Reckless

by Andrew Gross

  Hauck looked him in the eye. “So how’d that one go?”

  “I know where you’re heading…They shoved them into the pantry at gunpoint and took whatever they could and ran.”

  “What I thought, Steve.”

  The head of detectives looked at him and exhaled, then backed away. “The wife and daughter were in the bedroom upstairs. Lemme know if you find anything.” He winked. “Can always use the help. Take a minute, before you go.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The bedroom had a few techs and detectives Hauck knew well milling around and he said hi, fielding a few questions about how things were going and what he was doing there.

  He looked around the room—shades of yellow and green, colorful and warm. Hauck felt he could see April’s personality in it, the floral curtains and painted vines on the wall. The bed was still tousled from last night. A Jodi Picoult novel lay on her nightstand. A few framed pictures of her family and the dog.

  Even her familiar scent—fresh, like daisies—returned to him after all these years.

  He made his way over to the master closet and waited until the last CSI tech left.

  Two body outlines were next to each other, almost overlapping. Hauck envisioned April shielding her daughter, their mouths taped, wrists bound, terror leaping wildly in her heart. She must’ve heard them. The gunmen coming back upstairs; the door opening, light bursting in. Her daughter’s frantic, muffled screams. The vast depth of fear subsumed in a greater sadness.

  That must have been horrible for her.

  He had seen it so many times. Always left him numb in his heart. People he had loved.

  Why did it always feel as if it was the first?

  They had been kept in here while her husband was led down to the safe. What the hell had gone wrong? Had one of them seen one of their faces and the bastards had to cover their tracks? Had Marc tried to fight back? The dresser drawers were open, clothes, photographs, papers strewn over the floor. On top of the console, an enameled jewelry box was rifled through.

  Robbery.

  Hauck kneeled and pressed his palm in the center of the first blue outline. For a second, it was as if he felt her warm heart still beating there. After all these years. A fist of nausea rolled up in his gut. The past rushing back, a driverless train out of control.

  He had seen this so many times, he thought he could just put it aside.

  But he couldn’t. Everything always came back.

  In the clash between memory and forgetting, memories always won.

  “Ty…?”

  He recognized her as soon as he turned. After all these years.

  At the back of the line behind him at the dry cleaner’s on Putnam. The soft green luminous eyes, the midwestern drawl bringing him instantly back. The pleased surprise so radiant in her smile.

  “April?”

  “Oh my God, Ty…” He stepped out of the line and she hugged him. “God, it’s been years…Four?”

  “Maybe five!” he said, drinking in the sight of her. “How are you?”

  However many years had passed, she looked the same. Better. Years had blossomed on her. Confidence shone in her face. With her honey-brown hair and freckles still dotting her cheeks, you could have mistaken her for a fairer Julianne Moore. She had on patched jeans and a long, gray sweater under a large down parka. Looking quite the country girl. There was something that sparkled in her.

  “I’m fine, Ty. We’re fine. I heard you were in town here. On the force. You don’t know how many times I meant to come in and say hi.”

  “So, hi,” Hauck said, grinning.

  She giggled back. “Hi!”

  It was like when you see someone you haven’t seen in years and you’ve forgotten just how much that person once meant to you. And then it rushes back, all at once. He took her hands and studied every line on her pretty face.

  She said, “You know, I think about you a lot. I ran into Doctor Paul last month. Believe or not, we bumped into each other at the movies in Stamford. Sorta like we are now…Some art film. You ever see him anymore?”

  “No. Not in years.” He shook his head. “Not since…” They moved away from the line. “So tell me how you are.”

  “I’m fine. Really,” she said as if he needed convincing. “I am. We all are, actually. Marc’s still at Wertheimer. Doing great. Becca’s twelve now. She’s into ballet. She’s actually pretty good. She’s trying out for The Nutcracker at SUNY Purchase.”

  He grinned. April had danced as a kid. “Why am I not surprised?”

  She smiled at him. “Always the good guy to have around…So what about you?”

