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once or twice named Avila came up behind him, startling him. “Bad scene, huh, lieutenant?” The kid blew his cheeks out like some twenty-year veteran who had seen this a hundred grisly times.
    “It’s not ‘lieutenant’ anymore. I’m no longer on the force.”
    “Still, it’s hard to put it away, isn’t it, sir? I guess it stays in the blood.”
    “What stays in the blood, son?” Hauck looked at him.
    “I don’t know.” Avila shrugged. “What we do.”
    He looked back at the kid with his black crime kit, barely six months into his career. He gave him a wizened smile. “No, you can’t,” Hauck said. He patted the kid on the shoulder and left.
    You can’t put it away.
    You can’t put what’s inside behind you.
    No matter what corner you turn.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    T he Talon Group, Hauck’s new employer, was a worldwide security company doing business in thirty countries.
    Most of their revenue came from the corporate division. Background screening for key employees and directors. Forensic accounting. Data recovery. Protections against internal theft. Another division handled crisis management—PR, media training. And there was another side of the company, GTM, Global Threat Management, that specialized in providing protection for diplomats and contractors in the Middle East and on dangerous posts abroad, and acted as a consultant to various foreign governments.
    Hauck had joined the company as a partner in the firm’s new office in Greenwich.
    Leaving police work was a big shift in his life. He’d been in law enforcement for twenty years, rising rapidly out of college through the NYPD’s detective ranks and ending up in their Office of Information. Then, after his younger daughter was killed and his marriage fell apart, he eventually found his way back near the place he had been brought up, in the drab, working-class section of Byram on the Greenwich–Port Chester border. Slowly, he built his life back up, taking over the Violent Crime division in town, graduating to head of detectives. Solving two high-profile murder-conspiracies got him on the TV crime shows and made him a bit ofa celebrity around town. Put him in line for chief when Vern Fitzpatrick retired.
    But rubbing up against that same established power base, he knew he could never fully be happy there.
    Now he had a corner office with a fancy view of the sound. A pretty secretary out front. Access to important executives. Right off the bat he had brought in two new pieces of business: High Ridge Capital, a hedge fund—he coached one of the partners’ kids—and the town of New Canaan, which was looking into security screening on new applicants. A lot of the work had been pretty mundane. Compliance issues. His bright spot was the mortgage thief.
    That afternoon, around one thirty, Hauck’s boss, Tom Foley, senior managing director of the firm, knocked on Hauck’s door. “Ty, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
    Foley was tall, Princeton-educated, wore suspenders over his pinstripe shirt, and he came in with a stylish, blond-haired woman Hauck pegged as being in her midforties. She wore a white cable-knit sweater over crisp beige slacks, her hair pulled back into a re-fined ponytail. Pastel-pink lipstick. She also wore one of those fashionable white Chanel watches on her wrist.
    Foley said, “Ty, say hello to Merrill Simons.”
    Hauck stood up and came from around his desk. Merrill Simons looked like she could’ve been on the cover of Greenwich Magazine, hosting a garden tour at her Town and Country –style twenty-million-dollar estate. He shook her hand and motioned to the couch. “Why don’t we sit over here?”
    Hauck’s office was spacious and bright, with a comfortable sitting area—a couch, two chairs, and a walnut coffee table. Above them was some kind of contemporary oil painting Hauck couldn’t figure out but that had come with the office. The windows looked out over Greenwich harbor.
    “Ty’s our newest