pulled her Lexus into the driveway. She stopped at the mailbox and rolled down her window to pick up the mail. Samantha was home. Her Acura MPV was parked in front of the garage.

Sam was in the last days of school, graduating in a week. Then she and Alex were heading to Africa on safari with Karen’s folks. Karen would have loved to be going along as well, but when the plans were made, months earlier, she had just started at the real-estate agency, and now, with all that was happening, how could she just walk away and abandon Ty? Anyhow, she rationalized, what was better than the kids going on that kind of adventure with their grandparents?

As the commercials said, Priceless!

Karen reached through the car window and pulled out the mail. The usual deadweight of publications and bills, credit-card solicitations. A couple of charity mailings. An invitation from the Bruce Museum was one of them. It had a fabulous collection of American and European paintings and was right in Greenwich. The year before, Charlie had been appointed to the board.

Staring at the envelope, Karen drifted back to an event there last year. She realized it was just two months before Charlie disappeared. It was black-tie, a carnival theme, and Charlie had gotten a table. They had invited Rick and Paula. Charlie’s mother, up from Pennsylvania. Saul and Mimi Lennick. (Charlie had harangued Saul into a considerable pledge.) Karen remembered he’d had to get up in his tux and make a speech that night. She’d been so very proud of him.

Someone else invaded her thoughts from that night, too. Some Russian guy from town, whom she’d never met before, but Charlie seemed to know well. Charles had gotten him to donate fifty thousand dollars.

A real charmer, Karen recalled, swarthy and bull-like with thick, dark hair. He patted Charlie on the face as if they were old friends, though Karen had never even heard his name. The man had remarked that if he’d known that Charles had such an attractive wife, he would have been happy to donate more. On the dance floor, Charlie mentioned that the guy owned the largest private sailboat in the world. A financial guy, of course, he said-a biggie-friend of Saul’s. The man’s wife had on a diamond the size of Karen’s watch. He had invited them all out to his house-in the backcountry. More of a palace, Charlie said, which struck Karen as strange. “You’ve been there?” she asked. “Just what I’ve heard.” He shrugged and kept dancing. Karen remembered thinking she didn’t even know where in the world he had known the guy from.

Afterward, at home, they took a walk down to the beach at around midnight, still in their tuxedo and gown. They brought along a half-filled bottle of champagne they’d taken from the table. Trading swigs like a couple of teenagers, they took off their shoes and Charles rolled up his pant legs, and they sat on the rocks, peering out at the faraway lights of Long Island, across the sound.

“Honey, I’m so proud of you,” Karen had said, a little tipsy from all the champagne and wine, but clearheaded on this. She placed her arm around his neck and gave him a deep, loving kiss, their bare feet touching in the sand.

“Another year or two, I can get out of this,” he replied, his tie hanging open. “We can go somewhere.”

“I’ll believe that when it happens,” Karen said laughingly. “C’mon, Charlie, you love this shit. Besides…”

“No, I mean it,” he said. When he turned, his face was suddenly drawn and haggard. A submission in his eyes Karen had never seen before. “You don’t understand…”

She moved close to him and brushed his hair off his forehead. “Understand what, Charlie?” She kissed him again.

A month later he was gone in the blast.

Karen put the car into park and sat there in front of her house, suddenly trying to hold back an inexplicable rush of tears.

Understand what, Charlie?

That you withheld things from me all our lives, who you really were? That while you went in to the office every day, drove to Costco with me on weekends, rooted for Alex and Sam at their games, you were always planning a way to leave? That you may have even had a hand in killing innocent people? For what, Charlie? When did it start? When did the person I devoted myself to, slept next to all those years, made love with, loved with all my heart-when did I have to become afraid of you, Charlie? When did it change?

Understand what?

Wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands, Karen gathered the stack of letters and magazines on her lap. She put the car back into gear and coasted down to the garage. It was then that she noticed something standing out in the pile-a large gray envelope addressed to her. She stopped in front of the garage and slit it open before she climbed out.

It was from Tufts, Samantha’s college, where she was headed in August. No identifying logo on the envelope, just a brochure, the kind they had received early in the application process, introducing them to the school.

A couple of words had been written on the front. In pen.

As she read them, Karen’s heart crashed to a stop.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

A day later Hauck and Karen arranged to meet. They decided on the Arcadia Coffee House on a side street in town, not far away. Hauck was already at one of the tables when she arrived. Karen waved, then went to the counter and ordered herself a latte. She joined him by the window in the back.

“How’s the side?”

He lifted his arm. “No harm, no foul. You did a good job.”

She smiled at the compliment, but at the same time looked at him reprovingly. “You still should let someone take a look at it, Ty.”

“I got a few things back,” he said, changing the subject. He pushed across a copy of the list of Mustang World subscribers. Karen turned through a couple of pages and blew out her cheeks, daunted at the size.

“I was able to narrow it down. I think it’s a good bet to assume that Charles is out of the country. If he has funds kept in the Caribbean, at some point he’d have to access those banks. There’s sixty-five new names in Florida alone, another sixty-eight international. Thirty of them are in Canada, four in Europe, two in Asia, four in South America, so let’s forget them. Twenty-eight of them were in Mexico, the Caribbean, or Central America.”

Hauck had highlighted them with a yellow marker.

Karen cupped her hands around her coffee. “Okay.”

“I have a friend who’s a private investigator. I went to him for the information I showed you on Charles’s offshore company in Tortola. We eliminated four of the names right away. Spanish. Six others were commercial-auto dealerships, parts suppliers. I had him do a quick financial search on the rest.”

“So what did you find?”

“We scratched off six more because of issues like length of stay at their residence and stuff we could glean from credit cards. Five others listed themselves as married, so unless Charles has been really very busy in the past year, I think we’re safe to can them, too.”

Karen nodded and smiled.

“That leaves eleven.” He had highlighted them page by page. Robert Hopewell, who lived on Shady Lane, in the Bahamas. An F. March-in Costa Rica. Karen paused over him. She and Charles and Paula and Rick had once been there. A Dennis Camp, who lived in Caracas, Venezuela. A Steven Hanson, who was listed at a post-office box in St. Kitts. Alan O’Shea, from Honduras.

Five more.

“Any of these names seem familiar to you?” Hauck asked.

Karen went through the entire list and shook her head. “No.”

“A few have phone numbers listed as well. I can’t imagine that anyone trying to be invisible would do that. Most are just post-office boxes.”

“Assuming he’s even here?”

“Assuming he’s here.” Hauck nodded with a sigh. “The one advantage we have is that he doesn’t know there’s any reason for anyone to assume he’s alive.” He looked at her. “But I have a couple more irons in the fire, before you even think of having to make that call.”

“It’s not that.” Karen nodded, fretful, massaging her brow.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s something I have to show you, Ty.”

She reached inside her bag. “I found a couple of things last week, buried in Charlie’s desk drawer, when you asked me to go through stuff. I should have showed them to you then, but they were old and they scared me. I wasn’t sure what to do. They’re from before the bombing.”

“Let me see.”

Karen took them out of her purse. One was a small note card still in its tiny envelope, addressed to Charles. Hauck flipped it open. It was one of those cards that would accompany a floral delivery.

Sorry about the pooch, Charles. Could your kids be next?

He looked back up at Karen. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Before he died”-Karen wet her lips-“left… we had another Westie. Sasha. She was run over by a car, right on our street. Right in front of our house. It was horrible. Charlie was the one who found her. A couple of weeks before the bombing…”

Hauck looked back at the note. They were threatening him.

“And this…” Karen pushed forward the other item. She rubbed her forehead, her eyes strained.

It was a holiday card. A picture of the family on it. A happier time. From the Friedmans. Charlie, in a blue fleece vest and knit shirt, his arm around Karen, in a windbreaker and jeans, sitting on a stockade fence in the country somewhere. She looked bright-eyed and proud. Pretty. Wishing you the season’s best for the coming year…

Hauck winced, as if a blunt force had punched him in the belly.

Samantha’s and Alex’s faces-they had both been cut out.

He looked up at her.

“Someone was threatening Charles, Ty. A year ago. Before he left. Charlie kept these things hidden away. I don’t know what he did, but I know it has to do with the people at Archer and all this money offshore.”

Someone was threatening him, Hauck thought, placing the cards on top of each other and handing them back to Karen.

“Then yesterday I got this.”

Karen reached into her bag and came out with something else, this time a large gray envelope. “In the mail.”

Her eyes were worried. Hauck thumbed the top open, slid out what was inside. It was a brochure. Tufts. Where Sam was heading in the fall, he remembered.

There was some writing on the front. The same forward-leaning script as on the floral note.

You still owe us some answers, Karen. No one’s gone away. We’re still here.

“They’re threatening my children, Ty. I can’t let that happen.”

