Reckless

by Andrew Gross

  “I know, I know,” he said. “Truth is”—he tried to smile—“I never saw anyone so eager to get themselves poisoned.”

  “No humor, Ty, please. That’s not the point.”

  “I know it’s not the point.” He squeezed her warmly on her knee, his hand staying there. “I went into the city to follow up on a lead. I guess I just got wrapped up.”

  “Ty, you’ve been wrapped up somewhere else since this woman was killed.” Annie faced him. “I’m sorry about that, Ty, I really am. But I deserve some attention too. It’s almost making me jealous. Like, is there anything you want to confess?”

  Hauck shrugged and tried to smile. “Other than maybe taking you for granted from time to time.” He saw the tightness in her jaw start to soften. She drew her knees up and pushed back her hair. It took a lot to get Annie mad, and he’d overachieved. Laughter was a lot more natural for her than anger. The ticking digital clock flashed on the screen and 24 went into next week’s previews.

  “Anyway, you missed a lights-out episode.” She stood up and picked up her dish. “There’s a plate for you in the microwave. A weak moment—don’t ask me why. And don’t even think of asking about what you missed because there’s no way I’m going to divulge…Even with sex,” she said, scrunching her nose playfully at him, climbing over him.

  Hauck reached and caught her by the wrist and pulled her onto his lap. He squeezed her, hoping for a hint of forgiveness. “Wouldn’t even try,” he said. “However, I do have Dove bars in the freezer for dessert.” He knew she would kill for those. “I was hoping that might work.”

  “Hmmm.” Annie nodded, thinking for a second, then rolled off of him. “You’re on dangerous turf there, mister…Maybe bring one upstairs when you’re done. And remember, forgiveness is predicated on performance.” She took her plate over to the sink and dumped it in. “Let’s just say we can agree the dishes are yours tonight. And by the way, there’s an envelope for you over there. It was under the door when I let myself in.” She went to the stairs. “I’m heading up.”

  “Annie…”

  She turned around on the landing in her baggy flannels and University of Michigan T-shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” Hauck said again. “I really am.”

  She continued up without saying anything but, to his delight, wiggled out of her top and tossed it back to the floor from the top of the stairs.

  “Dove bar…,” she called teasingly.

  “Got it.” Hauck laughed and went around to the kitchen, weighing whether to follow her up before she’d even shut the door—Right answer, he thought—or surrender to his growling stomach and the plate she had put in the microwave. He picked food. He hit the reheat button on the microwave and opened the fridge, pulling out a beer. He heard Annie in the bathroom and sat at the counter, waiting for the meal to heat.

  He hadn’t been entirely forthcoming with her. And he was still holding back from being so right now. She was right; he had been elsewhere. He was sorry he’d let it all fall back on her, but he knew that if he was straight with her, it would only produce the lecture that maybe he should follow the advice of his boss right now and drop this thing for good.

  While the meal warmed, Hauck reached out for the brown, taped-up legal envelope on the counter, which, he noticed immediately, had come from Vito. Good man! He slit it open and found a large ream of the phone records from Thibault he had asked for, along with a note on Vito’s company letterhead: “Bill to follow.”

  Hauck chuckled.

  He took a swig of beer. The microwave beeped. He went over and took out the plate and sat, flinching for a second from the heat, back at the counter. He cut into the steak, which was tender and flavorful, admiring how his own concoction of red wine, olive oil, soy sauce, and balsamic had come out to perfection, even if Annie had lit the grill.

  Between bites, he leafed through the sheets.

  He had homework to do. The stack was maybe two hundred pages thick. And he didn’t have much to go on. The logs went all the way back to October like he’d requested—six months. He had mulled things over maybe a dozen times on the ride from the city. Should he just drop it? He knew he was treading on thin ice. Steve Chrisafoulis was starting to get irritated. The detective in New York didn’t exactly seem like his new BFF. And then there was Foley, his boss…

  “How is it down there?” Annie called from the upstairs landing.

