by Andrew Gross
“I’m not quite done, Carl.”
Fitzpatrick blinked. “Oh, Jesus, Mary…”
Hauck took him through the last part. His trip to St. Hubert. With Karen. How they’d located Charles.
“How?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Hauck shrugged. “We just did.” He told his boss about finding Charles’s body on the boat. Then how he’d slightly misled the investigators there.
“Jesus, Ty, were you trying to break every fucking rule in the book?”
“No.” Hauck smiled and shook his head, finally done. “Just seemed to happen naturally, Carl.”
“I think I’m gonna need your badge and gun, Ty.”
BEFORE HE LEFT, Hauck went over to a computer on the second floor. Members of his squad came up to him excitedly. “We got you back now, LT?”
“Not quite,” he said with an air of resignation, “not just yet.”
He did a Google search—something that had been bugging him for days.
The Black Bear.
The search yielded several responses. About a dozen wildlife sites. An inn in Vermont.
It took to the third page until Hauck finally found the first real hit.
From the Web site of Perini Navi, an Italian boatbuilder.
The Black Bear. Luxury sailing yacht. The 88-meter clipper (290 ft.) is the largest privately owned sailing yacht in the world, using the state of the art DynaRig propulsion concept. 2 Duetz 1800 HP engines. Max Speed 19.5 knots. Sleek black ultramodern design with three 58-meter carbon fiber masts, total area under sail 25,791 sq. ft. The boat has six luxury staterooms, complete with full satellite, Bloomberg, communications, oversize plasma TVs, full gym, 50" plasma in main salon, B/O sound system. A 32" twin-engine Pascoe tender. Sleeps 12 with a crew of 16.
Impressive, Hauck thought, scrolling on. A page later, in an online boat-enthusiast magazine, he found what he was looking for.
Hauck pushed back from the computer. He paused a long time on the name. It hit home. Once he’d even been out to the house. Some house.
The Black Bear was owned by Russian financier Gregory Khodoshevsky.
CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
We led them to him, Karen.
The whole first day back, after telling Paula and swearing her to secrecy, Karen racked her brain for how that might be.
Led whom?
She hadn’t told anyone where they were going. She’d made the reservations herself. Sitting around trying to divert her thoughts from Charles, she backed through everything from the beginning.
The documentary. The horror of seeing his face on TV. Then the note sheet from his desk she’d been sent—with no return address. Which led to the passport and the money.
Then the men from Archer, the creep who terrified Sam in her car. The horrible things Karen had found in Charles’s desk—the Christmas card and the note about Sasha. Her mind kept unavoidably flicking back to him. On the beach. Then the boat.
What was anyone trying to find there, Charles?
“Who? Charlie, who? Tell me?” Who were you running from? Why would they want to keep after you now? She knew that Ty had gone into the office, come clean. They’d have to reopen the hit-and-runs. They’d be able to find out now who his investors were.
Tell me, Charlie. How did they know you were alive? They must have seen the fee account drawn down, he had said. Followed the bank trail. A year later, what did they need from him? What did they think he had? All that money?
Karen let her mind run as she gazed out the office window. She’d been answering a couple of e-mails she’d received from the kids. Which excited her, made things feel normal. They were having a fabulous time.
The garage doors were open. She noticed Charlie’s Mustang, parked in the far bay.
Suddenly it came back to her. Just what Charlie had said: The truth, it’s always been right inside my heart, Karen.
Something did happen to you, Charlie.
Why weren’t you able to tell me? Why did you have to hide it, Charlie, like everything else? What did he say when she pressed him? Don’t you understand, I don’t want you to know, Karen.
Don’t want me to know what, Charles?
She was about to sign off on her message to the kids when her mind wandered back once again.
This time her whole body seemed to rattle.
The truth…it’s always been right inside my heart.
Karen stood up. A sweat came over her. She looked out the window.
At Charlie’s car.
You still have the Mustang, don’t you, Karen?
She thought he was just babbling!
Oh, my God!
Karen ran out of the office, Tobey trailing after her, and out the front door to the open garage.
There it was. On the rear fender of the Mustang. Where it had always been. The bumper sticker. She had seen it, passed it by—every day for a year. The words written on it: LOVE OF MY LIFE.
Written on a bright red heart!
Karen’s whole body seemed to convulse. “Oh, Charlie,” she moaned out loud. “If you somehow didn’t mean it like this, please don’t think I’m the biggest fucking idiot in the world.”
Karen knelt beside the rear bumper. Curious, Tobey nuzzled up. Karen pushed him away. “Gimme a second, baby, please.” She crouched down, her back to the ground, reached up underneath the chrome bumper, and felt around.
Nothing. What did she expect? Just a bunch of dust and grime, her hand showing black streaks all over it. She pretended she wasn’t feeling like a total fool.
It’ll explain a lot of things, Karen.
Karen reached up again. This time farther. “I’m trying, Charlie,” she said. “I’m trying.”
She groped blindly just behind the “inside” of the heart.
Her fingers wrapped around something. Something small. Fastened to the inside of the fender.