He placed his palm over her hand. “No. We won’t.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

The cell call came in just as Hauck was getting ready to go into visit Chief Fitzpatrick, to request that a patrol car be assigned to watch Karen’s house again.

“Joe?”

“Listen,” the JIATF man said, “I have something important here. I’m faxing it out to you now.”

The pages started to flow before Hauck even arrived back at his desk. “What I’m sending you is a transcript of a series of online conversations taken off a car-enthusiast site,” Velko explained. “The first exchange took place in February.” Three months earlier. Joe sounded excited. “I think we got something here.”

Hauck started to read the transcript as fast as he could tear the pages from the machine. The first page was headed ALERT. In the shadow box, there was a transcript number and a date, February 24. There was also a listing of the key “trigger phrases” Hauck had given Joe: “1966 Ford Mustang. Emberglow. Greenwich, Ct. Concours d’ Élégance. Charlie’s Baby.” A few of his favorite phrases.

The alert box was marked “HIGH.”

Hauck sat down at his desk and read, his blood pulsing expectantly.

KlassicKarMania.com:

Mal784: Hey, trading a 66 Ember Glow ’Stang in for a 69 Merc 230 Cabriolet. Any1 interested?

DragsterB: Saw one of those in a movie out last year. Sandra Bullock. Looked fine.

Xpgma: The car or the girl?

DragsterB: Real funny, dude.

Mal784: Lake House. Yeah, except mine’s a ragtop, GT. 62,000 miles. 280hp. Near mint. Any1 interested? Take $38.5.

DragsterB: I know someone who might be.

SunDog: Where is it?

Mal784: Florida. Boynton Beach. Rarely sees the light of day.

SunDog: Maybe. Had one once myself. Up north. What’s the VIN code? C or K?

Mal784: K. High performance. All the way.

SunDog: How’s the inside?

Mal784: Orig Pony leather. Orig radio. Not a scratch. Little bastards have a way of getting under your skin, right?

SunDog: Had to sell. Moved. Used to show it around.

Mal784: Where?

DragsterB: This a private conversation? Anyone out there got a line on a set of Crager 16" rims????

SunDog: A few places. Stockbridge, Mass. The Concours in Greenwich. Once down your way, in Palm Beach.

Mal784: Hey, you used to be on here a while back? Different name, though. CharlieBoy or something, wasn’t it?

SunDog: Change of life, man. Lemme see the car. Post a picture.

Mal784: Gimme your address.

SunDog: Put it on this site, Mal. I’ll look.

That was all. Hauck read through the exchange again. Every instinct told him he was onto something. He flipped the page over. There was another exchange. This one was two weeks later, March 10.

Mal784: You don’t know your Mustangs for shit, bro. Check out the VIN#. K’s are higher horsepowers. Command higher price. Yours is a J. 27-28K tops.

Opie$: Okay, I’ll check.

Mal784: You’ll learn something. Some people don’t know what they have.

SunDog: So, Mal, you still got that Ember Glow????

Mal784: Hey!!! Look what the tide dragged in. What happened to you, guy? I posted a shot, like you said. Never heard back.

SunDog: Saw it. Lights-out machine, no doubt. No luck, huh? Anyway, not for my life now.

Mal784: I can deal. My middle name.

SunDog: Not that. I’m more on water than dry land now. Then I got to find a way to get it through customs down here.

Mal784: Donde?

SunDog: Caribbean. No matter. Would only rot in the sun down here. But I may come back to you. Thx.

Mal784: You late, you wait, man. Putting it up through the auctions now.

SunDog: Best of luck. From an ol’ short seller, another time. I’ll keep checking.

Opie$: Hey, I just looked. What about VINS beginning with N?

“Ty, you read them yet?” Joe Velko asked.

Hauck shuffled the pages. “Yeah. I think we hit the jackpot here. So how do we trace this dude, SunDog?”

“I already put out an IP user trace through the Web site’s server, Ty. You understand, I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for you?”

“I know that, Joe.”

“So I went to the blog site. They didn’t put up a lot of resistance. It’s amazing what a government agency can do, post-9/11, even without a subpoena. Got a pen?”

Hauck scrambled around the desk. “I’m feeling safer already, Joe. Shoot.”

“SunDog is just a user name. We traced it back to a Web address, which they supplied us. Oilman0716@hotmail.com.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Hauck fixed on the name. Oilman. He knew without needing anything else that they had found him. Everything inside him told him this was Charles.

“Is this traceable, Joe?”

“Yes…and no. As you know, Hotmail is a free Internet site. Therefore you don’t need anything but a given name to register, and it doesn’t even have to be a real one to get that done. Or even a real address. But we can go back to them and trace what was on the application. And there’s a communication history we can go back on. What I can’t do, however, is narrow that down to a specific place.”

Hauck’s blood surged with optimism. “Okay…”

“The activity seems to be coming from the Caribbean region. Not to a specific location though, but on a wireless LAN. There’s been activity picked up around St. Maarten, the BVIs. Even as far away as Panama.”

“The guy’s been traveling?”

“Maybe, or on a boat.”

A boat. That made sense to Hauck. “Can we narrow that down?”

“With time,” the JIATF man explained. “We can set up a surveillance and monitor future activity and triangulate a point of origin. But that takes manpower. And paperwork. And other countries involved. You understand what I mean. And I gather that’s something you’re not eager to deal with, are you, Ty?”

“No,” he admitted. “Not if I can help it, Joe.”

“That’s what I thought. So this is the next-best step. We traced the application information through the Hotmail people. That much I can do, but after that you’re on your own.”

“That’s great!”

“The address on the account is to a post-office box at the central post office on the island of St. Maarten in the Caribbean. I went as far as I could without getting anyone else involved and checked down there. It’s registered to a Steven Hanson, Ty. That ring a bell?”

“Hanson?” At first it was a blank, but then something went off inside him. “Hold on a second, Joe…”

He swiveled around the desk, rifling through a stack of papers. Until he found it.

The list of new subscribers from Mustang World.

He had narrowed it down to just a handful of names. From all over the region: Panama. Honduras. The Bahamas. The BVIs… It took a few seconds, scanning the list. Hopewell, March, Camp, O’Shea.

But there it was! S. Hanson. Date of subscription: 1/17. This year! The only address given was a post-office box on St. Kitts.

Steven Hanson.

A surge of validation ran through Hauck’s veins.

Steven Hanson was Oilman0716. And Oilman0716 had to be Charles. Too much fit.

The car. The Concours. The little phrases. Karen had been right. This was the part of him that could not change. His baby.

They had found him!

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

The doorbell rang, and when Karen went to answer it, she stood fixed in surprise. “Ty…”

Samantha was in the kitchen, polishing off a yogurt, watching the tube. Alex had his feet slung over the couch in the family room, alternately groaning and exulting loudly, engrossed in the latest Wii video game.

Hauck’s face was lit up with anticipation. “There’s something I have to show you, Karen.”

“Come on in.”

Karen had tried to shield the kids from all that was going on-her shifting moods, the worry that seemed permanently etched in her face right now. Her frustrated, late-night rummaging through Charles’s old things.

But it was a losing fight. They weren’t exactly stupid. They saw the unfamiliar circumspection, the tenseness, her temper a little quicker than it had ever been before. Ty’s showing up unannounced would only arouse their suspicions even more.

“C’mon in here,” Karen said, taking him into the kitchen. “Sam, you remember Detective Hauck?”

Her daughter looked up, her knees curled on the stool, dressed in sweatpants and a Greenwich Huskies T-shirt, her expression somewhere between confused and surprised. “Hi.”

“Good to see you again,” Hauck said. “Hear you’re gearing up for graduation?”

“Yeah. Next week.” She nodded. She shot a glance toward Karen.

“Tufts, right?”

“Yeah,” she said again. “Can’t wait. What’s going on?”

“I need to speak with Detective Hauck a second, hon. Maybe we’ll just go…”

“It’s okay.” She got down from the stool. “I’m leaving.” She tossed her yogurt container into the trash and tossed the spoon into the sink. “Good to see you again,” she said to Hauck, tilting her head and screwing her eyes toward Karen, like, What’s going on?

Hauck waved. “You, too.”

Karen flicked off the kitchen TV and led him toward the sunroom. “C’mon, we’ll go in here.”

She sat down on the corner of the floral couch. Ty took a seat in the upholstered chair next to her. She had her hair up in a ponytail and was wearing a vintage heather gray Texas Longhorns T-shirt. No makeup. She knew she looked a mess. Still, she knew he wouldn’t show up like this, at night, unless it was about something important.

He asked her, “Do they know?”

“About what I found in the mail?” Karen shook her head. “No. I don’t want to worry them. I’ve got my folks coming up next week for the graduation. Charlie’s mom, coming in from PA. They’re going to Africa on safari with my folks a few days later. Sam’s graduation present. I’ll feel a whole lot better the minute I get them on that plane.”

