Sacred

by Dennis Lehane

  “Okay,” Manny said. “Okay. She was recruited.”

  Bubba said, “I turn this on again, I’m using it, Ange. Whether you like it or not.”

  She nodded.

  “Jeff Price,” Manny said. “He was the recruiter.”

  “Jeff?” I said. “I thought his name was Sean.”

  Manny shook his head. “That was his middle name. He used it as an alias sometimes.”

  “Tell us about him.”

  “He was the treatment supervisor at Grief Release and a member of the Church Council.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Church Council is like the board of directors. It’s made up of people who’ve been with the Church since its days in Chicago.”

  “So, this Jeff Price,” Angie said, “where’s he now?”

  “Gone,” John said.

  We looked at him. Even Bubba seemed to be getting interested. Maybe he was taking mental notes for the day he’d start his own Church. The Temple Defective.

  “Jeff Price stole two million dollars from the Church and disappeared.”

  “How long ago?” I said.

  “Little over six weeks ago,” Manny said.

  “Which is when Desiree Stone disappeared.”

  Manny nodded. “They were lovers.”

  “So you think she’s with him?” Angie said.

  Manny looked at John. John looked at the floor.

  “What?” Angie said.

  “I think she’s dead,” Manny said. “Jeff, you gotta understand, he’s—”

  “A first-class bastard,” John said. “Coldest prick you’ll ever meet.”

  Manny nodded. “He’d trade his mother to the alligators for a pair of fucking shoes, if you know what I mean.”

  “But Desiree could be with him,” Angie said.

  “I suppose. But Jeff’s traveling light. You know? He knows we’re looking for him. And he knows a girl as good-looking as Desiree kind of stands out in a crowd. I’m not saying she might not have left Massachusetts with him, but he would have cut her loose at some point. Probably as soon as she found out about the money he stole. And I don’t mean cut her loose like leave her behind at a Denny’s or something. He would have buried her deep.”

  He looked down and his body sagged against the ropes.

  “You liked her,” Angie said.

  He looked up and you could see it in his eyes. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Look, I scam people? Yes. Right. I do. But most of these assholes? They come in bitching about malaise or chronic fatigue syndrome, how they’ll never get over having wet the bed as a child. I say, fuck ’em. They obviously have too much time and too much money on their hands, and if some of that money can help the Church, all the better.” He stared up at Angie with a cold defiance that gradually warmed or weakened into something else. “Desiree Stone wasn’t like that. She came to us for help. Her whole fucking world caved in on her in a period of, like, two weeks and she was afraid she was going to crack up. You might not believe this, but the Church could have helped her. I really think that.”

  Angie shook her head slowly and turned her back to him. “Save us some time, here, Manny. Jeff Price’s story about his family getting killed by carbon monoxide poisoning?”

  “Bullshit.”

  I said, “Someone infiltrated Grief Release recently. Someone like us. You know who I’m talking about?”

  He was genuinely confused. “No.”

  “John?”

  John shook his head.

  “Any leads on Price’s whereabouts?” Angie said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Manny. You can wipe out my credit and bank account, at night, in less than twelve hours, I’d say it’d be pretty hard to hide from you people.”

  “But that was Price’s specialty. He came up with the whole concept of counter-ops.”

  “Counter-ops,” I said.

  “Yeah. Get to your opponent before they can get to you. Silence dissent. Do what the CIA does. All the information gathering, the sessions, the PIN test, that was all Price’s idea. He started that back in Chicago. If anyone can hide from us, he’s the guy.”

  “There was that time in Tampa,” John said.

  Manny glared at him.

  “I’m not getting burned,” John said. “I’m not.”

  “What time in Tampa?” I said.

  “He used a credit card. His own. He must have been drunk,” John said. “That’s his weakness. He’s a drinker. We have a guy, all he does, day in day out, is sit by a computer linked up to all the banks and credit companies Price has accounts with. Three weeks ago, this guy, he’s staring at the computer screen one night and it starts making noise. Price used his credit card at a motel in Tampa, the Courtyard Marriott.”

  “And?”

  “And,” Manny said, “we had guys there in four hours. But he was gone. We don’t even know if it was him. The desk clerk told us it was a chick used the card.”

  “Desiree maybe,” I said.

  “No. This chick was blond, had a big scar on her neck. The desk clerk said he was sure she was a hooker. Claimed the card was her daddy’s. I think Price probably sold his credit cards or threw them out a window, let the vagrants find them. Just to screw with us.”

  “Have any been used since?” Angie said.

  “No,” John said.

  “Kind of shoots holes in that theory, Manny.”

  “She’s dead, Mr. Kenzie,” Manny said. “I don’t want her to be, believe me, but she is.”

  We grilled them for another thirty minutes, but we didn’t come up with anything new. Desiree Stone had met, been manipulated by, and fallen in love with Jeff Price. Price stole $2.3 million that couldn’t legally be reported because it was from the slush fund Grief Release and the Church had built out of money bilked from members. At ten A.M., February 12, Price accessed the bank code for the account in the Grand Cayman Islands, wired the money into his personal account at Commonwealth Bank, and withdrew it at eleven-thirty that same morning. He walked out of the bank and disappeared.

