“Charlie …?” Karen shook her head. “You can’t think Charlie’s some kind of killer, Ty. No. Why?”
“To cover up what Raymond’s father stumbled onto in Pensacola. That they were falsifying shipments of oil in one of the companies Charlie controlled.”
Karen shook her head again defiantly.
“It’s true. Have you ever heard of Dolphin Oil, Karen? Or something called Falcon Partners?”
“No.”
“They’re subsidiaries, owned by his company. Harbor. Offshore. You want me to call in the police, Karen? If I do, they’re going to issue an immediate warrant for his arrest. There are ample grounds—fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to commit murder. Is that what you want me to do, Karen? To you and your family? Call in the police? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”
Karen put a hand to her forehead and shook her head reflexively. “I don’t know.”
“Charlie was tied to them. Through the investment companies he controlled. Through Dietz. He’s tied in to both murders, Karen—”
“I don’t believe it! You can’t expect me to believe my husband’s a murderer, Ty!”
“Look!” Hauck reached over and grabbed the papers he had taken from Dietz’s office and put them in front of her face. “His name is all over the place. Two people are dead, Karen. And now you have to listen to me and make a decision, because there may be more. This guy Dietz, he’s looking for Charlie, too. I don’t know who the hell he is or who he’s working for, but he’s out there, Karen, and somehow he knows Charlie’s alive, just like we do, and he’s searching for him, too—I found the trail! Maybe they’re trying to shut him up, I don’t know. But I guarantee you if he finds him, Karen, before we do, it won’t be to tearfully look him in the eyes and ask how he could’ve possibly done this to you.”
Karen nodded haltingly, a tremor of confusion rattling her. Hauck reached over and took her hand. He wrapped his fingers around her tightened fist.
“So you tell me, Karen, is that what you really want me to do? Call in the police? Because the police are involved. I’m involved. And after today, with what’s happened, I can’t just reverse the clock and go back empty-handed anymore.”
Her eyes were filled, tears reflecting in them. “He’s the father of my kids. You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to kill him myself, but what you’re telling me … a murderer? No, I won’t believe it till I hear it from him.”
“I’ll find him for you, Karen. I promise I will. But just be sure that with what’s happened now, these people know I’m onto them. We’re in it now. If that’s something you don’t think you can face—and I’d understand it if it was—now’s the time to say so.”
Karen looked down. Hauck felt a finger wrap around his hand, her pinkie, cautious and tremulous. It squeezed. There was a frightened look in her eyes, but behind it something deeper, a twinkling of resolve. She looked at him and shook her head again.
“I want you to find him, Ty.”
Her face dipped, ever so slightly, close to his, her hair tumbling against his cheek. Her breath was close and halting. Their knees touched. Hauck felt his blood spark alive as the side of her breast brushed his arm. Their lips could have touched right there. It would have taken only a nudge, and she would have folded into him—and a part of him wanted her to, a strong part, but another part said no. The hair on his arms tingled as he listened to her breathe.
“You knew this all along,” she said to him. “About Charlie. That this led back to him. You held it back from me.”
“I didn’t want you to be any more hurt until I was sure.”
She nodded. She locked her fingers inside his hand. “He wouldn’t kill anyone, Ty. I don’t care how foolish it makes me look. I know him. I lived with him for close to twenty years. He’s the father of my kids. I know.”
“So what do you want to do?”
Karen gently eased open Hauck’s robe. He tensed. She ran her fingers along his chest. She reached for the bag of liniment she had brought. “I want to take a look at that wound.”
“No,” he said, catching her hand. “You know what I meant.”
She held a moment, their hands still touching.
“I want to hear from his lips what he’s done, why he walked away from us, from almost twenty years of marriage, his family. I want to find him, Ty. Find Charles. Something came up while you were down there. I think I may know how.”
It was the car.
She had already been through everything two times over, just as Ty had asked. Still, while he was down in Jersey, she felt she had to do something. To keep from worrying.
So Karen tore through Charlie’s things all over again—the old bills, the stacks of receipts he’d left in his closet, the papers on his desk. Even the sites he’d visited on his computer before he “died.”
A wild-goose chase, she told herself. Just like the one before.
Except this time some things came up. A file buried deep in his desk, hidden under a pile of legal papers. A file Karen had never noticed before. From before Charlie died. Things she didn’t understand.
A small note card still in its envelope—addressed to Charles. The kind that accompanied a gift of flowers. Karen opened it, a little hesitantly, and saw it was written in a hand she didn’t recognize.
It stopped her.
Sorry about the pooch, Charles. Could the kids be next?
Sorry about the pooch. Karen saw that her hands were shaking. Whoever wrote it had to be talking about Sasha. And what did that possibly mean, that the kids could be next?
Their kids …
Suddenly Karen felt a tightness in her chest. What had these people done?
And then, in that same hidden-away file, she came across one of the holiday cards they’d sent as a family before Charlie had died. The four of them sitting on a wooden fence at a field near their ski house in Vermont. A happy time.
She opened it.
She almost threw up.
The kids’ faces, Samantha and Alexander—they had both been cut out.
Karen covered her face with her hands and felt her cheeks flush with blood.
“What the hell is happening here, Charlie?” She stared at the card. What the hell were you involved in? What were you doing to us, Charlie? All of a sudden, the incident in Samantha’s car at school came hurtling back to Karen, her heart starting to race. Accusingly. She got up from the desk. She wanted to hit something. She touched her hand to her face. Looked around the room.
His room.
“Talk to me, Charlie, you bastard, talk to me!”
And then her eyes seemed to fall on it.
Amid the clutter of papers and prospectuses and sports magazines she had still never quite cleared from his office.
The stack. The neatly piled stack Charlie kept on the bookshelf. Every issue. A sure-as-hell fire hazard,