Ty nodded. “I’m sure. Listen…” He pulled some papers out of his jacket. “I’m sorry to bother you here like this.” He dropped them on the table in front of her. “You might as well read it yourself.”

Warily, Karen picked them up. “What is it?”

“It’s a transcript. Of two Internet conversations. From one of your husband’s car sites. They took place back in February and March. One of the outfits I gave the information you found managed to pick them up.”

The tiny hairs on Karen’s arms stood on end.

She read through the transcripts. Emberglow. Concours. Greenwich. Her heart picked up a beat each time she encountered a familiar phrase. Suddenly it dawned on Karen just what this was. SunDog. The mention of a change of life, in the Caribbean. A reference to Charlie’s old screen name, CharlieBoy.

An invisible hand seemed to clutch her heart in its icy fist and not let go. She focused on the name for a long time. Then she looked up. “You think this is Charlie, don’t you?”

“What I think is that there’s an awful lot that sounds pretty familiar,” he replied.

Karen stood up, a jolt of nerves winding through her. Until now it had been safe to feel that it was all some abstract puzzle. Seeing his face on the screen; finding the safe-deposit box in New York. Even the horrible death of that person on his staff, Jonathan…It all just led somewhere nebulous, somewhere she never thought she’d actually have to confront.

But now…Her heart raced. SunDog. Karen could actually see him coming up with something like that. Now there was the possibility that everything that had happened was real. Now she could read words and phrases he might have said and almost hear his voice-familiar, alive. Out there-doing the same things, having the same conversations he’d once had with her.

A pressure throbbed in Karen’s forehead. “I don’t know what to do with this, Ty.”

“I had my contacts trace the name,” he said. “It’s a free Internet site, Karen. Hotmail. There’s no name registered against it, just a post-office box out of St. Maarten. In the Caribbean.”

Karen held her breath and nodded.

“The P.O. box was registered under the name of Steven Hanson.”

“Hanson?” Karen looked anxious.

“Does it mean anything to you?”

“No.”

Hauck shrugged. “No reason it should. But it did strike something in me. I checked it back against the list we got from Mustang World.” He handed her another sheet. “Look, there’s an S. Hanson right here. No address, but a P.O. box. This one’s in St. Kitts.”

“That doesn’t prove it’s him,” Karen said. “Only someone who’s interested in the same kind of cars-from down there. Lots of people might be.”

“Who’s keeping an awfully low profile, Karen. Post-office boxes, assumed names. I did a credit check on the name down there, and you know what came back? Nothing.”

“That still doesn’t mean it’s Charles!” Her voice carried an edge of desperation in it. “Why? Why are you doing this, Ty? Why did you quit your job?” She came back to the couch and sat down on the arm, staring at him. “What’s in it for you? Why the hell are you making me face this?”

“Karen…” He put his hand on her knee and gently squeezed.

“No!” She pulled away.

His deep-set eyes were unwavering, and for a second she thought she might just start to cry. She wanted him to hold her.

“You said there was an e-mail address?”

“Yeah. There is.” He reached over and handed her a slip of paper. Karen took it, her fingers shaking.

Oilman0716@hotmail.com.

She read it over a couple of times, the truth slowly sinking in. Then she looked up at him with a half smile, as if stung, wounded.

“Oilman…” She sniffled, feeling lifted for a second, and at the same time let down.

A moist film burned in her eye.

“It’s him.” She nodded. “That’s Charlie.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” She exhaled, as if fortifying herself against the dam burst of tears about to come down. “That number, 0716-we always used it for our passwords. That’s our anniversary-July sixteenth… The date we were married. In 1989. That’s Charlie, Ty.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

The house was dark. Karen sat in Charlie’s office. The kids had long since closed their doors and gone to sleep.

Karen stared over and over at the e-mail address. Oilman0716.

Waves of anger and uncertainty coursed through her veins. Anger mixed with accusation, uncertainty at what she should do. She wasn’t sure if she even knew what she was feeling inside, but the more she stared at the familiar number, the more all doubt was gone. She knew it had to be Charlie.

And that took something out of her. The last ember of faith she still had in him. In the life they’d led. Her last hope.

You bastard, Charlie…

Contact him? She didn’t know what she could possibly even say to him.

How could you, Charlie? How could you have left us like that? We were a team. We were soul mates, right? Didn’t we always say how we completed each other? How could you have done these horrible things?

Karen’s head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. She thought of AJ Raymond and Jonathan Lauer. Deaths her husband was tied to. It repulsed her, sickened her.

Is it all true?

Over the past year, she had learned to make her peace with the fact that her husband had died. She’d done whatever it had taken. And now he was back. Alive-just as she was alive.

She could confront him.

Oilman0716.

What could she possibly say?

Are you alive, Charlie? Are you reading this? Do you know how I feel? How we would all feel if the children even knew? How badly you’ve hurt me? How you cheapened all those years we spent together. Charlie, how…?

She logged on to her own AOL account. KFried111. Twice she even summoned the courage to go as far as type in his address. Oilman.

Then stopped herself.

What was there to be gained from opening this all up? To have him say he was sorry. To have him admit to her that he was someone other than the person she knew. That he had done these things-while living with her, sleeping with her. Planned his way out. To hear the pretense that he had once loved her, loved them…

Why? What was to be gained? To drag her family through it all over again. This time it would be much worse.

A tear burned down Karen’s cheek. A tear filled with doubt and accusation. She stared at the address on the screen and started to cry.

“Mom?”

Karen looked up. Samantha was in the doorway, in her oversize Michigan T-shirt and panties. “Mom, what’s going on? What are you doing here sitting in the dark?”

Karen brushed away the tear. “I don’t know, baby.”

“Mom, what’s happening?” Sam came over to the desk and knelt next to her. “What are you doing at Dad’s desk? You can’t tell me it’s nothing-something’s been bothering you for over two weeks.” She put her hand on Karen’s shoulder. “It’s about Dad, isn’t it? I know it. That detective was here again. Now there’s a car outside down the street. What the hell’s going on, Mom? Look at you-you’re in here crying. Those people are bothering us again, aren’t they, Mom?”

Karen nodded, drawing in a breath. “They sent another note,” she said, wiping the wetness out of her eyes. “I just want you to have a day to yourself we’ll all be proud of, honey. You deserve that. And then go on that trip.”

“And then what happens, Mom? What the hell has Dad done? You can tell me, Mom. I’m not six.”

How? How could she tell her? Tell her all? It would be like stealing her daughter’s innocence in a way, the warm memory she carried of her father. They had mourned him, laid him to rest. Learned to live without him. Damn you, Charlie, Karen seethed. Why are you making me do this now?

She cuddled Sam by the waist and took a breath. “Daddy may have done some things, Sam. He may have run some people’s money. Bad people, honey. Offshore. Illegally. I don’t know who they were. All I know is now they want it.”

“Want what, Mom?”

“Money that’s unaccounted for, honey. That Daddy may have lost. That’s the message they wanted you to pass along to me.”

“What do you mean, they want it, Mom? He’s dead.”

Karen brought her daughter to her lap and squeezed her, the way she did when she was little, even drawing in a breath of Sam’s familiar fresh-scrubbed scent. She shuddered against what she was about to say.

“Yes, honey, he’s dead.” Karen nodded against her.

“There’s stuff you’re not telling me, isn’t there? I know, Mom. Lately you’re always down there rifling through his old things. Now you’re here, in the middle of the night, in his office, in front of his computer. Daddy wouldn’t do something wrong. He was a good man. I saw the way he worked. I saw the way the two of you were with each other. He’s not here to defend himself, so it’s up to us. He would never have done anything that would cause us harm. He may have been your husband, Mom, but he was our dad. I knew him, too.”

“Yes, baby, you’re right.” Karen hugged her. “It is up to us.” She stroked Sam’s hair as her daughter folded into her.

It’s up to us that this has to end. Whatever it was these people wanted from her. Sam had a life to live. They all did. What was this nightmare going to do-follow them forever?

Would you really want to know, baby, if I told you? What he’d done. Would you really want your memories and love destroyed? Like mine. Wouldn’t it just be better, simply to love him, to remember him as you do? Taking you to skating practice, helping you with your math. Being there in your heart, as he was now?

“This is scaring me a little, Mom,” Sam said, pulling close.

“Don’t let it, honey.” Karen kissed her hair. But inside, she said to herself, It scares me, too.

Damn you, Charlie. Why did I ever have to see your face on that screen?

Look at what you’ve done.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

The day finally came for the kids to leave. Karen helped pack up their bags and drove them to JFK, where they connected with her folks, who had come up the day before, at the British Air terminal.

She parked the car and went inside with them to check in, where she met up with Sid and Joan. Everyone was excited. Karen hugged Sam with everything she had and told her to take care of her brother. “I don’t want him to be listening to his iPod and get carried off by a pack of lions.”

