Sacred

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.”