The Dark Tide

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hauck took the guy in the sport jacket, Freddy the North Face fleece.

Hauck’s turned out to be a retired cop from South Jersey, name of Phil Dietz. He claimed he was up here cold-canvassing for state-of-the-art security systems—“You know, ‘smart’ homes, thumbprint, ID sensors, that sort of thing”—which he’d been handling since turning in the badge three years before. He had just pulled into the Arby’s up the street to grab a sandwich when he saw the whole thing.

“He came down the street moving pretty good,” Dietz said. He was short, stocky, graying hair a little thin on top, with a thick mustache, and he moved his stubby hands excitedly. “I heard the engine pick up. He accelerated down the street and made this turn there.” He pointed toward the intersection of West Street and the Post Road. “SOB hit that kid without even touching the brakes. I didn’t see it until it was too late.”

“Can you give me a make on the car?” Hauck asked.

Dietz nodded. “It was a white late-model SUV. A Honda or an Acura, I think, something like that. I could look at some pictures. Plates were white, too—I think blue lettering, or maybe green.” He shook his head. “Too far away. My eyes aren’t what they were when I was on the job.” He jiggled a set of reading glasses in his breast pocket. “Now all I have to do is to be able to read POs.”

Hauck smiled, then made a notation on his pad. “Not local?”

Dietz shook his head. “No. Maybe New Hampshire or Massachusetts. Sorry, I couldn’t get a solid read. The bastard stopped for a second—after. I yelled, ‘Hey, you!’ and started to run down the hill. But he just took off up the road. I tried to grab a picture with my cell phone, but it happened too fast. He was gone.”

Dietz pointed up the hill, toward the heights of Railroad Avenue. West Street went into a curve as it bent past an open lot, an office building. Once you were up there, I-95 was only a minute or two away. Hauck knew they’d have to be lucky if anyone up there saw him.

He turned back to the witness. “You said you heard the engine accelerate?”

“That’s right. I was stepping out of my car. Thought I’d kill some time before my next appointment.” Dietz pressed his interlocked hands around the back of his head. “Cold calls … Don’t ever quit.”

“I’ll try not to.” Hauck grinned, then redirected him, motioning south. “It was coming from down there? You were able to follow it before it turned?”

“Yup. It caught my eyes as it sped up.” Dietz nodded.

“The driver was male?”

“Definitely.”

“Any chance you caught a description?”

He shook his head. “After the vehicle stopped, the guy looked back for an instant through the glass. Maybe had a second thought at what he’d done. I couldn’t get a read on his face. Tinted windows. Believe me, I wish I had.”

Hauck looked back up the hill and followed what he imagined was the victim’s path. If he worked at J&D Tint and Rims, he’d have to walk across West Street, then cross the Post Road at the light to get to the diner.

“You say you used to be on the force?”

“Township of Freehold.” The witness’s eyes lit up. “South Jersey. Near Atlantic City. Twenty-three years.”

“Good for you. So what I’m going to ask you, Mr. Dietz, you may understand. Did you happen to notice if the vehicle was traveling at a consistently high rate of speed prior to making the turn? Or did it speed up as the victim stepped into the street?”

“You’re trying to decide if this was an accident or intentional?” The ex-cop cocked his head.

“I’m just trying to get a picture of what took place,” Hauck replied.

“I heard him from up there.” Dietz pointed up the block toward the Arby’s. “He shot down the hill, then spun into the turn—outta control. To me it was like he must’ve been drunk. I don’t know, I just looked up when I heard the impact. He dragged the poor kid’s body like a sack of wheat. You can still see the marks. Then he stopped. I think the kid was underneath him at that point, before he sped away.”

Dietz said he’d be happy to look at some photos of white SUVs, to try to narrow down the make and model. “You find this SOB, Lieutenant. Anything I can do, you let me know. I wanna be the hammer that drives the nail into his coffin.”

Hauck thanked him. Not as much to go on as he would have liked. Muñoz stepped over. The guy he’d been talking to saw the incident from across the street. A track coach from up in Wilton, twenty miles away. Hodges. He identified the same white vehicle and same out-of-state plates. “AD or something. Maybe eight …” He was just stepping out of the bank after using the ATM. It had happened so quickly that he, too, couldn’t get much of a read. He gave roughly the same sketchy picture Dietz had of what had taken place.

Muñoz shrugged, disappointed. “Not a whole lot to go on, is it, Lieutenant?”

Hauck pressed his lips in frustration. “No.”