“It’s a portable DVR, Mom. And in his case more likely a pack of baboons.”

“Funny.” Alex scrunched his face, elbowing her. He’d always had to be dragged a little to go on this trip, always moping about large bugs and contracting malaria.

“C’mon, guys…” Karen gave them both a big hug. “I love you both. You know that. You have a blast. And be in touch.”

“We can’t be in touch, Mom,” Alex reminded her. “We’re in the bush. We’re on safari.”

“Well, pictures then,” she said. “I expect lots and lots of pictures. Y’hear?”

“Yeah, we hear.” Alex smiled sheepishly.

The kids both put their arms around her and gave her a real hug. Karen couldn’t help it-tears welled in her eyes.

Alex snorted. “Here goes Mom.”

Karen wiped them away. “Cut it out.”

She hugged her parents, too, and then she watched them go off, waving as they headed to security-Alex in a Syracuse baseball cap with his backpack containing his car magazines, Sam in a pair of sweatpants with her iPod, waving a last time. Karen barely held it together.

She thought of the warning she had just received and of Charles’s e-mail. And how she wanted her kids to be safe-so what was she doing, sending them to Africa? Back in her car, she sat for a moment in the garage before turning on the ignition. She pressed her face against the steering wheel and cried, happy that her kids were gone but at the same time feeling very alone, knowing that the time had finally come.

The time to face him.

It’s up to us, right?

THAT NIGHT KAREN sat over Charles’s computer.

There was no more fear, no more question of what she had to do. Only the resolve that she now felt to face it.

The thought occurred that she should call Ty. In the past weeks, she had grown close to him, feelings stirring in her, feelings mixed in with the confusion over what was happening with Charles, that seemed better to deny. And she’d never given Ty an answer about what she was prepared to do with what he’d found.

She logged on to her e-mail account.

KFried111. A name Charlie would recognize in an instant.

She was giving him her answer.

It’s just the two of us now, Charlie. And the truth.

What could she possibly say? Every time she thought about it, everything came back. The anguish of losing him. The shock of seeing him again on the screen. Finding the passport, the money. The realization that he wasn’t dead but had abandoned her. Her daughter’s fear after she’d been accosted in her car.

Everything came back, but Ty was right. It wasn’t going to go away.

People had died.

Hesitantly, she typed in the address. Oilman0716. Karen had done it several times before, but this time there was no turning back. She wondered, with a faint smile, what he would think, how his world would change, what door she was opening, a door maybe better off shut.

Not any longer, Charlie.

Karen typed out two words. She read them over and swallowed. Two words that would change her life a second time, reopen wounds that had barely healed.

She clicked send.

Hello, Charlie.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

In a spot called Little Water Cay, near the islands of Turks and Caicos, Charles Friedman flicked on his laptop. The satellite broadband beamed in.

An unsettling dread deepened in him.

First it had been a week ago on Domenica. A teller he sometimes flirted with there mentioned how someone had been into the bank the week before, a short, mustached man, inquiring of one of the managers about an American who had wired in funds. Describing a person similar to him. The man had even showed a photo around.

Then there was the article that he now unfolded in his lap.

From the Caribbean Times. Regional News section. About a murder on the island of St. Maarten. An old-line diamond merchant had been shot in his car. Nothing had been broken into or stolen. The man’s name was Issa. He had been on the island for fifty years.

His diamond merchant. His contact. In the past year, he had made two transactions with Issa. Charles’s eyes drilled in on the headline. A crime of that nature hadn’t happened there in ten years.

Somehow they knew. It was getting too close. He’d have to change venues. They must have followed him through his network of banks, discovered that his fee account from Falcon had been drawn down. Now the death of this diamond merchant. It saddened Charles that he might be responsible for the old man’s fate. He had liked Issa. Soon Charles would need funds. But it was getting too dangerous to show his face right now. Even here.

He always knew that it was always likely one day they would latch onto the trail of the money.

It had rained heavily during the night. A few puffy clouds still loitered in the crisp blue sky. He sat on the deck of his boat with a mug of coffee and fired up his Bloomberg account, his early-morning ritual. Checked his overnight positions, just as he’d been doing for twenty years, though now he traded only for himself. Soon he’d have to stop that as well. Maybe they could trace his activity-his investment signature was on every trade. Still, it was all he could do to keep sane. Now he would lose that, too.

His laptop came to life. His server announced that he had four new messages.

He didn’t receive many e-mails under his new account. Mostly just spam that managed to reach him-mortgage solicitations and Viagra ads. An occasional electronic trading update. He didn’t dare draw attention to his new identity. That’s the way it had to be.

And that’s what he was thinking, spam, as, sipping his coffee, he scanned the list of messages.

Until his eyes stopped.

Not stopped-crashed was more like it, his stomach seizing, into the address of the sender of the third one down.

KFried111.

Charles’s feet fell off the gunwales. His spine arched, as if a jolt of high voltage had been shot through it. He focused on the name again, blinking, as if his eyes were somehow playing tricks on him.

Karen.

Heart pounding, he double-checked, just to make sure he hadn’t managed to log on to his old e-mail address, which he knew was impossible. But what else could it be?

No, it was all correct. Oilman.

His throat went dry. Worse, then came the bowel-tightening realization that in a flash everything had just caught up with him. His past. His deceptions. What he had done. How was this possible? How could she have found his name? His address? No, he realized those weren’t even the right questions.

How was it possible she even knew he was alive?

A year had passed. He had covered his tracks perfectly. He had no connection to his old life. He had never once run into anyone they knew-always his greatest fear. Charles’s fingers were shaking. KFried111. Karen. How would she have been able to track him there?

A mix of emotions swept over him: panic, fear, longing. Memory. Seeing all their faces, missing them in this moment as much as he had missed them all so terribly those first months.

Finally Charles summoned the nerve. He clicked on the name. All that was there were two sparse words. He read them, the color draining from his face, his eyes welling up, stinging with guilt and shame.

Hello, Charlie.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

When the call found him, Saul Lennick had just climbed into bed in his silk Sulka pajamas. He was glancing over a financial prospectus for a meeting he had in the morning, his attention diverted by the late TV news.

Mimi, who was in the midst of an Alan Furst novel next to him, sighed crossly, glancing at the cell phone. “Saul, it’s after eleven.”

Lennick fumbled for his phone on the night table. He didn’t recognize the number, but it was from out of the country. Barbados. His heart picked up. “Sorry, dear.”

He removed his reading glasses and flipped it open. “Can’t this wait until the morning?”

“If it could, I would’ve,” the caller, Dietz, replied. “Relax, I’m on a phone card. It can’t be traced.”

Lennick sat up and put on his slippers. He uttered a guilty sigh to his wife, pretending that it was business. He took the phone into the bathroom and shut the door. “All right, go ahead.”

“We’ve got problems,” Dietz announced. “There’s a homicide detective in Greenwich who handled that thing we did up there. The one who interrogated me. I may have mentioned him before.”

“So…?”

“He knows.”

“He knows what?” Lennick stood in front of the mirror, picking at a pore on the side of his face.

“He knows about the accident. He also knows about that other thing in New Jersey. He somehow broke into my house. He’s linked me with one of the other witnesses. You beginning to get an idea what I’m talking about now?”

Under his breath Lennick gasped, “Jesus Christ!” He was no longer staring at the pore but at his face, which had turned white.

“Sit down. It gets worse.”

“How the hell can it get worse, Dietz?”

“You remember Hodges? One of my men.”

“Go on.”

“He’s been shot.”

Lennick’s chest began to feel like he was having a heart attack. Dietz told him how Hodges had gone to Dietz’s house and found the cop. Inside. How the two of them had tussled.

“Now, listen, before you bust an artery, Saul, there’s some good news.”

“What can be good about this?” Lennick sat down.

“He has no grounds. The Greenwich detective. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it alone. It’s not part of any official investigation. He broke into my house. He brought a gun in there and used it. He didn’t make a move to arrest Hodges. You see what this means?”

“No,” Lennick said, panicked, “I don’t see what this means.”

“It means he’s completely out of his jurisdiction, Saul. He was simply sneaking around. Before I called you, I called up his station up in Greenwich. The guy’s on fucking leave! He’s freelancing, Saul. He’s not even on active duty. If it came out what he did, they’d take his badge. They’d arrest him, not me.”

A dull pain flared up in Lennick’s chest. He ran a hand through his white hair, sweat building up underneath his pajama top. He immediately retraced the steps of what anyone could have known that could have led back to him.

He exhaled. It was all Dietz.

“Here’s the kicker,” Dietz went on. “I had someone I know up there keep an eye on him. At night he’s been watching over a house in Greenwich in his own car.”

“Whose?”

“A woman. Someone you know well, Saul.”

Lennick blanched. “Karen?”

He tried to piece it together. Did Karen somehow know? Even if she had found out about the incident with Lauer, how would she possibly have connected it with the other? A year ago. She had found the safe-deposit box, the passport, the cash.

