Don’t Look Twice

CHAPTER SIX

The victim was a federal prosecutor working out of the Hartford, Connecticut, office. David Sanger. His driver’s license indicated he was forty-one years old. The address on it was on Pine Ridge Road off Stanwich, just five minutes out of town.

The headline had just changed.

Once more, Hauck thought back through the chain of events. The red truck screeching to a stop. The darkened window rolling down. The muzzle of the gun extending.

At him.

Sanger had been standing only a few feet away, right behind Jess in line. The bullet pattern seemed to go from right to left. It seemed likely he had been hit in the initial barrage.

“Any chance you’re thinking he was the target?” Munoz questioned. The victim’s ID made anything possible.

Hauck thought back. The attack had continued for a full minute after Sanger would have been struck. The shooter had even reloaded. Bullet marks were everywhere. Glass shattered on the refrigerated unit in back. The type of weapon used, a Tec-9 or a Mac-10, wasn’t exactly the kind of pinpoint weapon one might choose if they were trying to target someone.

“No.” Hauck shook his head. “Just the wrong place at the wrong time, Freddy.”

Still, a federal prosecutor gunned down this way would bring a lot of attention to this. Every media outlet across the country would be on their backs. Not to mention the Feds. They’d have to take a look at everything. What Sanger was doing here. Any personal vendettas against him. What cases he was working on.

“You know what this means, LT?” Munoz said, standing up.

“Yeah, I know what it means…” He slid out a small photo from David Sanger’s wallet. His wife—pretty, blonde, her hair in a ponytail. Smiling. Two kids. Just a few minutes ago that had been his world.

He handed Munoz back the wallet. “It means you can forget about that angel, Freddy.”

The shells were nine-millimeter. Dozens were lodged all over the walls. Judging from what Hauck recalled—the amount of bullets, casings, the fast reload—the gun was probably a Tec-9.

Not the kind of weapon one could expect to make a precision shot with.

A canvas of the witnesses mostly confirmed Hauck’s own recollection of events. No one had been able to get a clear description of the assailants. The truck’s windows were tinted. The shooter faced away from the crowd. Only Hauck had caught a glimpse. Everyone else had ducked or panicked as soon as the initial shots rang out. It had all happened so fast.

Except several people recalled the shooter shouting something prior to driving away.

The woman who had been in front of Hauck at the counter just before it happened said it sounded something like “Tarantino, asshole…”

“Like the director?” Hauck asked.

“That’s what she heard,” Steve Chrisafoulis said. “The guy filling up his Prius on pump two heard it different. More like ‘Porsafina.’”

“Porsafina?”

“Just telling you what they heard, LT.”

It was going to be difficult, if not impossible, Hauck realized, to get any agreement. The sudden shock and panic. Twenty people were going to have twenty different recollections of what had taken place.

Munoz turned to Hauck. “You said the shooter was Hispanic, right?”

Ed Sweeney offered, “No one seemed to get much of a view, Lieutenant.”

Hauck said, “I think so. Why?”

“’Cause what if it was more like, For Sephina, maybe? Por Sephina? That mean anything to you, LT?”

“No.” If he had somehow been the target of this, he didn’t see the connection.

He went back inside the store. Sunil still had a medical tech attending to him. “You doin’ okay?”

The Pakistani had a cut on his arm from flying glass. He blew out his cheeks. “I suppose so, Lieutenant.”

“Lemme ask you, Sunil, any reason someone would want to do something like this to you? Any enemies we should know about? Any money you owe out there?”

“Enemies?” The gas station manager rounded his eyes wide. “No, I’m a good guy, Lieutenant. I don’t have enemies…”

“People heard the gunman shouting something like ‘Tarantino’ as they pulled away.”

Sunil furrowed his brow. “You mean like that Hollywood guy, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know what I mean, Sunil. ‘Tarantino.’ Or maybe ‘Por Sephina.’ Spanish. Anything like what I’m saying meaning anything to you, Sunil?”

The Pakistani looked perplexed. He dabbed a hand through his thinning dark hair. “You know me, Lieutenant. I don’t make problems for anyone.”

He wasn’t lying. Hauck patted him on the shoulder. “I know. You get that nick looked after, Sunil.”