  “Well, I’m here. Two years now. I’m living in Stamford. I’m head of the Violent Crimes Unit on the force.”

  “And your wife? It was Beth, right?” He nodded. “Did things ever work out?”

  “No.” He shrugged resignedly. “We never got back together. Split up for good around three years back.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ty.”

  “It’s okay. Jessie’s getting big now herself. She’s ten. A bit more into soccer than ballet.”

  “Who would’ve ever guessed that?” April smiled knowingly.

  There was a lull. Hauck realized he still had her hands in his. Finally, without drawing his eyes to them, he let them go.

  “You look good, Ty. All that stuff seems like such a long time ago. Another life. We both turned corners, didn’t we? We made it through. That’s what he always said.”

  “We did.” Hauck nodded. Her face brought so much back to him. “We did.”

  April glanced at her watch. “Ugh. Becca’s probably waiting for me at school. Doing the high-class chauffeur thing. We ought to get together. I’d really like that, Ty.”

  “Yeah, we should.” Hauck knew it was one of those things that would probably never occur.

  “I should go.” Then suddenly her eyes brightened. “Hey, c’mon, out here…There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  She looped an arm through his and took him outside. A silver Mercedes SUV was parked in front of the store. She led him around and unlocked the rear passenger door. There was a boy in back. Four, maybe five. A mop of straw-colored hair. Eyes as lively and moss-green as his mom’s. Maybe it was the sunlight that shone off his face, or the light that fell on April’s, radiating from her, as if she was showing him a snapshot of her own heart.

  “This is Evan, Ty…”

  Hauck stood up, his gimpy knees emitting a crack. A pressure built up in his stomach, the sweats coming over him. He pressed back against a sensation of tightly coiled anger and the feeling of being sick.

  Memories always won.

  A young CSI tech he had met once or twice named Avila came up behind him, startling him. “Bad scene, huh, lieutenant?” The kid blew his cheeks out like some twenty-year veteran who had seen this a hundred grisly times.

  “It’s not ‘lieutenant’ anymore. I’m no longer on the force.”

  “Still, it’s hard to put it away, isn’t it, sir? I guess it stays in the blood.”

  “What stays in the blood, son?” Hauck looked at him.

  “I don’t know.” Avila shrugged. “What we do.”

  He looked back at the kid with his black crime kit, barely six months into his career. He gave him a wizened smile. “No, you can’t,” Hauck said. He patted the kid on the shoulder and left.

  You can’t put it away.

  You can’t put what’s inside behind you.

  No matter what corner you turn.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Talon Group, Hauck’s new employer, was a worldwide security company doing business in thirty countries.

  Most of their revenue came from the corporate division. Background screening for key employees and directors. Forensic accounting. Data recovery. Protections against internal theft. Another division handled crisis management—PR, media training. And there was another side of the company, GTM, Global Threat Management, that specialized in providing protection for diplomats a
nd contractors in the Middle East and on dangerous posts abroad, and acted as a consultant to various foreign governments.

  Hauck had joined the company as a partner in the firm’s new office in Greenwich.

  Leaving police work was a big shift in his life. He’d been in law enforcement for twenty years, rising rapidly out of college through the NYPD’s detective ranks and ending up in their Office of Information. Then, after his younger daughter was killed and his marriage fell apart, he eventually found his way back near the place he had been brought up, in the drab, working-class section of Byram on the Greenwich–Port Chester border. Slowly, he built his life back up, taking over the Violent Crime division in town, graduating to head of detectives. Solving two high-profile murder-conspiracies got him on the TV crime shows and made him a bit of a celebrity around town. Put him in line for chief when Vern Fitzpatrick retired.

  But rubbing up against that same established power base, he knew he could never fully be happy there.

  Now he had a corner office with a fancy view of the sound. A pretty secretary out front. Access to important executives. Right off the bat he had brought in two new pieces of business: High Ridge Capital, a hedge fund—he coached one of the partners’ kids—and the town of New Canaan, which was looking into security screening on new applicants. A lot of the work had been pretty mundane. Compliance issues. His bright spot was the mortgage thief.