Did Karen somehow know that Charles was alive?

Lennick moistened his lips. They had to speed this up. He pressed Dietz. “How are things going down there?”

“We’re making progress. I’ve had to do some ‘off-road’ stuff, if you know what I mean. But that never seemed to bother you before. I think he’s on a boat somewhere. But somewhere close. I’ve traced him through three of his banks. He’ll need money. I’ll have him soon. I’m closing in.

“But, listen,” Dietz said, “regarding the detective, he may have found certain things in my office…related to what I’m doing here. Maybe even about you. I can’t be sure.”

A police detective? Things were growing deeper than Lennick was comfortable with. That was surely crossing the line. Still, what choice did he have?

“You know how to handle these things, Phil. I’ve got to go.”

“One more thing,” Dietz said. “If the detective knows, there’s always the chance that she knows, too. I realize you’re friendly. That you have something to do with her kids.”

“Yes,” Lennick muttered blankly. He was fond of Karen. And, having been like an uncle to them since they were small, in charge of their family trusts, you could say he did have something to do with the kids.

But it was business. Lauer had been business, the Raymond kid had been business, too. The furrows on his face were carved deep and hard. They made him seem older-older than he’d felt in years.

“Just do whatever it is you have to do.”

Lennick clicked off. He splashed some water on his face, smoothed back his hair. Shuffling in his slippers, he trudged back to bed.

The evening news had finished. Mimi had turned off the light. David Letterman was on. Lennick turned to her to see if she was asleep. “Shall we catch the monologue, dear?”

CHAPTER SEVENTY

Karen waited two days. Charles didn’t reply.

She wasn’t sure he ever would.

She knew Charles. She tried to imagine the shock and dismay that her e-mail must have caused.

The same shock he had caused when she saw his face up on that screen.

Karen checked her e-mails several times a day. She knew what must be going through him now. Sitting in some remote part of the globe, the careful construct of his new life suddenly crumbling. It must be killing him-retracing every step, running through a thousand possibilities.

How could she possibly know?

How many times, Karen imagined, he would have read over those two words. Replaying everything in his mind, racking his brain, all the preparations he had made. His bowels acting up. Not sleeping. Things always affected Charles that way. You owe me, she said to him silently, relishing this image of him, panicked, rocked. You owe me for the hurt you put me through. The lies…

Still, she couldn’t forgive him. Not for what he’d done to her-to the kids. She no longer knew if there was love between them. If there was anything still between them, other than the memory of a life spent together. Still, it didn’t matter. She just wanted to hear from him. She wanted to see him-face-to-face.

Answer me, Charlie…

Finally, after three days, Karen typed out another message. She closed her eyes and begged him.

Please, Charlie, please… I know it’s you. I know you’re out there. Answer me, Charlie. You can’t hide any longer. I know what you’ve done.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

I know what you’ve done!

Charles sat in the corner of a quiet Internet café in the harbor on Mustique, where he had put in, staring in horror at Karen’s latest message.

A collection of dreadlocked locals drinking Jamaican beer and a party of itinerant German surfers in tattoos and bandannas. He had a pressing fear, even here, that everything was closing in on him.

I know what you’ve done!

What? What do you know I’ve done, Karen? And how? Hidden behind his shades, he took a sip of a Caribe and read the message over for the tenth time. He knew she would keep at it. He knew her. This was no longer something he could just ignore.

And how in hell did you find me?

What do you want me to say to you, Karen? That I’m a bastard? That I betrayed you? Charles could sense the anger resonating in her words. And he didn’t blame her. He deserved whatever she felt. To have left them as he did. To have put them through that anguish. The loss of a husband, a father. Then, after it all finally subsided, to suddenly find out he was alive!

Answer me, Charlie.

What do you know, Karen?

If you knew, truly knew, you would understand. At least a little. That it was never to hurt you. That would have been the last thing in my heart.

But to protect you, Karen. To keep you safe. To keep Sam and Alex safe as well. You would know why I had to stay away. Why, when the door opened and the path presented itself, I had to “die.”

Please, Charlie, please… Answer me, Charlie.

The surfers were cackling loudly in German at something they had found on YouTube. A heavyset island woman in a colorful shift sat down across from him, towing a young daughter sipping on a Fanta. Charles realized he had spent so much of the past year hiding, in shadows, turning away from who he was. From everything he once loved.

But all of a sudden it was like he felt alive again. For the first time in a year! It was clear to him, you could never fully kill it. What was inside you. Who you are.

And now Charles realized that if he only touched this key, a flick of his hand, sent this message back, answered her, it reopened everything. The whole world changed again.

I know what you’ve done.

He took a swig of beer. Maybe it was time to move on again. To Vanuatu in the Indian Ocean. Or back to Panama. No one would find him. He had money there.

He lifted his shades. He looked closely at the words he had written. Pandora’s box was about to open again. For her and for him. And this time there would be no closing it. No sudden bomb blast interfering-nowhere to hide.

The hell with it, he said. He finished the last of his beer. She had found him. The iron fist in the velvet glove… he recalled fondly.

She would never let up.

Yes, I’m here. Yes, it’s me, he said. With one last reflection, he pushed the send key, sending his world spinning again.

Hello, baby…

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Hauck had gone out for an evening run around the cove. He’d sat at home for a couple of days, and still he hadn’t heard from Karen. The night was hot, sticky. The cicadas were buzzing. Finally he just had to calm the frustration that was bursting in his chest.

He knew it wasn’t right to push. He knew how hard this had to be for her, to face her husband. It would be like a part of Norah suddenly brought up for him again. Ripping open wounds that hadn’t healed. He wasn’t sure whether to wait and see if she still wanted to find Charles. Or now that she knew the truth-at least parts of it-to simply pack it in. Bring what they’d found into Fitzpatrick.

He’d have to reopen the case. AJ Raymond’s hit-and-run.

That’s what had started him on it in the first place, right?

To his surprise, as he headed back down Euclid toward his house, he spotted the familiar Lexus parked on the street. Karen sitting on his front stairs. When he came to a stop, she stood up.

A slightly awkward smile. “Hey…”

She was dressed in a fitted black shirt worn out over nice jeans, her caramel hair a little messy, a chunky, quartzlike bracelet dangling loosely from her wrist. It was a warm summer night. She looked great to him.

“I’m sorry to barge in,” she said, a look that was almost forlorn, little-girl-ish, coming through on her face. “I just needed to talk to someone. I took a chance.”

Hauck shook his head. “You’re not barging in.”

He walked her up the steps and unlocked the door. He grabbed a towel off the kitchen counter and wiped down his face. He asked if she wanted a beer from the fridge.

“No. Thanks.”

Karen was like a bundle of nerves, and she walked around like she was holding something deep inside. She went up to the easel by the window. He followed her over, taking a seat on the stool.

“I didn’t know you paint.”

Hauck shrugged. “You better look at it closely before you use that word.”

She stepped up to the easel. So close that Hauck could smell her scent-sweet, blossomy-his pulse climbing. He held back the urge to touch her.

“It’s nice,” she said. “You’re always full of surprises, aren’t you, Lieutenant?”

“That’s about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about it.” He smiled.

“You probably cook, too. I bet you-”

“Karen…” He had never seen her so wound up. He swiveled around and went to grab her arm.

She pulled away.

“It was him,” she said. Her eyes were liquid, angry, almost glaring at him. “He answered me. It took three days. I had to write him twice.” She put a hand to the back of her neck. “I didn’t know what to say to him, Ty. What the hell could I say? ‘I know it’s you, Charles. Please answer me’? Finally he did.”

“What did he say?”

“What did he say?” She sniffed, blew out a derisive blast of air. “He said ‘Hello, baby.’”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah.” She smiled, hurt. “That was all.” She took a few steps around, as if she were holding back some torrent, checking out the view of the cove off the deck. She went over to a console against the wall. He kept a couple of pictures on it. She picked them up, one by one. A shot of the two girls when they were babies. He saw her staring at it. Another of Hauck’s boat, the Merrily.

“Yours?”

“Mine.” Hauck nodded. He stood up. “Not exactly like the sultan of Brunei ’s, but Jessie likes it. In the summer we go up to Newington or out to Shelter Island. Fish. When the weather’s nice, I’ve been known to-”

“You do it all, don’t you, Ty?” Her eyes were ablaze, flashing at him. “You’re what they call a good man.”

Hauck wasn’t sure if that was a compliment. Karen compressed her lips tightly, ran a hand through her tousled hair. It was like she was ready to explode.

He stepped forward. “Karen…”

“‘ Hello, baby,’” she said again, her voice cracking. “That’s all he fucking said to me, Ty. Like, ‘What have you been up to, hon? Anything new with the kids?’ It was Charles! The man I buried. The man I slept next to for eighteen years! ‘Hello, baby.’ What the hell do I say to him now, Ty? What the hell happens now?”