The ME van had arrived, lights flashing, from the state facility up in Farmington.

So had Chief Fitzpatrick. In golf attire. He wove his Saab through the maze of news vans and police lines right into the station. Hauck saw him chat for a second with a patrolman, then jog his way.

“Jesus, Ty, I just heard…How’s Jessie doing?”

“She’s okay, Vern. Just a little shock. Thanks.”

“What about you…?” Fitz’s eyes shot to the bandage on Hauck’s neck.

“Just some flying glass. From the window…”

The chief of police looked at him skeptically and snorted back a smile. “Flying glass, my ass, Ty. You’re a lucky dude.”

Hauck smiled wistfully at him, scratched the back of his head. “We got issues, Vern. The dead guy’s a federal prosecutor from up in Hartford. Best I can say, he just stepped into it. Random. I don’t know who this goddamn thing was aimed at—me, Sunil here—you can see they tore the place up pretty good. But there’s going to be a lot of eyeballs on our backs. Freddy will brief you, if that’s okay. I’d appreciate it if you could run some interference on the press for me on this.”

“Don’t even think about that, Ty. You should stay with Jessie…”

“Jess is fine. Her mom’s on the way.”

A sharp beeping tone rang from inside. It took a moment for everyone to realize just where it came from. The victim’s cell phone. Still on him.

“Christ.” Hauck bent down and found it inside David Sanger’s vest.

The digital display read HOME. Everyone stood around and just listened as it continued to ring, four, five times, looking at one another silently before it finally went into voice mail.

“No.” Hauck exhaled at Vern. “There’s something else I have to do.”

He jotted down the address they had found in the victim’s wallet, 475 Pine Ridge Road. Only a mile or two from there. This was one of the jobs nobody vied for, the unenviable responsibility of rank. He grabbed a local patrolman he knew and asked him to follow in his car. This sort of thing was always done better in twos.

Outside, by the fuel pumps, Hauck grabbed hold of Munoz.

Freddy asked, “You want me to come with you, LT?”

“No. I want you to stay and brief the crime scene guys. And listen, Freddy—I got that APB out within a minute or two; no way they could’ve gotten very far. If we haven’t heard anything back, you know what I’m thinking…”

Munoz nodded. “That the truck’s still somewhere around here. That they dumped it somewhere.”

Hauck backed away to where his Explorer was and pointed at Freddy. “You find that truck.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wendy Sanger had the bags packed and dragged downstairs. Haley was in the midst of her usual early morning tortured-teenager routine, whining on about why they had to drag her up to Vermont when Ariel had a party planned for Saturday night and it was “just leaves up there, Mom, not even goddamn snow!” Wendy shouted back at her up the stairs, stuffing the case with Ethan’s medicine. “Don’t you give me a hard time this morning, Haley! Just get your butt down!”

They were heading up to the ski house at Stratton, lugging the ski stuff up with all their clothes for the season. Easier than packing it all up and transporting it to New Britain, near Hartford, where the family was moving before Christmas. It was a stressful time for all of them. Maybe the most for Haley—leaving her friends smack in the middle of the school year.

But it was hard on all of them. And Wendy knew her daughter would probably spend the whole weekend on the couch yapping on the phone anyway, so what the hell did it even matter where she was?

“C’mon, Hale, I mean it, get moving! Daddy’ll be back soon.”

“Who the hell took my goddamn iPod, Mom?”

Ugh. Wendy put down the medicine case in frustration. “I don’t know, hon!”

David had gone into town to wash the car, like he did every Saturday morning. His compulsive little ritual. Vacuum it out like it was the queen’s bedroom, polish down the chrome.

She checked the clock. That was over an hour ago. Where the hell is David? she wondered.

She had tried him on the cell, twice, and left a message: “Just wondering what it is you’re doing, David…You remember, we have this little trip planned today. We’re sitting here ready…” But he wasn’t answering, which struck Wendy as odd. David always picked up unless he was in trial. That was starting to worry her a bit.

