Sacred (3 page)

As we reached the patio, Angie held the door open for Trevor Stone and said, “Mr. Stone, you said you’d heard we had the two qualities you were looking for most.”

“Yes.”

“One was honesty. What’s the other?”

“I heard you were relentless,” he said as he stepped into his study. “Utterly relentless.”

“Fifty,” Angie said as we rode the subway from Wonderland Station toward downtown.

“I know,” I said.

“Fifty thousand bucks,” she said. “I thought twenty was insane enough, but now we’re carrying fifty thousand dollars, Patrick.”

I looked around the subway car at the mangy pair of winos about ten feet away, the huddled pack of gangbangers considering the emergency pull switch in the corner of the car, the lunatic with the buzz-cut blond hair and thousand-yard stare gripping the hand strap beside me.

“Say it a little louder, Ange. I’m not sure the G-boys down back heard you.”

“Whoops.” She leaned into me. “Fifty thousand dollars,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I whispered back as the train bucked around a curve with a metal screech and the fluorescents overhead sputtered off, then on, then off, then on again.

Lurch, or Julian Archerson as we’d come to know him, had been prepared to drive us all the way home, but once we hit the stand-still traffic on Route 1A, after sitting in an earlier automotive thicket on Route 129 for forty-five minutes, we had him drop us as
close to a subway station as possible and walked to Wonderland Station.

So now we stood with the other sardines as the decrepit car heaved its way through the maze of tunnels and the lights went on and off and we carried fifty thousand of Trevor Stone’s dollars on our persons. Angie had the check for thirty thousand tucked in the inside pocket of her letterman’s jacket, and I had the twenty thousand in cash stuffed between my stomach and belt buckle.

“You’ll need cash if you’re going to start immediately,” Trevor Stone had said. “Spare no expense. This is just operating money. Call if you need more.”

“Operating” money. I had no idea if Desiree Stone was alive or not, but if she was, she’d have to have found a pretty remote section of Borneo or Tangier before I blew through fifty grand in order to find her.

“Jay Becker,” Angie said and whistled.

“Yeah,” I said. “No kidding.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“Six weeks ago or so,” I said and shrugged. “We don’t keep tabs on each other.”

“I haven’t seen him since the Big Dick awards.”

The lunatic on my right raised his eyebrows and looked at me.

I shrugged. “You can dress ’em up nice, you know? But you can’t take ’em out.”

He nodded, then went back to staring at his reflection in the dark subway window as if it pissed him off.

The Big Dick award was actually the Boston Investigators Association’s Gold Standard Award for Excellence in Detecting. But everyone I knew in the field called it the Big Dick award.

Jay Becker won the Big Dick this year as he had last
year and back in ’89 as well, and for a while rumors abounded in the private detective community that he was going to open an office of his own, break away from Hamlyn and Kohl. I knew Jay well, though, and I wasn’t surprised when the rumors proved false.

It wasn’t that Jay would have starved on his own. On the contrary, he was easily the best-known PI in Boston. He was good-looking, smart as hell, and could have charged retainers in the mid five figures if he chose. Several of Hamlyn and Kohl’s wealthiest clients would have happily crossed the street if Jay had opened his doors there. The problem was, those clients could have offered Jay all the money in New England, and he still couldn’t have taken their cases. Every investigator who signed a contract with Hamlyn and Kohl also signed a promissory note to the effect that should the investigator leave Hamlyn and Kohl, he agreed to wait three years before accepting any case from a client with whom he’d worked at Hamlyn and Kohl. Three years in this business might as well be a decade.

So Hamlyn and Kohl had a pretty good hold on him. If any investigator was good enough and respected enough, however, to jump ship from Everett Hamlyn and Adam Kohl and make a profit, Jay Becker was. But Jay was also shitty with money, as bad as anyone I’ve ever known. As soon as he got it, he spent it—on clothes, cars, women, leather sectionals, what have you. Hamlyn and Kohl paid his overhead, paid for his office space, provided and protected his stock options, his 401(k), his portfolio of municipal funds. They daddied him, basically, and Jay Becker needed a daddy.

In Massachusetts, aspiring private investigators must perform twenty-five hundred hours of investigatory work with a licensed private investigator before getting their
licenses themselves. Jay only had to do one thousand hours because of his FBI experience, and he did his with Everett Hamlyn. Angie did hers with me. I did mine with Jay Becker.

