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Her heart kept sinking. “This is Charlie Friedman….”
Tears rolled down her cheeks as she pushed back her worst fears. This can’t be happening!
Karen made a sharp right out of the Sportsplex’s lot onto Prospect, cut the light at the corner, accelerating onto I-95. Traffic was backed up, slowing everything headed into downtown Greenwich.
All sorts of new, conflicting reports were coming in. The radio said that multiple explosions had taken place. That there was a fire on the tracks, burning out of control. That the intense heat and the possibility of noxious fumes made it impossible for firefighters even to get close. That there were significant casualties.
It was starting to scare Karen to death.
He could be trapped down there. Anywhere. He could be burned or injured, unable to get out. On his way to a hospital. There were a hundred fucking scenarios that could possibly be playing out. Karen pressed the speed dial again.
“Where are you, goddamn it, Charlie? Come on, please….”
Her mind flashed again to Alex and Samantha. They wouldn’t have any idea. Even if word had spread to them, it wouldn’t occur to them. Charlie always drove.
Karen pulled off the highway at Exit 5, Old Greenwich, and onto the Post Road. Suddenly her car phone beeped. Thank God! Her heart almost leaped out of her chest.
But it was only Paula, her best friend, who lived nearby in Riverside, only a few minutes away.
“You hear what’s going on?” The sound of the TV was blaring in the background.
“Of course I’ve heard, Paula. I—”
“They’re saying it was from Greenwich. There might even be people we—”
“Paula.” Karen interrupted her. She could barely force the words out of her mouth. “I think Charlie was on that train.”
“What?”
Karen told her about the car and not being able to reach him. She said she was heading home and wanted to keep the lines free, in case he or his office might call.
“Of course, honey. I understand. Kar, he’s going to be okay. Charlie always comes out okay. You know that, Kar, don’t you?”
“I know,” Karen said, though she knew she was lying to herself. “I know.”
Karen drove through town, her heart beating madly, then turned onto Shore Road near the sound. Then Sea Wall. Half a block down, she jerked the Lexus into her driveway. Charlie’s old Mustang was pulled into the third bay of the garage, just as she’d left it an hour earlier. She ran through the garage and into the kitchen. Her hope was momentarily raised by a message light flashing on the machine. Please … she prayed to herself, and pushed the play button, her blood pulsing with alarm.
“Hey, Mrs. Friedman …” a dull voice came over the speaker. It was Mal, their plumber, droning on and on about the water heater she’d wanted to have fixed, about some goddamn valve he was having a bitch of a time finding. Tears ran down Karen’s cheeks as her legs started to give out, and she pressed herself to the wall and sank helplessly onto the floor. Tobey wagged his way up, nuzzling into her. She mashed her tears with the palms of her hands. “Not now, baby. Please, not now….”
Up on the counter, Karen fumbled for the remote. She flicked on the TV. The situation had gotten worse. Matt Lauer was on the screen—with Brian Williams now—and the reports were that there were dozens of casualties down on the tracks, that the fire was spreading and uncontained. That some of the lower part of the building had collapsed, and while they were flashing to some expert about Al Qaeda and terrorism, they split-screened to the dark cloud seeping into the Manhattan sky.
He would’ve called them, Karen knew, at least Heather at the office—if he was okay. Maybe even before he would’ve called her. That’s what scared her most. She closed her eyes.
Just be okay, Charlie, wherever you are. Just be okay.
A car door slammed outside. Karen heard the doorbell ring. Someone called out her name and came running into the house.
It was Paula. She fixed on Karen huddled on the floor, in a way she had never seen her before. Paula sank down next to her, and they just hugged each other, tears glistening on each other’s cheeks.
“It’s gonna be okay, honey.” Paula stroked Karen’s hair. “I know it will. There could be hundreds of people down there. Maybe the phones aren’t working. Maybe he needed some medical attention. Charlie’s a survivor. If anyone’s gonna get out, it’s him. You’ll see, baby. It’s gonna be okay.”
And Karen kept nodding back and repeating, “I know, I know,” wiping the tears with her sleeve.
They called over and over. What else was there to do? Charlie’s cell phone. His office. Maybe thirty, forty times.
At some point Karen even sniffled back a smile. “You know how mad Charlie gets when I bug him at the office?”
By nine forty-five they had settled onto the couch in the family room. That’s when they heard the car pull up and more doors slamming. Alex and Samantha burst in through the kitchen with a shout. “School’s closed!”
They stuck their heads into the TV room. “You heard what happened?” Alex said.
