The Dark Tide Free for a Limited Time (23 page)

The cell call came in just as Hauck was getting ready to go into visit Chief Fitzpatrick, to request that a patrol car be assigned to watch Karen’s house again.

“Joe?”

“Listen,” the JIATF man said, “I have something important here. I’m faxing it out to you now.”

The pages started to flow before Hauck even arrived back at his desk. “What I’m sending you is a transcript of a series of online conversations taken off a car-enthusiast site,” Velko explained. “The first exchange took place in February.” Three months earlier. Joe sounded excited. “I think we got something here.”

Hauck started to read the transcript as fast as he could tear the pages from the machine. The first page was headed
ALERT
. In the shadow box, there was a transcript number and a date, February 24. There was also a listing of the key “trigger phrases” Hauck had given Joe: “1966 Ford Mustang. Emberglow. Greenwich, Ct. Concours d’ Élégance.
Charlie’s Baby.
” A few of his favorite phrases.

The alert box was marked “HIGH.”

Hauck sat down at his desk and read, his blood pulsing expectantly.

KlassicKarMania.com:

Mal784: Hey, trading a 66 Ember Glow ’Stang in for a 69 Merc 230 Cabriolet. Any1 interested?

DragsterB: Saw one of those in a movie out last year. Sandra Bullock. Looked fine.

Xpgma: The car or the girl?

DragsterB: Real funny, dude.

Mal784: Lake House. Yeah, except mine’s a ragtop, GT. 62,000 miles. 280hp. Near mint. Any1 interested? Take $38.5.

DragsterB: I know someone who might be.

SunDog: Where is it?

Mal784: Florida. Boynton Beach. Rarely sees the light of day.

SunDog: Maybe. Had one once myself. Up north. What’s the VIN code? C or K?

Mal784: K. High performance. All the way.

SunDog: How’s the inside?

Mal784: Orig Pony leather. Orig radio. Not a scratch. Little bastards have a way of getting under your skin, right?

SunDog: Had to sell. Moved. Used to show it around.

Mal784: Where?

DragsterB: This a private conversation? Anyone out there got a line on a set of Crager 16" rims????

SunDog: A few places. Stockbridge, Mass. The Concours in Greenwich. Once down your way, in Palm Beach.

Mal784: Hey, you used to be on here a while back? Different name, though. CharlieBoy or something, wasn’t it?

SunDog: Change of life, man. Lemme see the car. Post a picture.

Mal784: Gimme your address.

SunDog: Put it on this site, Mal. I’ll look.

That was all. Hauck read through the exchange again. Every instinct told him he was onto something. He flipped the page over. There was another exchange. This one was two weeks later, March 10.

Mal784: You don’t know your Mustangs for shit, bro. Check out the VIN#. K’s are higher horsepowers. Command higher price. Yours is a J. 27–28K tops.

Opie$: Okay, I’ll check.

Mal784: You’ll learn something. Some people don’t know what they have.

SunDog: So, Mal, you still got that Ember Glow????

Mal784: Hey!!! Look what the tide dragged in. What happened to you, guy? I posted a shot, like you said. Never heard back.

SunDog: Saw it. Lights-out machine, no doubt. No luck, huh? Anyway, not for my life now.

Mal784: I can deal. My middle name.

SunDog: Not that. I’m more on water than dry land now. Then I got to find a way to get it through customs down here.

Mal784: Donde?

SunDog: Caribbean. No matter. Would only rot in the sun down here. But I may come back to you. Thx.

Mal784: You late, you wait, man. Putting it up through the auctions now.

SunDog: Best of luck. From an ol’ short seller, another time. I’ll keep checking.

Opie$: Hey, I just looked. What about VINS beginning with N?

“Ty, you read them yet?” Joe Velko asked.

Hauck shuffled the pages. “Yeah. I think we hit the jackpot here. So how do we trace this dude, SunDog?”

“I already put out an IP user trace through the Web site’s server, Ty. You understand, I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for you?”

“I know that, Joe.”

“So I went to the blog site. They didn’t put up a lot of resistance. It’s amazing what a government agency can do, post-9/11, even without a subpoena. Got a pen?”

Hauck scrambled around the desk. “I’m feeling safer already, Joe. Shoot.”

