by Andrew Gross
Freddy came into view, standing before the glass.
Hauck waved. The detective gave him a wave in return. He had Hauck’s house phone in his hand and went to slide open the doors.
Hauck heard him pick up. “Yo, Lieutenant…,” Munoz said, flashing his familiar smile.
Then there was a second click.
He looked up to the deck in panic, realizing what it was.
“Freddy…!”
A second later the glass doors exploded, followed by a fire-ball of orange flame. In horror, Hauck turned away from the shower of splintered glass and the gust of searing heat.
“Freddy!”
It took a moment for the heat to fade before he could even look back.
By then it was too late. Everything was quiet. Upstairs, the curtains were incinerated, the glass doors gone. He smashed his fist against the dash. Debris and burning embers settled around him like a cloud. Hauck shielded his face with his arm, smoke stinging in his eyes.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Freddy, no…”
Hauck leaped out of the Explorer, heading for the stairs.
Then he just stopped.
Powerless, disbelieving, he stood there watching the flames. The heat baking his cheeks. Hearing only the haunting flap of the wind.
“Oh, God, Freddy…”
Something yellow and shiny came to rest at his feet. Hauck bent down and picked it up. A small disc, still hot from the blast. Almost melted. The image on it was barely recognizable. Hauck turned it over in his palm.
It was a yellow plastic image of the Fonz.
PART THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
The same dream left him sweating and awake for days.
He is running up a flight of stairs. The rooftop of an apartment building, back when he was a detective with the NYPD. Somehow Beth is part of it. Waiting for him at home. With the girls. He and his partner climb the last set of stairs, in pursuit of someone. “You behind me, dude?”
“Right behind you.”
It’s Warren.
They open a latched metal door and step onto the darkened rooftop. They hear the guy they’re chasing stumbling around, crashing into metal trash cans and storage bins.
“I’ll go this way.” He points. Warren understands. He’ll go the other.
“Roger.” They split up. The structure housing the stairwell blocks their view.
Nervously, he flicks the safety off his gun. He hopes he’s handling this right. Warren isn’t a cop. What’s he doing there?
He hears a scuffle. A shout. “Ty!”
Gun drawn, he rushes to the other side, but it’s obstructed, blocked. All kinds of containers and rusted old machinery in his way. “I’m coming!” he yells. When he finally makes it around, there’s no sign of the guy they’re chasing. “Warren!”
He hears a shout. He goes to the ledge and looks over the side. It’s Warren, hanging ten stories above the ground.
Terrified, he wraps his hand around his brother’s wrist. “I’ve got you!” He sees the look of fear on Warren’s face.
He starts to pull him up.
But it’s as if Warren’s somehow fighting. “Pull,” he says, straining with everything he has.
At first his brother begins to rise. Then he slips. Dangling by a hand over the edge. “I’m not going to let you go.”
“Ty, it’s okay,” Warren says.
But there’s nothing he can do. His weight is just too heavy. His grip begins to slip. Every muscle in his body is straining to the edge.
“Ty…” His voice is calm, resigned.
“Why aren’t you pulling, Warren?” He looks into his brother’s face.
“I’m sorry,” he says, feeling his grip begin to slip.
But suddenly the face has changed. It’s no longer Warren’s.
It’s Freddy’s. “Yo, Lieutenant!”
Hauck pulls back in horror. He loses his grasp.
Freddy slips into the night.
For days, Hauck couldn’t bring himself to be part of the investigation. He kept reliving the same scene: driving down the street, spotting Freddy’s car, punching in his number.
Freddy coming out onto the deck. With a familiar wave. “Yo, Lieutenant!”
Then everything blew up.
A pall was cast over the department. It was hard to define the feeling that took him over in the days after. Anger. Depression. Guilt. Anger so deep rooted, it was like all the rage he had ever felt boiled down to a hardened, dense dot that couldn’t be reduced any more.