Maybe he’d stopped at the station for a cup of coffee. That would be just like him, Wendy knew. Getting everyone up at dawn, pushing them to get moving, promising, “Greenburgers at Dot’s in Manchester by one!”—while he chatted someone up at the car wash about some new bond initiative in town, dawdling over the morning editorials as he filled up the car, and all the while she was running around like a chicken without a head, getting everything together, dressing and making breakfast for Ethan. And then he’d finally come home with an innocent look on his face and clap. “So, hey, what’s everyone been doing, guys? We gotta go!”

That would be just like him.

Ethan was eating cereal in the kitchen, watching Teletubbies. He was six, the love of their lives, though not everything was right with him. Asperger’s syndrome. Not full-out autism, they hoped, but still, a little impaired. And now with the move they had to change schools from Eagle Hill, and maybe doctors too, though they had found a fabulous program up near Hartford with people who seemed to really care.

“Aargh!” Wendy heard Ethan shout something, followed by the sound of something hitting the floor.

“Ethan, no!”

She went over to the wall and picked it up. “Haley!” she called upstairs. “I think Ethan found your iPod…!”

She’d miss this place, Wendy realized. It was an old, refurbished colonial. Her folks had helped them buy it when David took a job with the government after law school. The kitchen was small, they had never quite gotten around to giving the bathrooms a do-over, but there was that terrific yard in back, which faced a nature preserve no one could ever build on. And some of the elms on their property were over a hundred feet tall. And they’d made friends.

Still, David’s Monday-to-Friday commute was growing exhausting. Some nights he wouldn’t get home until after nine, when Ethan was already asleep. Some weeks he didn’t make it home at all. The new promotion at Justice was what David had dreamed of. Why he left private practice in the first place and sacrificed all the money. A chance to really do something and make a difference. Before law school, he’d taught English in Guatemala. A chance to serve.

Speaking of which…Wendy glanced at the kitchen clock again—it was already after ten! He had wanted to be on the road by nine thirty. She tried David’s cell one more time. Again, his voice mail came on.

What the hell is going on, David?

She started to get worried. She knew she sometimes tended to overstress a bit. She’d lost her dad at eighteen to a sudden heart attack. And David had this mild arrhythmia himself, though the doctors convinced her it was nothing to really worry about. Even at forty-one. Still, she always carried around this tiny fear…That one day she would be alone, just like her mom had been left alone. That she would have to bring up Ethan by herself. Stupid, she knew, maybe even a little selfish. But where the hell was he, anyway?

That’s when she spotted the two cars pulling up in the drive outside the kitchen window.

One was a black SUV, just like theirs. Except it had lights on top. Flashing lights! The other was a regular blue and white Greenwich police car.

The wave of worry in her chest had now grown into full-out panic. What are they doing here?

She told herself that there were a million things it could be. It could be the car had broken down, or that he’d had a little accident. But then David would’ve called! Or that he’d been taken to the hospital. It could be he’d just taken sick. It could be anything.

“Ethan, you stay right here, honey…Mommy’s just going outside.” Wendy put down her phone and ran to the front door.

But as she opened it, heart starting to race, and stared quizzically into the face of the man coming up her walk—saw how he stopped, solemnly met her eyes, and how there was just something in them—she knew.

She knew it was the worst. What she’d always feared.

“David!” she yelled, though there was just this man, staring at her.

She always knew.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wendy Sanger sat numbly on the couch, her daughter’s raw face pressed into her shoulder, eyes bleary from tears. A neighbor had come over to take care of her son, who seemed a bit handicapped, in a TV room.

Hauck sat across from them in the pleasantly decorated living room.

“I just can’t believe it.” She shook her head. “He just went into town to wash the car. He did that every Saturday. That was David’s thing. How he relaxed. You know…David’s a prosecutor with the U.S. Justice office—in Hartford. We’re supposed to be moving up there before Christmas. We were just…”

She caught herself, tears rushing into her eyes, her face a blank. Hauck noticed the packed suitcases at the door. “You were all headed somewhere?”

“We were just going to pack up the car. We were heading up to our place in Vermont. Stratton.”

Wendy Sanger cupped her face in her hands and shook her head, trying to keep from crying. Her daughter sniffed back tears.

