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Merrill moistened her lips. She seemed to hesitate.
    “It’s just that what, Ms. Simons?”
    “It’s just that some of these things…I’ve had my people looking into them. Informally, of course. Some of the transactions he’s made, his personal background…family, university degrees. Sources of income. I’m not exactly sure how to say this. But all of a sudden, I’m not sure they’re adding up.”
    “Adding up?” The unease was etched deeply into Merrill Simons’s face. Hauck moved closer.
    “It’s as if anything that goes more than a few years back is a complete blank.” Merrill looked up and faced him. “I’m not sure Dani is who he says he is, Mr. Hauck. And before this gets deeper, I want to know who the man I’m supposed to be falling in love with really is.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    R oger Cantwell stared at his Bloomberg screen in dismay.
    High above Park Avenue, on the forty-eighth floor of the sleek glass tower that bore his company’s iconic name, the managing director of Wertheimer Grant read the banner headline flashing across CNBC: MURDERED TRADER WAS WERTHEIMER’S INVESTMENT STAR .
    His stomach knotted. He took a breath the way his personal trainer had instructed him to do to ramp down the stress. But no simple cleansing breath could wash this mess away.
    It was awful.
    The days since Marc Glassman’s murder had thrown the once-shining firm into a maelstrom. A frigging roach motel of rumor and distortion, Cantwell thought with dread. He himself had gone through a mix of emotions and worries he had never experienced before. First, the shock. The disbelief, imagining the horror of it. Cantwell had known the trader well. Though it was his rule to leave the investment responsibilities to his senior staff, as head of the firm, and as someone who had never lost his love for the trenches, he’d been in dozens of strategy sessions with Glassman over the years, not to mention sales conferences, golf outings, charitable events. My God, Cantwell thought, we were all together just a few days ago at the firm’s winter opera event at the Met.
    But soon the grief started to morph into worry. CNBC’s headline was correct. Marc was Wertheimer’s brightest shining star. In the midst of this year from hell—with the mortgage crisis eviscerating the firm’s balance sheet, their earnings dropping like a weight, their stock price tanking in the midst of the global sell-off, rumors flying—Glassman was one of the rare people actually making money for the firm. Some might even say the only thing propping it up.
    Now that was gone.
    Now there were just these headlines.
    Cantwell turned around and gazed gloomily out his office window. He could see the skyline of lower Manhattan to the south, the East River. To the west, the skating pond in Central Park. He liked this view. He wanted to keep it for a while. He wanted to keep the company jet too.
    Along with sponsoring Phil Mickelson and hobnobbing with world movers and shakers at places like Davos and the Aspen Institute, not to mention the appearances on Fox and CNBC, where attractive reporters sought out whatever he said.
    He just didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep any of it.
    The board was growing weary. The firm had a ton of toxic mortgage exposure. Christ, they’d been packaging that shit all the way up, right from the start. Now no one knew what anything out there was worth. “Mark to market,” it would kill them! Not to mention the stock price. Some big-name hedge fund asshole was out there shorting the shit out of it. The market cap had already plummeted from one hundred and ten billion down to fourteen. Not to mention their dwindling cash reserves. And their overnight borrowing on the repo market drying up, all these whispers…If the true picture ever got out, if there was ever a run on the accounts—Cantwell swallowed—they’d be toast.
    He looked at the wall of photographs of him with leaders and celebrities that had been taken