Gripped by the same type of numbing guilt as when Norah was killed. That what happened had been his fault. It had all been set up for him. Freddy had simply wandered in.
Hauck had pushed him in.
He went to visit Freddy’s widow, Rosa, almost silently pleaded for her to beat her fists against his chest and scream You did this. You killed my husband. Instead, she just looked at him with those dark, forgiving eyes. “No one blames you, Ty…Freddy worshipped you. You know he would have done anything for you.”
And he did.
At the crowded wake, he sat down on a bench with Freddy’s two boys, silently placed his hands on their knees, and if it wasn’t for the rage he felt for Raines hardening in his heart, he would have surely broken down and cried. He stared at the casket and imagined what people must be thinking.
What he was thinking.
That should be him in there.
Many times, he wished it were.
For days, the department operated basically at half speed. Steve Chrisafoulis took charge of the investigation. They combed for prints or suspicious fibers all over Hauck’s house. Didn’t find a thing. These people were pros. They canvassed the neighborhood for anyone who might have been spotted going in. A neighbor down the street did recall seeing a white van. “ABC Plumbing or something?”
The very first thing anyone checked into was Raines’s whereabouts.
The casino security chief had been in Baltimore all day, at an industry trade show. He’d been hosting a large group out to dinner when the explosion occurred. He had the contacts to prove it.
Hauck wasn’t surprised.
He had Steve drop off the files on the casino. He kept going over them as a distraction to keep from driving himself crazy. He just about gave in to the urge that he should give up. Turn it all over, whatever he had. Let the FBI handle it from here. Pacello was dead. Raines was clean. No one wanted to take on the Pequot Woods. They didn’t have any leads.
He looked over the faces of the Pequot Woods management team. Names he didn’t know. The board of directors. William Turner. Senator Oren Casey. Richard Scaynes. Not people he could take on. They knew Turner had paid off Pacello. That was a place he could start. He looked at it from every possible angle. Look once, it’s one thing to you.
Look twice, it shifts. It’s something else.
Everything is always something else.
Vern called two days after Freddy’s wake. “I need you back, Ty.”
The next day he finally came back in. He stopped in to see Vern. He said that Sculley and Taylor were heading down that afternoon and wanted to share notes on the case.
This time Hauck didn’t object.
He pulled his team together and told them business had to go on. There were other cases to work on. People were counting on them. Freddy would want no less.
“C’mon.” Steve Chrisafoulis stood up. “The lieutenant’s right. Let’s get moving.”
Gradually they all did.
A short while later, Steve came in.
“Appreciate the support,” Hauck said to him. “Any chance you got anything for me?”
“I don’t know,” the mustached detective said. “I’m not sure if this is the right time…”
“Time for what?” Hauck asked.
Steve seemed a little nervous. He unwrapped a couple of large bound folders. “You had me digging into whoever was tied into the Pequot Woods…I was tracing that payment to Pacello, through Bill Tur
ner, and I started perusing some of the affidavits on file. Public record…” He opened the folder in front of Hauck. “This was when the tribe first applied for sovereign nation status…”
Petition A23. Before the Department of the Interior on behalf of the Pequot Indian tribe for Sovereign Nation Status.
“Yeah…?”
“See here…One of the legal firms on behalf of the tribe was an outfit out of Hartford called Parker, Kegg.”
Hauck looked. He knew the name. The firm was familiar to him.
“And here…This is to the state gaming board. This is to renew their tax-exempt status. The casino’s in-house attorneys handle it, but they need an outside counsel to sign off on it as well. They have to file a Ten-B every year.”
Hauck looked at the long tax form replete with appendices of charts and graphs. Steve flipped to the signature page.
“And here…”
The detective pointed and Hauck stared at the line.
He felt like he’d been hit by a truck.
All of a sudden a lot of things became clear.
In familiar script. On several documents. Some as part of a firm, others, later on, on his own.
Warren C. Hauck.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
It was after six that day when Hauck pulled up across from the two-story white colonial just off the green in Southington, twenty miles out of Hartford. It was a quiet small-town street, a stone’s throw from the town square, a bank and a dry cleaner around the corner.
