by Andrew Gross
“He left this all behind?” A year ago. “This may have been just some kind of backup.” Hauck shrugged. “I guess you understand, this wasn’t unpremeditated. He was planning this.”
She nodded, biting her lower lip. “I realize that.”
But what Charles could never have planned, Hauck knew, was how he would execute this. Until the moment came.
His thoughts settled on another name. Thomas Mardy.
“Listen.” Hauck swiveled to her. “I have to ask, did your husband have any history of…you know…”
“Did he what?” Karen stared at him. “Did he play around? I don’t know. A week ago I would have said that was impossible. Now I’d be almost happy to hear that’s what it was. He had that passport, those cards…. He was planning all this. While we were sleeping in the same bed. While he was rooting for the kids at school. He somehow managed to get away from that train in the midst of the chaos and say, ‘Now it’s happening. Now’s the time. Now’s the time I’m going to walk out on my entire life.’”
For a few seconds, there was only silence.
Hauck pressed his lips together and asked again, “What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. Part of me wants to just put my arms around him and tell him that I’m happy he’s alive. This other part…I opened that box and realized he’s kept a whole part of his life secret from me. From the person he supposedly loved. I don’t know what the hell I want to do, Lieutenant! Slap him in the face. Throw him in jail. I don’t even know if he’s committed a crime. Other than hurting me. But it doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m here.”
Hauck wheeled his chair closer. “Why are you here?”
“Why am I here?” Tears rushed into her eyes again. She clenched her fists and tapped them helplessly against the table. Then she looked back up at him. “Isn’t it pretty obvious? I’m here because I can’t think of anywhere else to go!”
Hauck went over to her as she just folded, weightlessly, into his arms. She buried her head on his shoulder and dug her fists into him. He held her, feeling her trembling in his grasp, and she didn’t pull away.
“He was dead! I mourned him. I missed him. I agonized on whether his last thoughts were about us. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t wish I just could have talked to him one last time. To tell him I hoped that he was okay. And now he’s alive….”
She sucked back a breath, wiping the tears off her dampened cheeks. “I don’t want him hunted down. He did what he did, and he must have had some reason. He’s not a bastard, Lieutenant—whatever you might think. I don’t even want him back. It’s too late now. I have no idea what I even feel….
“I guess I just want to know…I just want to know why he did this to me, Lieutenant. I want to know what he’s done. I want to see his face and have him tell me. The truth. That’s all.”
Hauck nodded. He squeezed her arms and let go. He kept a tissue box by his desk. He pulled a couple for her.
She sniffled back a smile. “Thanks.”
“Part of the job. People always seem to be crying in here.”
She laughed and dabbed her eyes and nose. “I must be like a goddamn train wreck to you. Every time you see me…”
“No.” He winked. “Anything but. However, you do seem to present some intriguing situations.”
Karen tried to laugh again. “I don’t even know what the hell I’m asking you to do.”
“I know what you want me to do,” he replied.
“I’m not sure where else to turn, Lieutenant.”
“It’s Ty.”
What he said seemed to take her by surprise. For a second they just stood there, drawn to each other. She brushed a wave of auburn hair away from her still-raw eyes.
“Okay.” She sucked in a breath and nodded. “Ty…”
“And the answer’s yes.” He sat back on the edge of his desk and nodded. “I’ll help.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
He’d said yes. Hauck went over the scene again.
Yes, he would help her. Yes, he knew what she needed him to do. Even though he knew in that instant it could never be accomplished with him on the job.
He took the Merrily out on the sound that night. He sat in the dark with the engines off, the water calm, the lights of downtown Stamford flickering on the shore.
Why? he asked himself.
Because he couldn’t get the image of her out of his mind? Or the feel of her softness when she leaned into him. Her sweet scent still vibrant in his nostrils, every hair on his arm on edge, every nerve awakened from its long slumber.
Was that what it was, Ty? Is that all?
