Sacred: A Novel (16 page)

For the next few minutes, none of us spoke. We sat in our booth as the rain spewed against the windows and the wind bent the row of royal palms along the boulevard, and we ate our sandwiches.

Nothing, I thought as I chewed my sandwich without really tasting it, was as it seemed just fifteen minutes ago. Angie had been right the other night—black was white, up was down.

Desiree was dead. Jeff Price was dead. Trevor Stone had hired Jay not just to find his daughter, but to kill her.

Trevor Stone. Jesus Christ.

We had taken this case for two reasons—greed and empathy. The first was not an honorable motive. But fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, particularly when you haven’t worked in several months and your chosen profession isn’t known for its workmen’s comp bennies.

But it was still greed. And if you accept a job because you’re greedy, you can’t really bitch too much when your employer turns out to be a liar. The pot calling the kettle black and all that…

However, greed wasn’t our only motivation. We’d taken this case because Angie had looked at Trevor Stone with sudden recognition—the recognition of one griever upon meeting another. She’d cared about his grief. I had, too. And any lingering doubts I’d had disappeared when Trevor Stone showed us the shrine he’d erected to his lost daughter.

But it hadn’t been a shrine. Had it?

He hadn’t surrounded himself with photos of Desiree because he needed to believe she was alive. He’d filled his room with his daughter’s face so his blood could feed off his hate.

Once again, my perspective of prior events was reshaping, transmogrifying, reinventing itself until I felt increasingly stupid for ever trusting my initial instincts.

This case, I swear.

“Anthony Lisardo,” I said to Jay eventually.

He chewed his sandwich. “What about him?”

“What happened to him?”

“Trevor had him whacked.”

“How?”

“Laced a pack of cigarettes with coke, gave it to Lisardo’s friend—what was his name, Donald Yeager—and Yeager left the pack in Lisardo’s car the night they went to the reservoir.”

“What,” Angie said, “the coke was laced with strychnine or something?”

Jay shook his head. “Lisardo had an allergic reaction to coke. He’d collapsed once at a college party when he was dating Desiree. That was his first heart attack. And that was the first and only time he was stupid enough to try coke. Trevor knew about it, laced the cigarettes, the rest is history.”

“Why?”

“Why’d Trevor kill Lisardo?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “Man had a problem sharing his daughter with anyone, if you know what I mean.”

“But then he hired you to kill her?” Angie said.

“Yup.”

“Again,” Angie said. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down at the table.

“You don’t
know
?” Angie said.

His eyes widened. “I don’t know. What’s so—”

“Didn’t she tell you, Jay? I mean, you were ‘with’ her these past few weeks. Didn’t she have some idea why her own father would want her, oh I dunno, dead?”

His voice was hard and loud. “If she did, Ange, she didn’t want to talk about it, and now she’s sort of beyond the point where she can.”

“And I’m sorry about that,” Angie said. “But I have to have a little more sense of Trevor’s motives to believe he’d want to kill his own daughter.”

“The fuck do I know?” Jay hissed. “Because he’s crazy. He’s whacked and the cancer’s in his brain. I don’t know. But he wanted her dead.” He crumpled an unlit cigarette in his palm. “And now she is. Whether by his hand or not, she’s gone. And he’s going to pay.”

“Jay,” I said softly, “back up. To the beginning. You went on that Grief Release retreat to Nantucket, and then you disappeared. What happened in the interim?”

He kept his glare on Angie for another few seconds, then let it drop. He looked at me.

I raised my eyebrows up and down a couple of times.

He smiled and it was his old smile, his old self for a moment. He looked around the diner, gave one of the nurses a sheepish grin, then looked back at us.

“Gather round, children.” He rubbed crumbs off his hands and leaned back in his chair. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

The Grief Release retreat for Level Fives was held in a nine-bedroom Tudor on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound. The first day, all Level Fives were encouraged to join in a group “purging” session in which they’d try to shed their layers of negative aura (or “malapsia blood poisoning,” as Grief Release termed it) by talking in depth about themselves and what had led them there.

In the session, Jay, using the David Fischer alias, immediately identified the first “purger” as a fraud. Lila Cahn was in her early thirties and pretty, with the sinewy body of an aerobics junkie. She claimed to have been the girlfriend of a small-time drug runner in a Mexican town called Catize, just south of Guadalajara. Her boyfriend had ripped off the local consortium of drug lords, who had taken their revenge by kidnapping Lila and her boyfriend off the street in broad daylight. They were dragged by a gang of five men to the basement of a bodega, where her boyfriend was shot once in the back of the head. The five men then raped Lila for six hours, an experience she described in vivid detail to the group. She was allowed to live to serve as a warning to any other
gringas
who might think of coming to Catize and getting mixed up with the wrong element.

