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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

      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. Merryvale 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 СКАЧАТЬ