goes?”
Hauck nodded, walked her over to Foley, and handed her his card. He didn’t like what he was doing either. Ripping up the floorboards of someone’s life. Digging into their affairs. On the job, he had done it a million times. But this was different.
Dani Thibault wasn’t under suspicion for committing any crime.
After Merrill had left, Hauck typed in what she had given him, creating a data file.
This time we do, Tom Foley had said. Take on the PI case. As well as what Hauck saw, with Peter Simons’s ex involved, as an obvious conflict of interest.
He picked up the phone and buzzed Brooke outside. “See if you can get me Richard Snell at our office in London.”
Hauck did his best to keep his hand in the Glassman murders as well.
He couldn’t put away the image of April. It dogged him—the sweet, bright eyes that shone back from the photographs of her. The light touch of her hand on his when they had last bumped into each other in town.
It’s been what, Ty , she beamed, happily. Four years…??
Five.
They had met in a support group Hauck had gone to for a while after Norah was killed. He couldn’t escape the dreams that made him constantly relive it. Grief that wouldn’t go away. Blame unwilling to soften. By then, Beth and he had given up. Nine/eleven had brought with it a whole new scrapbook of faces and lives he had been unable to save. Names of the unaccounted for he was charged with following up on. Frantic loved ones calling in. Not knowing. It was as if he was trying to find a glimpse of Norah, his dead daughter, in every face, every call he fielded.
Only two out of two hundred he followed up on ended up being found alive.
It just got to him. For the first time in his life what was constraining him was greater than what he could do. One day he put in his notice. Out of nowhere, he walked into the office of the assistant chief of the NYPD and told him he couldn’t do it anymore. Their shining star. He had made detective, got fast-tracked into management, faster than anyone before. His career had arced upward in a steady, unflagging line.
As part of the settlement he agreed to talk it out with someone. A police shrink. The doctor urged him to come to the group. Just to show he didn’t need it, he went.
Hauck didn’t think about those years much anymore. The Dark Ages, he liked to call them. Depression. Maybe it was a chemical thing, lurking in his brain for years. Maybe it was like the towers, the well-built wall he had erected around himself—sports hero, Colby grad, the pretty wife, the picture-book family, his career—all brought down. Leaving ashes behind.
Whatever it was, he had built himself back up. He had moved away, to Greenwich. Found a new home. Slowly found new people to love. Rebuilt his career. Clearly, his life was moving upward once again.
The Dark Ages.
The memories were back again.
He remembered watching her from across the circle of twelve patients. She was both pretty and at the same time quiet, hurt. Their eyes met with a brief smile. Both of them saying, in the way everyone there seemed to say, I really don’t belong here, you know.
“April,” Dr. Paul Rose said, “we have a few new people here. Would you give us a little about yourself and tell us why you’re here?”
“Sure,” she said, shrugging diffidently. “I’m, uh, Frasier got canceled on Thursday nights, so I was free…” There were a few polite laughs. “Sorry,” she said, flattening her lips. A delicate light shone on her face.
Then she told everyone about her darkness.
The Glassman murders received a lot of attention. Marc Glassman’s notoriety and position made all the cable news shows and the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The FBI was involved. Along with the SEC. It seemed unbelievable that Marc Glassman had turned out to be some kind of rogue trader. That he had cost Wertheimer Grant billions of dollars. What kinds of controls were there? Now the firm hung on the verge of collapse. Rumors were everywhere. THE MURDER THAT MAY SINK ONE OF WALL STREET’S MOST RESPECTED FIRMS, the New York Times headline read.
All sprung from a local crime spree that had gotten out of control.
Finally Hauck knew the right thing was just to stay out. He made his decision. Let the right people back at Havemeyer Place handle it. He walked away. He had Annie.
April,…could you tell us why you’re here…?
Hauck recalled that most mornings Steve Chrisafoulis dropped off his daughter at the high school before heading into work. A few days after the story broke he waited for him, until he saw the blue Chrysler minivan pull up and Emily jump out and shut the door, merging with a group of kids on the walk. She waved. “Bye, Daddy…”
Steve waved back. “See you tonight, hon…”
Hauck stepped up just as he was rolling up the window.
“Funny, I didn’t know you had kids in the school here.” The detective smirked with a roll of his cynical eyes.
Hauck shrugged. “Can’t help myself. Sometimes I still hang around here, just to make sure everything’s okay.”
“You better watch yourself. Someone may get the wrong idea and you’ll get yourself arrested, Ty.”
“Look, I know it’s awkward to talk to me on this, Steve.”
“It’s not awkward,” the detective said. “It’s more like inappropriate. You’re not wearing a badge now.”
“You don’t find it just a shade peculiar how this break-in seemed to bust the Wertheimer thing wide open?”
“Peculiar? I also think it’s peculiar how the safe in the house was emptied and the drawers were rifled through, Ty.”
“Any thoughts on what they might have been looking for?”
Now it was Steve who shrugged. “Money, jewelry. Call me crazy…Look, I really gotta get on to the office now.”
“How’s the boy? How’s he doing?”
“Spooked.” Chrisafoulis nodded. “Like anyone might be. He’s with his grandparents up in Darien. One day he’s gonna have to come to terms with what he saw in there. The rest of his family murdered. How’s your kid doing, Ty?”
“Jessie? She’s doing great, thanks. Starting high school this year. You said the kid had taken some pictures…Anything ever pan out?”
“Ty, you’re asking something I can’t divulge. You know that. This is the second time you’ve pumped me for what’s going on. Want to let me in on the story, dude?”
Hauck bent down at the window. He met the new