He went back to his car and called in an APB. A white late-model SUV driven by a white male, “possibly Honda or Acura, possibly Massachusetts or New Hampshire plates, possibly beginning AD8. Likely front-end body damage.” They’d put it out to the state police and the auto-repair shops all over the Northeast. They’d canvass people farther up along West Street to see if anyone spotted him racing by. There might be some speed-control cameras along the highway. That was their best hope.

Unless, of course, it turned out someone had it in for Abel Raymond.

There was a guy in a Yankees cap standing nearby, huddled against the chill. Stasio brought him over. Dave Corso, the owner of the auto custom shop where AJ Raymond worked.

“He was a good kid.” Corso shook his head, visibly distressed. “He’d been working with me for about a year. He was talented. He remodeled old cars himself. He was up from Florida.”

Hauck recalled his license. “You know where?”

The body-shop owner shrugged. “I don’t know. Tallahassee, Pensacola … He always wore these T-shirts, the Florida State Seminoles. I think he took everyone out for a beer when they won that college bowl last year. I think his father was a sailor or something down there.”

“You mean like in the navy?”

“No. Tugboat or something. He had his picture tacked up on the board. It’s still inside.”

Hauck nodded. “Where did Mr. Raymond live?”

“Up in Bridgeport, I’m pretty sure. I know we have it on file inside, but you know how it is—things change. But I know he banked over at First City….” He told them that AJ got this call, maybe twenty minutes before he left. He was in the middle of doing this tinting. Then he came and said he was going on early break. “Marty something, I think the guy said. AJ said he was going across the street to grab some smokes. The diner, I think. It has a machine.” Corso glanced over at the covered mound in the street. “Then this … How the hell do you figure?”

Hauck removed the victim’s wallet from out of a bag and showed Corso the photo of the girl and her son. “Any idea who this is?”

The auto-body manager shrugged. “I think he had some gal up there…. Or maybe Stamford. She picked him up here once or twice. Lemme look…. Yeah, I think that’s her. AJ was into working on classic cars. You know, restoring them. Corvettes, LeSabres, Mustangs. I think he’d just been up at a show this past weekend. Man …”

“Mr. Corso.” Hauck took the man aside. “Is there anyone you can think of who’d possibly want to do Mr. Raymond harm? Did he have debts? Did he gamble? Do drugs? Anything you can think of would help.”

“You’re thinking this wasn’t an accident?” The victim’s employer’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Just doing our job,” Muñoz said.

“Jeez, I don’t know. To me he was just a solid kid. He showed up. Did his job. People liked him here. But now that you mention it, this gal … I think she was married or recently split up from her husband. I know somewhere back I heard AJ mention he was having trouble with her ex. Maybe Jackie would know. Inside. He was closer to him.”

Hauck nodded. He signaled to Muñoz to follow that up.

“While we’re in there, Mr. Corso, you mind if we check where the phone call he received came from, too?”

There was something in Hauck’s gut that wasn’t sitting well about this.

He went out to the side of the road, looking back down the knoll to the accident site. It was visible—clearly. The West Street turnoff. Nothing obstructing the view. The assailant’s car hadn’t slowed. It hadn’t made a move to stop or avoid him. A DUI would have had to have been drop-dead out of his gourd on a Monday at noon to have hit this kid head-on.

The medical team from upstate had finally arrived. Hauck went back down the hill. He picked up the victim’s cell phone. He’d check the recently dialed numbers. It wouldn’t surprise him if the number that had called in would be traced to the same guy.

Things like this often worked that way.

Hauck knelt over Abel Raymond’s body a last time, taking a good look at the kid’s face. I’m gonna find out for you, son, he vowed. His thoughts flashed back to the bombing. There were a lot of people in town who weren’t going to be coming home tonight. This would only be one. But this one he could do something about.

This one—Hauck stared at the locks of long red hair, the ache of a long-untended wound rising up inside him—this one had a face.

As he was about to get up, Hauck checked the victim’s pockets a final time. In the guy’s trousers, he found some change, a gas receipt. Then he reached into the chest pocket under the embroidered patch that bore his initials. AJ.

He poked his finger around and brought out a yellow scrap of paper, a standard Post-it note. It had a name written on it with a number, a local phone exchange.

It could’ve been the person AJ Raymond was on his way to meet. Or it could’ve been in there for weeks. Hauck dropped it in the evidence bag with the other things he had pulled, one more link to check out.

Charles Friedman.

