Andrew Gross: Reckless

Not to mention the fact that he had suddenly left the force and gone into the private sector. After fifteen years.

Now he traded up to a jacket and tie every day and had spiffy new digs in an office park on the water. Earning three times what he had before. He had colleagues in Europe and Asia on his speed dial. He even glanced through the Wall Street Journal every morning, pretending he was keeping abreast of business news, after he checked the sports scores on ESPN.com, of course. He had opened himself up to a new feeling, the arc of his new life seeming to work out. He was, like Annie pushed him to do, trusting the moment. Okay, maybe like he’d said, it was somewhere down deep, somewhere that didn’t come up to the surface very often. But it had been a long time since he felt this way. Boundaryless. Free of regret.

“Really, I gotta get up,” he said. He lifted her off. “I’ll do the coffee.”

Annie fell back against the pillows, groaning loudly, “Alright…”

The news anchor came back on. “And now, back to our lead from the top of the hour…”

The congestion on the Merritt Parkway had given way to something far more serious.

“In Connecticut, the town of Greenwich is waking this morning to a horrifying triple murder. An equities trader at a prestigious Wall Street firm was brutally shot to death during the night along with his wife and daughter in their expansive home in backcountry Greenwich. Cindy Marquez is on the scene…”

Hauck sat up, his years as head of detectives taking over, as the attractive reporter, bundled against the cold, stood in front of two large stone pillars leading to a typical Greenwich home.

“Kate, the local police believe that the motive behind this family’s tragic end was simply a robbery gone bad. A string of break-ins up here has rocked this affluent community for months. But until now, none had ever turned so violent.

“Marc Glassman”-a photo flashed on the screen-“who was forty-one and worked as a lead equities trader for troubled Wall Street giant Wertheimer Grant, was found shot downstairs in their posh five-bedroom home off of Cat Rock Road…”

Hauck sat up. A tremor knifed through him.

“Hold it a second,” he said, disentangling from Annie’s legs. He stared, his heart rate accelerating, as he edged closer to the screen.

“The bodies of his wife, April, who was well known in local charities and schools, and their teenage daughter, Rebecca, were found in an upstairs closet. A younger son…”

Hauck fixed again on the photo. A shot of the family in happy times. His mind raced as the reporter described the grisly scene; he fixed on the husband-slightly receding hair, in a fleece pullover and sunglasses, one arm around his daughter, who was wearing an oversize college sweatshirt and had long brown hair, and the other arm around another child, a son, younger, a mop of yellow hair and smiles.

Then he focused in on the wife.

Pretty. Happy looking. In a green baseball cap, her light-brown hair, in a ponytail, peeking through the vent. A beautiful smile that was both proud and tragic at the same time.

“Oh, God…” Hauck groaned, sucking in a fortifying breath.

“I know, it’s horrible,” Annie said. She came up behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder, staring past him at the screen. “Are you okay?”

He nodded silently, not an answer as much as it was all he could do. A heavy weight fell inside him.

“I knew her,” he said.

The gleaming white Dassault Falcon touched down gracefully at Westchester County Airport, only a stone’s throw from the Greenwich town line.

The sleek six-passenger jet taxied off the runway to the NetJets private hangar. When the engines cut off, the door opened, and the attached stairway lowered down. An attractive couple stepped off-a stylish woman in her forties, blond hair flowing from underneath her cowboy hat, a fur draped around her shoulders; and her companion, dark complexioned, sunglasses, a little younger, in a navy cashmere blazer and jeans. The woman stopped at the top of the steps and said a word of thanks to the pilot, complimenting him on the landing.

“Always perfect, Mike.”

“Always a pleasure, Mrs. Simons. We’ll wait to hear from you on the Anguilla trip.”

“I’ll have Pam be in touch as soon as I know. You have a nice week.”

As they stepped down to the tarmac, both wore the tan of a week of spring skiing in Aspen.

Merrill Simons was forty-four and a household name around the charity circuit in Greenwich. Over the years she had chaired dozens of balls, served on a thousand committees, pretty much knew everyone. That went hand in hand with being married for twenty-three years to Peter Simons, chairman of Wall Street’s Reynolds Reid.

But that was all ancient history now. Their divorce had been finalized a year ago, six months after he had moved in with Erskina Menshikova, the Victoria’s Secret lingerie model, granting Merrill the house on Dublin Hill, the place in Palm Beach, and the penthouse overlooking the park on Fifth Avenue, not to mention continued use of the private jet.

The very same six months before the divorce was final, Merrill acknowledged, with a certain degree of relish, Reynolds Reid’s stock had begun to collapse, due to the firm’s heavy exposure in the mortgage crisis and the resulting wave of global sell-offs. She’d always suspected Peter didn’t know shit about dealing with a balance sheet, any more than he knew about being a father or keeping a marriage together.

She’d gotten that one right!

Now she enjoyed the thought that he was probably sweating bullets with a net worth about a quarter of what it was at the time of their settlement and was probably no longer able to get it up with his silky-thighed, golden-haired trophy catch. Which was only a matter of time anyway, she knew firsthand-regardless of Reynolds’s stock plunge.

Merrill had found her own “new chapter to write” as well, as Pete had aptly phrased it the day he told her he wanted to leave. Dani Thibault was handsome and successful in his own right. He had business interests throughout Europe-hotels and commercial office deals-partially financed by his ties to the Belgian royal family. He was a breeder on the polo circuit. Windsurfed. Skied like he’d been born on them. He didn’t seem to need her money, and he seemed to love how he had awakened her forty-four-year-old body from its long slumber. He did things to her that her husband hadn’t done since he was a trainee back in the bond department. Actually, had never done, if she was truthful! Dani seemed to know the world-he could line up fabulous evenings at private clubs in London, could get a table at El Bulli near Barcelona or Robuchon in Paris. Even her kids-Louisa was in L.A. working at a production company, and Jason was still a junior at GW-were taken with him too and loved the fact that their mom had pulled herself up and transitioned to a new and happier life. That she was getting laid. Merrill’s girlfriends in town, mired in their own tired, unfulfilling marriages, were ogling her in jealousy.

It was just that a few details that concerned her had recently come up. Regarding Dani.

She hadn’t shared them with him. She’d been keeping them to herself the entire trip. Things were getting deeper between them, and she’d begun to realize just how little she actually knew about him. About the man she was falling in love with.

And a little of what he had told her just wasn’t adding up.

As they deplaned, two cars were waiting on the tarmac. One, a black, chauffeured Mercedes C 63 AMG, was Dani’s. His familiar driver opened the door. The other was Merrill’s own silver Audi wagon.

“I have to head into the city,” Dani said in his hard-to-pin-down but definitely sexy European accent. She had guessed German; he said Dutch, with a touch of French in it, maybe, from Brussels. “I have meetings until five. Then we have this thing at the library tonight, right? I’ll change at the apartment, if that’s okay.”