Andrew Gross - The Dark Tide

“Keep at it, Lieutenant,” Muñoz said, flopping back over the arm of the heavy chair.

All that was left was the detail of the eyewitness depositions. Deposition. There was only one.

As Hauck opened it up, he froze. He felt his jaw drop open, his eyeballs pulled like magnets to the name on the deposition’s front page.

“See what I’m seeing?” Freddy Muñoz sat up. He swung his legs off the chair.

“Yeah.” Hauck nodded and took a breath. “I sure do.”

The lone eyewitness to Jonathan Lauer’s murder had been a retired New Jersey policeman.

His name was Phil Dietz.

The same eyewitness as at AJ Raymond’s hit-and-run.

He had slipped up. Hauck read over his testimony once, twice, then again.

He had slipped up big-time!

Immediately Hauck recalled how Pappy Raymond had described the guy who’d met him outside the bar and put the pressure on him. Stocky, mustached. In the same moment, it became clear to Hauck just who had taken those pictures of AJ Raymond’s body in the street.

Dietz.

His heart slammed to a stop.

Hauck thought back to his own case. Dietz had described himself as being in the security business. He’d said he’d run down to the crash site after the accident. That he never got a good look at the car, a white SUV, out-of-state plates, as it sped away up the road.

Good look, my ass.

He’d been planted there.

That’s why they’d never been able to locate any white SUV with Massachusetts or New Hampshire plates. That’s why the New Jersey police couldn’t find a similar vehicle there.

They didn’t exist! It had all been set up.

It was a thousand-to-one shot anyone would have ever connected the two incidents, if Karen hadn’t seen her husband’s face in that documentary.

Hauck grinned. Dietz was at both sites. Two states apart, separated by over a year.

Of course, that meant Charles Friedman was connected, too.

Hauck looked back up at Muñoz, a feeling that he was finally getting somewhere buzzing in his veins. “Anyone else know about this, Freddy?”

“You said keep it between us, Lieutenant.” The detective shrugged. “So that’s what I did.”

He looked back up at Freddy. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Muñoz nodded.

“I want to go over the Raymond file again. You get me a copy up here today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hauck stared at the image of the gregarious, mustached face-an ex-cop-now morphed into the calculating countenance of a professional killer.

The two cases hadn’t merged, they had basically crashed together. Head-on. And this time there were other people to see. His blood was racing.

You screwed up, he said to Dietz. Big-time, you son of a bitch!

THE FIRST THING Hauck did was forward a photo of Dietz’s face to Pappy, who a day later confirmed that that had been the same man who’d been in Pensacola. That alone was probably enough to arrest Dietz right now for conspiracy to murder AJ Raymond, and maybe Jonathan Lauer, too.

But it didn’t take things through to Charles Friedman.

Coincidence didn’t prove anything. With a good lawyer, it could be argued that being at both crash sites was just that. He’d given his word to Karen to find out about her husband. Charles had been in Greenwich. Lauer worked for him. They both led to Dolphin. Dietz was in it, too. Hauck wasn’t liking at all where this was leading. Tying Charles to Dietz would be a start. Right now he was afraid that if he blew the lid off everything, who knew where any of it would lead?

You should go back to Fitzpatrick, a voice in him said. Swear out a warrant. Let the feds figure this out. He had taken oaths. His whole life he’d always upheld them. Karen had uncovered a conspiracy.

But something held him back.

What if Charles was innocent? What if he couldn’t tie Charles and Dietz together? What if he hurt her, Karen, her whole family, after vowing to help her, trying to make his case, not hers? Bring him in. Put the pressure on Dietz. He would roll.

Or was it her? Was it what he felt himself falling into, these cases colliding together. Wanting to protect her just a little longer until he knew for sure. What stirred so fiercely in his blood. What he lay awake thinking of at night. Conflicted. As a cop, knowing his feelings were leading him astray.

He called her later that day, staring at Dietz’s file. “I’m heading down to New Jersey for a day. We may have found something.”

Karen sounded excited. “What?”

“I looked through the file on Jonathan Lauer’s hit-and-run. The only eyewitness there, a man named Dietz-he was one of the two witnesses to AJ Raymond’s death, too.”

Karen gasped. In the following pause, Hauck knew she was putting together just what this meant.

“They were set up, Karen. This guy, Dietz, he was at both accidents. Except they weren’t accidents, Karen. They were homicides. To cover something up. You did good. No one would ever have put any of this together if you hadn’t gone to visit Lauer.”

She didn’t reply. There was only silence. The silence of her trying to decide what this meant. In regard to Charles. For her kids. For her.

“What the hell am I supposed to think, Ty?”

“Listen, Karen, before we jump…”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Karen said. “I’m sorry about these people. It’s terrible. I know this is what you were always thinking. But I can’t help thinking that there’s something going on here, and it’s starting to scare me, Ty. What does all this mean about Charles?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Find out how, Ty? What are you going to do?”

There was a lot he had withheld from her. That Charles had a connection to Falcon. To Pappy Raymond. That he was sure Charles was complicit in AJ Raymond’s death-and maybe Jonathan Lauer’s, too. But how could he tell her any of that now?

“I’m going to go down there,” he said, “to Dietz’s home. Tomorrow.”

“You’re going down there? What for?”

“See what the hell I can find. Try and figure out what our next step is.”

“Our next step? You arrest him, Ty. You know he set those poor people up. He’s responsible for their deaths!”

“You wanted to know how this connected to your husband, Karen! Isn’t that why you came to me? You wanted to know what he’s done.”

“This man’s a murderer, Ty. Two people are dead.”

“I know that two people are dead, Karen! That’s one thing you don’t have to remind me of.”

“What are you saying, Ty?”

The silence was frosty between them for a second. Suddenly Hauck felt sure that by admitting he was not going down to bring Dietz in he was somehow giving away everything that was in his heart: the feelings he carried for her, the braids of red hair that had pushed him here, the echo of a distant pain.

Finally Karen swallowed. “You’re not telling me everything, are you, Ty? Charles is tied to this, isn’t he? Deeper than you’re letting on?”

“Yes.”

“My husband…” Karen let out a dark chuckle. “He always bet against the trends. A contrarian, he called himself. A fancy name for someone who always thinks he’s smarter than everybody else. You better be careful down there, Ty, whatever you’re planning.”

“I’m a cop, Karen,” Hauck said. “This is what cops do.”

“No, Ty, cops arrest people when they’re implicated in a crime. I don’t know what you’re going to do down there, but what I do know is that some of it is about me. And that’s scaring me, Ty. You just make sure you do the right thing, okay?”

Hauck flipped open the file and stared at Dietz’s face. “Okay.”