CHAPTER NINE

I never heard from my husband again. I never knew what happened.

The fires raged underground in Grand Central for most of the day. There’d been a powerful accelerant used in the blast. Four blasts. One in each of the first two cars of the 7:51 out of Greenwich, exploding just as it came to a stop. The others in trash baskets along the platform packed with a hundred pounds of hexagen, enough to bring a good-sized building down. A splinter cell, they said. Over Iraq. Can you imagine? Charlie hated the war in Iraq. They found names, pictures of the station, traces of chemicals where the bombs were made. The fire that burned there for most of two days had reached close to twenty-three hundred degrees.

We waited. We waited all day that first day to hear something. Anything. Charlie’s voice. A message from one of the hospitals that he was there. It seemed like we called the whole world: the NYPD, the hotline that had been set up. Our local congressman, whom Charlie knew.

We never did.

One hundred and eleven people died. That included three of the bombers, who, they suspected, were in the first two cars. Where Charlie always sat. Many of them couldn’t even be identified. No distinguishable remains. They just went to work one morning and disappeared from the earth. That was Charlie. My husband of eighteen years. He just yelled good-bye over the hum of the hair dryer and went to take in the car.

And disappeared.

What they did find was the handle of the leather briefcase the kids had given him last year—the charred top piece still attached, blown clear from the blast site, the gold-embossed monogram, CMF, which made it final for the first time and brought our tears.

Charles Michael Friedman.

Those first days I was sure he was going to crawl out of that mess. Charlie could pull himself out of anything. He could fall off the damn roof trying to fix the satellite and he’d land on his feet. You could just count on him so much.

But he didn’t. There was never a call, or a piece of his clothing, even a handful of ashes.

And I’ll never know.

I’ll never know if he died from the initial explosion or in the flames. If he was conscious or if he felt pain. If he had a final thought of us. If he called out our names.

Part of me wanted one last chance to take him by the shoulders and scream, “How could you let yourself die in there, Charlie?” How?

Now I guess I have to accept that he’s gone. That he won’t be coming back. Though it’s so effing hard….

That he’ll never get to drive Samantha to college that first time. Or watch Alex score a goal. Or see the people they become. Things that would have made him so proud.

We were going to grow old together. Sail off to that Caribbean cove. Now he’s gone, in a flash.

Eighteen years of our lives.

Eighteen years …

And I don’t even get to kiss him good-bye.

CHAPTER TEN

A few days later—Friday, Saturday, Karen had lost track—a police detective came by the house.

Not from the city. People from the police in New York and the FBI had been by a few times trying to trace Charlie’s movements that day. This one was local. He called ahead and asked if he could talk with Karen for just a few moments on a matter unrelated to the bombing. She said sure. Anything that helped take her mind off things for a few moments was a godsend to her now.

She was in the kitchen arranging flowers that had come in from one of the outfits that Charlie cleared through when he stopped by.

Karen knew she looked a mess. She wasn’t exactly keeping up appearances right now. Her dad, Sid, who was up from Atlanta and who was being very protective of her, brought him in.

“I’m Lieutenant Hauck,” he said. He was nicely dressed, for a cop, in a tweed sport jacket and slacks and a tasteful tie. “I saw you at the meeting in town Monday night. I’ll only take a few moments of your time. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” Karen nodded and pushed her hair back as they sat down in the sunroom, trying to shift the mood with an appreciative smile.

“My daughter’s not feeling so well,” her father cut in, “so maybe, whatever it is you have to go over …”

“Dad, I’m fine.” She smiled. She rolled her eyes affectionately, then caught the lieutenant’s gaze. “It’s okay. Let me talk to the policeman.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m out here. If you need me …” He went back into the TV room and shut the door.

“He doesn’t know what to do,” Karen said with a deep sigh. “No one does. It’s tough for everyone right now.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” the detective said. “I won’t take long.” He sat across from her and took something out of his pocket. “I don’t know if you heard, but there was another incident in town on Monday. A hit-and-run accident, down on the Post Road. A young man was killed.”

“No, I didn’t,” Karen said, surprised.

“His name was Raymond. Abel John Raymond.” The lieutenant handed her a photo of a smiling, well-built young man with red dreadlocks, standing next to a surfboard on the beach. “AJ, he was called. He worked in a custom-car shop here in town. He was crossing West Street when he was run over at a high speed by an SUV making a right turn. Whoever it was didn’t even bother to stop. The guy dragged him about fifty feet, then took off.”