  “Pretty good,” Hauck yelled back. “Pasta’s not bad, but this flank steak is a ten!”

  “Oh, you’re definitely pushing it, mister…”

  “Up in a minute,” he said.

  He gulped down a few last bites and quickly flipped forward to late-February and March, just before April and her family were killed.

  At first glance he didn’t find any calls from Thibault to the dead trader. It was all pretty much just numbers and phone IDs he didn’t recognize. He leafed forward a month, to April, just a couple of weeks ago, the weeks before James Donovan’s death.

  A number jumped out at him. 212-555-5719.

  He put down his fork and knife and pushed away the plate. From a coffee mug near the wall phone where he kept things, he grabbed a yellow marker. He highlighted the number.

  Then he leafed back through the stack of listings and locations. He searched for the same number. He found it several times, his pulse seeming to pick up each time. He noted the time of day of these calls.

  One fifty-seven A.M.

  Two fifteen A.M.

  Three oh five.

  Always in the middle of the night. Always to the same location. A location that just made that ice he was on even thinner.

  He’d just been there today.

  352 East Fifty-third Street. Donovan’s apartment building. He dialed the number on his cell. A voice recording came on. Hispanic. “This is the super’s office. No one is here to take your call…”

  Hauck hung up. Something surged through his veins. Vindication.

  That linked Dani Thibault to both dead traders.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The cheers from the crowd and the thwack of the ball on wooden sticks rang out on the Greenwich Academy field.

  The Gators were playing the Lady Crusaders from St. Luke’s in field hockey. It was a crisp May afternoon. Greenwich was ranked number one in the state. About a hundred people were on the field or in the stands, mostly parents and friends, shouting, “Go, Green, go, Green!” as a determined blond attacker in the home jersey sprinted down the sideline past the last St. Luke’s defender. To rising cheers, she executed a spin and centered the ball directly in front of the visitor’s goal. There was a heated scrum for control. A teammate wound up and whacked the ball into the open net.

  “Attaway, Jen! Good goal, good goal!”

  The team celebrated with a bunch of high fives.

  Dani Thibault made his way across the top row of the bleachers. A man in a red Lands’ End jacket and green bleached-out baseball cap stood up, clapping and yelling, “Way to go, Jen. Way to set Amy up!” Thibault waited until play resumed. He came over and took a seat behind him. St. Luke’s sent the ball down to the Greenwich end.

  He leaned over the man in the cap. “Your daughter, right?”

  The man continued clapping, Thibault’s voice seeming to take him by surprise. The man turned and recognized him from the meeting they had had in New York and also from the party circuit around town. “I didn’t know you had a kid here.”

  “I don’t. That’s her who set up the goal, number fourteen, right?”

  The man in the Lands’ End jacket nodded, standing up. He was a fund manager at one of the largest hedge funds in Greenwich. “Get it out of there, Jen! Dig it out! Thataway!” He sat back down and said, face forward, confused, “I thought we decided I’d contact you if I wanted to talk further.”

  “Oh, yes, right, on that other issue,” Thibault said. “That situation is gone. Someone grabbed it. Another time. She’s very good, your daughter.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees.
“North Carolina, isn’t it, next year?”

  “Duke,” the man in the red jacket said, glancing along the bleachers, making sure they were alone.

  “That’s right, Duke. And you’ve got two more right behind her, don’t you? Great girls, I hear. All top students…”

  “Listen.” The man finally turned to him, perturbed. “It’s Dani, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Dani.” Thibault nodded.

  Thibault knew the man’s story better than his own. He was a senior investment manager at a troubled fund that had just been bought by one of the large banks. He’d bet huge on the spread between mortgage rates and bonds, the evaporating spread, and now his positions were in free fall. The last two years, multimillion-dollar bonuses had been paid in restricted stock. And to support his fancy lifestyle—the kids in the right school, the ski house in Vail, the twelve-thousand-square-foot castle under construction—Lands’ End had been borrowing against it heavily. A little at a time, then more as the stock price went down. Never believing it was anything more than a blip. A blip that would reverse.