“SunDog is just a user name. We traced it back to a Web address, which they supplied us. [email protected].”

Hauck fixed on the name.
Oilman
. He knew without needing anything else that they had found him. Everything inside him told him this was Charles.

“Is this traceable, Joe?”

“Yes…and no. As you know, Hotmail is a free Internet site. Therefore you don’t need anything but a given name to register, and it doesn’t even have to be a real one to get that done. Or even a real address. But we can go back to them and trace what was on the application. And there’s a communication history we can go back on. What I
can’t
do, however, is narrow that down to a specific place.”

Hauck’s blood surged with optimism. “Okay…”

“The activity seems to be coming from the Caribbean region. Not to a specific location though, but on a wireless LAN. There’s been activity picked up around St. Maarten, the BVIs. Even as far away as Panama.”

“The guy’s been traveling?”

“Maybe, or on a boat.”

A boat. That made sense to Hauck. “Can we narrow
that
down?”

“With time,” the JIATF man explained. “We can set up a surveillance and monitor future activity and triangulate a point of origin. But that takes manpower. And paperwork. And other countries involved. You understand what I mean. And I gather that’s something you’re not eager to deal with, are you, Ty?”

“No,” he admitted. “Not if I can help it, Joe.”

“That’s what I thought. So this is the next-best step. We traced the application information through the Hotmail people. That much I can do, but after that you’re on your own.”

“That’s great!”

“The address on the account is to a post-office box at the central post office on the island of St. Maarten in the Caribbean. I went as far as I could without getting anyone else involved and checked down there. It’s registered to a Steven Hanson, Ty. That ring a bell?”

“Hanson?” At first it was a blank, but then something went off inside him. “Hold on a second, Joe….”

He swiveled around the desk, rifling through a stack of papers. Until he found it.

The list of new subscribers from
Mustang World
.

He had narrowed it down to just a handful of names. From all over the region: Panama. Honduras. The Bahamas. The BVIs…. It took a few seconds, scanning the list. Hopewell, March, Camp, O’Shea.

But there it was! S. Hanson. Date of subscription: 1/17.
This year!
The only address given was a post-office box on St. Kitts.

Steven Hanson.

A surge of validation ran through Hauck’s veins.

Steven Hanson was Oilman0716. And Oilman0716 had to be Charles. Too much fit.

The car. The Concours. The little phrases. Karen had been right. This was the part of him that could not change.
His baby.

They had found him!

The doorbell rang, and when Karen went to answer it, she stood fixed in surprise. “Ty…”

Samantha was in the kitchen, polishing off a yogurt, watching the tube. Alex had his feet slung over the couch in the family room, alternately groaning and exulting loudly, engrossed in the latest Wii video game.

Hauck’s face was lit up with anticipation. “There’s something I have to show you, Karen.”

“Come on in.”

Karen had tried to shield the kids from all that was going on—her shifting moods, the worry that seemed permanently etched in her face right now. Her frustrated, late-night rummaging through Charles’s old things.

But it was a losing fight. They weren’t exactly stupid. They saw the unfamiliar circumspection, the tenseness, her temper a little quicker than it had ever been before. Ty’s showing up unannounced would only arouse their suspicions even more.

“C’mon in here,” Karen said, taking him into the kitchen. “Sam, you remember Detective Hauck?”

Her daughter looked up, her knees curled on the stool, dressed in sweatpants and a Greenwich Huskies T-shirt, her expression somewhere between confused and surprised. “Hi.”

“Good to see you again,” Hauck said. “Hear you’re gearing up for graduation?”

“Yeah. Next week.” She nodded. She shot a glance toward Karen.

“Tufts, right?”

“Yeah,” she said again. “Can’t wait. What’s going on?”

“I need to speak with Detective Hauck a second, hon. Maybe we’ll just go…”

“It’s okay.” She got down from the stool. “I’m leaving.” She tossed her yogurt container into the trash and tossed the spoon into the sink. “Good to see you again,” she said to Hauck, tilting her head and screwing her eyes toward Karen, like,
What’s going on?

Hauck waved. “You, too.”

Karen flicked off the kitchen TV and led him toward the sunroom. “C’mon, we’ll go in here.”