Hauck went to her and took her in his arms. This time as he had always dreamed of holding her tightly, pressing her close to his chest, hard. His blood almost burst out of his veins.

At first she tried to pull away, anger coursing. Then she let him, tears smearing on his shirt, her hair honey-scented and disarrayed, her breasts full against his chest.

He kissed her. Karen didn’t resist. Instead she parted her lips in response, her tongue seeming just as eager to seek out his, something beyond their control taking hold of them, her scent deep in his nostrils-an intoxication, something sweet, jasmine-driving him wild.

His hand traveled down the curve of her back, his fingers crawling underneath the belt on her jeans. Arousing him. He drew it back, her blouse loose, finding the warmth of the exposed flesh of her belly, drew it past the breathless sigh of her breasts, and cupped her face in his hands.

“You don’t have to do anything,” he said.

“I can’t.” Karen looked at him, tears glistening off her cheeks. “I can’t be there alone.”

He kissed her again. This time their tongues lingered in a sweet, slow dance. “I just can’t…”

Hauck wiped the tears off her face. “You don’t have to,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything.”

Then he picked her up in his arms.

THEY MADE LOVE in the bedroom.

Slowly, he unbuttoned her shirt, ran his hands over the black lace of her bra, tenderly down to her groin, as she drew back, a little afraid, parts of her that hadn’t been touched in a year.

Her breathing heavy, Karen tilted her head against his bare chest. “Ty, I haven’t done this in a long time.”

“I know,” he said, gently pulling her arms through her sleeves, running his hand along her thigh, underneath her jeans.

She tensed with anticipation.

“I mean with someone else,” she said. “I’ve been with Charles for twenty years.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I know.”

He laid her back on the bed, drew her jeans out from under her firm thighs a leg at a time, slipped his hand underneath her panties, felt the tremor of anticipation there. The throbbing in her womb was driving Karen wild. She looked up at him. He had been there for her, steadied her, when everything else was just insanity. He had been the one thing in which she could believe. She reached up and gently touched his side, the marks healing, and kissed them, his perspiration sweet. Hauck, tensing, unbuckled his shorts. He was the one thing that held her together. Without him she didn’t know what she would have done.

She put her face close to him. “Ty…”

He moved his body firmly over hers, his buttocks tight, arms strong, athletic. Their bodies came together like a warm wave, electricity shooting down Karen’s spine. She arched her back. Her breasts, his chest came together, a hundred degrees.

Suddenly there was nothing holding them back. She felt this yearning rising up from her center. Karen let her head fall back, fall from side to side as he entered her, a tremor shooting through her from the tips of her fingers to her toes, like a current, a long-awaited prize. She cupped his rear and drew him into her deeply. A wildness taking over. Gasping, their bodies became a tangle of pelvises and thighs. She clung to him. This man had risked everything for her. She didn’t want to hold anything back. They rocked. She wanted to give him everything. A part of her she had never given to anyone. Even Charles. A part of her she had always held back.

Everything.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Afterward they lay on the bed, spent, Karen’s body slick with lovely sweat, still radiating fire. Hauck cooled her, blowing on her chest, her neck. Her hair was a tangled mess.

“Must be your lucky day,” she mused, with an ironic roll of her eyes. “Normally I never give out until at least the third date. It’s a hard-and-fast rule at Match.com.”

Hauck laughed, lifting a leg up on his other knee. “Listen, if it means anything, I promise I’ll still come through with a couple of meals.”

“Whew!” Karen blew out a breath. “That’s a load off my mind.”

She glanced around the cramped bedroom, looking for things about him she didn’t know. A simple wooden bed frame, a night table with a couple of books stacked-a biography of Einstein, a novel by Dennis Lehane-a pair of jeans tossed over a chair in the corner. A small TV.

“What the hell is that?” Karen said, pointing to something against the wall.

“Hockey stick,” Hauck said, falling back.

Karen propped up on her elbow. “Tell me I didn’t just sleep with a man who keeps a hockey stick in his bedroom.”

Hauck shrugged. “Winter league. Guess I never moved it.”

“Ty, it’s fucking June.”

He nodded, like a little boy discovered with a stash of cookies under his bed. “You’re lucky you weren’t here last week. My skates were in here, too.”

Karen brushed her hand against his cheek. “It’s good to see you laugh, Lieutenant.”

“I guess we could say we’re both a bit overdue.”

For a while they lay like two starfish on the large bed, barely covered, just the tips of their fingers touching, still finding each other.

“Ty…” Karen raised herself up. “There’s something I need to ask you about. I saw something when I came to your office that day. You had a picture on the credenza. Two young girls. When I saw you at the game that day, I met your daughter and you told me she was your only one. Then tonight I saw another of her, outside.” She leaned close to him. “I don’t mean to open something up-”

“No.” He shook his head. “You’re not opening anything up.”

Facing the ceiling, he told her. About Norah. At last. “She’d be nine now.”

Karen felt a stab of sadness rush over her.

He told her how they’d just come back from the store and forgotten something and had been in such a rush to get back there. There was his shift, he was running late. Beth was mad at him. They were living out in Queens then. He had bought the wrong dessert. “Pudding Snacks…”

How he had somehow left the car in a rush, his shift in half an hour, rushing back in to grab the receipt.

“Pudding Snacks,” Hauck said again, shrugging at Karen, an empty smile.

“They’d been playing on the curb. Tugboat Annie, Jessie told us later. You know the song-‘Merrily, merrily, merrily… ’” He inhaled a breath. “The car backed out. I hadn’t put it in park. All we ever heard was Jessie. And Beth. I remember the look she gave me. ‘Oh, Ty, oh, my God!’ It all happened so suddenly.” He looked up at her and wet his lips. “She was four.”

Karen sat up, and brushed her hand across his slick face. “You’re still carrying it, aren’t you? I can see it in your eyes. I saw it there the first time we met.”

“You were the one who was forced to deal with something then.”

“Yes, but I still saw it. I think that’s why I thanked you. For what you said. You made me feel like you understood. I don’t think you ever let it go.”

“How do you let that go, Karen?”

“I know.” Karen nodded. “I know… What about your wife? Beth, right?”

Hauck leaned up on his side, hunched his shoulders sort of helplessly. “I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me. The irony was, she was the reason I was running back to the store.” He turned and faced her. “You know how you always asked me why I’m doing this, Karen?”

She nodded again. “Yeah.”

“And one reason is that I think I was drawn to you from the first time we met. I couldn’t get you out of my mind.”

Karen took his hand.

“But the other,” he said, and shook his head, “that Raymond kid, lying there on the asphalt. I knew there was something about it from the get-go. Something about him just brought me back, to Norah. I couldn’t put it away…his image. I still can’t.”

“Their hair,” Karen said, cupping Hauck’s curled hand close to her breast. “They both had the same red hair. You’ve been trying to make up for that accident all this time. By solving this hit-and-run. By playing the hero for me.”

“No, that part was just my plan to get in your pants,” he teased, deadpan.

“Ty.” She looked into his sorrowful eyes. “You are a good man. That part I could see the first time we met. Anyone who knows you can see that. We all do things every day-walk off the curb into traffic, drive when we’ve had a bit too much to drink, forget to blow out a candle when we go to sleep. And things just go on, like they always do. Until one time they don’t. You can’t keep judging yourself. This happened a long time ago. It was an accident. You loved your daughter. You still do. You don’t have to make up for anything anymore.”

Hauck smiled. He pressed his hand to her cheek and stroked Karen’s face. “This from a woman who walked in here tonight having found out that her once-deceased husband was her new AOL pen pal.”

“Tonight, yes.” Karen laughed. “Tomorrow…who the hell knows?”

She dropped back onto the bed. Suddenly she remembered why she had come. The frustration that bristled in her blood. Hello, baby… It all overwhelmed her a little. She grasped his hand.

“So what the hell are we gonna do now, Ty?”

“We’re gonna let it drop,” he said, running his finger along the slope of her back and letting it linger on her buttock. “Anyway, it’s not exactly conducive, Karen.”

“Conducive? Conducive to what?” she asked, aware of the renewed stirring in her belly.

He turned toward her and shrugged. “To doing it again.”

“Doing it again?” He pulled Karen on top of him, their bodies springing alive. She brushed her nose against his, her hair cascading all over his face like a waterfall, and then she laughed. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve heard those words?”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

In the morning Hauck put on coffee. He was out on the deck when Karen stepped outside after nine, wearing an oversize Fairfield University T-shirt she’d grabbed from the drawer, wiping sleep from her eyes.

“Morning.” He looked up, his hand brushing against her thigh.

She leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder. “Hi.”

It was a bright, warm, early-summer morning. Karen looked across the row of modest homes to the sound. Boaters were readying their crafts in the marina. An early launch to Cove Island was going out. A few gray gulls flapped in the sky.