  Twenty-one minutes later, Desiree Stone parked her car at 500 Boylston Street, nine city blocks from Price’s bank. And that was the last anyone ever saw of her, either.

  “By the way,” I said, thinking of Richie Colgan, “who runs the Church? Who’re the moneymen?”

  “No one knows,” Manny said.

  “Please.”

  He glanced at Bubba. “Really. I’m serious. I’m sure the members of the council know, but not guys like us.”

  I looked at John.

  He nodded. “The head of the Church, in name, is the Reverend Kett, but nobody’s actually seen him in the flesh in at least fifteen years.”

  “Maybe even twenty,” Manny said. “We get paid well, though, Kenzie. Real well. So we don’t complain, and we don’t ask questions.”

  I looked at Angie. She shrugged.

  “We’ll need a picture of Price,” she said.

  “It’s on the diskettes,” Manny said. “In a file called PFCGR—Personnel Files, Church and Grief Release.”

  “Anything else you can tell us about Desiree?”

  He shook his head and his voice was pained when he spoke. “You don’t meet many good people. I mean, good. No one in this room is a good person.” He looked around at all of us. “But Desiree was. She would have been good for this world. And now she’s probably in a ditch somewhere.”

  Bubba knocked Manny and John cold again, and then he and Nelson and the Twoomey brothers drove them out to a section of urban waste under the Mystic River Bridge in Charlestown. They waited for them to wake up with their hands bound and their mouths gagged. Then they booted them both out the back of the van, fired a couple of rounds into the ground near their heads until John whimpered and Manny wept. Then they drove off.

  “People surprise you sometimes,” Bubba said.

  We sat on the hood of the Crown Victoria, parked by the side of the road in front of Plymouth Correctional. F
rom here we could see the inmates’ gardens and greenhouse, hear the boisterous sound of men playing basketball in the crisp air on the other side of the wall. But one look at the Cyclone fence stretched, coiled and vicious, around the top of the walls or the silhouettes of guard and rifle in the towers, and you couldn’t mistake it for anything but what it was—a place that caged human beings. No matter how you felt about crime and punishment, that fact was always there. And it was an ugly one.

  “She could be alive,” Bubba said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “No, seriously. Like I said, people surprise you. You two told me before those shitheads woke up in my place, she Maced some guy once.”

  “So?” Angie said.

  “So it shows she’s strong. You know? I mean, you got a guy sitting beside you and you pull out a can of Mace and shoot it in his eyes? You know what kind of strength that takes? That’s a girl with some spine. Maybe she found a way to get away from this guy, this Price shitbird.”

  “But then she would have called her father. She would have made some sort of attempt at contact.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. You’re the detectives, I’m the moron going to jail for packing a piece.”

  We leaned back against the car, looked up again at the granite walls and Cyclone fence, the hard, darkening sky.

  “Gotta go,” Bubba said.

  Angie hugged him tightly and kissed his cheek.

  I shook his hand. “You want us to walk you to the door?”

  “Nah. Feel like you were my parents on the first day of school.”

  “The first day of school,” I said, “I remember you beat the hell out of Eddie Rourke.”

  “’Cause he gave me shit about my parents walking me to the door.” He winked. “See you in a year.”

  “Before that,” Angie said. “You think we’d forget to visit?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t forget what I told you. They’ll surprise you, people.”

  We watched him walk up the crushed shell and gravel walkway, his shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, the stiff breeze rising off the frozen furrows of vegetation in the fields and mussing his hair.

  He went through the doors without a look back.

  12

  “So my daughter’s in Tampa,” Trevor Stone said.

  “Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “did you hear what we said?”

  He tightened his smoking jacket at his throat, looked at her through bleary eyes. “Yes. Two men believe she’s dead.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “But from what we’ve heard of this Jeff Price, he doesn’t seem like the type who’d keep a woman as noticeable as your daughter with him while he tries to lie low. So the Tampa lead…”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. His eyes clenched shut and he seemed to be biting back against something acidic. His face was slick with sweat and paler than bleached bone. Yesterday morning, he’d been prepared for us, and he’d used his cane and dressed smartly and presented the figure of a frail but proud and resilient warrior.

  Tonight, however, with no time to prepare for our arrival, he sat in the wheelchair Julian told us he used three quarters of the time now, his mind and body exhausted by cancer and the chemotherapy trying to combat it. His hair stuck out in wispy static tufts from his head and his voice was a thin whisper soaked in gravel.

  “It’s a lead, however,” he said, his eyes still closed, tremulous fist pressed to his mouth. “Maybe that’s where Mr. Becker disappeared to also. Hmm?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “How soon can you leave?”

  “Huh?” Angie said.

  He opened his eyes. “For Tampa. Could you be ready first thing in the morning?”

  “We’d have to make flight arrangements,” I said.

  He scowled. “Flight arrangements are unnecessary. Julian can pick you up first thing in the morning and take you to my plane.”

  “Your plane,” Angie said.

  “Find my daughter or Mr. Becker or Mr. Price.”

  “Mr. Stone,” Angie said. “It’s a long shot.”

