One Mile Under (11 page)

Hauck went inside the small cell block, down to the last of four manually locked cells. The only one that was occupied.

Danielle was on her back on the cot, in jeans and a T-shirt, one leg resting over a knee. She didn’t even look up at him. He could see right away that she wasn’t at all what he remembered. The wiry, athletic tomboy had grown up into a pretty, filled-out, young gal.

“Whoever you are, I want to see Wade. You can’t keep me locked up in here forever. I’ll call a lawyer. I’ve got a job and you’re keeping me from doing it. I have a dog that needs attention. And I’m sick of eating just Subway and Burger King. And I want a shower. And—”

“Calm down, and you might just get what you want,” Hauck said, stepping up to the cell.

She rolled her head, her soft blue eyes narrowing in on him. Then she jumped off the cot and stared at him, totally disbelieving. “
Uncle Ty
…?”

“I’m not really a big fan of Subway and Burger King myself,” he said. “Must be somewhere out here we can find some good Mexican food.”

Her eyes doubled in size. “Uncle Ty! What the hell are you doing
here
…?”

“Not surprisingly, your father sent me.”

“Dad …?”

It had been years, ten maybe, and Hauck took in the sight. Dani was now a pretty young woman. She was wearing a gray T-shirt that read,
What happens on the river, stays on the river,
and tight-fitting jeans. Untied blue Converse sneakers. She had her mother’s wholesome looks—a rosy complexion, a few freckles dotting her cheeks, her hair between light brown and blond, and lots of it, thick, curls over her face, tied back in a bushy ponytail, and her mother’s eyes, glacier blue.

“He said you’d gotten yourself into some kind of trouble out here.” He grinned. “None that I can see, though.”

She shrugged. “None I couldn’t handle.”

“Of course not. You seem right at home in here. He said you needed someone to bail your ass out of here, so c’mon, pack up. Amazingly, Chief Dunn has agreed to entrust you to my care. As long as you’re a good girl.”

“Who decides what that means?” Dani turned up her nose.

“For the moment, me. Basically, if you don’t hit anyone on the way out or leave something vile in the toilet, you’re okay to leave. Oh yeah, and that you talk to me about whatever it is that’s got you all riled up and landed you in here, before you go on about it anymore.”

“Wade got to you, didn’t he?”

It had taken barely a minute, but Hauck thought he already had a sense of what it was the chief was talking about. The part of her that was more an enemy than a friend. “He didn’t get to me,” he said. “He talked to me. And if I was still a policeman trying to do my job with all that was going on here I might have done the same thing, too. Just to protect you.”

“Throw your own stepdaughter in a cell? Keep her locked up for two days.”

“If she wouldn’t keep her nose out of an official investigation? Or threatened to go to the press? Maybe.”

“
Official investigation …”
Dani chuffed and rolled her eyes. “Wade wouldn’t know an ‘official investigation’ from a tractor pull. He’s dropped the ball on this from day one. So that’s the deal, then? I have to shut my mouth and let them bury what’s possibly a murder of a friend under the rug, just so I can get out of here.” She crumpled her sweat shirt up and tossed it back on the cot. “I’ll stay.”

“The deal, Dani,” Hauck said, putting a key in the lock, “is that I haven’t seen you in about ten years and I’m here. And that your father was worried about you. Which I would damn well be as well if it was my Jessie. And all I had to promise, as you say, was that you would keep your mouth shut and not do anything stupid until you talked it over with me. Now does that sound like something you can do, or shall I tell them to order you up another Foot-Long Double Philly Cheesesteak …? Onions and peppers …”

“No …” She shrugged, her voice finally softening. “Don’t! I can’t take it anymore.” She finally broke down and grinned. “I think I gained five pounds in two days.”

“Then grab your stuff. And look at the bright side of this. I see a couple of things …”

“What?”

“One, that you get to spend a couple of days with me. Which is something I would like very much.”

“Me, too. And …?”

“Two—it’s not everyone who can say they were thrown in jail by their own stepfather.”

“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.”

“I know how it sounds, Uncle Ty. But you’ve handled dozens of cases. Just because it’s easier
not
to believe it, that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Am I right?”

Of all the big cases he’d been involved in, and some went high up into the government, it was always easier at first to doubt your reasoning. To even accept yourself that it was true. “You were a science major in college, if I recall?”

“Geology.” She shrugged. “I’m like an expert on rocks and things.”

“And in geology, if someone was pushing this theorem, one that had a way of making you believe it if you fit a number of things together, but was unsubstantiated by fact, only possibility, no matter how credible the thinking behind it seemed … what would you advise them to do?”

“I know where you’re going with this, Uncle Ty … I’d tell them to test it. To corroborate it. With evidence. Both in the field and in the lab.” She took out a pen and grabbed a napkin and wrote something on it, and passed it across to Hauck. “So there …”

It was a number. D69-416.

Hauck asked, “What’s this?”

“Your corroboration. It’s the license plate number of the car that went in there just after Trey. From the security film at the park gate. Just check it out. You can do that, can’t you?”

“I don’t exactly have jurisdiction to do anything out here. Plus, I gave your stepfather my word.”

“
Ex-
stepfather,” Dani said. “Look, Wade’s basically a good guy. I don’t know why he would have sat on this. But he’s not exactly his own man these days. He’s burned a lot of bridges and he’s got a son who’s in a VA hospital who needs every dime he has. I think it’s fair to say, there’s not another job for him after this one.”

“So maybe he did check it out. And it went nowhere.”

“If that’s the case, then what’s there to lose? Please, that’s all I’m asking. If you can bring down the secretary of the Treasury, I know you can manage to get an ID on a license plate. If it leads nowhere, I’ll drop it. I promise. I’ll be a good girl.”

Hauck nodded. He folded the napkin up and put it in his shirt pocket. “And if it does lead somewhere …?”

“If it does lead somewhere, it means that Trey and Rooster were murdered …”

“And we give it to Chief Dunn. That’s the only way I’ll do it. I’m not going around playing cowboy here, Dani. That’s the deal.”

“Fine.” She nodded. “I agree.”

“Good. So now that we’ve gotten past that, where does a guy stay in this place? On an ex-detective’s wage. I don’t need to bunk next to Jay-Z and Beyoncé.”

“You’re welcome to stay with me.” Dani shrugged. “If you don’t mind the company.”

“Roommates?” Hauck asked.

“No. Long tail. Four legs.”

“I love dogs, but maybe it’s better if we keep this a working relationship,” Hauck said.

“Brooke …?” Hauck called in from a room at a pleasant-looking motel not far from Dani’s apartment unit.

His secretary back at Talon was silent, clearly startled. “
Ty …?
Is that you?”

He hadn’t called into the office in almost a month. “The one and only.”

“Where are you? Still in the Caribbean? I have a ton of mail and some messages I was going to send in my weekly email.”

“I’m actually in Aspen.”

“
Aspen?
Colorado?”

“Nearby anyway. A town called Carbondale.”

“Jeez, you certainly win the prize on how to get the most out a leave of absence. What happened to the boat?”

“It’s in a marina back in St. Kitts. An old friend called me to get involved in something, something to do with his daughter who got into a bit of trouble out here.”

“Everyone was expecting you to come back here.”

“I’m just checking out a few things and then I’ll be back. Which is the reason I’m calling. I need you to do something …”

“Ty, everyone here wants to know what’s going on. People come up to me, as if I have some inside information. Even Mr. Foley asked.” Tom Foley was Hauck’s boss, president of Talon, who Hauck knew was using him, his name recognition at least, to attract accounts. “I’m not sure how to respond.”