Sacred: A Novel (2 page)

“Last year,” Trevor Stone said, “my wife was driving back from a party at the Somerset Club on Beacon Hill. You’re familiar with it?”

“We throw all our functions there,” Angie said.

“Yes, well anyway, her car broke down. I was just leaving my office downtown when she called, and I picked her up. Funny.”

“What?” I said.

He blinked. “I was just remembering how little we’d done that. Driven together. It was the sort of thing that had become a casualty of my commitment to work. Something as simple as sitting side by side in a car for twenty minutes, and we were lucky if we did it six times in a year.”

“What happened?” Angie said.

He cleared his throat. “Coming off the Tobin Bridge, a car tried to run us off the road. A carjacking, I believe it’s called. I had just bought my car—a Jaguar XKE—and I wasn’t about to give it up to a pack of thugs who thought wanting something was the same thing as being entitled to it. So…”

He stared out a window for a moment, lost, I can only assume, in the crunching of metals and revving of engines, the smell of the air that night.

“My car flipped onto the driver’s side. My wife, Inez, couldn’t stop screaming. I didn’t know it then, but she’d shattered her spine. The carjackers were angry because I’d destroyed the car they presumably thought of as theirs already. They shot Inez to death as I tried to remain conscious. They kept firing into the car, and three bullets found my body. Oddly, none caused critical damage, though one lodged in my jaw. These three men then spent some time trying to light the car on fire, but they never thought to puncture the gas tank. After a time, they grew bored, and left. And I lay there with three bullets in my body and several broken bones and my wife dead beside me.”

We’d left the study and Lurch and the Weeble behind and had made our way unsteadily into Trevor Stone’s rec room or gentleman’s parlor or whatever one called a room the size of a jet hangar with both a billiard and snooker table, cherrywood backing to the dart board, a poker table, and a small putting green in one corner. A mahogany bar ran up the east side of the room with enough glasses hanging overhead to get the Kennedys through a month of partying.

Trevor Stone poured two fingers of single-malt into his glass, tilted the bottle toward my glass, then Angie’s, and both of us refused.

“The men—boys, actually—who committed the crime were tried rather quickly and convicted and recently began serving life without possibility of parole at Norfolk, and that’s as close to justice as there is, I guess. My daughter and I buried Inez, and that should have been it except for the grief.”

“But,” Angie said.

“While the doctors were removing the bullet from my jaw, they found the first sign of cancer. And as they probed deeper they found it in my lymph nodes. They expect to find it in my small and large intestines next. Soon after that, I’m sure, they’ll run out of things to cut.”

“How long?” I said.

“Six months. That’s their opinion. My body tells me five. Either way, I’ve seen my last autumn.”

He swiveled his chair and looked out the window at the sea again. I followed his gaze, noted the curve of a rocky inlet across the bay. The inlet forked and thrust out into something that resembled lobster claws, and I looked back to its middle until I found a lighthouse I recognized. Trevor Stone’s house sat on a bluff in the midst of Marblehead Neck, a jagged finger of landscape off Boston’s North Shore where the asking price for a house was slightly less than that for most towns.

“Grief,” he said, “is carnivorous. It feeds whether you’re awake or not, whether you fight it or you don’t. Much like cancer. And one morning you wake up and all those other emotions—joy, envy, greed, even love—are swallowed by it. And you’re alone with grief, naked to it. And it owns you.”

The ice cubes in his glass rattled, and he looked down at them.

“It doesn’t have to,” Angie said.

He turned and smiled at her with his amoeba mouth. His white lips shook with tremors against the decayed flesh and pulverized bone of his jaw, and the smile disappeared.

“You’re acquainted with grief,” he said softly. “I know. You lost your husband. Five months ago, was it?”

“Ex-husband,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “Yes.”

I reached for her hand, but she shook her head, placed her hand on her lap.

“I read all the newspaper accounts,” he said. “I even read that terrible ‘true crime’ paperback. You two battled evil. And won.”

“It was a draw,” I said and cleared my throat. “Trust me on that.”

“Maybe,” he said, his hard green eyes finding my own. “Maybe for the two of you, it was a draw. But think of how many future victims you saved from those monsters.”

