The Dark Tide Free for a Limited Time (32 page)

Maybe they had been, Karen finally admitted as she went over and over the horrible image of Charles the next few days.

Maybe they had been set up. Maybe they did lead them directly to him.

Who?

Hauck told her about the black sailing ship he’d seen the day before. That he’d also seen on Dietz’s wall. Karen even remembered a plane circling high above the island as she and Charles said good-bye, though it hadn’t registered at the time.

Still, none of that mattered to her now.

Seeing Charlie—his poor, bloated body, whatever he’d done, whatever pain he’d caused, that’s what haunted her. They’d spent half their lives together. They had shared just about every joyful moment in each other’s life. As Karen reflected, it was hard to even separate her life from his, they were so intertwined. The tears returned, and they came back with mixed, hard-to-understand emotions. He had died all over again for her. She could not have imagined, having lost him a year ago, then having held in
such pent-up anger toward him, that it could be so cruel. The who or the why—that was for Ty to solve.

They flew home the following day. Hauck wanted to get back into the country, before the investigation there rooted out that Steven Hanson had no past. Before they would have to explain things in full.

And Karen…she wanted to get out of that nightmare world as quickly as possible. When they got home, Hauck left her with her friend Paula. No way she could be alone. She had to finally open up to someone.

“I don’t even know how to begin,” Karen said. Paula took her hand. “You just have to swear, Paula, this is something between
us.
Us alone. You can’t tell anyone. Not even Rick.”

“Of course I won’t, Karen,” Paula vowed.

Karen swallowed. She shook her head and let out a breath that felt like it had been kept inside her for weeks. And it had. She looked at her friend with a flustered smile. “You remember that documentary, Paula?”

T
HAT SAME AFTERNOON
Hauck went into Greenwich. To the station. He bypassed saying hello to his unit and went straight to Chief Fitzpatrick’s office on the fourth floor.

“Ty!” Fitzpatrick stood up, as if elated. “Everyone’s been wondering when we’d see you again. We got a few doozies waiting for you if you’re ready to come back. Where you been?”

“Sit down, Carl.”

The chief slowly retook his seat. “Not sure I like the sound of that, guy.”

“You won’t.” Before he started in, Hauck looked his boss firmly in the eye. “You remember that hit-and-run I was handling?”

Fitzpatrick inhaled. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, I have a little more information I can add.”

Hauck took him through everything. From the top.

Karen. Charles’s number in the victim’s pocket. His trip down south to Pensacola. Finding the offshore accounts, how they all tied back to Charles. Soberly, he took Fitzpatrick through his escapade down at Dietz’s house. The chief ’s eyes grew wide. Then his scuffle with Hodges…

“You must be fucking shitting me, Lieutenant.” The chief pushed back from his desk. “What sort of evidence did you have? What went on down there—not to mention not reporting back immediately that you fucking
shot
someone—was totally illegal.”

“I don’t need a handbook refresher, Carl.”

“I don’t know, Ty.” The chief stared. “Maybe you do!”

“Well, before that, there’s more.”

Hauck went on and told him about the second hit-and-run in New Jersey. How Dietz had been a witness at that one, too.

“They were hits, Carl. To keep people silent. To cover up their investment losses. I know that what I did was wrong. I know I may have to be cited. But the accidents were set up.
Murders,
Carl.”

The chief put his fingers over his face and pressed the skin around his eyes. “The good news is, you may have found enough to reopen the case. The bad news is—it may be part of the case against
you.
You know better, Ty. Why the hell didn’t you stop right there?”

“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.”

B
EFORE 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.