Karen could barely answer. The sight of them struck terror in her heart. She told them to sit down. They could see that her face was raw and worried. That something was terribly wrong was written all over it.
Samantha sat down across from her. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“Daddy took the car in this morning,” Karen said, “for service.”
“So?”
Karen swallowed back a lump, or she was sure she would start to cry. “Afterward,” she paused, “I think he went into the city by train.”
Both kids’ eyes went wide and followed hers, as if drawn, to the wide screen.
“He’s there?” her son asked. “At Grand Central?”
“I don’t know, baby. We haven’t heard from him. That’s what’s so worrisome. He called and said he was on the train. That was eight thirty-four. This happened at eight forty-one. I don’t know….”
Karen was trying so hard to appear positive and strong, trying with all her heart not to alarm them, because she knew with that same unflinching certainty that any moment Charlie would call, tell them he had made it out, that he was okay. So she didn’t even feel the trail of tears carving its way down her cheeks and onto her lap, and Samantha staring at her, jaw parted, about to cry herself. And Alex—her poor, macho Alex, white as parchment—eyes glued to the horrifying plume of smoke elevating into the Manhattan sky.
For a while no one said a word. They just stared, all in their own world between denial and hope. Sam, arms hung loosely around her brother’s neck, her chin resting nervously on his shoulder. Alex, grasping Karen’s hand for the first time in years, watching, waiting for their father’s face to emerge. Paula, elbows on knees, poised to shout and point, Look, there he is! Jump up in glee. Waiting with all the certainty in the world to hear the phone she was sure was about to ring.
Alex turned to Karen. “Dad’s gonna make it out of there? Isn’t he, Mom?”
“Of course he is, baby.” Karen squeezed his hand. “You know your father. If anyone will, it’s him. He’ll make it out.”
That was when they heard a rumble. On the screen the camera shook from another muffled explosion. Onlookers gasped and screamed as a fresh cloud of dense black smoke emerged from the station.
Samantha wailed, “Oh, God …”
Karen felt her stomach fall. She cupped Alex’s fist tightly and squeezed. “Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie …”
“Secondary explosions …” muttered a fire chief coming out of the station, his head shaking with a kind of finality. “There are many, many bodies down there. We can’t even get our people close.”
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_3cd351e5-9510-5468-949a-18295e22e5b6)
Around noon
When the call came in, Hauck was on the phone with the NYPD’s Emergency Management Office in the city.
Possible 634. Leaving the scene of an accident. West Street and the Post Road.
All morning long he’d kept a close tab on the mess going on in the city. Panicked people had been calling in all day, unable to reach their loved ones, not knowing what else to do. When the Trade Towers were hit, he’d been working for the department’s Office of Information, and it had been his job for weeks afterward to track down the fates of people unaccounted for—through the hospitals, the wreckage, the network of first responders. Hauck still had friends down there. He stared at the list of Greenwich names he’d taken down: Pomeroy. Bashtar. Grace. O’Connor.
The first time around, out of the hundreds unaccounted for, they had found only two.
“Possible 634, Ty!” the day sergeant buzzed in a second time. Hit and Run. Down on the Post Road, by West Street, near the fast-food outlets and car dealerships.
“Can’t,” Hauck said back to her. “Get Muñoz on it. I’m on something.”
“Muñoz is already on the scene, Lieutenant. It’s a homicide. It seems you got a body down there.”
It took only minutes for Hauck to grab his Grand Corona out of the lot outside, shoot straight up Mason, his top hat flashing, to the top of the avenue by the Greenwich Office Park, then down the Post Road to West Street, across from the Acura dealership.
As he was the head of Violent Crimes in town, this was his call. Mostly his department broke up spats at the high school, the occasional report of a break-in, marital rows. Dead bodies were rare up here in Greenwich.
Stock fraud was a lot more common.
At the bottom of the avenue, four local blue-and-whites had blocked off the busy commercial thoroughfare, their lights ablaze. Traffic was being routed into one lane. Hauck slowed, nodding to a couple of patrolmen he recognized. Freddy Muñoz, one of the detectives on his staff, came over as Hauck got out.
“You gotta be kidding, Freddy.” Hauck shook his head in disbelief. “Today of all days …”
The detective made a grim motion toward a covered mound in the middle of West Street, which intersected the Post Road and cut up to Railroad Avenue and I-95.
“It look like we’re kidding, LT?”
The patrol cars had parked in a way that formed sort of a protective circle around the body. An EMS truck had arrived, but the tech was standing around waiting for the regional medical team out of Farmington. Hauck knelt and peeled back the plastic tarp.