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “with all due respect, please don’t talk to us about this.”

“Why not?”

She raised her head. “Because you don’t know anything about it, so it makes you sound like a moron.”

His fingers caressed the head of his cane lightly before he leaned forward and touched her knee with his other hand. “You’re right. Forgive me.”

Eventually she smiled at him in a way I’d never seen her smile at anyone since Phil’s death. As if she and Trevor Stone were old friends, as if they’d both lived in places where light and kindness can’t reach.

“I’m alone,” Angie had told me a month ago.

“No, you’re not.”

She lay on a mattress and box spring we’d thrown down in my living room. Her own bed, and most of her belongings, were still back in her house on Howes Street because she wasn’t capable of entering the place where Gerry Glynn had shot her and Evandro Arujo had bled to death on the kitchen floor.

“You’re not alone,” I said, my arms wrapped around her from behind.

“Yes, I am. And all your holding and all your love can’t change that right now.”

Angie said, “Mr. Stone—”

“Trevor.”

“Mr. Stone,” she said, “I sympathize with your grief. I do. But you kidnapped us. You—”

“It’s not my grief,” he said. “No, no. Not my grief I was referring to.”

“Then whose?” I said.

“My daughter’s. Desiree.”

Desiree.

He said her name like it was the refrain of a prayer.

His study, when well lighted again, was a shrine to her.

Where before I’d seen only shadows, I now faced photos and paintings of a woman in nearly every stage of life—from baby snapshots to grade school, high school yearbook photos, college graduation. Aged and clearly mishandled Polaroids took up space in new teak-wood frames. A casual photo of her and a woman who was quite obviously her mother looked to have been taken at a backyard barbecue as both women stood over a gas grill, paper plates in hand, neither looking at the camera. It was an inconsequential moment in time, fuzzy around the edges, taken without consideration of the sun being off to the women’s left and thereby casting a dark shadow against the photographer’s lens. The kind of photo you’d be forgiven if you chose not to incorporate it into an album. But in Trevor Stone’s study, framed in sterling silver and perched on a slim ivory pedestal, it seemed deified.

Desiree Stone was a beautiful woman. Her mother, I saw from several photos, had probably been Latin, and her daughter had inherited her thick, honey-colored hair, the graceful lines of her jaw and neck, a sharp bone structure and thin nose, skin that seemed perpetually under the glow of sunset. From her father, Desiree had been bequeathed eyes the color of jade and full, fiercely determined lips. You noticed the symmetry of genetic influence most in a single photograph on Trevor Stone’s desk. Desiree stood between mother and father, wearing the purple cap and gown of her graduation, the main campus of Wellesley College framed behind her, her arms around her parents’ necks, pulling their faces close to hers. All three were smiling, robust with riches and health it seemed, and the delicate beauty of the mother and prodigious aura of power in the father seemed to meet and meld in the face of the daughter.

“Two months before the accident,” Trevor Stone said and picked up the photo for a moment. He looked at it, and the lower half of his ruined face spasmed into what I assumed was a smile. He placed it back on the desk, looked at us as we took the seats in front of him. “Do either of you know a private detective by the name of Jay Becker?”

“We know Jay,” I said.

“Works for Hamlyn and Kohl Investigations,” Angie said.

“Correct. Your opinion of him?”

“Professionally?”

Trevor Stone shrugged.

“He’s very good at his job,” Angie said. “Hamlyn and Kohl only hire the best.”

He nodded. “I understand they offered to buy the two of you out a few years ago if you’d come to work for them.”

“Where do you get this stuff?” I said.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“And it was a rather handsome offer from what I understand. Why did you refuse?”

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not the power suits and boardroom type.”

“But Jay Becker is?”

I nodded. “He did a few years with the FBI before he decided he liked the money in the private sector more. He likes good restaurants, nice clothes, nice condo, that sort of thing. He looks good in a suit.”

“And as you said, he’s a good investigator.”

“Very,” Angie said. “He’s the one who helped blow the whistle on Boston Federal Bank and their mob ties.”

“Yes, I know. Who do you think hired him?”

“You,” I said.

“And several other prominent businessmen who lost some money when the real estate market crashed and the S and L crises began in ’88.”

