“It’s been years.” Hauck said admiringly, at a cramped table at Allegria on Main Street. “Look at you.” He ordered the tuna melt on seven-grain bread and Dani a juice concoction of kale, celery, and zucchini that Hauck knew had to be over-the-top healthy given it was such an unappealing shade of green. “At least ten, I think. You’re a beauty. All grown up.”
“Since that time in Vermont. I was just a kid.”
“We were up at your father’s place at Catamount. And you weren’t a kid on that snowboard. Now I hear you’re rafting …”
“Whitewater guiding.” Dani corrected him. “It’s not exactly 3-D engineering, like my brother, but it pays the bills and keeps me in the fresh air. You ought to try it while you’re here.”
“We’ll see. I think my wild days are behind me,” Hauck said.
Dani scratched her chin with her thumb and index finger and grinned teasingly. “Not from what I see …”
“You mean the growth? Just a product of a bit too much time on my hands …”
“And the tan. You’re looking pretty smokin’, Uncle Ty, for an old dude. Some of my friends would be all over you. I’m gonna have to watch you while you’re here.”
Hauck laughed, still moving a little stiffly after being shot three times just a few months ago. But who wouldn’t like hearing a woman say that, even if it was your twenty-five-year-old goddaughter.
It had been years. He had grown a little distant from Tom and the kids since the divorce and Tom’s move to Boston. Then Judy remarried. “I was really sorry to hear about your mom,” Hauck said. This was the first time they’d been face-to-face. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it out for the funeral.” He was on a special case on the Greenwich force at that time and couldn’t leave. “She was quite a gal.”
“That’s okay. I know you had your own loss you were dealing with, too,” Dani said. “Dad told me. I never got to meet your daughter.”
Hauck had lost his youngest daughter, run over in his own driveway with Hauck at the wheel as he backed out of the garage after a spat with Beth. The moment that had altered his life, leading to the Dark Ages, as he called it, when he and Beth divorced and he was treated for depression for about a year.
“I think you would have gotten along. Anyway, let’s not get caught up in all those old stories, okay? You’re a whitewater guide. Boyfriend?”
Dani shrugged. “I see someone. No one exactly special. We like to keep it that way.”
“I get it. What about your brother and sister? They’re good?”
“Aggie’s in her residency in Austin. Burn trauma. And Tommy’s at Stanford. Total nerd material. Turns out, he’s the brainiac of the clan.”
“The game’s not over yet,” Hauck said.
Dani smiled and drank down the last of her juice. “Hopefully that will neutralize three days of Subway and Burger King …”
“So Chief Dunn gave me a sense of what happened, and why he felt he had to make a point to you.”
“Chief Dunn …? You mean Wade. Some point …” Dani rolled her eyes.
“All the same, I’d like to hear it from you.”
She told him about what happened. Trey. How she found him out there, and how he could handle that level of rapid blindfolded, and about Rooster, weird as he was, but what he said he saw, and then what happened to him.
“Hot-air balloons don’t just fall out of the sky, do they, Uncle Ty?”
“I don’t know.”
Then she went through how she had found Trey’s helmet, when no one else had even believed he was wearing one, all the way downstream.
“Which proves what?” Hauck asked, finishing up his sandwich.
“It proves that if he was wearing one at the time he hit his head hard enough to kill him, it should have protected him, right? At the very least it should have shown the effects of the impact. Not to mention, how did it happen to come off if he was in his kayak? To me, it all says he wasn’t wearing it when something hit his head.”
“Go on.”
She described the path she’d found above the river and the tire tracks by the road. And then the car that had been there not five minutes after Trey arrived—and then left forty minutes later. The same car Wade knew about two days earlier, and was just sitting on after he kept insisting that nothing had happened. “Why would there be a need to requisition these security tapes if all along he truly felt it was just an accident?”
Hauck shrugged. “Maybe he was just doing his job.”
“Or maybe hiding something.”
Hauck understood from his detective days how evidence can be slanted to look a certain way if you’re inclined to see it through that lens. Especially when that evidence is all totally circumstantial. “Why would anyone want to kill this kid?” he finally had to ask.
“I don’t know. Wade keeps asking me that, too.”
“Chief Dunn … I mean Wade”—Hauck caught himself—“said Trey didn’t have an enemy in the world. And this guy who was drunk …”
“He wasn’t drunk, Uncle Ty. He was sober. He’s back in rehab and I checked what he was drinking.”
“Nonetheless, according to Chief Dunn he wasn’t exactly someone who’d you’d put your trust in as a witness. And not to discount anything you say, but whoever did this, if it’s as you’re suggesting, would have had to go to some extraordinary lengths to execute it and then cover it up. So you’re talking about someone who not only had the means and the capability to get it done, and the knowledge of what this guy Rooster said and did for work, but also the will. This is pretty serious stuff.”
“I realize that,” Dani said.
“Which means this wasn’t some random act against your friend. But something far more organized. And likely with more than one person involved.”