It was a recruiting technique of Hamlyn and Kohl to pick an aspiring private eye who they believed showed promise and provide that hungry wannabe with a seasoned investigator to show him the ropes, get him his twenty-five hundred hours, and, of course, open his eyes to the gilded world of Hamlyn and Kohl. Every one I know who got his license this way then went to work for Hamlyn and Kohl. Well, everyone except me.

Which didn’t sit well with Everett Hamlyn, Adam Kohl, or their attorneys. There were grumblings for a while there that usually reached me on cotton-bond stationery bearing the letterhead of Hamlyn and Kohl’s attorneys, or occasionally on the stationery of Hamlyn and Kohl themselves. But I’d never signed anything or given them even a verbal indication that I planned to join their firm, and when my own attorney, Cheswick Hartman, noted this on his stationery (which was a very attractive mauve linen bond), the grumbling ceased appearing in my mailbox. And somehow I built an agency whose success exceeded even my own expectations by working for a clientele that could rarely afford Hamlyn and Kohl.

But recently, shell-shocked I suppose by our exposure to the raging psychosis of Evandro Arujo, Gerry Glynn, and Alec Hardiman—an exposure that cost Angie’s ex-husband, Phil, his life—we’d closed the agency. We hadn’t been doing much of note since, unless you count talking in circles, watching old movies, and drinking too much as doing something.

I’m not sure how long it would have lasted—maybe another month, maybe until our livers divorced us by
citing cruel and unusual punishment—but then Angie looked at Trevor Stone with a kinship she’d shown toward no one in three months and actually smiled without affectation, and I knew we’d take his case, even if he was so impolite as to kidnap and drug us. And the fifty grand, let’s admit it, went a long way toward helping us overlook Trevor’s initial bad form.

Find Desiree Stone.

Simple objective. How simple the execution of that objective would be remained to be seen. To find her, I was pretty sure we’d have to find Jay Becker or at least follow his tracks. Jay, my mentor, and the man who’d given me my professional maxim:

“No one,” he told me once near the end of my apprenticeship, “and I mean, no one, can stay hidden if the right person is looking for him.”

“What about the Nazis who escaped to South America after the war? No one found Josef Mengele until he’d died peacefully and free.”

And Jay gave me a look I’d become accustomed to during our three months together. It was what I called his “G-man look,” the look of a man who’d done his time in the darkest corridors of government, a man who knew where bodies were buried and which papers had been shredded and why, who understood the machinations of true power better than most of us ever would.

“You don’t think people knew where Mengele was? Are you kidding me?” He leaned over our table in the Bay Tower Room, tucked his tie against his waist even though our plates and table crumbs had been cleared, impeccable as always. “Patrick, let me assure you of something, Mengele had three huge advantages over most people who try to disappear.”

“And they were?”

“One,” he said and his index finger rose, “Mengele had money. Millions initially. But millionaires can be found. So, two”—his middle finger joined the index—“he had information—on other Nazis, on fortunes buried under Berlin, on all sorts of medical discoveries he’d made using Jews as guinea pigs—and this information went to several different governments, including our own, who were supposedly looking for him.”

He raised his eyebrows and sat back smiling.

“And the third reason?”

“Ah, yes. Reason number three, and the most important—Josef Mengele never had me looking for him. Because nobody can hide from Jay Becker. And now that I’ve trained you, D’Artagnan, my young Gascon, nobody can hide from Patrick Kenzie, either.”

“Thank you, Athos.”

He made a flourish with his hand and tipped his head.

Jay Becker. No one alive ever had more style.

Jay, I thought as the subway car broke from the tunnel into the waxy green light of Downtown Crossing, I hope you were right. Because here I come. Hide-and-seek, ready or not.

Back at my apartment, I stashed the twenty grand in the space behind the kitchen baseboard where I stow my backup guns. Angie and I dusted off the dining room table and spread out what we’d accumulated since this morning. Four photographs of Desiree Stone were fanned out in the center, followed by the daily progress reports Trevor had received from Jay until he disappeared thirteen days ago.

“Why did you wait so long to contact another investigator?” I’d asked Trevor Stone.