“So if you used him before, why’re you asking us for a character reference?”

“Because, Mr. Kenzie, I recently retained Mr. Becker, and Hamlyn and Kohl as well, to find my daughter.”

“Find?” Angie said. “How long has she been missing?”

“Four weeks,” he said. “Thirty-two days to be exact.”

“And did Jay find her?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Because now Mr. Becker is missing as well.”

In the city this morning, it had been cold but reasonable with not much of a wind, the mercury hovering in the low thirties. Weather that made you aware of it, but not enough to make you hate it.

On Trevor Stone’s back lawn, however, the wind screamed off the Atlantic and the whitecaps churned, and the cold hit my face like pellets. I turned the collar of my leather jacket up against the ocean breeze, and Angie dug her hands deep into her pockets and hunched over, but Trevor Stone leaned into the wind. He’d added only a light gray raincoat to his wardrobe before leading us out here, and it flapped open around his body as he faced the ocean, seemed to dare the cold to infiltrate him.

“Hamlyn and Kohl has returned my retainer and dropped my case,” he said.

“What’s their cause?”

“They won’t say.”

“That’s unethical,” I said.

“What are my options?”

“Civil court,” I said. “You’d take them to the cleaners.”

He turned from the sea and looked at us until we understood.

Angie said, “Any legal recourse is useless.”

He nodded. “Because I’ll be dead before anything gets to trial.” He turned into the wind again and spoke with his back to us, his words carried on the stiff breeze. “I used to be a powerful man, unaccustomed to disrespect, unaccustomed to fear. Now I’m impotent. Everyone knows I’m dying. Everyone knows I have no time to fight them. Everyone, I’m sure, is laughing.”

I crossed the lawn and stood beside him. The grass dropped away just past his feet and revealed a bluff of craggy black stones, their surfaces shining like polished ebony against the raging surf below.

“So why us?” I said.

“I’ve asked around,” he said. “Everyone I’ve talked to says you both have the two qualities I need.”

“Which qualities?” Angie said.

“You’re honest.”

“Insofar—”

“—as that goes in a corrupt world, yes, Mr. Kenzie. But you’re honest to those who earn your trust. And I intend to.”

“Kidnapping us probably wasn’t the best way to go about it.”

He shrugged. “I’m a desperate man with a ticking clock inside me. You’ve shut down your office and refuse to take cases or even meet with potential clients.”

“True,” I said.

“I’ve called both your home and office several times in the last week. You don’t answer your phone and you don’t have an answering machine.”

“I have one,” I said. “It’s just disconnected at the moment.”

“I’ve sent letters.”

“He doesn’t open his mail unless it’s a bill,” Angie said.

He nodded, as if this were common in some circles. “So I had to take desperate measures to ensure you’d hear me out. If you refuse my case, I’m prepared to pay you twenty thousand dollars just for your time here today and your inconvenience.”

“Twenty thousand,” Angie said. “Dollars.”

“Yes. Money means nothing to me anymore and I have no heirs if I don’t find Desiree. Besides, once you check up on me, you’ll find that twenty thousand dollars is negligible in comparison to my total worth. So, if you wish, go back inside my study and take the money from the upper-right-hand desk drawer and go back to your lives.”

“And if we stay,” Angie said, “what do you want us to do?”

“Find my daughter. I’ve accepted the possibility that she’s dead. I’m aware of the likelihood of that, in fact. But I won’t die wondering. I have to know what happened to her.”

“You’ve contacted the police,” I said.

“And they’ve paid me lip service.” He nodded. “But they see a young woman, beset with grief, who decided to go off on a jaunt and get herself together.”

“And you’re sure that’s not the case.”

“I know my daughter, Mr. Kenzie.”

He pivoted on his cane and began walking back across the lawn toward the house. We followed and I could see our reflections in the large panes of glass fronting his study—the decaying man who stiffened his back to the wind as his raincoat flapped around him and his cane searched for purchase on the frozen lawn; on his left, a small, beautiful woman with dark hair blowing across her cheeks and the ravages of loss in her face; and on his right, a man in his early thirties wearing a baseball cap, leather jacket, and jeans, a slightly confused expression on his face as he looked at the two proud, but damaged people beside him.