Once Lila finished her story, the counselors hugged her and complimented her on her bravery in retelling such a horrific story.

“Only problem was,” Jay told us in the diner, “the story was utter horseshit.”

In the late 1980s, Jay was part of a joint FBI-DEA task force that went to Mexico in the wake of the murder of Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent. Ostensibly an information-seeking force, the real job of Jay and his fellow agents was to kick ass, take names, and make sure the Mexican drug lords would sooner shoot their own young before they’d entertain the idea of shooting a federal agent again.

“I lived in Catize for three weeks,” he said. “There’s not a basement in the entire town. The ground’s too soft because the town’s built over swampland. The boyfriend getting shot in the back of the head? No way. That’s an American Mafia hit, not a Mexican one. You rip off a drug lord down there, you die one way and one way only—Colombian necktie. They cut your throat and pull your tongue out through the hole, toss your body from a moving car into the village square. And no Mexican gang rapes an American woman for six hours and lets her live to serve warning to other
gringas.
Warning for what? They wanted to send a warning, they would have cut her into pieces and airmailed her back to the States.”

Looking for lies and inconsistencies now, Jay identified four other alleged Level Fives whose stories didn’t hold water. It was, he’d find out as the retreat wore on, standard operating procedure for Grief Release to place these frauds in groups of truly grief-stricken people because internal studies had shown that a client was far likelier to first confide in a “peer” before a counselor.

And what pissed Jay off most was hearing the bullshit stories threaded in with the real ones: a mother who’d lost her infant twins in a fire she escaped; a twenty-five-year-old man with an inoperable brain tumor; a woman whose husband had walked out on her for his nineteen-year-old secretary twenty years after their wedding and six days after the woman lost a breast in a mastectomy.

“These were shattered people,” Jay told us, “looking for a lifeline, for hope. And these Grief Release scumbags nodded and cooed and probed for every dirty secret and every piece of financial minutiae just so they could blackmail them later and enslave them to the Church.”

When Jay got mad, he usually got even.

By the end of the first night, he noticed Lila glancing at him, giving him shy smiles. The next night, he went to her room, and far from fitting the psychological profile of a woman who’d been gang-raped less than a year ago, Lila was joyfully uninhibited and quite inventive in bed.

“You know the golf-ball-through-the-garden-hose analogy?” Jay asked me.

“Jay,” Angie said.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

For five torrid hours, Jay and Lila had sex in her room. During breaks between rounds, she’d probe for information about his past, his current means, his hopes for the future.

“Lila,” he whispered in her ear during their final tryst that night, “there are no basements in Catize.”

His interrogation of her took two more hours, during which he convinced her that he was a former hit man for the Gambino family in New York who was trying to lie low awhile and figure out Grief Release’s angles before he muscled his way in on whatever con they had going here.

Lila, who Jay correctly guessed got turned on by men of danger, was no longer enamored of her position with either Grief Release or the Church. She told Jay the story of her former lover, Jeff Price, who’d heisted over two million dollars from the coffers of Grief Release. After promising to take her with him, Price ditched her and took off with the “Desiree bitch,” as Lila called her.

“But, Lila,” Jay said, “you know where Price went. Don’t you?”

She did, but she wasn’t telling.

But then Jay convinced her that if she didn’t cough up Price’s whereabouts, he’d make sure her fellow Messengers knew she was in on the heist with Price.

“You wouldn’t,” she said.

“Wanna bet?”

“What do I get if I tell you?” She pouted.

“A flat fifteen percent of whatever I take off Price.”

“How do I know you’ll pay it?”

“Because if I don’t,” Jay said, “you’ll rat me out.”

She chewed on that and eventually she said, “Clearwater.”

Jeff Price’s hometown, and the place where he planned to turn the two million into ten by going in on a drug deal with old friends who had heroin connections in Thailand.

Jay left the island that morning, but not before giving Lila one final piece of advice:

“You hold your breath until I get back, and you’ll have a nice chunk of change. But, Lila? You try and warn Price I’m coming, and I’ll do far worse to you than any five Mexicans would have.”

“So, I got back from Nantucket and called Trevor.”

Trevor, far from what he told us or Hamlyn and Kohl, sent a car for Jay, and the Weeble drove him back to the house in Marblehead.

He commended Jay on his diligent work, toasted him with his fine single-malt, and asked Jay how he felt about Hamlyn and Kohl’s attempt to remove him from the case.

“It must be a tremendous ego blow to a man with your skills.”

And it had been, Jay admitted. As soon as he found Desiree and returned her safely, he was going out on his own.

“How are you going to do that?” Trevor said. “You’re broke.”

Jay shook his head. “You’re mistaken.”

