CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Hauck headed back upstairs to his office from the holding cells down in the basement. He and Freddy Muñoz had just taken a statement from a scared Latino kid who was part of this group from up in Norwalk who had been heisting fancy cars from backcountry Greenwich homes, a statement that could now blow the case wide open. Joe Horner, a detective from the Norwalk police department, was holding on the phone for him.

As Hauck turned in from the hallway, Debbie, his unit’s secretary, flagged his attention.

“Someone’s here to see you, Ty.”

She was seated on the bench in the outer office, wearing an orange turtleneck and a lightweight beige jacket, a tote bag on the bench next to her. Hauck made no attempt to conceal that he was pleased to see her.

“Tell Horner I’ll get back to him in a minute, Deb.”

Karen stood up. She smiled, a little nervous to be here. Hauck hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, since that other situation, the people harassing her, had quieted down and they’d pulled the protection. He had called once or twice to make sure everything was okay. Smiling, he went up to her. Her face was pallid and drawn.

“You said I should call.” She shrugged. “If anything ever came up.”

“Of course.”

She looked up at him. “Something did.”

“Come on in my office,” he said, taking her by the arm.

Hauck called to Debbie that he’d ring the Norwalk detective back, then led Karen past the row of detectives’ desks through the glass partition into his office. He pulled out a cheap metal chair at the round conference table across from his desk. “Sit down.”

It was clear she was upset. “You want something? Some water? A cup of coffee?” She shook her head. Hauck pulled another chair around and sat, facing her, arms across the back. “So tell me what’s going on.”

Karen sucked in a breath and pressed her lips tightly together, then reached inside her purse, the expression on her face somewhere between grateful and relieved. “Do you have a computer in here, Lieutenant?”

“Sure.” Hauck nodded, wheeling around to a credenza by his desk.

She handed him a small DVR disc. “Can you put this in?”

He reached down and inserted it into the computer beneath the credenza. The disc kicked in and came to life, some kind of TV show or news report in mid-airing on the screen. A mass of people on the streets of New York. In unrest. Amateur footage, a handheld camera in the crowd. It became immediately clear he was watching the aftermath of the Grand Central bombing.

Karen asked him, “Did you happen to watch that documentary, Lieutenant? Last Wednesday night?”

He shook his head. “I was working. No.”

“I did.” She brought his attention back to the disc: people running out of the station onto the street. “It was very hard for me. A mistake. It was like living the whole thing all over again.”

“I can understand.”

Karen pointed. “Just about here I couldn’t watch it anymore. I went to turn it off.” She stood up and came behind his back, leaning over his shoulder, facing the screen. “It was like I was going crazy inside. Watching Charlie’s death. All over.”

Hauck didn’t see where this was heading. She reached her hand across him for the mouse. She waited, letting the action on the screen unfold, people staggering up onto the street out of a remote entrance to the station, gagging, coughing out smoke, faces blackened. The handheld camera jiggled.

“That’s when I saw it.” Karen pointed.

She positioned the mouse on the toolbar and clicked. The picture on the screen came to a stop. 9:16 A.M.

The frame captured a woman reaching out to comfort someone on the street who had collapsed. In front of her was someone else, a man, his jacket dusty, his face slightly averted from the camera, rushing by. Karen’s eyes fixed on the screen, something almost steely about them, hardened, yet at the same time, Hauck couldn’t help but notice, sad.

“That’s my husband,” she said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. She looked him in the eye. “That’s Charlie, Lieutenant.”

Hauck’s pulse came to a stop. It took a second for it to fully sink in just what she meant. Her husband had died there. A year ago. He had been to her home, to the memorial. That much was clear. He turned again to the screen. The features seemed a bit familiar from the photos he’d seen at her house. He blinked back at her.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I mean,” Karen said. “He was on that train-that much I’m sure. He called me from it, just before the blast. They found pieces of his briefcase in the wreckage…” She shook her head. “But somehow he didn’t die.”

Hauck pushed back from the desk, his eyes intent on the screen again. “A hundred people might look like that. He’s covered in ash. There’s no way you can be sure.”

“That’s what I told myself,” she said. “At first. At least it’s what I was hoping.” Karen moved back to the table. “Over the past week, I must have looked at that scene a thousand times.”

She reached in and drew a sheet of paper out of her bag. “Then I found something. It doesn’t matter what. All that matters is that it led me to this safe-deposit box at a bank in Manhattan that I never knew my husband had.”

She slid the sheet across the table to Hauck.

It was a photocopy of an account-activation form from Chase. For a safe-deposit box and, attached, what appeared to be an account history. There was a lot of activity, going back a couple of years. All the entries bore the same signature.

Charles Friedman.

Hauck scanned down.

“Check out the last date,” Karen Friedman told him. “And the time.”

Hauck did, and felt a sharp pain stick him in the chest. His eyes flashed back at her, not understanding. Can’t be…

“He’s alive.” Karen Friedman met his eyes. Her pupils glistened. “He was there, at that bank, four and a half hours after the bombing. Four and a half hours after I thought he was dead.

“That’s Charlie.” She nodded to him, glancing at the screen. “That’s my husband, Lieutenant.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“Who have you told?”

“No one.” She stared back at him. “How could I? My kids…after what they’ve been through, it would kill them, Lieutenant. How could they even begin to understand? My friends?” She shook her head, glassy-eyed. “What am I possibly supposed to say to them, Lieutenant? That it was all some kind of crazy mistake? ‘Sorry, Charlie’s not really dead. He’s just been fucking deceiving me over the past year. Deceiving all of us!’ At first I thought maybe you hear about people who come out of these life-altering situations, you know, affected…” She placed her finger on the bank forms. “But then I found these. I thought about taking everything to Saul Lennick. Charlie was like a second son to him. But I got scared. I thought, what if he’s really done something? You know, something bad. What if I was doing the wrong thing…? How it would affect everybody. I got all scared. Do you understand what I mean?”

Hauck nodded, the stress clear in her voice.

“So I came here.”

Hauck picked up the bank papers. Because he was a cop, he had learned over the years to withhold his reactions. Gather the facts, be a little circumspect, until a picture of the truth becomes clear. He looked at the bank form. Charles Friedman was there.

“What is it you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.” Karen shook her head in consternation. “I don’t even know what he’s done. But it’s something… Charlie wouldn’t just do this to us. I knew him. He wasn’t that kind of man, Lieutenant.” She pushed a wisp of hair out of her face and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, tears smearing. “The truth is, I don’t have any fucking idea what I want you to do.”

“It’s okay,” he said, squeezing her arm. Hauck stared back at the screen. He ran through the usual responses. Some crazy shock reaction-amnesia-from the bombing. But the bank form dismissed that one fast. Another woman? Embezzlement? He flashed to the scene in the parking lot with Karen’s daughter. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. Yet Saul Lennick had assured him Charles’s hedge fund was perfectly intact.