Andrew Gross 3-Book Thriller Collection 1: The Dark Tide, Don’t Look Twice, Relentless. Andrew Gross

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      “I can understand.”

      Karen pointed. “Just about here I couldn’t watch it anymore. I went to turn it off.” She stood up and came behind his back, leaning over his shoulder, facing the screen. “It was like I was going crazy inside. Watching Charlie’s death. All over.”

      Hauck didn’t see where this was heading. She reached her hand across him for the mouse. She waited, letting the action on the screen unfold, people staggering up onto the street out of a remote entrance to the station, gagging, coughing out smoke, faces blackened. The handheld camera jiggled.

      “That’s when I saw it.” Karen pointed.

      She positioned the mouse on the toolbar and clicked. The picture on the screen came to a stop. 9:16 A.M.

      The frame captured a woman reaching out to comfort someone on the street who had collapsed. In front of her was someone else, a man, his jacket dusty, his face slightly averted from the camera, rushing by. Karen’s eyes fixed on the screen, something almost steely about them, hardened, yet at the same time, Hauck couldn’t help but notice, sad.

      “That’s my husband,” she said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. She looked him in the eye. “That’s Charlie, Lieutenant.”

      Hauck’s pulse came to a stop. It took a second for it to fully sink in just what she meant. Her husband had died there. A year ago. He had been to her home, to the memorial. That much was clear. He turned again to the screen. The features seemed a bit familiar from the photos he’d seen at her house. He blinked back at her.

      “What do you mean?”

      “I don’t know what I mean,” Karen said. “He was on that train—that much I’m sure. He called me from it, just before the blast. They found pieces of his briefcase in the wreckage….” She shook her head. “But somehow he didn’t die.”

      Hauck pushed back from the desk, his eyes intent on the screen again. “A hundred people might look like that. He’s covered in ash. There’s no way you can be sure.”

      “That’s what I told myself,” she said. “At first. At least it’s what I was hoping.” Karen moved back to the table. “Over the past week, I must have looked at that scene a thousand times.”

      She reached in and drew a sheet of paper out of her bag. “Then I found something. It doesn’t matter what. All that matters is that it led me to this safe-deposit box at a bank in Manhattan that I never knew my husband had.”

      She slid the sheet across the table to Hauck.

      It was a photocopy of an account-activation form from Chase. For a safe-deposit box and, attached, what appeared to be an account history.

      There was a lot of activity, going back a couple of years. All the entries bore the same signature.

       Charles Friedman.

      Hauck scanned down.

      “Check out the last date,” Karen Friedman told him. “And the time.”

      Hauck did, and felt a sharp pain stick him in the chest. His eyes flashed back at her, not understanding. Can’t be …

      “He’s alive.” Karen Friedman met his eyes. Her pupils glistened. “He was there, at that bank, four and a half hours after the bombing. Four and a half hours after I thought he was dead.

      “That’s Charlie.” She nodded to him, glancing at the screen. “That’s my husband, Lieutenant.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

      “Who have you told?”

      “No one.” She stared back at him. “How could I? My kids … after what they’ve been through, it would kill them, Lieutenant. How could they even begin to understand? My friends?” She shook her head, glassy-eyed. “What am I possibly supposed to say to them, Lieutenant? That it was all some kind of crazy mistake? ‘Sorry, Charlie’s not really dead. He’s just been fucking deceiving me over the past year. Deceiving all of us!’ At first I thought maybe you hear about people who come out of these life-altering situations, you know, affected….” She placed her finger on the bank forms. “But then I found these. I thought about taking everything to Saul Lennick. Charlie was like a second son to him. But I got scared. I thought, what if he’s really done something? You know, something bad. What if I was doing the wrong thing …? How it would affect everybody. I got all scared. Do you understand what I mean?”

      Hauck nodded, the stress clear in her voice.

      “So I came here.”

      Hauck picked up the bank papers. Because he was a cop, he had learned over the years to withhold his reactions. Gather the facts, be a little circumspect, until a picture of the truth becomes clear. He looked at the bank form. Charles Friedman was there.

      “What is it you want me to do?”

      “I don’t know.” Karen shook her head in consternation. “I don’t even know what he’s done. But it’s something…. Charlie wouldn’t just do this to us. I knew him. He wasn’t that kind of man, Lieutenant.” She pushed a wisp of hair out of her face and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, tears smearing. “The truth is, I don’t have any fucking idea what I want you to do.”

      “It’s okay,” he said, squeezing her arm. Hauck stared back at the screen. He ran through the usual responses. Some crazy shock reaction—amnesia—from the bombing. But the bank form dismissed that one fast. Another woman? Embezzlement? He flashed to the scene in the parking lot with Karen’s daughter. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. Yet Saul Lennick had assured him Charles’s hedge fund was perfectly intact.

      “If you don’t mind my asking, what did you find in there?” Hauck asked, pointing to the record for the safe-deposit box.

      “Money.” Karen exhaled. “Lots of money. And a passport. Charlie’s picture, with a totally assumed name. A few credit cards …”

      “He left this all behind?” A year ago. “This may have been just some kind of backup.” Hauck shrugged. “I guess you understand, this wasn’t unpremeditated. He was planning this.”

      She nodded, biting her lower lip. “I realize that.”

      But what Charles could never have planned, Hauck knew, was how he would execute this. Until the moment came.

      His thoughts settled on another name. Thomas Mardy.

      “Listen.” Hauck swiveled to her. “I have to ask, did your husband have any history of … you know …”

      “Did he what?” Karen stared at him. “Did he play around? I don’t know. A week ago I would have said that was impossible. Now I’d be almost happy to hear that’s what it was. He had that passport, those cards.… He was planning all this. While we were sleeping in the same bed. While he was rooting for the kids at school. He somehow managed to get away from that train in the midst of the chaos and say, ‘Now it’s happening. Now’s the time. СКАЧАТЬ