Sacred (Page 62)

“Like father, like daughter,” Angie said.

And that’s when it hit me. Like a building had fallen on me. The oxygen in my chest swirled into a vortex created by a single instant of horrifying clarity.

“What’s the best type of lie in the world?” I asked Angie.

“The type that’s mostly true.”

I nodded. “Why does Trevor want Desiree dead so badly?”

“You tell me.”

“Because he didn’t set up that murder attempt on the Tobin Bridge.”

“She did,” Angie said in a near whisper.

“Desiree killed her mother,” I said.

“And tried to kill her father.”

“No wonder he’s pissed at her,” the woman beside Angie said.

“No wonder,” I repeated.

34

It was all there to see in black-and-white for anyone who had the right information and the right perspective. With headlines such as THREE MEN CHARGED IN BRUTAL SLAYING OF MARBLEHEAD SOCIALITE, or ALLEGED THRILL-KILL TRIO ARRAIGNED FOR CARJACK KILL, the stories quickly fell off the front page when the three killers—Harold Madsen of Lynn, Colum Devereaux of South Boston, and Joseph Brodine of Revere—entered guilty pleas the day after the grand jury’s decision to indict.

Angie and I went straight from the airport to the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. We sat in the periodical room and scrolled through microfilm of the Trib and the News until we found the stories, then read each one until we found what we were looking for.

It didn’t take long. In fact, it took less than half an hour.

The day before the grand jury met, Harold Madsen’s attorney had contacted the District Attorney’s Office with a proposed deal for his client. Madsen would enter a plea of guilty to first-degree manslaughter for a sentence of fourteen to twenty years. In exchange, he would finger the man who had hired him and his friends to kill Trevor and Inez Stone.

It had all the makings of a bombshell, because up to this point, no mention had ever been made of the murder resulting from anything but a botched car theft.

CARJACK KILLER CLAIMS: IT WAS A HIT, the News screamed.

But when the man Madsen claimed had hired them turned out to have died two days after Madsen’s arrest, the DA laughed them out of his office.

“Anthony Lisardo?” Assistant District Attorney Keith Simon said to a Trib reporter. “Are you kidding me? He was a high school buddy of two of the defendants who died of a drug overdose. It’s a pathetic ploy by the defense to give this sordid crime a grandeur it never had. Anthony Lisardo had absolutely no connection to this case.”

No one on the defense team could prove he did, either. If Madsen, Devereaux, and Brodine had been contacted by Lisardo, that fact died with him. And since their story hinged on contact with Lisardo and no one else, they took the fall for Inez Stone’s murder all by themselves.

A defendant who pleads guilty before a potentially costly trial for the state usually gets some time taken off his sentence. Madsen, Devereaux, and Brodine, however, were each convicted of first-degree murder, both the judge and the DA having rejected a reduction to second degree with depraved indifference. Under recent Massachusetts sentencing guidelines, there is only one possible prison term for first-degree murder—life without possibility of parole.

And personally, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over three scumbags who shot a woman to death and obviously had abscesses where their hearts should have been. Nice knowing you, boys. Careful in the shower.

But the real criminal, the person who’d put them up to this, planned it, paid for it, and left them to suffer for it alone—that person deserved as much agony as, if not more than, those boys would be subjected to for the rest of their lives.

“Case file,” I said to Angie as we left the microfilm room.

She handed it to me and I leafed through it until I found our notes on our meeting with Captain Emmett T. Groning of the Stoneham Police Department. Lisardo’s companion the night he drowned was a kid named Donald Yeager of Stoneham.

“Phone books?” Angie asked the clerk at the information desk.

There were two Yeagers in Stoneham.

Two quarters later, we’d narrowed it down to one. Helene Yeager was ninety-three years old and had never known a Donald Yeager. She’d known a few Michaels, some Eds, even a Chuck, but not that Chuck.

Donald Yeager of 123 Montvale Avenue answered his phone with a hesitant “Yeah?”

“Donald Yeager?” Angie said.

“Yeah?”

“This is Candy Swan, program director of WAAF in Worcester.”

“AAF,” Donald said. “Cool. You guys kick ass.”

“We’re the only station that really rocks,” Angie said and flipped me the bird as I gave her a thumbs-up. “Donald, the reason I’m calling is we’re starting a new segment on our seven-to-midnight show tonight called, ahm, Headbangers from Hell.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah, and what we do is interview fans such as yourself, local interest stuff, just so you can speak to our other listeners about why you love AAF, who your favorite bands are, that sort of thing.”

“I’m going to be on the air?”

“Unless you got other plans for the night.”

“No. No way. Shit. Can I call my friends?”

“Absolutely. I just need your verbal consent, and—”

“My what?”

“You need to tell me it’s okay for us to call you back later. Say around seven.”

“Okay? Shit, it’s the balls, man.”

“Good. Now you’ll be there when we call back?”

“I’m not going anywhere. Hey, do I like win a prize or something?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “How’s two black Metallica T-shirts, a Beavis and Butthead video, and four tickets to Wrestlemania Seventeen at the Worcester Centrum sound?”

“Awesome, man! Awesome. But, hey?”

“Yeah?”

“I thought Wrestlemania was only up to number sixteen.”

“My mistake, Donald. We’ll call you at seven. Make sure you’re there.”

“With bells on, babe.”

“Where’d you come up with that?” I said as we took a cab back to Dorchester to drop off our luggage, clean up, replace the guns we’d lost in Florida, and get our car.

“I don’t know. Stoneham. AAF. They seem to go together.”

“The only station that really rocks,” I said. “Dude.”