“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 their 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.”