She sat down on the corner of the floral couch. Ty took a seat in the upholstered chair next to her. She had her hair up in a ponytail and was wearing a vintage heather gray Texas Longhorns T-shirt. No makeup. She knew she looked a mess. Still, she knew he wouldn’t show up like this, at night, unless it was about something important.

He asked her, “Do they know?”

“About what I found in the mail?” Karen shook her head. “No. I don’t want to worry them. I’ve got my folks coming up next week for the graduation. Charlie’s mom, coming in from PA. They’re going to Africa on safari with my folks a few days later. Sam’s graduation present. I’ll feel a whole lot better the minute I get them on that plane.”

Ty nodded. “I’m sure. Listen….” He pulled some papers out of his jacket. “I’m sorry to bother you here like this.” He dropped them on the table in front of her. “You might as well read it yourself.”

Warily, Karen picked them up. “What is it?”

“It’s a transcript. Of two Internet conversations. From one of your husband’s car sites. They took place back in February and March. One of the outfits I gave the information you found managed to pick them up.”

The tiny hairs on Karen’s arms stood on end.

She read through the transcripts.
Emberglow. Concours. Greenwich
. Her heart picked up a beat each time she encountered a familiar phrase. Suddenly it dawned on Karen just what this was.
SunDog
. The mention of a change of life, in the Caribbean. A reference to Charlie’s old screen name,
CharlieBoy.

An invisible hand seemed to clutch her heart in its icy fist and not let go. She focused on the name for a long time. Then she looked up. “You think this is Charlie, don’t you?”

“What I think is that there’s an awful lot that sounds pretty familiar,” he replied.

Karen stood up, a jolt of nerves winding through her. Until now it had been safe to feel that it was all some abstract puzzle. Seeing his face on the screen; finding the safe-deposit box in New York. Even the horrible death of that person on his staff, Jonathan…It all just led somewhere nebulous, somewhere she never thought she’d actually have to confront.

But now…Her heart raced. SunDog. Karen could actually see him coming up with something like that. Now there was the possibility that everything that had happened was real. Now she could read words and phrases he might have said and almost hear his voice—familiar, alive. Out there—doing the same things, having the same conversations he’d once had with her.

A pressure throbbed in Karen’s forehead. “I don’t know what to do with this, Ty.”

“I had my contacts trace the name,” he said. “It’s a free Internet site, Karen. Hotmail. There’s no name registered against it, just a post-office box out of St. Maarten. In the Caribbean.”

Karen held her breath and nodded.

“The P.O. box was registered under the name of Steven Hanson.”

“Hanson?”
Karen looked anxious.

“Does it mean anything to you?”

“No.”

Hauck shrugged. “No reason it should. But it did strike something in me. I checked it back against the list we got from
Mustang World.
” He handed her another sheet. “Look, there’s an S. Hanson right here. No address, but a P.O. box. This one’s in St. Kitts.”

“That doesn’t prove it’s him,” Karen said. “Only someone who’s interested in the same kind of cars—from down there. Lots of people might be.”

“Who’s keeping an awfully low profile, Karen. Post-office boxes, assumed names. I did a credit check on the name down there, and you know what came back?
Nothing
.”

“That still doesn’t mean it’s Charles!” Her voice carried an edge of desperation in it.
“Why?
Why are you doing this, Ty? Why did you quit your job?” She came back to the couch and sat down on the arm, staring at him. “What’s in it for you?
Why the hell are you making me face this?”

“Karen…” He put his hand on her knee and gently squeezed.

“No!” She pulled away.

His deep-set eyes were unwavering, and for a second she thought she might just start to cry. She wanted him to hold her.

“You said there was an e-mail address?”

“Yeah. There is.” He reached over and handed her a slip of paper. Karen took it, her fingers shaking.

[email protected].

She read it over a couple of times, the truth slowly sinking in.
Then she looked up at him with a half smile, as if stung, wounded.

“Oilman…” She sniffled, feeling lifted for a second, and at the same time let down.

A moist film burned in her eye.

“It’s him.” She nodded. “That’s Charlie.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” She exhaled, as if fortifying herself against the dam burst of tears about to come down. “That number, 0716—we always used it for our passwords. That’s our anniversary—July sixteenth…. The date we were married. In 1989.
That’s Charlie, Ty
.”