Or maybe it was the face that crept into his head as he sat with his Topsiders up on the gunnels, drinking a Harpoon Ale. A face Hauck had not brought into mind for months but that now once again came back to life for him, frighteningly real.
Abel Raymond.
The blood trickling out from under his long red hair. Hauck kneeling over him, promising he’d find out who had done this.
Charles Friedman hadn’t died.
That changed everything now.
Thomas Mardy. He’d been a supervisor at a credit-checking business. He’d gotten on the 7:57 that day out of Cos Cob and had died on the tracks in Grand Central, in the blast.
Yet somehow one of his credit cards had been used for a limo ride up to Greenwich three hours later.
Now Hauck knew how.
He wondered, could the Mustang just have been a coincidence? Charlie’s Baby… It had thrown him off. It would have thrown anyone off.
But now, seeing Charlie’s face on the screen, he knew—more clearly than Karen Friedman could ever know—just how her husband had spent the hours between being caught by that camera coming out of that station and ending up hours later in the vault of that bank.
The son of a bitch hadn’t died.
That afternoon Hauck had run Charlie’s name through the NCIC system. The usual asset check—credit cards, bank accounts, even immigration. Freddy Muñoz brought it back, knocked on the door wearing a quizzical expression. “This guy’s deceased, LT. On April ninth.” His look sort of summed it up. “In the Grand Central bombing.”
Nothing. But Hauck wasn’t surprised.
Charles Friedman and AJ Raymond had been connected. And not by the copper Mustang. That much he now knew. They had lived different lives, a universe apart. Yet they had been connected.
What the hell could it be?
Hauck drained the last of his IPA. The answer wasn’t here. The kid had family. Pensacola, right? His brother had come up to claim his things. His father was a harbor captain. Hauck remembered the old man’s photo among AJ’s things.
Yes, he would help her, he had said. Hauck pulled himself up out of the chair. He started the ignition. The Merrily coughed to life.
He’d help her. He only hoped she wouldn’t regret whatever he found.
“CARL, I’M GOING to need a little time.” Hauck knocked on his boss’s door. “I have a bunch built up.”
Carl Fitzpatrick, Greenwich’s chief of police, was at his desk, preparing for an upcoming meeting. “Sure, Ty. C’mon in, sit down.” He swiveled his chair around his desk and came back with a scheduling folder. “What are we talking about, a few days?”
“A couple of weeks,” Hauck said, unconfiding. “Maybe more.”
“Couple of weeks?” Fitzpatrick gazed at him over his reading glasses. “I can’t authorize that kind of time.”
Hauck shrugged. “Maybe more.”
“Jesus, Ty…” The chief tossed his glasses on his desk, looked at him directly. “What’s going on?”
“Can’t say. Things are pretty clean right now. Whatever comes up, Freddy and Zaro can cover. I haven’t taken more than a week in five years.”
“Is everything all right, Ty? This isn’t something about Jess, is it?”
“No, Carl, everything’s fine.” Fitzpatrick and he were friends, and he hated being vague. “It’s just something that’s
come up I have to see through.”
“Couple of weeks…” The chief scratched the back of his head. He pieced through the file. “Gimme a few days. I’ll shuffle things around. When did you need to leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” Fitzpatrick’s eyes stretched wide. “Tomorrow’s impossible, Ty. This is totally out of the blue.”
“To you, maybe.” Hauck slowly stood up. “To me it’s long overdue.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The doorbell rang. Barking, Tobey scampered to the door. Alex was at a friend’s, studying for an exam. Samantha was on the phone in the family room, her legs dangling over the back of the couch, Heroes on the TV.
“Can you get that, Mom?”
Karen had just finished up cleaning in the kitchen. She tossed down the cloth and went to answer the door.
When she saw who it was, she lit up in surprise.
“There’s a couple of things you can do for me,” the lieutenant said, huddled in a beige nylon jacket against a slight rain.
