by Andrew Gross
“You got a name?”
“Raymond. First name Abel. Middle name John. Went by AJ, his boss at the auto-customizing shop over there said. That’s where he worked.”
A young uniformed officer was standing nearby with a notepad. His nameplate read STASIO. Hauck assumed he’d been first on the scene.
“He was just off-shift,” Muñoz said. “Said he was going out to buy some smokes and make a call.” He pointed across the street. “Seems like he was headed into the diner over there.”
Hauck glanced over to a place he knew called the Fairfield Diner, an occasional police hangout. He’d grabbed a meal there a couple of times himself.
“What do we know about the car?”
Muñoz called over Officer Stasio, who looked about a month removed from training, and who read, a little nervously, from his spiral pad. “It appears like the hit-car was a white SUV, Lieutenant. It was traveling north up the Post Road and turned sharply onto West Street here…. Ran into the vic just as he was crossing the street. We got two eyewitnesses who saw the whole thing.”
Stasio pointed to two men, one stocky, sport coat, mustached, sitting in the front seat of an open patrol car rubbing his hair. The other in a blue fleece top talking to another officer, somberly shaking his head. “We located one in the parking lot of the Arby’s over there. An ex-cop, it turns out. The other came from the bank across the street.”
The kid had put it together pretty good. “Good work, Stasio.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Hauck slowly raised himself up, his knees cracking. A parting gift from his football days.
He looked back at the rutted gray asphalt on West Street—the two extended streaks of rubber about twenty feet farther along than the victim’s cell phone and glasses. Skid marks. Well past the point of impact. Hauck sucked in an unpleasant breath, and his stomach shifted.
Son of a bitch hadn’t even tried to stop.
He looked over at Stasio. “You doin’ okay, son?” That this was the young officer’s first fatality was plainly written all over his face.
Stasio nodded back. “Yessir.”
“Never easy.” Hauck patted the young patrolman on the shoulder. “That’s true for any of us.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
Hauck pulled Muñoz aside. He guided his detective’s eye along the Post Road south, the route that the hit-car traveled, then in the direction of the tire marks on the pavement.
“Seeing what I’m seeing, Freddy?”
The detective nodded grimly. “Bastard never made a move to stop.”
“Yeah.” Hauck pulled out a latex glove from his jacket pocket and threaded it over his fingers.
“Okay.” He knelt back down to the inert body. “Let’s see what she says….”
Hauck lifted Abel Raymond’s torso just enough to remove a black wallet from the victim’s trouser pocket. A Florida driver’s license: Abel John Raymond. There was also a laminated photo ID from Seminole Junior College, dating back two years. Same bright-eyed grin as on the license, hair a little shorter. Maybe the kid had dropped out.
There was a MasterCard in his name, a card from Sears, others from Costco, ExxonMobil, Social Security. Forty-two dollars in cash. A ticket stub from the 1996 Orange Bowl. Florida State–Notre Dame. Hauck recalled the game. From out of the wallet’s divider he unfolded a snapshot of an attractive dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her twenties holding a young boy. Hauck handed it up to Muñoz.
“Doesn’t look like a sister.” The detective shrugged. The victim wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “Girlfriend, maybe.”
They’d have to track down who it was.
“Someone’s not going to be very happy tonight.” Freddy Muñoz sighed.
Hauck tucked the photo back into the wallet and exhaled. “Long list, I’m afraid, Freddy.”
“It’s crazy, isn’t it, Lieutenant?” Muñoz shook his head. He was no longer talking about the accident. “You know my wife’s brother took in the 7:57 this morning. Got out just before it happened. My sister-in-law was going crazy. She couldn’t reach him till he got into the office. You roll over in bed for a few more minutes, get stuck at a light, miss your train…. You know how lucky he is?”
Hauck thought of the list of names back on his desk, the nervous, hopeful voices of those who had called in about them. He glanced over to Stasio’s witnesses.
