Reckless by Andrew Gross Page A

Why was it up to Hauck to destroy him? He wasn’t with the police any longer.
    We don’t do this kind of work, he had said to Foley. Mess with people’s lives.
    This time we do.
    He opened a thick folder filled with photos he had compiled of Dani. Some were from Greenwich Magazine at charity events. He and Merrill. A few were from the Shiny Sheet in Palm Beach. The Garden Club Ball. Page Six in the New York Post. He didn’t exactly shy away from publicity.
    He thumbed through a few contact sheets a friend of his who worked for Fairfield Style had sent over. A gathering for the state’s attorney general on Ron Tillerson’s yacht. “Merrill Simon and financier Dani Thibault.” Saturday polo matches at Conyers Farm. Thibault had some horses. The two of them looked happy, in love. Holding hands.
    It was her choice, what to do with what they had found. Her call.
    This wasn’t exactly the kind of work he had signed up for when he changed careers.
    He picked up the phone and dialed Tom Foley to let him know what information they had. Let his boss decide how to take it to Merrill. Her ex-husband was still a very important account. It was still a new job for Hauck, and the whole thing was a bit uncomfortably politically charged. The receptionist at Talon’s New York office put him on hold.
    He opened the folder and slid the photos back in.
    One, near the bottom, caught his eye.
    It was at the Conyers Farm polo gathering. A Patrons of Greenwich Library literacy thing. A bunch of the usual types Hauck had dealt with over the years: men in blazers and green pants, the women in expensive sundresses and large hats.
    Thibault, wearing a white linen blazer and open white shirt, was caught in conversation with someone who seemed slightly familiar, behind dark sunglasses, his back turned to the camera but his profile clearly visible. It was an outtake, cropped from a larger shot. The two of them never even knew it was being snapped.
    Hauck was about to stuff it back in the file when it hit him with a jolt just who the man Thibault was talking to was.
    He put down the phone.
    It made the next step with Thibault no longer Merrill Simons’s call.
    It was a face Hauck had seen in the papers and on TV. Very much in the news. He flipped it over, his antennae buzzing like crazy, looked for the date. June, last year .
    It would have been meaningless back then, the two of them talking.
    But now, with the Dow dropping a couple of thousand points, with one of Wall Street’s biggest firms toppled, a close friend from his past brutally killed, Hauck fixed numbly on the forgotten photo, his blood on fire.
    The man caught with Dani Thibault, looking away, was April Glassman’s husband, Marc.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
    I t was two in the morning and James Donovan was scared.
    For weeks, he’d shut his eyes this time of night and listened to his wife’s steady breathing. He’d looked in on Zachy, his four-year-old, asleep in his room. He’d gone online, checked his positions. The Alt-A’s collapsing. Volumes drying up. Until he couldn’t take it anymore. Felt like he was about to explode.
    Then he’d leashed up the dog and gone downstairs in the dead of night for some air.
    He’d done something terribly wrong. Now he didn’t know how to take it back.
    Tonight, the sharp breeze off the East River blew right through his parka. Remi, his white bichon, looked up at him as if she wanted to head back inside. James wasn’t ready yet.
    He didn’t know what to do.
    The first check he’d taken had been for 1.6 million dollars. Deposited into an account in the Cayman Islands he opened in his son’s name. He’d waited until the funds were in his hands. The next one was for 2.3. Life-changing money. Given what was going on in the markets, money he’d never have been able to duplicate. Not with the mortgage securities markets gone to hell. With the firm talking about no bonuses this year. Or next. With the stock slid all the way to six.
    They were