Karen’s heart started to race. She pushed herself farther underneath and stripped the object away from the edges of the chrome.
Whatever it was peeled off.
It was a small bundle, tightly bound in bubble wrap.
Karen stared incredulously at Tobey. “Oh, my God.”
CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
Karen brought it into the kitchen. She went through the pantry drawer and took out a package blade and cut at the tape, carefully unfolding the protective wrapping. She held it in her hand.
It was a cell phone.
Not any phone she’d ever seen before. Thinking back, she remembered that Charlie used a BlackBerry. It had never been found. Karen stared at it—almost afraid to keep it in her hands. “What are you trying to tell me, Charles?”
Finally she pressed the power button. Amazingly, after all this time, the LCD screen sprang to life. HANDSET LOCKED.
Damn. Disappointed, Karen placed it down on the counter.
She ran through a mental file of what Charlie’s password might be. Several possibilities, starting with the obvious. She punched in their anniversary, 0716. The day Harbor opened. His e-mail name. She pressed enter.
Nothing. HANDSET LOCKED.
Shit. Next she punched in 0123, his birthday. Nothing, again. Then 0821. Hers. Wrong—a third time. So Karen tried both of the kids’ birthdays: 0330. Then 1112. No luck. It began to exasperate her. Even if her thinking was right, there could still be a hundred variations. A three-digit number—eliminate the zero for the month. Or a five-digit number—include the year.
Shit.
Karen sat down. She took a notepad from the counter. It had to be one of them. She prepared to go through them all.
Then it hit her. What else did Charlie say that day? Something about “You’re still beautiful, Karen.”
Something about “the color of my baby’s eyes.”
Charlie’s Baby.
On a whim Karen punched in the word—the color of his “baby.” Emberglow.
To her shock, the LOCKED icon on the readout disappeared.
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
Saul Lennick sat in the library of his home on Deerfield Road, on the grounds of the Greenwich Country Club.
He had Puccini’s Turandot on the sound system. The opera put him in the right mood, as he was going over the minutes of the most recent board meeting of the Met that he’d attended. From his leather chair, Lennick looked out at the expansive garden in back, tall trees, a pergola leading to a beautiful gazebo by the pond, all lit up like a colorful stage set.
His cell phone trilled.
Lennick flipped open the phone. He’d been awaiting the call.
“I’m back,” Dietz said. “You can rest a little now. It’s done.”
Lennick closed his eyes and nodded. “How?”
“Don’t worry your buns off how. It seems that your old friend Charlie had a penchant for the late-night swim.”
The news left Lennick relieved. All at once the weight he’d been carrying seemed to rise from his tired shoulders. This hadn’t been easy. Charles had been his friend. Saul had known him twenty years. They’d shared many highs and lows together. He’d felt sadness when he first heard the news after the bombing. Now he just felt nothing. Charles had long ago grown into a liability that had to be written off.
Lennick felt nothing—other than a frightening new sense of what he was capable of.
“Were you able to find anything?”
“Nada. The poor bastard took it to the grave, whatever he had. And you know that I can be highly persuasive. We searched his boat from top to bottom. Ripped out the fucking engine block. Nothing.”
“That’s okay.” Lennick sighed. “Maybe there never was anything. Anyway, it was due.” Perhaps it was just a fear. Survival, Lennick reflected. It’s truly astounding what one can do when it becomes threatened.
“There may still be a problem, though,” Dietz said, breaking into his thoughts.
“What?” The detective, Lennick recalled. Now that he was back.
“Charles met with his wife. Before we were able to get to him. She and the cop, they found him.”
“No,” Lennick agreed sadly, “that’s not good.”
“They talked for a couple of hours on this island. I would’ve tried to do something down there, but the local cops were all over. He knows about both accidents. And Hodges. And who can guess what your boy Charles may have said to her?”
“No, we can’t let that linger,” Lennick concluded. This was something he had let fester far too long. “Where are they now?”
Dietz said, “Back here.”
“Hmmph…” Lennick had gone to Yale. In his day he’d been one of the youngest partners ever at Goldman Sachs. Now he knew the most powerful people in the world. He could call anybody, and they would take it. He had the fucking secretary of the treasury on his speed dial. He had four loving grandkids….
Still, when it came to business, you couldn’t be too careful or too smart.
“Let’s do what we have to do,” Lennick said.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
“I was placed on disciplinary leave,” Hauck said at Arcadia, warming his fingers around his coffee cup.
Karen had called him an hour earlier. She’d told him she had something important to show him. He met her in town.
“What about your job?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.” Hauck let out a breath of resignation. “I’m not exactly up for Officer of the Year. I told them everything,” he said, then smiled. “The whole shebang. There’ll be a review. The problem is, I didn’t help my case with what I let go on down in New Jersey. Still, we have the hit-and-runs…. I’m pretty sure Pappy Raymond will testify it was Dietz who forced him to back off the tankers. That’ll have to do—until something else plays out.”
“I’m sorry,” Karen said. She placed a hand on his. Her eyes were sparkling, round. And they came with a smile. “But I think I may be able to help you, Lieutenant.”