“C’mon, Freddy, let’s get an ID on that car.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hauck took the guy in the sport jacket, Freddy the North Face fleece.
Hauck’s turned out to be a retired cop from South Jersey, name of Phil Dietz. He claimed he was up here cold-canvassing for state-of-the-art security systems—“You know, ‘smart’ homes, thumbprint, ID sensors, that sort of thing”—which he’d been handling since turning in the badge three years before. He had just pulled into the Arby’s up the street to grab a sandwich when he saw the whole thing.
“He came down the street moving pretty good,” Dietz said. He was short, stocky, graying hair a little thin on top, with a thick mustache, and he moved his stubby hands excitedly. “I heard the engine pick up. He accelerated down the street and made this turn there.” He pointed toward the intersection of West Street and the Post Road. “SOB hit that kid without even touching the brakes. I didn’t see it until it was too late.”
“Can you give me a make on the car?” Hauck asked.
Dietz nodded. “It was a white late-model SUV. A Honda or an Acura, I think, something like that. I could look at some pictures. Plates were white, too—I think blue lettering, or maybe green.” He shook his head. “Too far away. My eyes aren’t what they were when I was on the job.” He jiggled a set of reading glasses in his breast pocket. “Now all I have to do is to be able to read POs.”
Hauck smiled, then made a notation on his pad. “Not local?”
Dietz shook his head. “No. Maybe New Hampshire or Massachusetts. Sorry, I couldn’t get a solid read. The bastard stopped for a second—after. I yelled, ‘Hey, you!’ and started to run down the hill. But he just took off up the road. I tried to grab a picture with my cell phone, but it happened too fast. He was gone.”
Dietz pointed up the hill, toward the heights of Railroad Avenue. West Street went into a curve as it bent past an open lot, an office building. Once you were up there, I-95 was only a minute or two away. Hauck knew they’d have to be lucky if anyone up there saw him.
He turned back to the witness. “You said you heard the engine accelerate?”
“That’s right. I was stepping out of my car. Thought I’d kill some time before my next appointment.” Dietz pressed his inter-locked hands around the back of his head. “Cold calls…Don’t ever quit.”
“I’ll try not to.” Hauck grinned, then redirected him, motioning south. “It was coming from down there? You were able to follow it before it turned?”
“Yup. It caught my eyes as it sped up.” Dietz nodded.
“The driver was male?”
“Definitely.”
“Any chance you caught a description?”
He shook his head. “After the vehicle stopped, the guy looked back for an instant through the glass. Maybe had a second thought at what he’d done. I couldn’t get a read on his face. Tinted windows. Believe me, I wish I had.”
Hauck looked back up the hill and followed what he imagined was the victim’s path. If he worked at J&D Tint and Rims, he’d have to walk across West Street, then cross the Post Road at the light to get to the diner.
“You say you used to be on the force?”
“Township of Freehold.” The witness’s eyes lit up. “South Jersey. Near Atlantic City. Twenty-three years.”
“Good for you. So what I’m going to ask you, Mr. Dietz, you may understand. Did you happen to notice if the vehicle was traveling at a consistently high rate of speed prior to making the turn? Or did it speed up as the victim stepped into the street?’
“You’re trying to decide if this w
as an accident or intentional?” The ex-cop cocked his head.
“I’m just trying to get a picture of what took place,” Hauck replied.
“I heard him from up there.” Dietz pointed up the block toward the Arby’s. “He shot down the hill, then spun into the turn—outta control. To me it was like he must’ve been drunk. I don’t know, I just looked up when I heard the impact. He dragged the poor kid’s body like a sack of wheat. You can still see the marks. Then he stopped. I think the kid was underneath him at that point, before he sped away.”
Dietz said he’d be happy to look at some photos of white SUVs, to try to narrow down the make and model. “You find this SOB, Lieutenant. Anything I can do, you let me know. I wanna be the hammer that drives the nail into his coffin.”