Christ! His cheeks puffed out a blast of air.
The guy was just a kid—twenty-two, twenty-three at most—white, wearing a brown work uniform, long red locks braided in cornrows in the manner of a Jamaican rasta. His body was twisted so that his hips were swung over slightly and raised off the pavement, while his back was flat, face upward. The eyes were open, wide, the moment of impact still frozen in their pupils. A trickle of blood ran onto the pavement from the corner of the victim’s mouth.
“You got a name?”
“Raymond. First name Abel. Middle name John. Went by AJ, his boss at the auto-customizing shop over there said. That’s where he worked.”
A young uniformed officer was standing nearby with a notepad. His nameplate read STASIO. Hauck assumed he’d been first on the scene.
“He was just off-shift,” Muñoz said. “Said he was going out to buy some smokes and make a call.” He pointed across the street. “Seems like he was headed into the diner over there.”
Hauck glanced over to a place he knew called the Fairfield Diner, an occasional police hangout. He’d grabbed a meal there a couple of times himself.
“What do we know about the car?”
Muñoz called over Officer Stasio, who looked about a month removed from training, and who read, a little nervously, from his spiral pad. “It appears like the hit-car was a white SUV, Lieutenant. It was traveling north up the Post Road and turned sharply onto West Street here…. Ran into the vic just as he was crossing the street. We got two eyewitnesses who saw the whole thing.”
Stasio pointed to two men, one stocky, sport coat, mustached, sitting in the front seat of an open patrol car rubbing his hair. The other in a blue fleece top talking to another officer, somberly shaking his head. “We located one in the parking lot of the Arby’s over there. An ex-cop, it turns out. The other came from the bank across the street.”
The kid had put it together pretty good. “Good work, Stasio.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Hauck slowly raised himself up, his knees cracking. A parting gift from his football days.
He looked back at the rutted gray asphalt on West Street—the two extended streaks of rubber about twenty feet farther along than the victim’s cell phone and glasses. Skid marks. Well past the point of impact. Hauck sucked in an unpleasant breath, and his stomach shifted.
Son of a bitch hadn’t even tried to stop.
He looked over at Stasio. “You doin’ okay, son?” That this was the young officer’s first fatality was plainly written all over his face.
Stasio nodded back. “Yessir.”
“Never easy.” Hauck patted the young patrolman on the shoulder. “That’s true for any of us.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
Hauck pulled Muñoz aside. He guided his detective’s eye along the Post Road south, the route that the hit-car traveled, then in the direction of the tire marks on the pavement.
“Seeing what I’m seeing, Freddy?”
The detective nodded grimly. “Bastard never made a move to stop.”
“Yeah.” Hauck pulled out a latex glove from his jacket pocket and threaded it over his fingers.
“Okay.” He knelt back down to the inert body. “Let’s see what she says….”
Hauck lifted Abel Raymond’s torso just enough to remove a black wallet from the victim’s trouser pocket. A Florida driver’s license: Abel John Raymond. There was also a laminated photo ID from Seminole Junior College, dating back two years. Same bright-eyed grin as on the license, hair a little shorter. Maybe the kid had dropped out.
There was a MasterCard in his name, a card from Sears, others from Costco, ExxonMobil, Social Security. Forty-two dollars in cash. A ticket stub from the 1996 Orange Bowl. Florida State – Notre Dame. Hauck recalled the game. From out of the wallet’s divider he unfolded a snapshot of an attractive dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her twenties holding a young boy. Hauck handed it up to Muñoz.
“Doesn’t look like a sister.” The detective shrugged. The victim wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “Girlfriend, maybe.”
They’d have to track down who it was.
“Someone’s not going to be very happy tonight.” Freddy Muñoz sighed.
Hauck tucked the photo back into the wallet and exhaled. “Long list, I’m afraid, Freddy.”
“It’s crazy, isn’t it, Lieutenant?” Muñoz shook his head. He was no longer talking about the accident. “You know my wife’s brother took in the 7:57 this morning. Got out just before it happened. My sister-in-law was going crazy. She couldn’t reach him till he got into the office. You roll over in bed for a few more minutes, get stuck at a light, miss your train…. You know how lucky he is?”
Hauck thought of the list of names back on his desk, the nervous, hopeful voices of those who had called in about them. He glanced over to Stasio’s witnesses.
“C’mon, Freddy, let’s get an ID on that car.”
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_d5660e8c-7989-5131-a3b8-3e99bc70aecd)
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.