A white sign that read WARREN C. HAUCK, ATTORNEY AT LAW hung from a post on the gate.
Warren’s white Range Rover was parked next to the house in the small lot. Hauck went up the front stairs and opened the wood-paneled door. There was a small reception area inside. Framed color portraits of well-known golf holes from around the world hung on the walls. The par-3 over the ocean at Pebble Beach. The fifteenth green at Augusta. The road hole at St. Andrews. A LeRoy Neiman watercolor of Jack Nicklaus.
Worth a pretty penny.
The front desk was unoccupied. It was after six. Everyone had gone home.
He knocked.
A hallway led past a staircase to a row of offices in back. A man who seemed to be in his early thirties, in a collared shirt with a satchel slung over his shoulder, stuck out his head. “Help you?”
“I’m looking for Warren Hauck,” Hauck said.
“He expecting you?” the man asked.
“I wanted to surprise him. I’m his brother.”
“Hey!” The young man lit up. “I can see it. I’m Ken Wolfe. I work with Warren.” He pointed down the hall. “He’s straight down there. End of the hall. I was just heading out.”
“Thanks.” Hauck waved, following a voice. “I think I hear him now.”
He went down the hall. He could hear Warren plainly now, on the phone. His office door was open. It didn’t seem as if anyone else was around.
Hauck stuck his head in. The office looked like it might have once been the living room in the house. Large, airy, paneled. French doors led out to a rear yard. His brother had his back toward him in a swivel chair, in a pink knit shirt and one of those headsets on. Cole Haans elevated onto the credenza, facing out the window.
“So listen, I’m gonna have Tom call you about that filing in the A.M.…We’ll button it up with the planning board, then go forward with the petition…”
Hauck knocked on the door.
Warren spun, his eyes arching in complete surprise. He didn’t smile at first. He didn’t wave Hauck in. What he seemed to be doing was ratcheting through his startled brain just why his brother was here.
“Okay, guy, talk soon…” Warren switched off the line. He took off the headset and stood up. “Ty…” His face registered bewilderment. “Jesus, bro, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Can’t a guy just visit his older brother when he’s passing through town?”
“Yeah, right.” Warren grinned, trying to decipher just what Hauck meant. “C’mon in, take a seat. I’m just trying to think if you’ve ever been here before.”
“Long overdue,” Hauck said. He sat down across from him and put his satchel on the floor. Warren’s desk looked like a train wreck—papers, briefs, piled high in towers; an ashtray and a beer bottle. The place smelled like smoke.
“Want something? Bottle of water? Beer? Something stronger?”
Hauck shook his head. “No, thanks.”
“Well, I do. So what have you got in there?” His eyes darted to Hauck’s bag. “Looks like you’re going to trial!” He went over to a small fridge and took out a longneck bottle of Bud Light. “I tried to call you,” he said, throwing himself back in his chair. “When I heard about what happened up there. Jesus, Ty…” He shook his head grimly. “That must’ve been fucking awful. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about what happened to your guy…”
“My guy…?”
“You know, your detective. Munoz, right? Here’s to staying safe…” Warren downed a gulp of beer; with his free hand he tapped a pen against the desk.
“Let me tell you about him, Warren. He worked for me for six years. He almost went to law school himself. He had two young kids. His wife is a wreck. But I guess you know about that kind of thing, don’t you, big brother…” He met his eyes. “He picked up the fucking phone at my house…”
Warren stopped tapping. He stared back at Hauck, put down his beer, leaned back, and put his hands behind his head. “Just why are you here, Ty?”