Hauck thanked him. Not as much to go on as he would have liked. Muñoz stepped over. The guy he’d been talking to saw the incident from across the street. A track coach from up in Wilton, twenty miles away. Hodges. He identified the same white vehicle and same out-of-state plates. “AD or something. Maybe eight…” He was just stepping out of the bank after using the ATM. It had happened so quickly that he, too, couldn’t get much of a read. He gave roughly the same sketchy picture Dietz had of what had taken place.
Muñoz shrugged, disappointed. “Not a whole lot to go on, is it, Lieutenant?”
Hauck pressed his lips in frustration. “No.”
He went back to his car and called in an APB. A white late-model SUV driven by a white male, “possibly Honda or Acura, possibly Massachusetts or New Hampshire plates, possibly beginning AD8. Likely front-end body damage.” They’d put it out to the state police and the auto-repair shops all over the Northeast. They’d canvass people farther up along West Street to see if anyone spotted him racing by. There might be some speed-control cameras along the highway. That was their best hope.
Unless, of course, it turned out someone had it in for Abel Raymond.
There was a guy in a Yankees cap standing nearby, huddled against the chill. Stasio brought him over. Dave Corso, the owner of the auto custom shop where AJ Raymond worked.
“He was a good kid.” Corso shook his head, visibly distressed. “He’d been working with me for about a year. He was talented. He remodeled old cars himself. He was up from Florida.”
Hauck recalled his license. “You know where?”
The body-shop owner shrugged. “I don’t know. Tallahassee, Pensacola…He always wore these T-shirts, the Florida State Seminoles. I think he took everyone out for a beer when they won that college bowl last year. I think his father was a sailor or something down there.”
“You mean like in the navy?”
“No. Tugboat or something. He had his picture tacked up on the board. It’s still inside.”
Hauck nodded. “Where did Mr. Raymond live?”
“Up in Bridgeport, I’m pretty sure. I know we have it on file inside, but you know how it is—things change. But I know he banked over at First City….” He told them that AJ got this call, maybe twenty minutes before he left. He was in the middle of doing this tinting. Then he came and said he was going on early break. “Marty something, I think the guy said. AJ said he was going across the street to grab some smokes. The diner, I think. It has a machine.” Corso glanced over at the covered mound in the street. “Then this…How the hell do you figure?”
Hauck removed the victim’s wallet from out of a bag and showed Corso the photo of the girl and her son. “Any idea who this is?”
The auto-body manager shrugged. “I think he had some gal up there…. Or maybe Stamford. She picked him up here once or twice. Lemme look…. Yeah, I think that’s her. AJ was into working on classic cars. You know, restoring them. Corvettes, LeSabres, Mustangs. I think he’d just been up at a show this past weekend. Man…”
“Mr. Corso.” Hauck took the man aside. “Is there anyone you can think of who’d possibly want to do Mr. Raymond harm? Did he have debts? Did he gamble? Do drugs? Anything you can think of would help.”
“You’re thinking this wasn’t an accident?” The victim’s employer’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Just doing our job,” Muñoz said.
“Jeez, I don’t know. To me he was just a solid kid. He showed up. Did his job. People liked him here. But now that you mention it, this gal…I think she was married or recently split up from her husband. I know somewhere back I heard AJ mention he was having trouble with her ex. Maybe Jackie would know. Inside. He was closer to him.”
Hauck nodded. He signaled to Muñoz to follow that up.
“While we’re in there, Mr. Corso, you mind if we check where the phone call he received came from, too?”
There was something in Hauck’s gut that wasn’t sitting well about this.
He went out to the side of the road, looking back down the knoll to the accident site. It was visible—clearly. The West Street turnoff. Nothing obstructing the view. The assailant’s car hadn’t slowed. It hadn’t made a move to stop or avoid him. A DUI would have had to have been drop-dead out of his gourd on a Monday at noon to have hit this kid head-on.
The medical team from upstate had finally arrived. Hauck went back down the hill. He picked up the victim’s cell phone. He’d check the recently dialed numbers. It wouldn’t surprise him if the number that had called in would be traced to the same guy.