She went over to the railing. “It’s nice out here.” She nodded toward the painting, still on its easel. “Feel like I’ve seen this before.”

Hauck pointed to a stack of canvases against the wall. “All the same view.”

Karen raised her face to the sun and ran a hand through her tangled hair against the breeze. Then she sat down next to him, cupping her hands around the mug.

He said, “Listen, about last night…”

She put out her hand and stopped him. “Me first. I didn’t mean to throw myself at you. I just couldn’t face being alone. I-”

“I was about to say last night was a dream,” he said, winking into her sleepy eyes.

“I was about to say something like that, too.” Karen smiled back sheepishly. “I hadn’t been with anyone else in almost twenty years.”

“It was crazy. All that pent-up energy…”

“Yeah, right.” She rolled her eyes.

He shifted himself around to her. “You know that yoga move, where you arch your spine back like that and-”

Karen slapped at his wrist, rebuking. “Oh, you’re a stitch!”

Ty caught her hand. He looked at her, directly now. “I meant it, Karen. What I told you about why I started in on this. Because of you. But you knew that. I’ve never been much of a poker player.”

Karen leaned her head on his shoulder again. “Ty, listen, I don’t know if this is such a smart idea for us right now.”

“That’s a risk I’ll have to take.”

“There’s just too much going on that I have to sort out. What we do about Charlie, my kids? My goddamn husband’s out there, Ty!”

“Have you made up your mind?”

“About what? Help me out. It’s like a fucking Costco of things to choose from.”

“About Charles,” Hauck said. “About what you want me to do.”

Karen drew in a breath. There was something firm in her gaze, replacing the coiled anxiety of last night. She nodded. “I’ve made up my mind. He owes me answers, Ty, and I want them. When he first started lying to me. When whatever it was he was chasing became more important to him than me or the kids. And I’m not gonna turn the page on almost half my life without hearing them. From him. By letting him off the hook. I’m want to find the man, Ty.”

AFTER SHE GOT home and took a shower and brushed out her hair, Karen sat back down at the computer. All the anxiety she’d been feeling last night had hardened into a new resolve.

She clicked onto AOL and found Charlie’s reply to her. She read it over one more time.

Hello, baby…

She started to type.

I’m not your “baby,” Charles. Not anymore. I’m someone you’ve terribly hurt-beyond what you could ever imagine. Someone very confused. But you already know that, Charles, don’t you?

You knew that when you wrote me back. You must’ve known that since the day you left. So here’s the deal-I want to see you, Charles. I want to hear why you did this. Why you used us, Charlie, the people you supposedly loved. Not over the Internet. Not like this. I want to hear it directly from you. Face-to-face. Who you really are, Charlie.

She had to hold herself back.

So you tell me-how. You tell me where I can meet you, Charlie. You make it happen, so I can go forward in my life-if that’s something you at all might still care about. Don’t even think about saying no. Don’t even think about hiding, Charlie. Tell me how.

Karen.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Charles was inside the South Island Bank on St. Lucia when Karen’s message came in over his BlackBerry.

Her words stopped him like a shot of epinephrine into his heart.

No. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t see her. This wasn’t going to work. He had opened the door, but that had been a moment of weakness and stupidity. Now he had to slam it shut.

He had made out an account-transfer form. Filled in the routing numbers and the new accounts. He was cleaning house here, transferring the funds he kept to the Banco Nacional de Panama in Panama City and the Seitzenbank in Luxembourg, and from there on to safer ground.

It was time to be leaving.

Charles waited for a brightly clad local woman to finish, then sat down at the manager’s desk. The manager was an amiable islander he had worked with before, who seemed pleased to see Charles again, as he did every few months.

And she was disappointed to see him closing out his accounts.

“Mr. Hanson,” the manager said, dutifully fulfilling his request, “so it seems we will not be seeing you here anymore?”

“Maybe not for a while,” Charles said, standing up. “Thanks.” The two shook hands.

As he left, his mind weighing Karen’s urgent message-resolving to tell her no, not to contact him anymore-Charles never noticed the manager reaching for a slip of paper he kept hidden in his desk. Or picking up the phone before Charles had even stepped out the door.

KAREN WAS STILL at the computer when Charles’s reply came in.

No, Karen. It’s way too dangerous. I can’t let that happen. The things I did that you may think you know about…you simply don’t. Just accept that. I know how you must feel, but please, I beg you, just go on with your life. Don’t tell anyone you found me. No one, Karen! I loved you. I never meant to hurt you. But now it’s too late. I accept that. But please, please, whatever you may feel, don’t write me anymore.

Anger bristled through Karen’s blood. She wrote back:

Yes, Charlie, I’m afraid you ARE going to let that happen! When I say I know about what you’ve done, I don’t just mean that you’re alive. I know… I know about Falcon and all the money you were managing offshore, Charlie. That you kept from me all those years. And Dolphin. Those empty tankers, Charlie. That person in Pensacola who uncovered your fraud. What the hell did you try to do to him, Charlie?

This time his reply came back in seconds-a tone of panic:

Just who have you been talking to, Karen?

What does it matter who I’ve been talking to, Charlie?

Now they were going back and forth, real time. Karen and the man she had thought was a ghost.

You’re not seeing it. All that matters is, I know. I know about that boy who was killed in Greenwich. The day you disappeared. The day we were up here bleeding for you, Charlie. And I know you were there. Is that enough yet? I know you came up here after the bombing. The bombing when you were supposed to have been killed, Charlie. I know you called him under an assumed name.

How, Karen, how?

And I know who he was, Charlie. I know he was that man from Pensacola ’s son. What your own trader, Jonathan Lauer, probably found out himself and was trying to tell me. Is that enough yet, Charlie? Fraud. Murder. Covering it all up.

Seconds later Charlie wrote back:

Karen, please…

She wiped her eyes.

I haven’t told any of this to the kids. If I did, it would surely kill them, Charlie. Like it’s been fucking killing me. They’re away now. On safari with my folks. Sam’s graduation present. But people have been threatening us, Charlie. Threatening THEM! Is that what you wanted, Charlie? Is that what you wanted to leave behind?

She drew in a breath and went on typing.

I know there are risks. But we’re going to take those risks. Otherwise, I’m going to pass all this on to the police. You’ll be charged, Charlie. We’re talking murder. They’ll find you. If I could, believe me, so can they. And that’s what your kids will think of you, Charlie. That you were a murderer. Not the person they admire now.

Karen was about to push send, but then she hesitated.

So that’s the price, Charles, for my silence. To keep all this quiet. You always loved a fair exchange. I don’t want you back. I don’t love you anymore. I don’t know if I have any feelings for you. But I am going to see you, Charlie. I am going to hear why you did this to us, from your lips, face-to-face. So you just tell me how it’s going to get done. Nothing else. No apologies. No sorrow. Then you can feel free to disappear for the rest of your miserable life.

She pressed send. And waited. For several minutes. There was no reply. Karen began to grow worried. What if she had divulged too much? What if she had scared him away? For good. Now that she’d finally found him.

She waited for what seemed forever. Staring at the blank screen. Don’t do this to me again, Charles. Not now. C’mon, Charlie, pretend that you once loved me. Don’t put me through this again.

She shut her eyes. Maybe she even dozed off for a while, totally enervated, spent.

She heard a sound. When Karen opened her eyes, she saw that an e-mail had come in. She clicked on it.

Alone. That’s the only way it happens.

Karen stared at it. A tiny smile of satisfaction inched onto her lips.

All right, Charles. Alone.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

Another day passed while Karen waited for Charles’s instructions. This time she wasn’t nervous or afraid. Or surprised when she finally received them.

Just resolved.

Come down to the St. James’s Club on St. Hubert ’s in the BVIs.

Karen knew the place. They had sailed around there a couple of times. It was a beautiful spot on a horseshoe cove, a cluster of thatched bungalows nestled right on the beach. Completely remote.

Charles added:

Soon. Days, not weeks, Karen. I’ll contact you there.

There were many things Karen thought to say to him. But all she wrote back was:

I’ll be there.

RONALD TORBOR WRESTLED with what to do. That very morning he had looked up and seen Steven Hanson, the American, standing in front of his desk.

Come to close out his accounts.

The bank manager tried to camouflage his surprise. Since the two Americans had been to his house, he had prayed he would never see this man again. But here he was. All the while they talked and conducted business, Ronald’s heart was hammering out of his chest. As soon as the man left, Ronald rushed into the office bathroom. He splashed cold water all over his burning face.

What should he do?

He knew it was wrong-what those awful men had asked him to do. He knew it violated every fiduciary oath. That he would be fired if anyone found out. Lose everything he had worked for all these years.

