“Go on.”

Dubose shrugged. “Everyone kept telling him just to back off, that’s all. But Pappy was never one to listen. Stubborn old fool. You know the type? Came out of the womb that way. I miss the son of a bitch, though. Pretty soon after his boy died up there, he packed it in with his thirty years and called it quits. Took it hard.

“Funny thing, though…” Dubose crumpled his cup and tossed it into a trash bin against a wall. “After that happened, I never heard another peep out of him about those stupid tankers again.”

Hauck thanked him and drove back to the hotel. For the rest of the afternoon, he sat around on the small balcony overlooking the beautiful Gulf blue of Pensacola Bay.

The old man was hiding something. Hauck felt it for sure. He’d seen that haunted face a hundred times before. There’s nothing you can do that’s gonna help me now…

It might only be guilt, that he had pushed his youngest son away. And what happened afterward.

Or it could be more. That the hit-and-run up north hadn’t been so accidental after all. That that was why they were unable to ever find anything resembling the SUV the witnesses had described. Why no one else ever saw it. Maybe someone had deliberately killed Pappy Raymond’s son.

And Hauck felt sure those tankers were connected.

He nursed a beer. He thought about placing a call to Karen to see what she had found.

But he kept coming back to the hardened look in the old sailor’s eyes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Karen went back through all of Charlie’s things as Hauck had asked her. She opened the cartons she had kept piled in the basement, doing her best to avoid the attention of the kids. Heavy, boxed-up files that Heather, his secretary, had sent with a note: You never know what’s in them. Maybe something you’ll want to keep. Brochures for trips they had taken as a family. The ski house they rented one year at Whistler. Letters. A kazillion letters. A bunch of things on the Mustang, which Charlie had asked her in the will he left not to sell.

Basically, the sum of their lives together. Stuff Karen had never had the heart to go through. But nothing that helped. At some point she sat in frustration with her back against the concrete basement wall and silently swore at him. Charlie, why the hell did you do this to us?

Then she went through the computer that was still sitting at his desk. She turned it on for the first time since the incident. It felt weird, invasive-as if she were prying into him. His signature was everywhere. In a million years she would never have done this when he was alive. Charlie never kept a password. Karen was able to get right in. What on earth had there ever been to hide?

She scrolled through his stored Word documents. Mostly they were letters he’d written from home-to industry people, trade publications. The draft of a speech or two he’d given. She went on his AOL account. Any e-mails he might’ve written before he disappeared had probably long since been wiped away.

It felt futile. And dirty, going through his things. She sat there at his desk, in the messy study, much of it still just as he’d left it a year before, where he’d paid the bills and read over his trade journals and checked his positions, the desk still piled with trade sheets and prospectuses.

There was nothing. He didn’t want to be found. He could be anywhere in the fucking world.

And the truth was, Karen had no idea what she was gong to do if she even found him.

She contacted Heather, who was working at a small law firm now. And Linda Edelstein, whom Karen still occasionally used as a travel agent. She asked them both to think back on whether Charlie had made any unusual purchases (“a condo somewhere, as crazy as that sounds, or a car?”) or booked any travel plans in the weeks before he died. She concocted this inane story about discovering something in his office about a surprise trip he’d been planning, an anniversary thing.

How in the world could she possibly tell them what was really in her mind?

As a friend, Linda scrolled back through her travel computer. “I don’t think so, Kar. I would have remembered at the time. I’m sorry, hon. There’s nothing here.”

This was insane. Karen sat there among her husband’s things at her wits’ end, growing angry, wishing she never had watched that documentary. It had changed everything. Why would you do this to us, Charlie? What could you possibly have done?

Tell me, Charlie!

She picked up a stack of loose papers and went to throw them against the wall. Just then her gaze fell to a memo from Harbor that was still there from a year before. Her eye ran down the office distribution list. Maybe they knew. She spotted a name there-a name that hadn’t crossed her mind in months.

Along with a voice. A voice she had never responded to, but one that now suddenly echoed in her ears with the same ringing message:

I’d like to speak with you, Mrs. Friedman… There are some things you ought to know.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The address was 3135 Mountain View Drive, a hilly residential road. In Upper Montclair, New Jersey.

Karen found Jonathan Lauer’s address in one of Charlie’s folders. She checked to make sure it was still valid. She didn’t want to talk with him on the phone. It was a Saturday afternoon.

There are some things you ought to know…

Saul had said it was just a matter of personnel issues, compensation. Karen had never heard from him again. And it wasn’t that she didn’t trust Saul. It was just that if they were turning over every stone, the way Ty wanted to, she thought she might as well hear it from Lauer directly. She had never called him back. It had been an awfully long time.

But suddenly Charlie’s trader’s cryptic words took on a more important meaning.

Karen pulled into the driveway. There was a white minivan parked in the open two-car garage. The house was a cedar and glass contemporary with a large double-story window in the front. A kid’s bike lay on the front lawn. Next to a portable soccer net. Rows of pachysandra and boxwood flanked the flagstone walkway leading up to the front door.

Karen felt a little nervous and embarrassed, after so much time. She rang the bell.

“I got it, Mommy!”

A young girl in pigtails who appeared around five or six opened the door.

“Hey.” Karen smiled. “Is your daddy or mommy at home?”

A woman’s voice called out from inside, “Lucy, who’s there?”

Kathy Lauer came to the door, holding a rolling pin. Karen had met her once or twice-first at an office gathering and, later, at Charlie’s memorial. She was petite, with shoulder-length dark hair, wearing a green Nantucket sweatshirt. She stared at Karen in surprise.

“I don’t know if you remember me-” Karen started in.

“Of course I remember you, Mrs. Friedman,” Kathy Lauer replied, cradling her daughter’s face to her thigh.

“Karen,” Karen replied. “I’m sorry to bother you. I know you must be wondering what I’m doing here, out of the blue. I was just wondering if your husband might be at home.”

Kathy Lauer looked at her a bit strangely. “My husband?”

There was a bit of an awkward pause.

Karen nodded. “Jon called me a couple of times, after Charlie-” She stopped herself before she said the word. “I’m a little embarrassed. I never got back to him. I was all caught up then. I know it’s a while back. But he mentioned some things…”

“Some things?” Kathy Lauer stared. Karen couldn’t quite read her reaction, nervousness or annoyance. Kathy asked her daughter to go back into the kitchen, said she’d be along in a second to finish rolling the cookie dough with her. The little girl ran off.

“Some things about my husband’s business,” Karen clarified. “By any chance is he around? I know it’s a little strange to be coming here now…”