“I’m here because for weeks I’ve been trying to find some connection between the Pequot Woods and the murders of David Sanger and Keith Kramer—other than the horseshit I’ve been stepping around that they were party to some gambling scam up there. So I’ve been going through Joe Raines”—Hauck shrugged—“and some of the people on the board up there, Bill Turner of Heritage Financial, Senator Oren Casey, that dealer who was killed, Pacello…Trying to figure out what they would all have to hide that would be worth this kind of killing for. Looking for the thread that knitted it all together…”
“Oh, yeah,” Warren said, jiggling his pen again. “And what’d you find?”
“You, Warren.” Hauck stared back at him. “I found you.”
Warren grinned and made the kind of defensive, deep-in-the-throat chuckle that comes when someone’s brain is desperately groping for what to say. He rocked back in his chair, crossing his legs. “You found me?”
“I’ve had my people scouring over the Pequot Woods’s records. The board of directors, the council of overseers. DR-17 was just doing the dirty work for Raines. They tried to make the Sanger shooting look like a payback of some kind. So if it wasn’t about gambling, what was it about? There had to be something he found out. Something worth killing for. So what…?”
“Is that a question, Ty, or are you just trying to piss me the fuck off?”
“I’m afraid it is a question, Warren.” Hauck’s blood started to heat. He leaned over and opened the flap of his case. He pulled out the large sheath of papers Steve Chrisafoulis had arranged for him—two dozen documents and affadavits filed on behalf of the casino, going all the way back twelve years to the original sovereign nations filing to the federal government by the Pequot tribe. He dropped the stack on the desk. “You’ve been there every step of the way, Warren. When you worked for Parker, Kegg, up in Hartford, they represented the tribe. You became one of the lawyers of record. Your name’s right there on the filing. You handled several of their motions. Tax-exempt requests, land swaps…”
Warren didn’t reply.
“And then when you went on your own…,” Hauck went on, “you continued doing work for them. Senator Casey is on the board of overseers there, and guess what turns up? You’ve done work for him too. Bill Turner of Heritage. He’s a member of the board. It was his company that paid Paul Pacello off when he left the casino. And lo and behold, he happens to be on your client list too. Seems you handled a real estate trust for him.” Hauck’s gaze bore into him deep
ly. “See where we’re going now?”
“Yeah, and it all proves what, I’m trying to figure out. I’m a lawyer. I get paid to represent people. Where you’re going—”
“Where I’m going”—Hauck leaned forward, his tone hardening—“is someone tried to kill me the other day in my own home. Me, Warren! And then it sort of hits me, I’ve been looking for this common thread linking everything together, coming up blank…And here it’s been right under my nose all the time. In plain sight. I looked at everything I had, every which way I could find, and didn’t see it.
“And then I looked twice.”
Warren’s fists tightened and he rocked back in the chair. “And what is it you see, little brother?”
“You. Suddenly you just drop back in my life. With some tale of woe about how your life is falling apart. So I call Ginny. And you know what? She didn’t know shit about some real estate investment that got in between you…”
“I wish you hadn’t done that, Ty…”
“I think you have a pretty fair idea what the fuck’s going on, Warren. Just what these well-heeled clients of yours have to hide. And I think it has something to do with Senator Casey, not gambling at all, and that you’re up to your dick in the middle of it and that that’s why you showed up again out of the blue. And you know what? I’m not going to stop…I’m not going to get out of your face until I know what the hell is going on.”
Warren laughed. “This is all a little crazy, Ty. I’m thinking you kept some of that shit we were smoking at your house, ’cause this is all nuts…”
“You better hope it’s nuts.” Hauck felt the heat of anger on his face. “You better hope I’m fucking crazy…”
Warren just stared, trying to form a response, until Hauck could see it plainly in his eyes.
All of it.
He was totally involved.
Whatever was holding Hauck together snapped. He lunged across the desk, taking his brother by the collar, pulling him out of his chair and back across the desk.
“Five people are dead, Warren! Do you understand? Someone tried to kill me in my own home! I lost a friend. A cop. And now I want to hear it from you. No bullshit. No pretending you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, Warren. You’re my goddamn brother! So tell me! Who’s behind it? I’m going to find out. What the hell is going on?”