  That afternoon, around one thirty, Hauck’s boss, Tom Foley, senior managing director of the firm, knocked on Hauck’s door. “Ty, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  Foley was tall, Princeton-educated, wore suspenders over his pinstripe shirt, and he came in with a stylish, blond-haired woman Hauck pegged as being in her midforties. She wore a white cable-knit sweater over crisp beige slacks, her hair pulled back into a re-fined ponytail. Pastel-pink lipstick. She also wore one of those fashionable white Chanel watches on her wrist.

  Foley said, “Ty, say hello to Merrill Simons.”

  Hauck stood up and came from around his desk. Merrill Simons looked like she could’ve been on the cover of Greenwich Magazine, hosting a garden tour at her Town and Country–style twenty-million-dollar estate. He shook her hand and motioned to the couch. “Why don’t we sit over here?”

  Hauck’s office was spacious and bright, with a comfortable sitting area—a couch, two chairs, and a walnut coffee table. Above them was some kind of contemporary oil painting Hauck couldn’t figure out but that had come with the office. The windows looked out over Greenwich harbor.

  “Ty’s our newest partner,” Foley explained to Merrill. “He’s heading up our Greenwich operation for us. For years, he ran the local detective unit in town and worked on some pretty high-profile cases. He likes to play it all down, but we’re lucky to have him here.”

  “Tom just has a fascination with cops,” Hauck said. They all sat down. Hauck’s secretary, Brooke, stuck her head in and asked if Merrill might like a soft drink or a coffee. Merrill said she would take a tea. She appeared slightly nervous at first, uncomfortable at being there, and to Hauck, she seemed the type who was never nervous or uncomfortable, used to being in the company of important people no matter what the setting.

  “Simons,” Hauck said, thinking aloud. “Any relation to Peter Simons?” Peter Simons was a big financial guy in town. Credit Suisse, Lehman, or something. To Hauck, they all seemed to merge. What he did recall was that the Simonses had some monster Architectural Digest spread up on Dublin Hill, threw lavish parties, and were influential on the charity circuit and the cultural boards in Greenwich. They were like royalty in town.

  “Used to be.” Merrill shrugged, almost guiltily. “We were divorced a year ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hauck said. “I’ve actually been up at your house. You threw a party for the French president and his new wife a couple of years back. I oversaw some of the town security.”

  “I remember you.” Merrill brightened. “You’re the lieutenant from town, right?”

  “Was,” Hauck said, smiling. “Change of uniform. And I think I may have once taken one of your boys on a tour of the station. He was part of a group from Brunswick. Tall, inquisitive kid. Shaggy blond hair. If I recall, he wanted to see where we locked up the first-time drug offenders…”

  “That’s Jason.” Merrill laughed. “That kind of inquisitiveness we could certainly do without. Probably hoping to say hello to a few of his school chums. I hope you cured him.”

  “I did my best,” Hauck said. “But as I recall, you raised a pretty determined guy.”

  Merrill’s tea came. She took it and thanked Brooke. She took a sip and seemed to feel more at ease.

  “So, Ty,” Tom Foley started in, arms on his knees, “you’re probably wondering just why Merrill’s here. I’ll let her tell you, but suffice it to say it’s a very private matter, one that could easily find its way into the local papers, and I assured her we’d handle it with complete discretion.”

  “Of course. Goes without saying,” Hauck assured her. “That’s why we’re here.”

  Merrill nodded, gearing herself up. She opened her large crocodile-leather bag and took out a manila envelope. “For the past year, I’ve been seeing someone…,” she began to explain. She removed a black and white photo and laid it, tentatively, on the table.

  Hauck picked it up.

  It was of a man of about thirty-five or forty. Handsome. Dark, European features. A rugged chin. Short, wiry, dark hair. “His name is Dieter Thibault. He goes by Dani. He’s Dutch. His mother was Belgian, I think. At least that’s what he’s led me to believe. Things have moved along quite quickly. I suppose you could say we’ve fallen in love.”