  “Fine.” He coughed into his fist, closed his eyes again for a moment. “If she’s alive, I want her found. If she’s dead, I need to know. And if this Mr. Price is behind her death, will you do something for me?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Would you be so kind as to kill him?”

  The air in his room suddenly felt like ice.

  “No,” I said.

  “You’ve killed people before,” he said.

  “Never again,” I said as he turned his head toward the window. “Mr. Stone.”

  He turned his head back, looked at me.

  “Never again,” I repeated. “Is that understood?”

  He closed his eyes, lay his head back against the headrest in his wheelchair, and waved us from the room.

  “You see a man who is closer to dust than flesh,” Julian said as he held Angie’s coat in the marble foyer.

  Angie reached for her coat and he motioned for her to turn her back to him. She grimaced, but did so, and Julian slid her coat up her arms and over her back.

  “I see a man,” he said as he reached into the closet for my jacket, “who towered over other men, who towered over industry and finance and every world he chose to place his foot upon. A man whose footfalls caused trembling. And respect. Utmost respect.”

  He held out my jacket and I stepped into it, smelled the clean, cool scent of his cologne. It wasn’t a brand I recognized, but somehow I knew it was out of my price range anyway.

  “How long have you been with him, Julian?”

  “Thirty-five years, Mr. Kenzie.”

  “And the Weeble?” Angie said.

  Julian gave her a thin smile. “That would be Mr. Clifton?”

  “Yes.”

  “He has been with us for twenty years. He was Mrs. Stone’s valet and personal secretary. Now he helps me with property upkeep and maintenance, attending to Mr. Stone’s business interests when Mr. Stone himself is too tired.”

  I turned to face him. “What do you think happened to Desiree?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. I only hope it’s nothing irreparable. She’s a divine child.”

  “And Mr. Becker?” Angie said.

  “How do you mean, Miss?”

  “The night he disappeared he was en route to this house. We checked with the police, Mr. Archerson. There were no reports of any disturbances or strange incidents along Route One-A that night. No car accidents or abandoned vehicles. No cab companies which drove a fare to or toward this address at the time in question. No rental cars rented to a Jay Becker that day, and his own car is still parked in his condo parking lot.”

  “And this leads you to assume?” Julian said.

  “We have no assumptions,” I said. “Just feelings, Julian.”

  “Ah.” He opened the door for us and the air that flowed into the foyer was arctic. “And those feelings tell you what?”

  “They tell us someone’s lying,” Angie said. “Maybe a lot of someones.”

  “Food for thought. Yes.” Julian tipped his head. “Good evening, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. Do drive carefully.”

  “Up is down,” Angie said as we drove over the Tobin Bridge and the lights of the city skyline spread before us.

  “What?” I said.

  “Up is down. Black is white. North is south.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “Do you want to pull over and let me drive?”

  She shot me a look. “This case,” she said. “I’m starting to get the feeling everyone’s lying and everyone has something to hide.”

  “Well, what do you want to do about it?”

  “I want to stop taking anything at face value. I want to question everything and trust no one.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I want to break into Jay Becker’s place.”

  “Now?” I said.

&
nbsp; “Right now,” she said.

  Jay Becker lived in Whittier Place, a high-rise overlooking the Charles River or the Fleet Center depending on the placement of your condo.

  Whittier Place is part of the Charles River Apartments, a horrific complex of modern luxury housing built in the seventies along with City Hall, the Hurley and Lindemann Center buildings, and the JFK Building to replace the old West End neighborhood, which several genius city planners decided had to be razed so Boston in the 1970s would look like London in A Clockwork Orange.

  The West End had looked a lot like the North End, if a bit dustier and dingier in places due to its proximity to the red-light districts of Scollay Square and North Station. The red-light districts are gone now, as is the West End, as are most pedestrians after five o’clock. In the place of a neighborhood, city planners erected a cement complex of squat sprawling erector-set municipal buildings, no function and all form, and the form hideous too, and tall cinder-block apartment complexes that look like nothing so much as an arid, characterless hell.

  “If You Lived Here,” the clever signs told us as we looped around Storrow Drive toward the entrance to Whittier Place, “You’d Be Home Now.”

  “If I lived in this car,” Angie said, “wouldn’t I be home, too?”

  “Or under that bridge.”

  “Or in the Charles.”

  “Or in that Dumpster.”

  We ran with that until we found a parking space, another place we’d call home had we lived there.

  “You really hate modern, don’t you?” she said as we walked toward Whittier Place and I looked up at it with a scowl on my face.

  I shrugged. “I like modern music. Some TV shows are better than they’ve ever been. That’s about it, though.”

  “There’s not a single modern piece of architecture you like?”

  “I don’t instantaneously want to nuke Hancock Towers or the Heritage when I see them. But Frank Lloyd Wrong and I. M. Pei have never designed a house or building which could compete with even the most basic Victorian.”

  “You’re definitely a Boston boy, Patrick. Through and through.”

  I nodded as we walked up toward the doors of Whittier Place. “I just want them to leave my Boston alone, Ange. Go to Hartford if they want to build shit like this. Or L.A. Wherever. Just away.”