“Adam Kohl assured me he’d put another man on it,
but I think he was stalling. A week later, they dropped me as a client. I spent five days looking into every private investigator in the city who had an honest reputation, and eventually settled on the two of you.”

In the dining room, I considered calling Hamlyn and Kohl, asking Everett Hamlyn for his side of the story, but I had the feeling they’d stonewall me. You drop a client of Trevor Stone’s stature, you’re not going to be advertising it or gossiping about it to a fellow competitor in the trade.

Angie slid Jay’s reports in front of her and I looked through the notes we’d each taken in Trevor’s study.

“In the month after her mother died,” Trevor told us after we came in off the lawn, “Desiree suffered two separate traumas, either of which would have devastated a girl on their own. First, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and then a boy she’d dated in college died.”

“How?” Angie said.

“He drowned. Accidentally. But Desiree, you see, had been, well, insulated most of her life by her mother and me. Her entire existence up until her mother’s death had been charmed, untouched by even minor tragedy. She always considered herself strong. Probably because she was headstrong and stubborn like me and she confused that with the kind of mettle one develops under extreme opposition. So, you understand, she was never tested. And then with her mother dead and her father lying in intensive care, I could see that she was determined to bear up. And I think she would have. But then came the cancer revelation followed almost immediately by the death of a former suitor. Boom. Boom. Boom.”

According to Trevor, Desiree began to disintegrate under the weight of the three tragedies. She became an insomniac, suffered drastic weight loss, and rarely spoke
as much as a full sentence on any given day.

Her father urged her to seek counseling, but she broke each of the four appointments he made for her. Instead, as Lurch, the Weeble, and a few friends informed him, she was sighted spending most of her days downtown. She’d drive the white Saab Turbo her parents had given her as a graduation present to a garage on Boylston Street and spend her days walking the downtown and Back Bay greens of the Emerald Necklace, the seven-mile park system that surrounds the city. She once walked as far as a stretch of the Fens behind the Museum of Fine Arts, but usually, Lurch informed Trevor, she preferred the leafy mall that cuts through the center of Commonwealth Avenue and the Public Garden that abuts it.

It was in the Garden, she told Trevor, that she met a man who, she claimed, finally provided some of the solace and grace she’d been searching for throughout the late summer and early autumn. The man, seven or eight years older than her, was named Sean Price, and he too had been rocked by tragedy. His wife and five-year-old daughter, he told Desiree, had died the previous year when a faulty air conditioning unit in their Concord home had leaked carbon monoxide into the house while Sean was out of town on business.

Sean Price found them the next night, Desiree told Trevor, when he returned home from his trip.

“That’s a long time,” I said, looking up from my notes.

Angie raised her head from Jay Becker’s reports. “What’s that?”

“In my notes, I have it that Desiree told Trevor that Sean Price discovered his wife and child almost twenty-four hours after they died.”

She reached across the table, took her own notes from where they lay by my elbow, leafed through them. “Yup. That’s what Trevor said.”

“Seems a long time,” I said. “A young woman—a businessman’s wife and probably upscale if they were living in Concord—she and her five-year-old daughter aren’t seen for twenty-four hours and nobody notices?”

“Neighbors are less and less friendly and less and less interested in their fellow neighbors these days.”

I frowned. “But, okay, maybe in the inner city or the lower-middle-class burbs. But this happened in Concord. Land of Victorians and carriage houses and the Old North Bridge. Main Street, lily-white, upper-class America. Sean Price’s child is five years old. She doesn’t have day care? Or kindergarten or dance classes or something? His wife doesn’t go to aerobics or have a job or a lunch date with another upper-middle-class young wife?”

“It bugs you.”

“A bit. It doesn’t feel right.”

She leaned back in her chair. “We in the trade call that feeling a ‘hunch.’”

I bent over my notes, pen in hand. “How do you spell that? With an ‘h,’ right?”

“No, a ‘p’ for pinhead.” She tapped her pen against her notes, smiled at me. “Check out Sean Price,” she said as she scribbled the same words on the upper margin of her notes. “And death by carbon monoxide poisoning in Concord circa 1995 through ’96.”

“And the dead boyfriend. What was his name?”

She flipped a page. “Anthony Lisardo.”

“Right.”

She grimaced at the photos of Desiree. “A lot of people dying around this girl.”