Sacred

“With you?”

Jay nodded and sucked at the air, blinked back the tears in his eyes.

The waitress brought our food but we barely looked at it.

“With you?” Angie said. “As in…?”

Jay gave her a bitter smile. “Yes. With me. As in, Desiree and I were falling in love, I guess.” He chuckled but it only half left his mouth; the other half seemed to strangle in the back of his throat. “Hilarious, ain’t it? I come down here hired to kill her and I end up falling for her.”

“Whoa,” I said. “‘Hired to kill her’?”

He nodded.

“By whom?”

He looked at me like I was retarded. “Who do you think?”

“I don’t know, Jay. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Who hired you?” he said.

“Trevor Stone.”

He looked at us until we got it.

“Jesus Christ,” Angie said and hit the table with her fist so loudly the three truck drivers turned in their seats to look at us.

“Glad I could bring you both up to speed,” Jay said.

20

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…”

21

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.