voice from the TV said stock futures were trending down again for the fourth day in a row.
But Hauck and Annie weren’t listening. Their IRAs could have been in total free fall and right now neither of them would have given a damn.
Finally, with a last gasp, Annie arched, stiffening, then fell back onto him, joyfully spent of breath, draping her satisfied body over his, her chest feeling about a thousand degrees. “Damn,” she sighed from her head all the way down to her little toes, “now that’s the way to start the work week. That was a good one.”
“That was three.” Hauck flung back his arms in mock exhaustion. “I’m an old guy. You’re killing me.”
“Three?” She rested her chin on his chest. “Two, I think.”
“Two since they talked about the transit fares going up,” he told her. “One more since traffic and weather.”
“Oh, yeah, three,” she purred contentedly, releasing a long, slow sigh. “Math was never my strong suit.”
Hauck turned and focused in on the digital clock. “Damn. Look at the time! I’ve got to scoot.”
Annie restrained him as he tried to wrestle free, digging in her chin more sharply. “You know, I’m happy, Ty…” She smiled, a kind of coy, amused grin, being purposefully annoying. “Are you happy? You don’t always look so. I know you’re sort of a tough nut to crack.”
“Apparently not,” he said, chuckling at the lame joke. “And yeah, sure, I’m happy…” He tried to roll her off. “I’ll be happy if I can get you off of me and hop into the shower.”
“Oh, right,” Annie chortled, “like this wasn’t exactly what you had in mind when you snuggled over to me before the alarm went off…”
“Alright, maybe,” Hauck admitted a little guiltily. “One…”
“You’re just a glass-half-empty kind of dude, aren’t you? Never show too much of yourself. Never trust the moment.”
“I’m not half-empty at all.” Hauck finally spun her off and faced her sideways. “I’m actually completely halffull. It’s just that it’s buried. Very, very deep.”
“Right; if it were any deeper, you’d find oil in it,” Annie said, and deciding it was funny, twisted his nose.
“Laugh-out-loud,” Hauck said, screwing up his face. But then he laughed too.
That was because, truth be said, he was happy. The lines etched in his face might not have shown it, but Annie had brought things out in him he had never let surface before. The uncomplicated will to just enjoy life. To relax, stay in the moment. For the first time, it seemed things that had weighed heavily on him for so long—the deaths of his daughter, eight years before; his brother, only last year; and Freddy Munoz, his protégé on the force—all seemed to have been pushed back into some closed, time-locked vault he no longer felt compelled to open and to which he had momentarily lost the key.
Not to mention the fact that he had suddenly left the force and gone into the private sector. After fifteen years.
Now he traded up to a jacket and tie every day and had spiffy new digs in an office park on the water. Earning three times what he had before. He had colleagues in Europe and Asia on his speed dial. He even glanced through the Wall Street Journal every morning, pretending he was keeping abreast of business news, after he checked the sports scores on ESPN.com, of course. He had opened himself up to a new feeling, the arc of his new life seeming to work out. He was, like Annie pushed him to do, trusting the moment. Okay, maybe like she’d said, it was somewhere down deep, somewhere that didn’t come up to the surface very often. But it had been a long time since he felt this way. Boundaryless. Free of regret.
“Really, I gotta get up,” he said. He lifted her off. “I’ll do the coffee.”
Annie fell back against the pillows, groaning loudly, “Alright…”
The news anchor came back on. “And now, back to our lead from the top of the hour…”
The congestion on the Merritt Parkway had given way to something far more serious.
“In Connecticut, the town of Greenwich is waking this morning to a horrifying triple murder. An equities trader at a prestigious Wall Street firm was brutally shot to death during the night along with his wife and daughter in their formidable home in backcountry Greenwich. Cindy Marquez is on the scene…”
Hauck sat up, his years as head of detectives taking over, as the attractive reporter, bundled against the cold, stood in front of two large stone pillars leading to a typical Greenwich home.
“Kate, the local police believe that the motive behind this family’s tragic end was simply a robbery gone bad. A string of break-ins up here has rocked this affluent community for months. But until now, none had ever turned so violent.
“Marc Glassman”—a photo flashed on the screen—“who was forty-one and worked as a lead equities trader for troubled Wall Street giant Wertheimer Grant, was found shot downstairs in their posh five-bedroom home off of Cat Rock Road…”
Hauck sat up. A tremor knifed through him.
“Hold it a second,” he said, disentangling from Annie’s legs. He stared, his heart rate accelerating, as he edged closer to the screen.
“The bodies of his wife, April, who was well known in local charities and schools, and their teenage daughter, Rebecca, were found in an upstairs closet. A younger son…”
Hauck focused again on the photo. A shot of the family in happy times. His mind raced as the reporter described the grisly scene; he fixed on the husband—slightly receding hair, in a fleece pullover and sunglasses, one arm around his daughter, who was wearing an oversized college sweatshirt and had long brown hair, and the other arm around another child, a son, younger, a mop of yellow hair and smiles.
Then he focused in on the wife.
Pretty. Happy looking. In a green baseball cap, her light-brown hair, in a ponytail, peeking through the vent. A beautiful smile that was both proud and tragic at the same time.
“Oh, God…” Hauck groaned, sucking in a fortifying breath.
“I know, it’s horrible,” Annie said. She came up behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder, staring past him at the screen. “Are you okay?”
He nodded silently, not an answer as much as it was all he could do. A heavy weight fell inside him.
“I knew her,” he said.
The gleaming white Dassault Falcon touched down gracefully at Westchester County Airport, only a stone’s throw from the Greenwich town line.
The sleek six-passenger jet taxied off the runway to the NetJets private hangar. When the engines cut off, the door opened,