“My daughter’s at home,” Karen said, glancing back into the family room, not wanting to involve her. She grabbed a rain jacket off the bench and threw it over her shoulders and stepped outside. “What?”
“You can look through any of your husband’s personal belongings. Notes from his desk. Canceled checks, credit-card receipts. Whatever might still be around. Are you still able to access his computer?”
Karen nodded. She’d never had the urge to remove it from his study. It had never been quite the right time. “I think so.”
“Good. Go through his old e-mails, any travel sites he may have visited before he left, phone records. What about his work-related things? Are they still around?”
“I have some stuff of his that was given back to me in a box downstairs. I’m not sure where his office computer ended up. What am I looking for?”
“Anything that might prove useful in determining where he might go. Even if it ends up it’s not where he is now, it could at least be a starting point. Something to go on…”
Karen covered her head against the raindrops. “It’s been over a year.”
“I know it’s been a year. But there are still records. Get in touch with his ex-secretary or the travel agency he used to use. Maybe they sent him brochures or made some reservations that no one would have even thought were important then. Try to think yourself, where would he go? You lived with him for eighteen years.”
“You don’t think I haven’t already racked my brain?” The rain intensified. Karen wrapped her arms against the chill. “I’ll look again.”
“I’ll help you arrange to get some of it done if you need,” Hauck said, “when I get back.”
“When you get back? Back from where?”
“Pensacola.”
“Pensacola?” Karen squinted at him. “What’s down there? Is that for me?”
“I’ll let you know,” Hauck said with a smile, “as soon as it’s clear to me. In the meantime I want you to go through whatever you can find. Think back. There’s always some clue. Something someone’s left behind. I’ll be in touch when I get back.”
“Thank you,” Karen said. She placed her hand against his slicker, rain going down her face. Her eyes suddenly full.
It had been a long time since she’d felt the presence of someone in her life, and here was this man, this man she barely knew who had come into her life in the mayhem after Charlie had died, and he’d seen her, rootless as a craft foundering in the waves of a storm. And now he was the one person she could cling to in this world, the one anchor. It was strange.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into all this, Lieutenant. I’m sure you have enough to do in your job.”
“You didn’t drag me into it.” Hauck shook his head. “And anyway, I’m not doing this on the job.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t want this out in the open, did you? You didn’t want me to have to deal with whatever came back. I’d never be able to do that if I was there.”
She looked at him, confused. “I don’t understand.”
“I took a few weeks,” he said, rain streaming down his collar. Then he winked. “Don’t worry about it. I had no idea what to do with the time anyway. But it’s only me. No badge. No one else.” His blue eyes glimmered in a soft smile. “I hope that’s okay.”
Was it okay? Karen didn’t know what she was expecting when she went to him. Maybe only someone to listen to. But now her heart melted a bit at what he was willing to do.
“Why…?”
He shrugged. “Everybody else—they were either really busy or just needed the paycheck.”
Karen smiled, gazing back at him, a warming, grateful sensation filling up her chest. “I meant, why are you doing this, Lieutenant?”
Hauck shifted his weight from one foot to another. “I don’t really know.”
“You know.” Karen looked at him. She pushed back a lock of wet hair that had fallen into her eyes. “You’ll let me know when it’s time. But thank you anyway, Lieutenant. Whatever it is.”
“I thought we went through that one already,” he said. “It’s Ty.”
“All right, Ty.”
A glow of grateful warmth came into her gaze. Karen held out her hand. He took it. They stood there like that, rain pelting down on them.
“It’s Karen.” Her eyes met his. “I’m happy to meet you, Ty.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Gregory Khodoshevsky gunned the engine on his three-wheeled, seventy-thousand-dollar T-Rex sport cycle, and the three-hundred-horsepower vehicle shot over the makeshift course he had set up on the grounds of his twenty-acre Greenwich estate.
Trailing close behind, his fourteen-year-old son, Pavel, in his own bright red T-Rex, gamely tried to keep up.