Things like this often worked that way.
Hauck knelt over Abel Raymond’s body a last time, taking a good look at the kid’s face. I’m gonna find out for you, son, he vowed. His thoughts flashed back to the bombing. There were a lot of people in town who weren’t going to be coming home tonight. This would only be one. But this one he could do something about.
This one—Hauck stared at the locks of long red hair, the ache of a long-untended wound rising up inside him—this one had a face.
As he was about to get up, Hauck checked the victim’s pockets a final time. In the guy’s trousers, he found some change, a gas receipt. Then he reached into the chest pocket under the embroidered patch that bore his initials. AJ.
He poked his finger around and brought out a yellow scrap of paper, a standard Post-it note. It had a name written on it with a number, a local phone exchange.
It could’ve been the person AJ Raymond was on his way to meet. Or it could’ve been in there for weeks. Hauck dropped it in the evidence bag with the other things he had pulled, one more link to check out.
Charles Friedman.
CHAPTER NINE
I never heard from my husband again. I never knew what happened.
The fires raged underground in Grand Central for most of the day. There’d been a powerful accelerant used in the blast. Four blasts. One in each of the first two cars of the 7:51 out of Greenwich, exploding just as it came to a stop. The others in trash baskets along the platform packed with a hundred pounds of hexagen, enough to bring a good-sized building down. A splinter cell, they said. Over Iraq. Can you imagine? Charlie hated the war in Iraq. They found names, pictures of the station, traces of chemicals where the bombs were made. The fire that burned there for most of two days had reached close to twenty-three hundred degrees.
We waited. We waited all day that first day to hear something. Anything. Charlie’s voice. A message from one of the hospitals that he was there. It seemed like we called the whole world: the NYPD, the hotline that had been set up. Our local congressman, whom Charlie knew.
We never did.
One hundred and eleven people died. That included three of the bombers, who, they suspected, were in the first two cars. Where Charlie always sat. Many of them couldn’t even be identified. No distinguishable remains. They just went to work one morning and disappeared from the earth. That was Charlie. My husband of eighteen years. He just yelled good-bye over the hum of the hair dryer and went to take in the car.
And disappeared.
What they did find was the handle of the leather briefcase the kids had given him last year—the charred top piece still attached, blown cle
ar from the blast site, the gold-embossed monogram, CMF, which made it final for the first time and brought our tears.
Charles Michael Friedman.
Those first days I was sure he was going to crawl out of that mess. Charlie could pull himself out of anything. He could fall off the damn roof trying to fix the satellite and he’d land on his feet. You could just count on him so much.
But he didn’t. There was never a call, or a piece of his clothing, even a handful of ashes.
And I’ll never know.
I’ll never know if he died from the initial explosion or in the flames. If he was conscious or if he felt pain. If he had a final thought of us. If he called out our names.
Part of me wanted one last chance to take him by the shoulders and scream, “How could you let yourself die in there, Charlie?” How?
Now I guess I have to accept that he’s gone. That he won’t be coming back. Though it’s so effing hard….
That he’ll never get to drive Samantha to college that first time. Or watch Alex score a goal. Or see the people they become. Things that would have made him so proud.
We were going to grow old together. Sail off to that Caribbean cove. Now he’s gone, in a flash.
Eighteen years of our lives.
Eighteen years…
And I don’t even get to kiss him good-bye.
CHAPTER TEN
A few days later—Friday, Saturday, Karen had lost track—a police detective came by the house.
Not from the city. People from the police in New York and the FBI had been by a few times trying to trace Charlie’s movements that day. This one was local. He called ahead and asked if he could talk with Karen for just a few moments on a matter unrelated to the bombing. She said sure. Anything that helped take her mind off things for a few moments was a godsend to her now.
She was in the kitchen arranging flowers that had come in from one of the outfits that Charlie cleared through when he stopped by.
