The Dark Tide Free for a Limited Time (18 page)

He had slipped up.
Hauck read over his testimony once, twice, then again.

He had slipped up big-time!

Immediately Hauck recalled how Pappy Raymond had described the guy who’d met him outside the bar and put the pressure on him.
Stocky, mustached.
In the same moment, it became clear to Hauck just who had taken those pictures of AJ Raymond’s body in the street.

Dietz.

His heart slammed to a stop.

Hauck thought back to his own case. Dietz had described himself as being in the security business. He’d said he’d run down to the crash site after the accident. That he never got a good look at the car, a white SUV, out-of-state plates, as it sped away up the road.

Good look, my ass.

He’d been planted there.

That’s why they’d never been able to locate any white SUV
with Massachusetts or New Hampshire plates. That’s why the New Jersey police couldn’t find a similar vehicle there.

They didn’t exist! It had all been set up.

It was a thousand-to-one shot anyone would have ever connected the two incidents, if Karen hadn’t seen her husband’s face in that documentary.

Hauck grinned. Dietz was at both sites. Two states apart, separated by over a year.

Of course, that meant Charles Friedman was connected, too.

Hauck looked back up at Muñoz, a feeling that he was finally getting somewhere buzzing in his veins. “Anyone else know about this, Freddy?”

“You said keep it between us, Lieutenant.” The detective shrugged. “So that’s what I did.”

He looked back up at Freddy. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Muñoz nodded.

“I want to go over the Raymond file again. You get me a copy up here today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hauck stared at the image of the gregarious, mustached face—an ex-cop—now morphed into the calculating countenance of a professional killer.

The two cases hadn’t merged, they had basically crashed together. Head-on. And this time there were other people to see. His blood was racing.

You screwed up,
he said to Dietz.
Big-time, you son of a bitch!

T
HE FIRST THING
Hauck did was forward a photo of Dietz’s face to Pappy, who a day later confirmed that that had been the same man who’d been in Pensacola. That alone was probably enough to arrest Dietz right now for conspiracy to murder AJ Raymond, and maybe Jonathan Lauer, too.

But it didn’t take things through to Charles Friedman.

Coincidence didn’t prove anything. With a good lawyer, it could be argued that being at both crash sites was just that. He’d given his word to Karen to find out about her husband. Charles had been in Greenwich. Lauer worked for him. They both led to Dolphin. Dietz was in it, too. Hauck wasn’t liking at all where this was leading. Tying Charles to Dietz would be a start. Right now he was afraid that if he blew the lid off everything, who knew where any of it would lead?

You should go back to Fitzpatrick,
a voice in him said. Swear out a warrant. Let the feds figure this out. He had taken oaths. His whole life he’d always upheld them. Karen had uncovered a conspiracy.

But something held him back.

What if Charles was innocent? What if he couldn’t tie Charles and Dietz together? What if he hurt her, Karen, her whole family, after vowing to help her, trying to make
his
case, not hers? Bring him in. Put the pressure on Dietz. He would roll.

Or was it her?
Was it what he felt himself falling into, these cases colliding together. Wanting to protect her just a little longer until he knew for sure. What stirred so fiercely in his blood. What he lay awake thinking of at night. Conflicted. As a cop, knowing his feelings were leading him astray.

He called her later that day, staring at Dietz’s file. “I’m heading down to New Jersey for a day. We may have found something.”

Karen sounded excited. “What?”

“I looked through the file on Jonathan Lauer’s hit-and-run. The only eyewitness there, a man named Dietz—he was one of the two witnesses to AJ Raymond’s death, too.”

Karen gasped. In the following pause, Hauck knew she was putting together just what this meant.

“They were set up, Karen. This guy, Dietz, he was at both accidents. Except they weren’t accidents, Karen.
They were homicides
. To cover something up. You did good. No one would ever have put any of this together if you hadn’t gone to visit Lauer.”

She didn’t reply. There was only silence. The silence of her trying to decide what this meant. In regard to Charles. For her kids. For her.

“What the hell am I supposed to think, Ty?”

“Listen, Karen, before we jump…”

“Look,
I’m sorry,
” Karen said. “I’m sorry about these people. It’s terrible. I know this is what you were always thinking. But
I
can’t help thinking that there’s something going on here, and it’s starting to scare me, Ty.
What does all this mean about Charles?
”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Find out how, Ty? What are you going to do?”

There was a lot he had withheld from her. That Charles had a connection to Falcon. To Pappy Raymond. That he was sure Charles was complicit in AJ Raymond’s death—and maybe Jonathan Lauer’s, too. But how could he tell her any of that now?

“I’m going to go down there,” he said, “to Dietz’s home. Tomorrow.”

“You’re going down there? What for?”

“See what the hell I can find. Try and figure out what our next step is.”

“Our next step?
You arrest him, Ty. You know he set those poor people up. He’s responsible for their deaths!”

