Karen nodded haltingly, a tremor of confusion rattling her. Hauck reached over and took her hand. He wrapped his fingers around her tightened fist.

“So you tell me, Karen, is that what you really want me to do? Call in the police? Because the police are involved. I’m involved. And after today, with what’s happened, I can’t just reverse the clock and go back empty-handed anymore.”

Her eyes were filled, tears reflecting in them. “He’s the father of my kids. You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to kill him myself, but what you’re telling me…a murderer? No, I won’t believe it till I hear it from him.”

“I’ll find him for you, Karen. I promise I will. But just be sure that with what’s happened now, these people know I’m onto them. We’re in it now. If that’s something you don’t think you can face-and I’d understand it if it was-now’s the time to say so.”

Karen looked down. Hauck felt a finger wrap around his hand, her pinkie, cautious and tremulous. It squeezed. There was a frightened look in her eyes, but behind it something deeper, a twinkling of resolve. She looked at him and shook her head again.

“I want you to find him, Ty.”

Her face dipped, ever so slightly, close to his, her hair tumbling against his cheek. Her breath was close and halting. Their knees touched. Hauck felt his blood spark alive as the side of her breast brushed his arm. Their lips could have touched right there. It would have taken only a nudge, and she would have folded into him-and a part of him wanted her to, a strong part, but another part said no. The hair on his arms tingled as he listened to her breathe.

“You knew this all along,” she said to him. “About Charlie. That this led back to him. You held it back from me.”

“I didn’t want you to be any more hurt until I was sure.”

She nodded. She locked her fingers inside his hand. “He wouldn’t kill anyone, Ty. I don’t care how foolish it makes me look. I know him. I lived with him for close to twenty years. He’s the father of my kids. I know.”

“So what do you want to do?”

Karen gently eased open Hauck’s robe. He tensed. She ran her fingers along his chest. She reached for the bag of liniment she had brought. “I want to take a look at that wound.”

“No,” he said, catching her hand. “You know what I meant.”

She held a moment, their hands still touching.

“I want to hear from his lips what he’s done, why he walked away from us, from almost twenty years of marriage, his family. I want to find him, Ty. Find Charles. Something came up while you were down there. I think I may know how.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

It was the car.

She had already been through everything two times over, just as Ty had asked. Still, while he was down in Jersey, she felt she had to do something. To keep from worrying.

So Karen tore through Charlie’s things all over again-the old bills, the stacks of receipts he’d left in his closet, the papers on his desk. Even the sites he’d visited on his computer before he “died.”

A wild-goose chase, she told herself. Just like the one before.

Except this time some things came up. A file buried deep in his desk, hidden under a pile of legal papers. A file Karen had never noticed before. From before Charlie died. Things she didn’t understand.

A small note card still in its envelope-addressed to Charles. The kind that accompanied a gift of flowers. Karen opened it, a little hesitantly, and saw it was written in a hand she didn’t recognize.

It stopped her.

Sorry about the pooch, Charles. Could the kids be next?

Sorry about the pooch. Karen saw that her hands were shaking. Whoever wrote it had to be talking about Sasha. And what did that possibly mean, that the kids could be next?

Their kids…

Suddenly Karen felt a tightness in her chest. What had these people done?

And then, in that same hidden-away file, she came across one of the holiday cards they’d sent as a family before Charlie had died. The four of them sitting on a wooden fence at a field near their ski house in Vermont. A happy time.

She opened it.

She almost threw up.

The kids’ faces, Samantha and Alexander-they had both been cut out.

Karen covered her face with her hands and felt her cheeks flush with blood.

“What the hell is happening here, Charlie?” She stared at the card. What the hell were you involved in? What were you doing to us, Charlie? All of a sudden, the incident in Samantha’s car at school came hurtling back to Karen, her heart starting to race. Accusingly. She got up from the desk. She wanted to hit something. She touched her hand to her face. Looked around the room.

His room.

“Talk to me, Charlie, you bastard, talk to me!”

And then her eyes seemed to fall on it.

Amid the clutter of papers and prospectuses and sports magazines she had still never quite cleared from his office.

The stack. The neatly piled stack Charlie kept on the bookshelf. Every issue. A sure-as-hell fire hazard, Karen always called it. His little dream collection, dating back since he’d first acquired his toy, eight years earlier.

Mustang World.

She went over to it-the stack of magazines piled high. She picked up one or two, the thought now forming in her brain.

This was it! The one thing about him he could never change. No matter what name he was under. Or who he was now.

Or where.

His stupid car. Charlie’s Baby. He read about the damn things in his spare time, checked out the prices, chatted about them online. They always joked how it was a part of him. His mistress that Karen just had to put up with. She called it Camilla, as in Camilla and Charles. Better than Camilla, Charlie always joked. “Better-looking, too.”

Mustang World.

He constantly put the car up for sale, then never sold it. In the summer he drove it in rallies. Monitored the online sites. She didn’t understand what these cards she’d found were about. They scared her. She didn’t know for sure what he’d done.

“But that’s the way,” Karen said to Hauck as she went to dress his wounds now.

She reached into her bag and dropped a copy of the magazine on the table. Mustang World.

“That’s how we find him, Ty. Charlie’s Baby.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

One Police Plaza was the home of the NYPD’s administrative offices in lower Manhattan, as well as of the Joint Inter-Agency Task Force that oversaw the city’s security.

Hauck waited in the courtyard in front of the building, looking out over Frankfort Street, which led onto the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a warm May afternoon. Strollers and bikers were crossing the steel gray span, office workers in shirtsleeves and light dresses on their lunchtime stroll. A few years back, Hauck used to work out of this building. He hadn’t been down here in years.

A slightly built, balding man in a navy police sweater waved to a coworker and came up to him, his police ID fastened to his chest.

“ New York ’s Finest.” The man winked, standing in front of Hauck. He sat down beside him and gave him a tap of the fist.

“Go, blue!” Hauck grinned back.

Lieutenant Joe Velko had been a young head of detectives in the 105th Precinct, and had gone on to receive a master’s degree from NYU in computer forensics. For years he and Hauck had been teammates on the department’s hockey team, Hauck a crease-clearing defenseman with gimpy knees, Joe a gritty forward who learned to use a stick on the streets of Elmhurst, Queens. Joe’s wife, Marilyn, had been a secretary at Cantor Fitzgerald and had died on 9/11. Back then it was Hauck who had organized a benefit game for Joe’s kids. Captain Joe Velko now ran one of the most important departments in the entire NYPD.

Watchdog was a state-of-the-art computer software program developed by the NCSA, powered by nine supercomputers at an underground command center across the river in Brooklyn. Basically what Watchdog did was monitor billions of bits of data over the Internet for random connections that could prove useful for security purposes. Blogs, e-mail messages, Web sites, MySpace pages-billions of bits of Internet traffic. It sought out any unusual relationships between names, dates, scheduled public events, even repeated colloquial phrases, and spit them out at the command center in daily “alerts,” whereupon a staff of analysts pored over them, deciding if they were important enough to act on or to pass along to other security teams. A couple of years back, a plot to bomb the Citigroup Center by an antiglobalization group was uncovered by Watchdog, simply because it connected the same seemingly innocent but repeated phrase, “renewing our driver’s license,” to a random date, June 24, the day of an event there highlighted by a visit from the head of the World Bank. The connection was traced to someone on the catering team, who was an accomplice on the inside.