“What do you mean?” His heartbeat picked up, looking at her.
She grinned. “Something else played out.”
Karen reached inside her bag. “A present. From Charlie. He left it for me to find. He mentioned something about it when he was walking me back to the boat on the island, about things I would want to know if anything happened to him. About the truth being somewhere inside his heart. I thought he was just babbling. I never even gave it a second thought until I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“The heart.” Karen beamed triumphantly. “Charlie’s Mustang, Ty. His baby.”
She held out the phone. He looked at her a bit uncomprehendingly.
“It was taped inside the rear bumper of his car. That’s why he didn’t want me to get rid of it. He had it hidden there all along. It’s what he wanted me to find.”
“What, Karen?”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t sure either. So I checked through the entire contact log. It didn’t tell me much. Maybe you’ll find a number or two you could trace. Then I thought, a cell phone—pictures. Maybe he had some photos in there, you know, implicating someone. There had to be some reason for him to have hidden it there. So I went into Media…into Camera.” Karen flipped open the phone. “But there wasn’t anything there either.”
Hauck took it. “I can have someone go through it at the lab.”
“Don’t have to, Lieutenant—I found it! It was a voice recording. I never even knew these things did that, but it was there, next to Camera. So I clicked.” Karen took back the phone and scrolled into Voice Recording. “Here. Here’s your something else, Ty. A present from Charlie. Straight from the grave.”
Hauck looked at her. “You don’t seem very pleased about it, Karen.”
“Just listen.” She pressed the prompt.
A tinny voice came on. “You think I like having to be here.”
Hauck looked at Karen and Karen said, “That’s Charles.”
“You think I like the predicament that I’m in. But I’m in it. And I can’t let it go on.”
“No,” a second voice replied. This one Hauck was sure he’d heard somewhere before. “We’re in it together, Charles.”
Karen looked at him, the shock evaporated, replaced by a glint of vindication. “That’s Saul Lennick.”
Hauck blinked.
The recording continued. “That’s the whole problem, Charles. You think you’re the only one whose life you’re going to drag down because of your own bungling. I’m in this straight as you. You knew the stakes here. You knew who these people are. You want to play at the big table, Charles, you’ve got to put up the chips.”
“I got a holiday card back, Saul. Where the hell else could it have come from? For God’s sake, my kids’ faces were cut out.”
“And I have grandchildren, Charles. You think you’re the only one whose neck is on the line?” A pause. “I told you what to do. I told you how to handle this. I told you you had to shut up that redneck fuck down there. Now what?”
“It’s too late,” Charles replied with a sigh. “The bank, they already suspect—”
“I can handle the bank, Charles! But you…you have to clean up your own mess. If not, I assure you there are other ways, Charles.”
“What other ways?”
“He’s got a boy, I’m told, who lives up here.”
Pause.
“It’s called leverage, Charles. A concept you seemed to grasp quite clearly when it came to taking us down the well.”
“He’s just an old geezer, Saul.”
“He’s going to the press, Charles. You want them sticking their noses into some national-security story and finding out what they will? I’ll make sure the old man doesn’t talk. I’ve got guys who specialize in this kind of thing. You clean up your balance sheet, Charles. We’ve got a month. A month, Charles, no more fuckups. You understand what I’m saying, Charles? You’re not the only one with his head in the noose here.”
A hushed reply. “I get it, Saul.”
Hauck stared at Karen.
“It was Saul,” she said, tears fighting the
ir way into her eyes. “Dietz, Hodges—they work for him.”
He covered her hand. “I’m sorry, Karen.”
A sadness darkened Karen’s face. “Charlie loved him, Ty. Saul was there at every turn in our lives. Like an older brother to him.” She clenched her teeth. “He fucking spoke at Charlie’s memorial. And he could do this to him…. It was Saul, Ty. Jesus Christ, I even went to him when the Archer people came. When Sam got accosted. It makes me sick.”
Hauck squeezed.
“I went to him, Ty—before we left. I didn’t tell him exactly where I was going, but maybe he could have put it together.” Her face was ashen. “Maybe we were followed, I don’t know.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Karen.”
“You’re the one who said we led them to him.” She lifted the phone. “This is what they were looking for when they trashed the boat. Charles could have told him he had evidence. Before the bombing. Insurance. Then somehow they found out he was alive.”
She let out a breath, one filled with a feeling of betrayal and anger. “So what are we going to do?”
“You’re going to go home,” Hauck said. He looked at her firmly. “I want you to go and pack some clothes and wait for me to come over. If these people followed us to Charles, they must also know that you met with him there.”
“Okay. What about you?”
He reached for the cell phone. “I’m going home to make a copy of this, just in case. Then I’m going to call Fitzpatrick. I’ll have a warrant for them by tomorrow. Before this goes one step further.”
“They killed Charles,” Karen said, her fists curling slightly. She handed the phone over. “Make it worth something, Ty. Charlie wanted me to have this. Don’t let them win.”
“I promise, they won’t.”
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
Karen drove home.
Her fingers trembled on the wheel. Her stomach had never felt quite so hollow or so uncertain. Was she in danger now?