  Hauck waited while she took another sip of tea and faced her, putting down the photo. “Go ahead.”

  “This is a little difficult for me…,” Merrill said, glancing at Foley.

  He nodded her on.

  “You’re doing a bit of due diligence, perhaps? In case things get on to the next level,” Hauck inferred.

  Merrill gave him a slight nod. “I should stress that Dani is quite successful in his own right. He’s built hotels, done some Internet deals in Eastern Europe. Some members of the Belgian royal family are investors with him. Photos of him with them are very prominent in his office in New York. He’s never needed my money. In fact, it’s his lifestyle I’ve sort of fallen into. It’s just that…”

  Hauck waited for a moment while Merrill moistened her lips. She seemed to hesitate.

  “It’s just that what, Ms. Simons?”

  “It’s just that some of these things…I’ve had my people looking into them. Informally, of course. Some of the transactions he’s made, his personal background…family, university degrees. Sources of income. I’m not exactly sure how to say this. But all of a sudden, I’m not sure they’re adding up.”

  “Adding up?” The unease was etched deeply into Merrill Simons’s face. Hauck moved closer.

  “It’s as if anything that goes more than a few years back is a complete blank.” Merrill looked up and faced him. “I’m not sure Dani is who he says he is, Mr. Hauck. And before this gets deeper, I want to know who the man I’m supposed to be falling in love with really is.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Roger Cantwell stared at his Bloomberg screen in dismay.

  High above Park Avenue, on the forty-eighth floor of the sleek glass tower that bore his company’s iconic name, the managing director of Wertheimer Grant read the banner headline flashing across CNBC: MURDERED TRADER WAS WERTHEIMER’S INVESTMENT STAR.

  His stomach knotted. He took a breath the way his personal trainer had instructed him to do to ramp down the stress. But no simple cleansing breath could wash this mess away.

  It was awful.

  The days since Marc Glassman’s murder had thrown the once-shining firm into a maelstrom. A frigging roach motel of rumor and distortion, Cantwell thought with dread. He himself had gone through a mix of emotions and worries he had never experienced bef
ore. First, the shock. The disbelief, imagining the horror of it. Cantwell had known the trader well. Though it was his rule to leave the investment responsibilities to his senior staff, as head of the firm, and as someone who had never lost his love for the trenches, he’d been in dozens of strategy sessions with Glassman over the years, not to mention sales conferences, golf outings, charitable events. My God, Cantwell thought, we were all together just a few days ago at the firm’s winter opera event at the Met.

  But soon the grief started to morph into worry. CNBC’s headline was correct. Marc was Wertheimer’s brightest shining star. In the midst of this year from hell—with the mortgage crisis eviscerating the firm’s balance sheet, their earnings dropping like a weight, their stock price tanking in the midst of the global sell-off, rumors flying—Glassman was one of the rare people actually making money for the firm. Some might even say the only thing propping it up.

  Now that was gone.

  Now there were just these headlines.

  Cantwell turned around and gazed gloomily out his office window. He could see the skyline of lower Manhattan to the south, the East River. To the west, the skating pond in Central Park. He liked this view. He wanted to keep it for a while. He wanted to keep the company jet too.

  Along with sponsoring Phil Mickelson and hobnobbing with world movers and shakers at places like Davos and the Aspen Institute, not to mention the appearances on Fox and CNBC, where attractive reporters sought out whatever he said.

  He just didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep any of it.

  The board was growing weary. The firm had a ton of toxic mortgage exposure. Christ, they’d been packaging that shit all the way up, right from the start. Now no one knew what anything out there was worth. “Mark to market,” it would kill them! Not to mention the stock price. Some big-name hedge fund asshole was out there shorting the shit out of it. The market cap had already plummeted from one hundred and ten billion down to fourteen. Not to mention their dwindling cash reserves. And their overnight borrowing on the repo market drying up, all these whispers…If the true picture ever got out, if there was ever a run on the accounts—Cantwell swallowed—they’d be toast.