  That blip was about to kill him now.

  Thibault placed his hands squarely on the man’s shoulders. “Actually, I thought we might discuss something else.”

  Soon he’d be getting margin calls. Calls, with all his cash pledged, that he couldn’t meet. Then he’d talk about maybe unloading some property, property that was plummeting just as fast, that wouldn’t sell. Who knew, in a month he might even lose his job. The sweats were definitely coming out at night. Thibault knew he was as good as dead, as dead as the banks. Just walking around. Zombie.

  Piqued, the man said, “Listen, Dani, or whatever you go by, call me at the office if you have another deal. Not here. I’m watching my kid. You understand?”

  Thibault had pitched him on a Dutch retailer that was for sale, a private equity thing. Just feeling him out. First they had met at the Field Club in Greenwich. Thibault had a nose for the smell of panic underneath his calm country-club veneer.

  Zombie.

  “I was just thinking about the future, that’s all. Those big bonuses are a thing of the past now, aren’t they, Ted? How much does it look like this year?’

  “What are you now”—the man suddenly turned—“my fucking estate planner?”

  “Yeah, Ted.” Thibault leveled his gaze on Ted’s eyes. “That’s exactly what I am, my friend. I’m your ticket out, if you’re smart. Your only ticket.”

  The whistle blew. Half time. The girls on the field headed to their locker rooms. The man shifted around, annoyed. But didn’t walk away. “What are you talking about?”

  “Maybe we can have a drink next week. About how you’re going to get out of this mess. How you’re going to finish that house. Fork up the hundred and fifty grand for the girls. Plus the place in Jupiter, right? You know what I mean?”

  “I said we’d look at your proposal,” the hedge fund manager said. “If that’s gone, send me another. I’ll run it by the committee.”

  “No, that’s all changed, Ted. I’m no longer looking for a penny from you.” Thibault’s cool, purposeful smile seemed to make the man uneasy. “It’s the other way around now. Enough to get you out of this mess. For good. Enough to sort out that life of yours that’s underwater. Enjoy the game,” Thibault said, looking past him to the field and patting him firmly on the shoulders. “I’m your banker now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The connection he’d found between Dani Thibault and both dead traders weighed on Hauck the whole next day.

  Taken separately, it all meant nothing. Only the loosest circumstantial connection that didn’t prove a thing. Thibault lived in that world. He might well have known both Glassman and Donovan. It wasn’t enough to take to Chrisafoulis or Foley.

  Yet it was more than he could put aside.

  Wednesday, he awoke clearheaded. And he knew what to do.

  He called Steve Chrisafoulis at the station, Tom Foley’s admonition still in his mind. Steve wasn’t there. He chatted for a few seconds with Brenda, his old secretary. “Tell him to call me back,” he asked her. “It’s pretty important.”

  For the next few hours he did his best to focus on things at work. But he was distracted. He waited for Steve’s return call. Thibault was connected. The two dead traders were connected. He knew it. But he just couldn’t prove it—at least not on his own. Everyone was right. He had made his choices. He wasn’t a cop anymore.

  Now someone else had to run with the ball.

  Around three, he realized he hadn’t heard back from Steve. He tried him once more. He needed to get what he knew off his chest. This time, Brenda told him, “He had to run into the city. You have his cell, don’t you?”

  Hauck did. “Just tell him to give me a call on his way back.”

  When his phone shook a short time later he figured it was Steve finally calling him back, but it turned out to be Richard Snell from London. Hauck glanced at his watch, figuring the time there. “You’re sure burning the candle a bit late…”

  “I’m actually calling you from home,” the Talon British director said. “That search you had me looking into, Thibault—”

  “Listen, Richard,” Hauck said, cutting him off, “I should’ve called. Tom Foley asked me to—”

  “I know precisely what Tom asked,” Snell said. “He called here as well. But if you’ve got a paper and pen, I think I can be of some help. Something came back.”