“You wanted to know how this connected to your husband, Karen! Isn’t that why you came to me? You wanted to know what he’s done.”

“This man’s a murderer, Ty. Two people are dead.”

“I know that two people are dead, Karen! That’s one thing you don’t have to remind me of.”

“What are you saying, Ty?”

The silence was frosty between them for a second. Suddenly Hauck felt sure that by admitting he was not going down to bring Dietz in he was somehow giving away everything that was
in his heart: the feelings he carried for her, the braids of red hair that had pushed him here, the echo of a distant pain.

Finally Karen swallowed. “You’re not telling me everything, are you, Ty? Charles is tied to this, isn’t he? Deeper than you’re letting on?”

“Yes.”

“My husband…” Karen let out a dark chuckle. “He always bet against the trends. A
contrarian,
he called himself. A fancy name for someone who always thinks he’s smarter than everybody else. You better be careful down there, Ty, whatever you’re planning.”

“I’m a cop, Karen,” Hauck said. “This is what cops do.”

“No, Ty, cops arrest people when they’re implicated in a crime. I don’t know what you’re going to do down there, but what I do know is that some of it is about me. And that’s scaring me, Ty. You just make sure you do the right thing, okay?”

Hauck flipped open the file and stared at Dietz’s face.
“Okay.”

Something strange crept through Karen’s thoughts that night. After she hung up from Ty.

About what he’d found.

It lifted her at first. The connections between the accidents. That she’d actually helped him.

Then she didn’t know what she felt. An uneasiness that two people linked to her husband had been killed to cover something up—and the suspicion, a suspicion Ty wasn’t clearing up for her, that Charlie was involved.

Jonathan Lauer worked for him. The fellow who was run over in Greenwich the day he disappeared had had Charlie’s name in his pocket. The safe-deposit box with all that cash and the passport. The tanker that had a connection to Charlie’s firm. Dolphin Oil…

She didn’t know where any of this led.

Other than that her husband of eighteen years had been involved in something he’d kept from her and that Ty wasn’t telling her all he knew.

Along with the fact that much of the life she’d led the last eighteen years, all those little myths she’d believed in, had been a lie.

But there was something else burrowing inside her. Even more than the fear that her family was still at risk. Or sympathy for the two people who had died. Deaths, Karen was starting to believe, against her will, that were inextricably tied to Charles.

She realized she was worried for him, Hauck. What he was about to do.

It had never dawned on her before, but it did now. How she’d grown to rely on him. How she knew by the way he’d looked at her—that day at the football game, how his eyes lit up when he saw her waiting at the station, how he had taken everything on for her. That he was attracted to her.

And that in the most subtle, undetected way Karen was feeling the same way, too.

But there was more.

She felt certain he was about to do something rash, way outside the boundaries. That he might be putting himself in danger. Dietz was a killer, whatever he had done. That he was holding something back—something related to Charlie.

For her.

After he called, she stayed in the kitchen heating up a frozen French-bread pizza in the microwave for Alex, who seemed to live on those things.

When it was done, Karen called him down, and she sat with him at the counter, hearing about his day at school—how he’d gotten a B-plus on a presentation in European history that was half his final exam and how he’d been named co-chair of the teen Kids in Crisis thing. She was truly proud of that. They made a date to watch
Friday Night Lights
together in the TV room later that evening.

But when he went back upstairs, Karen stayed at the counter, her blood coursing in a disquieted state.

Strangely, inexplicably, there had grown to be something between them.

Something she couldn’t deny.

So after their show was done and Alex had said good night and had gone back upstairs, Karen went into the study and picked up the phone. She felt a shifting in her stomach, school-girlish, but she didn’t care. She dialed his number, her palms perspiring. He answered on the second ring.

“Lieutenant?” she said. She waited for his objection.

“Yes?” he answered. There was none.

“You just be careful,” she said again.

He tried to shrug it off with some joke about having done this a million times, but Karen cut him short.

“Don’t,”
she pleaded. “Don’t. Don’t make me feel this all over again. Just please be careful, Ty. That’s all I’m asking. Y’hear?”

There was a silence for a second, and then he said, “Yeah,
I hear
.”

“Good,” she said softly, and hung up the phone.

Karen sat there on the couch for a long time, knees tucked into her chest. She felt a foreboding worming through her—just as it had on the small plane that day as the propellers whirred in Tortola, Charlie waving from the balcony, the sun reflecting off his aviators, a sudden sensation of loss. A tremor of fear.

“Just be careful, Ty,” she whispered again, to no one, and closed her eyes, afraid.
I couldn’t bear to lose you, too.

The interstate that ran barely a mile from where Hauck lived in Stamford, I-95, turned into the New Jersey Turnpike south of the George Washington Bridge.

He took it, past the swamps of the Meadowlands, past the vast electrical trellises and the warehouse parks of northern New Jersey, past Newark Airport, over two hours, to the southern part of the state, north of the Philadelphia turnoff.