“C’mon, boy!” Khodoshevsky laughed through the helmet mike as he maneuvered around a cone, passing his son back on the other side. “You’re not going to let an old starik like me take you, are you?”
Pavel cut the turn sharply, almost flipping his machine. Then he righted himself and sped up to almost sixty miles per hour, going airborne over a knoll.
“I’m right behind you, old man!”
They sped around the man-made pond, past the helicopter pad, then bounced back onto a long straightaway on Khodoshevsky’s vast property. On the rise, his eighteen-thousand-square-foot redbrick Georgian stood like a castle with its enormous fountained courtyard and sprawling eight-car garage. Which Khodoshevsky filled with a Lamborghini Murciélago, a yellow Hummer that his wife, Ludmila, paraded around town, and a customized black Maybach Mercedes complete with bulletproof windows and a Bloomberg satellite setup. That cost him over half a million alone.
Though he was only forty-eight, the “Black Bear,” as Khodoshevsky was sometimes known, was one of the most powerful people in the world, though his name would not be found on any list. In the kleptocracy that became the privatization spree in Russia of the 1990s, Khodoshevsky convinced a French investment bank to buy a run-down automotive-parts plant in Irkutsk, then leveraged it into a controlling seat on the board of Tazprost, Russia’s largest—and ailing—automobile manufacturer, which, upon the sudden demise of two of its more uncompliant board members, dropped in Khodoshevsky’s lap at the age of thirty-six. From there he obtained the rights to open Mercedes and Nissan dealerships in Estonia and Latvia, along with hundreds of Gaznost filling stations all over Russia to fill them up.
Under Yeltsin the Russian economy was carved up by a handful of eager kapitalisti. One big fucking candy store, Khodoshevsky always called it. In the free-for-all that became the public finance sector, he opened department stores modeled after Harrods that sold pricey Western brands. He bought liquor distributorships for expensive French champagnes and wines. Then banks, radio stations. Even a low-cost airline.
Today, through a holding company, Khodoshevksy was now the largest single private landlord on the Champs-Élysées!
In the cour
se of growing his empire, he had done many questionable things. Public ministers on Putin’s economic trade councils were on his payroll. Many of his rivals were known to have been arrested and imprisoned. More than a few had been disposed of, suffering untimely falls from their office windows or unexplained car accidents on the way home. These days Khodoshevsky generated more free cash flow than a medium-size economy. In Russia today what he could not buy, he stole.
Fortunately, his was not a conscience that kept him troubled or awake at night. He was in touch daily through emissaries with a handful of powerful people—Europeans, Arabs, South Americans—whose capital had become so vast it basically ran the world. Wealth that had created the equivalent of a supereconomy, keeping real-estate prices booming, luxury brands flourishing, yacht makers busy, Wall Street indices high. They developed economies the way the International Monetary Fund once developed nations: buying up coal deposits in Smolensk, sugarcane fields for ethanol in Costa Rica, steel factories in Vietnam. However the coin fell, theirs always ended up on top. It was the ultimate arbitrage Khodoshevsky had crafted. The hedge fund of hedge funds! There was no way to lose.
Except maybe, as he relaxed a bit on the accelerator, today, to his son.
“C’mon, Pavel, let me see what you’re made of. Gun it now!”
Laughing, they sped into the final straightaway, then did a lap around the massive fountain in the courtyard in front of the house. The T-Rexes’ superheated engines spurted like souped-up go-carts. They bounced over the Belgian cobblestones in a father-son race to the finish.
“I’ve got you, Pavel!” Khodoshevsky called, pulling even.
“Believe it, old man!” His determined son gunned the engine and grinned.
In the final turn, they both went all out. Their wheels bumped together and scraped. Sparks flew, and Khodoshevsky lurched into the basin of the gigantic baroque fountain they had brought over from France. His T-Rex’s fiberglass chassis caved in like crepe paper. Pavel threw up his hands in victory as he raced by. “I win!”
