Sacred

“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. From 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?”