“That’s horrible,” Karen said, staring at the face again, feeling a stab of sorrow. Whatever had happened to her, it was still a small town. It could have been anybody. Anybody’s son. The same day she’d lost Charlie.

She looked back at him. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Any chance you’ve seen this person before?”

Karen looked again. A handsome face, full of life. The long red locks would’ve made it hard to forget. “I don’t think so. No.”

“You never heard the name Abel Raymond or maybe AJ Raymond?”

Karen stared at the photo once again and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Lieutenant. Why?”

The detective seemed disappointed. He reached back into his jacket again, this time removing a yellow slip of paper, a wrinkled Post-it note contained in a plastic bag. “We found this in the victim’s work uniform, at the crime scene.”

As Karen looked, she felt her insides tighten and her eyes grow wide.

“That is your husband’s name, isn’t it? Charles Friedman. And his cell number?”

Karen looked up, completely mystified, and nodded. “Yes. It is.”

“And you’re sure you never heard your husband mention his name? Raymond? He did tinting and custom painting at a car shop in town.”

“Tinting?” Karen shook her head and smiled with her eyes. “Unless he was gearing up for some kind of midlife crisis he didn’t tell me about.”

Hauck smiled back at her. But Karen could see he was disappointed.

“I wish I could help you, Lieutenant. Are you thinking this was intentional, this hit-and-run?”

“Just being thorough.” He took back the photo and the slip of paper with Charlie’s name. He was handsome, Karen thought. In a rugged sort of way. Serious blue eyes. But something caring in them. It must have been hard for him to come here today. It was clear he wanted to do right by this boy.

She shrugged. “It’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? Charlie’s name on that paper. In that boy’s pocket. The same day … you having to come here like this.”

“A bad one”—he nodded, forcing a tight smile—“yes. I’ll be out of your way.” They both stood up. “If you think of anything, you’ll let me know. I’ll leave a card.”

“Of course.” Karen took it and stared at it: CHIEF OF DETECTIVES. VIOLENT CRIMES. GREENWICH POLICE DEPARTMENT.

“I’m very sorry about your husband,” the lieutenant repeated.

His eyes seemed to drift to a photo she kept on the shelf. She and Charlie, dressed up formal. At her cousin Meredith’s wedding. Karen always loved the way the two of them looked in that picture.

She smiled wistfully. “Eighteen years together, I don’t even get to kiss him good-bye.”

For a second they just stood there, she wishing she hadn’t said that, he shifting on the balls of his feet, seemingly contemplating something and a little strained. Then he said, “On 9/11, I was working in the city at the NYPD’s Office of Information. It was my job to try and track down people who were missing. You know, presumed to be inside the buildings, lost. It was tough. I saw a lot of families”—he wet his lips—“in this same situation. I guess all I’m trying to say is, I have a rough idea of what you’re going through….”

Karen felt a sting at the back of her eyes. She looked up and tried to smile, not knowing what else to say.

“You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do.” He took a step to the door. “I still keep a few friends down there.”

“I appreciate that, Lieutenant.” She walked him through the kitchen to the back door in order to avoid the crowd in front. “It’s awful. I wish you luck with finding this guy. I wish I could be more help.”

“You have your own things to be thinking about,” he said, opening the door.

Karen looked at him. A tone of hopefulness rose in her voice. “So did anyone ever turn up? When you were looking?”

“Two.” He shrugged. “One at St. Vincent’s Hospital. She had been struck by debris. The other, he never even made it in to work that morning. He witnessed what happened and just couldn’t go home for a few days.”

“Not the best odds.” Karen smiled, looking at him as if she knew what he must be thinking. “It would just be good, you know, to have something….”

“My best to you and your family, Mrs. Friedman.” The lieutenant opened the door. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Outside, Hauck stood a moment on the walkway.

He had hoped the name and number in AJ Raymond’s pocket would prove more promising. It was pretty much all he had left.

A check of the phone records where the victim worked hadn’t panned out at all. The call that he’d received—Marty something, the manager had said—was designated a private caller. From a cell phone. Totally untraceable now.

Nor had the girlfriend’s ex. The guy turned out to be a lowlife, maybe a wife beater, but his alibi checked. He’d been at a conference at his kid’s school at the time of the accident, and anyway he drove a navy Toyota Corolla, not an SUV. Hauck had double-checked.

Now all he was left with were the conflicting reports from the two eyewitnesses and his APB on the white SUVs.

Next to nothing.

It burned in him. Like AJ Raymond’s red hair.