“Am I?” Trevor said. And he explained to Jay exactly what Adam Kohl had been doing with the 401(k)s, municipal funds, and stock options Jay had so blindly entrusted to him. “Your Mr. Kohl invested heavily, and on margin I might add, in stocks I advised him on recently. Unfortunately, those stocks didn’t perform as well as expected. And then there’s Mr. Kohl’s unfortunate and well-documented gambling addiction.”

Jay sat stunned as Trevor Stone detailed Adam Kohl’s long history of playing fast and loose with the stock and dividends of Hamlyn and Kohl employees.

“In fact,” Trevor said, “you won’t have to concern yourself with leaving Hamlyn and Kohl because they’ll be filing for Chapter Eleven within six weeks.”

“You ruined them,” Jay said.

“Did I?” Trevor moved his wheelchair over by Jay’s chair. “I’m sure I didn’t. Your dear Mr. Kohl overextended himself as he’s been doing for years. This time, however, he put too many of his eggs into one basket—a basket I advised him on, I admit, but without malice.” He placed his hand on Jay’s back. “Several of those investments are in your name, Mr. Becker. Seventy-five thousand six hundred forty-four dollars and twelve cents’ worth, to be exact.”

Trevor stroked the back of Jay’s neck with his palm. “So let’s talk truthfully, shall we?”

“He had me,” Jay told us. “And it wasn’t just the debt. I was shell-shocked when I realized that Adam, and maybe Everett, too, had actually betrayed me.”

“Did you talk to them?” Angie asked.

He nodded. “I called Everett and he confirmed it. He said he hadn’t known it himself. I mean, he’d known Kohl had a gambling problem, but he never thought he’d stoop to wiping out a fifty-three-year-old company in about seven weeks. Kohl had even pilfered the pension fund on Trevor Stone’s advice. Everett was devastated. You know his big thing about honor, Patrick.”

I nodded, remembering how Everett had spoken to Angie and me about honor in its twilight, about how hard it was to be an honorable man surrounded by dishonorable ones. How he’d stared at the view out his window as if it were the last time he’d ever see it.

“So,” Jay said, “I told Trevor Stone I’d do whatever he wanted. And he gave me two hundred and thirty thousand dollars to kill Jeff Price and Desiree.”

“I am more things than you could possibly fathom,” Trevor Stone told Jay that night. “I own trading corporations, shipping companies, more real estate than can be assessed in a day. I own judges, policemen, politicians, whole governments in some countries, and now I own you.” His hand tightened on Jay’s neck. “And if you betray me, I will reach across any oceans you try to put between us, and rip your jugular from your throat and cram it through the hole in your penis.”

So Jay went to Florida.

He had no idea what he’d do once he found Desiree or Jeff Price, only that he wouldn’t kill anyone in cold blood. He’d done that once for the feds in Mexico, and the memory of the look in the drug lord’s eyes just before Jay blew his heart all over his silk shirt had haunted him so completely, he quit the government a month later.

Lila had told him about a hotel in downtown Clearwater, the Ambassador, which Price had often raved about due to the vibrating beds and varied selection of porn movies available through the satellite TVs.

Jay thought it was a long shot, but then Price proved stupider than he’d thought when he walked out the front door two hours after Jay began staking the place out. Jay followed Price all day as he met with his buddies with the Thailand connections, got drunk in a bar in Largo, and took a hooker back to his room.

The next day, while Price was out, Jay broke into his room, but found no evidence of the money or Desiree.

One morning Jay watched Price leave the hotel and was about to give the room another toss when he got the feeling he was being watched.

He turned in his car seat and focused his binoculars, panned down the length of the street until he came face-to-face with another set of binoculars watching him from a car two blocks down.

“That’s how I met Desiree,” he told us. “Each of us watching the other through binoculars.”

He’d been wondering by this time if she’d ever really existed at all. He dreamed about her constantly, stared at her photographs for hours, believed he knew what she smelled like, how her laugh sounded, what her bare legs would feel like pressed against his own. And the more he built her up in his mind, the more she grew into something mythic—the tortured, poetic, tragic beauty who’d sat in Boston parks through the mists and rains of autumn, awaiting deliverance.

And then one day she was standing in front of him.

She didn’t drive away when he left his car to approach hers. She didn’t pretend it was all a misunderstanding. She watched him come with calm, steady eyes, and when he reached her car, she opened the door and stepped out.

“Are you from the police?” she said.

He shook his head, unable to speak.

She wore a faded T-shirt and jeans, both of which looked like they’d been slept in. Her feet were bare, her sandals on the floor mat of the car, and he found himself worrying that she might cut her feet on the glass or pebbles that littered the city street.

“Are you a private detective, perhaps?”

He nodded.

“A mute private detective?” she said with a small smile.

And he laughed.