And Ronald liked him. Mr. Steven Hanson. He was always cheerful and polite. He always had a good word to say about Ezra, whose picture was on Ronald’s desk and whom Hanson had seen once before when Ezra and Edith had been visiting in the bank.

But what choice did he have?

It was for his son that he was doing this.

The mustached man had promised-if he ever found out that Ronald had screwed him, they would be back. And if they had traced Hanson this far, they could trace him further. And if they found out his accounts had been transferred out, it would be worse for them. Edith and Ezra.

Far, far worse.

Ronald realized there was a lot more at stake than just his job. There was his family. They had threatened to kill him. Ezra. Ronald had vowed he could not see that look of fear in his wife’s eyes again.

Mr. Hanson, please understand. What choice do I have?

There was a pay telephone on the far end of the square outside the bank. Next to a bench, with an election poster on it, a picture of Nevis ’s corrupt incumbent minister over the slogan TIME COME FOR DEM TO GO.

He put a pay card in the slot and punched in the international number he’d been given. Make sure I hear from you, Ronald, the mustached man had said as he left, patting Ezra’s head. “Nice boy.” He winked. “I’m sure he’ll have quite a future in life.”

The call connected. Ronald swallowed back his fear.

“Hello,” a voice answered. Ronald recognized its tone. Just hearing it again sent a shiver of shame and revulsion down his spine.

“It’s Ronald Torbor. From Nevis. You said to call.”

“Ronald. Good to hear from you,” the mustached man replied. “How’s Ezra? Getting along?”

“I’ve seen him,” Ronald said without responding. “The man you’re looking for. He was here today.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

“I’m going alone,” Karen explained to Hauck.

They met for coffee again at Arcadia in town. Karen told him how Charlie had contacted her at last, and about his instructions. “He said just me. That was the deal I made. I’ve got to do it, Ty.”

“No. You’re not.” He put down his coffee and shook his head. “That doesn’t fly, Karen. You don’t have any idea who else he may be involved with. There’s no way I’m going to let you put yourself at risk.”

“That’s the deal, Ty. I agreed.”

“Karen.” Hauck leaned in close, lowering his voice so people at the nearby tables wouldn’t hear. “This man walked away from you and your family. You know precisely what he’s done. You also know what he has to protect. This is dangerous, Karen. This isn’t some high-school stunt. You told Charlie exactly what you’d uncovered about him. People have died. No way in hell would I let you go down there alone.”

“You don’t have to remind me what the stakes are, Ty.” Karen’s voice was strained, and growing louder. She looked at him pleadingly. “When I came to you, I trusted you. I told you things I could never tell anyone else.”

“I think I’ve earned that trust, Karen.”

“Yes.” Karen nodded. “I know you have. But now you have to trust me just a little, too. I’m going,” she said, her eyes lucid, unwavering. “This is my husband, Ty. I know him, whatever it may seem. And I know he would never harm me. I told him yes, Ty. I’m not going to lose this chance.”

Hauck exhaled a deep breath, his stern gaze reflecting his resistance. He could stop her, he knew. He could blow the whole thing wide open today. Take the heat he had brought upon himself. But this was what he’d always promised her. From the beginning. To find Charles. And as he ran through his remaining options, he realized that in many ways he was already in too deep.

“It has to be somewhere very public,” he said finally. “I have to be able to watch out for you. That’s the only way.”

She widened her eyes. “Ty…”

“That’s not negotiable, Karen. If the situation seems safe once we know all the details, you can go see him. Alone. I give you my word. But I’m going to be around. That’s the deal.”

Karen’s face carried an admonition. “You can’t use me to get to him, Ty. You have to promise.”

“You think I’m going down there to arrest him, Karen? What do you think, I’m going to call in Interpol and set up a sting like on Miami Vice?” He fixed on her. “The reason I’m going there is that I’m probably in love with you, Karen-don’t you understand that?-or something pretty damn close. I’m going there because there’s no way in hell I’m going to let you get in over your head and get yourself killed.”

The look in his eyes was determined and unbending. The shining blue in them had hardened into more of an intractable gray resolve. For a while the two of them just sat there, Hauck bristling.

Then slowly Karen smiled. “You said ‘probably.’”

“Yeah, probably.” Hauck nodded. “And while I’m at it, probably a little jealous, too.”

“Of Charles?”

“Of eighteen years, Karen. This is the person you built your life with, whatever the hell he’s done.”

“That part is over, Ty.”

“I don’t know what’s over.” He looked away for a second, then sucked in a frustrated breath. “Anyway, I said it, stupid as it sounded, what the hell.”

Karen reached over to his hand. She pressed his palm inside both of hers, massaging the soft cushions. Eventually he met her eyes.

“You know, I probably love you, too.” She shrugged. “Or something close.”

“I’m overwhelmed.”

“But if we do this, Ty, we can’t do it like that. Please. This is the most important thing for me now. That’s why I’m going down there. Afterward…” Karen pressed her thumb into his palm. “Afterward we’ll see. Is that a deal?”

He wrapped his pinkie around hers and granted his reluctant agreement. “Do you know this place?”

“The St. James Club? We were there once. We pulled in at the dock for lunch.” She saw his concern. “It’s like in Condé Nast Traveler, Ty. It’s not exactly the setting for an ambush.”

“So when do you go?”

“We go, Ty. We. Tomorrow,” Karen said. “I already booked the tickets.”

“Tickets?”

“Yeah, Ty, tickets.” Karen grinned. “You honestly think I thought you’d ever let me go down there on my own?”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

Rick and Paula were away. As were Karen’s kids. She e-mailed the lodge where Sam and Alex were staying and told them she would also be away for a few days. She realized she should let someone know where she was going. She dialed a number and a familiar voice picked up, at home.

“Saul?”

“Karen?” Lennick sounded surprised but pleased. “How are you? How’s that gang of yours?”

“We’re all good, Saul. It’s why I’m calling. I’m heading out of town for a few days. The kids are off in Africa, if you can believe it. On safari. Sam’s graduation present. With my folks.”

“Yes, I remember you talking about that,” he said blithely. “It certainly pays to be young now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Saul,” Karen said, “I guess it does. Listen, they’re a little hard to reach there, so I left your office number at their next lodge. You know, just in case anything comes up. I wasn’t sure who else to call.”

“Of course. I’m delighted, Karen. You know I’ll do what I can do. So where are you heading? Just in case I need to reach you,” he explained.

“Down to the Caribbean. The British Virgin Isles…”

“Excellent. The island are nice this time of year. Any specific place?”

“I’ll leave my cell number with you, Saul.” She decided to hold the rest back. “If you need me, you can reach me there.”

Saul was Charlie’s mentor. He had overseen the shutdown of Charlie’s firm. He had learned things about him. Archer. The offshore accounts. He’d never said anything about it to her. With a chill, Karen suddenly wondered, Does he know it all?

“I know that Charlie was up to some things, Saul.”

He paused. “Just what do you mean, Karen?”

“I know he was handling a lot of money. Those accounts we spoke of, offshore. That’s what those passports and the money were about, weren’t they? You never got back to me, but I know you know that, Saul. You knew him better than I did. And you’d protect him, Saul, wouldn’t you, if something came out? Even now?”

“I never wanted to worry you, Karen. That’s part of my job. And I’d protect you, too.”

“Would you, Saul?” Suddenly Karen felt she understood something. “Even if it threatened you?”

“Threatened me? How could it possibly threaten me, Karen. What do you mean?”

She was about to press him-ask him if he knew. Did he know that her husband was alive? Was Saul part of it? Part of why Charlie was hiding or, as a foreboding thought flashed through her, even the person he was running from? Was he a part of what came between them? Saul? He would have known about Jonathan Lauer. He never told her about that. Karen felt a nervousness snake through her, as if she had crept into a forbidden space, a closed vault, chilly and tightly sealed.

Saul cleared his throat. “Of course I would, Karen.”

“Of course you would what, Saul?”

“Protect you, Karen. And the kids. Isn’t that what you asked?”

Suddenly Karen felt sure. He did know. Much, much more than he was telling her. She could feel it in the quiver of his voice. Saul was Charlie’s mentor.

He knew. He had to know.

And now Saul knew that she knew, too.

“You never told me.” Karen wet her lips. “You knew that Jonathan Lauer had died. You knew he’d tried to contact me. You knew that Charlie was handling this money. Charlie’s dead, right, Saul? He’s dead-and you’re still protecting him.”

There was a pause.

“Of course he’s dead, Karen. Charlie loved you. That’s all you should be thinking about now. I think it’s best to keep it like that.”

“What did my husband do, Saul? What is it with you people? Why are you holding things back from me?”

“You enjoy yourself down there, Karen. Wherever you’re heading. You know I’ll take care of whatever needs to be done up here. You know that, don’t you, dear?”

“Yes,” Karen said. Her mouth was dry. A chill of uncertainty passed through her, a window left open to a world she once trusted.

“I know that, Saul.”