He got off at Exit 5 in Burlington County, finding himself on back roads that cut through the downstate—Columbus, Mount Holly, sleepy towns connected by wide-open countryside, horse country, a universe away from the industrial congestion back up north.

Dietz had been a cop in the town of Freehold. Hauck checked before he left. He’d put in sixteen years.

Sixteen years that had been cut short by a couple of sexual-harassment complaints and two rebukes for undue force, as well as some other issue that didn’t go away involving an underage witness in a methamphetamine case where Dietz had been found
to apply excessive pressure for her testimony, which sounded more like statutory rape.

Hauck had missed all this. What reason had there ever been to check?

Since then Dietz was self-employed in some kind of security company, Dark Star. Hauck had looked them up. It was hard to figure out just what they did. Bodyguards. Security. Private contract work. Not exactly installing exclusive security systems, or whatever he had said he’d been doing in the area when AJ Raymond was killed.

Dietz was a bad guy.

As he drove along backcountry stretches, Hauck’s mind wandered. He had been a cop for almost fifteen years. Basically, it was all he knew. He’d risen fast through the bureaucracy that was the NYPD. He’d made detective. Been assigned to special units. Now he ran his own department in Greenwich. He’d always upheld the law.

What was he going to do when he got there? He didn’t even have a plan.

Outside Medford, Hauck found County Road 620.

On each side there were gently sloping fields and white fencing. There were a few signs for stables and horse farms. Merry-vale Farms—home to Barrister, “World’s Record, quarter mile.” Near Taunton Lake, Hauck checked the GPS. Dietz’s address was 733 Muncey Road. It was about three miles south of town. Middle of nowhere. Hauck found it, bordering a fenced-in field and a local firehouse. He turned down the road. His heart started to pick up.

What are you doing here, Ty?

Muncey was a rutted blacktopped road in dire need of a repaving. There were a few houses near the turnoff, small clapboard farmhouses with trucks or the occasional horse van in front and overgrown, weeded yards. Hauck found a number on a mailbox: 340. He had a ways to go.

At some point the road turned into dirt. Hauck bounced along in his Bronco. The houses grew farther apart. At a bend he came upon a cluster of RD mailboxes, 733 written on one of them. The postal service didn’t even come down any farther. A tremor shot through Hauck as he knew he was near. Boundaries, he knew he’d left them behind long ago. He didn’t have a warrant. He hadn’t run this by the office. Dietz was a potential co-conspirator in two homicides.

What the hell are you doing down here, Ty?

He passed a red, fifties-style ranch house: 650. A film of sweat had built up on his wrists and under his collar. He was getting close.

Now there was a huge distance between homes this far down. Maybe a quarter mile. There was no sound to be heard, other than the unsettling crunch of gravel under the Bronco’s wheels.

Finally it came into view. Around a slight bend, tucked away under a nest of tall elms, the end of the road. An old white farmhouse. The picket fence in front was in need of repair. A loose gutter was hanging down. What lawn there was looked like it hadn’t been mowed in months. Except for the presence of a two-seater Jeep with a plowing hitch attached in the driveway, it hardly looked as if anyone even lived here. Hauck slowed the Bronco as he drove by, trying not to attract attention. A Freehold Township Police sticker was on the back of the Jeep. A number on the column of the front porch confirmed it:

733.

Bingo.

The dilapidated two-car garage was shut. Hauck couldn’t see any lights on inside the house. Cars would be few and far between down here. He didn’t want to be spotted driving by again. About fifty yards past, he noticed a turnoff, more of a horse trail than a road, barely wide enough for his car, and he took it, bouncing over the uneven terrain. Partway in, he cut a left through a field of dried hay, his path concealed by the tall, waist-high
brush. A couple of hundred yards behind, Hauck had a decent view of the house.

Okay, so what happens now?

From a satchel Hauck removed a set of binoculars and, lowering the window, took a wide scan back at the house. No movement. A shutter hung indolently from one of the windows. No indication that anyone was there.

From the same satchel, Hauck took out his Sig automatic, safety off, checking that the sixteen nine-millimeter rounds were loaded in the clip. He hadn’t drawn his gun in years. He recalled running into an alley, firing off three rounds at a suspect fleeing from a building, who had sprayed his TEC-9 at Hauck’s partner in a weapons bust as he was running away. He’d hit the guy in the leg with one shot. Brought him in. Received a commendation for it. That was the only time he had ever fired his gun on the job.

Hauck rested the gun on the seat next to him. Then he opened the glove compartment and took out the small black leather folder that contained his Greenwich shield. He didn’t quite know what to do with it, so he placed it in the pocket of his jacket, and took out a two-liter bottle of water and drank a long swig. His mouth was dry. He decided not to think too hard on what he was doing here. He took another sweep on the house with the binoculars.

Nothing. Not a fucking thing.

Then he did what he’d done a hundred times in various stakeouts over the years.

He uncapped a beer and watched seconds tick off the clock.

He waited.