“I know how hard this is for you, Ms. Sanger…” Five years ago, Hauck had had to pick up his own four-year-old daughter in his arms. He looked at Haley and tried to give her a supportive smile. “But if you can manage it now, there are some questions I need to ask…”

She didn’t say yes or no, just shrugged, her head shaking like a door off its hinge. “Why would anybody want to kill David, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t think anyone intended to shoot him, Mrs. Sanger. A truck pulled up and someone sprayed dozens of bullets all around the station.”

“Like a drive-by?”

Hauck nodded. “I was there myself. With my daughter. Your husband was standing just behind us in line. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Wrong place at the wrong time…This is fucking Greenwich, Lieutenant, not Newark. He just went out to wash the goddamn car!”

“We’re not sure yet, but we’re pretty sure this was aimed at something else. But I have to ask—you say there was no one who would want to hurt your husband? Were there any cases he may have tried where someone might have threatened him? Anybody he ever spoke of who he felt was out to get him? Maybe gang-related…”

“Gang-related?” Wendy Sanger looked back, incredulous. “My husband tried mostly bankruptcy cases. CEO malfeasance. He didn’t try gang-related cases.”

“And none of these people ever made threats toward him? Sent him letters, calls at the house? Maybe he wouldn’t even have told you?”

“No.” Wendy shook her head. “He would’ve told me. David and I didn’t hide things from each other. No one was threatening him. They were grooming him for bigger cases. That’s why we had to move up there.”

“Daddy said they were going to put him in charge of this big department,” his daughter said. She wiped a Kleenex across her nose. “That we had to move up there. I made it so tough on him, Mom. I—”

“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.” Wendy Sanger squeezed her tightly. Hauck swallowed hard.

“My son, he’s got Asperger’s syndrome, Lieutenant. He needs a lot of attention. David commuted up to Hartford for two years. Left before dawn and came back at ten sometimes. He didn’t want Ethan’s situation to have to change. That’s the kind of man he was. He pushed off this promotion for over a year. Didn’t want to upset the kids’ life. Haley’s just finishing up at the middle school. Ethan’s in a special program…”

“I understand,” Hauck said, giving her a little time. “Listen, I know this is a long shot, Ms. Sanger, but does the name ‘Tarantino’ have any special meaning to you?”

Wendy Sanger looked confused. “Like the director?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“What about ‘Por Sephina’? In Spanish. I know how tough this is. I know this is out of the blue.”

“This is crazy, Lieutenant. I can’t do this! No one wanted to kill my husband! No one had any ax to grind with him.”

“Why did this have to happen, Mom?” Haley dug her fists into her mother’s sweater and cried.

Wendy stroked her hair. “I know, baby, I know…”

Hauck looked into Wendy Sanger’s swollen eyes. Her straight blonde hair falling over her Fair Isle sweater and turtleneck. Her sharp chin and high cheekbones. There were pictures on the walls. The four of them together. Skiing. At Disneyland. Posing with Goofy. He knew there was no reason to press. He could check with Sanger’s office in Hartford about his cases.

“Do you have anyone that we can call? Give you some help in getting someone here?”

Numbly, she shook her head. “My sister lives in New Hampshire. I don’t know how she’s going to take this news…You never know how this feels, do you, until it happens to you?”

“No.” Hauck shrugged. “I’m going to leave an officer outside for the time being. You just let him know if there’s anything he can do.”

Wendy nodded vacantly. “Thanks.”

Hauck stood up. “We’re gonna find the people who did this, Ms. Sanger. I give you my word. I’ll let you know as soon as we know something.”

“Thank you again, Lieutenant.” Her daughter’s face was pressed to her lap.

Outside, Hauck paused on the steps. A carved jack-o’-lantern was already sitting on the slate landing.

You never know how this feels until it happens to you…

Yes, I do.

All over again, he saw the window rolling down, the man wearing the red bandana extending the gun—his face light-skinned, chiseled, a thin mustache. David Sanger, in his down vest, stepping up behind them. You guys, go ahead…He smiled.

Was it me…?

Was it him they were aiming at? Was it because of something he had done, some stray act of vengeance, that this family’s life had to be upended too?

They had been packing up for a weekend in Vermont. The guy had just gone to gas up the car. Only an hour before he’d had a life like Hauck’s, a daughter not much older than Jessie.

I know what you’re going through, man…