  Hauck grabbed a pen off his desk. “Go ahead.”

  “Before we were told to stop, we started looking into his banking connections over here. Thibault maintains a personal account in his own name at RBS. Most of what goes on seems on the up-and-up. He pays for a flat in Kensington. A housekeeper. Some monthly expenses. What did strike me as interesting, however, is that every month, like clockwork, there’s a payment of three thousand euros wired from his account to another European bank.”

  “To the Netherlands?” Hauck asked. That was where Thibault was supposedly from.

  “No, to an AstraBanca,” the Brit replied. “In a town called Novi Pazar. In Serbia.”

  “Serbia!” Hauck pushed back in his seat. “Wired to whom?”

  “We’re not sure. A woman. The name on the account is a Maria Radisovic. Ring a bell?”

  Hauck had never heard the name before. “No.”

  “I’m not surprised. We did a quick check. She’s sixty-eight years old. Her husband, Evo, is dead. She’s got a daughter, Ola. Receives a small monthly pension from an auto parts factory there.”

  Serbia.

  It triggered Hauck’s memory of Merrill Simons’s mentioning a photograph she had found in Thibault’s wallet. Two women, one older, in an unidentified European city. The other, she thought, was around Dani’s age.

  Hadn’t Thibault claimed to have been part of a Dutch force stationed in Serbia during the war?

  “My suggestion,” Snell went on, “is to get me a set of prints. Or even better, a toothbrush or a drinking glass. His DNA. We’ll find out who the bastard really is. But if you want my guess,” the Brit said, “if we went and dug through the local birth records, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out your Dani Thibault—whatever his real name is—isn’t Dani Thibault at all, but most likely, in the end, Maria Radisovic’s son.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  What Snell had found coursed through Hauck. Thibault had claimed to be Dutch. Or Belgian. Now he had a tie-in to a woman in Serbia. He had lied about his past, his banking connections. Now he had a link to both dead traders. It was only getting deeper. Hauck knew it was gradually climbing over his head. He wasn’t sure what to do.

  Merrill should know this. The FBI should know this. He had given his word not to divulge anything. To his boss and to his client.

  But it was also a potential embarrassment if it ever got out that this was a guy the firm was protecting.

  He tried Foley at the New York office. His secretary said he was in meetings and wouldn’t be free until after
five. Hauck said he was coming in and insisted on a couple of minutes with him. This was always how it began. Something small, an accident, a confidential search he stumbled upon. That grew. Four people were now dead. Two large banks had failed. This was larger than the firm’s commitment to Reynolds Reid. Larger than something they could simply put on hold.

  It was building speed like an avalanche—and he didn’t even have the charge to do anything about it.

  Hauck grabbed his case and stuffed it with all the files he had been compiling: the photo of Thibault and Glassman, the phone records Vito had pulled for him, the connection between Thibault and Donovan. He told Brooke he was leaving for the day. He went downstairs to the ground-floor parking garage.

  He found his Beemer in his private parking space and depressed the lock remote. He heard the familiar beep and opened the door. He threw his case on the passenger seat and went to climb in. He noticed something sitting on the windshield.

  A book of some kind. He got back out and lifted it off.

  The Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Wall Street.

  Hauck froze.

  “Thought you’d like the touch.” It was Shep Campbell’s voice.

  Hauck turned around and saw the NYPD detective leaning on a nearby car.

  “You really learn anything in that book or do you just use it as a prop?” Hauck asked, lifting it off his car.

  “Nice wheels,” Campbell said, coming over. “But, hey, you deserve it, right?” A heavy-set black man remained leaning on the city detective’s car. “Say hi to Detective Washburn.” Campbell’s chummy tone was starting to wear thin. Bringing in his partner. Making this visit official. What was going on?

  “Hey.” The large black dude waved. “Seen you on TV.”

  Hauck nodded. If they hadn’t been two New York City cops, he’d have thought he was in for some kind of fight.