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.
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.
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