Sacred

Mr. Mahew stated that on each occasion Ms. Stone was unequivocally alone.

2. Agnes Pascher, 44, Transient. Ms. Pascher’s testimony is questionable as this investigator noted physical evidence of both alcohol and drug (heroin) abuse about her person. Ms. Pascher claims to have seen Ms. Stone on two occasions—both in September (approximate)—in the Boston Common. Ms. Stone, according to Ms. Pascher, sat on the grass by the entrance at the corner of Beacon and Charles Streets, feeding squirrels with handfuls of sunflower seeds. Ms. Pascher, who had no contact with Ms. Stone, called her the “squirrel girl.”

3. Herbert Costanza, 34, Sanitation Engineer, Boston Parks & Recreation Department. Mr. Costanza on numerous occasions from mid-August through early November observed Ms. Stone, whom he dubbed “the sad, pretty girl,” sitting under a tree in the northwest corner of the Public Garden. His contact with her was limited to “polite hellos,” which she rarely responded to. Mr. Costanza believed Ms. Stone to be a poet, though he never witnessed her writing anything.

Note that the last of these sightings occurred in early November. Ms. Stone claimed to have met a man she identified as Sean Price in early November as well.

Computer search of statewide NYNEX telephone listings for Sean or S. Price yielded 124 matches. State DMV listings for Sean Price reduced the number to 19 matches within the target age (25-35). Since Ms. Stone’s sole physical description of Sean Price mentioned only his general age and race (Caucasian), the number was further reduced to 6 matches upon cross-referencing for ethnicity.

This investigator will begin contacting and interviewing the six remaining Sean Prices tomorrow.

Respectfully,

Jay Becker
Investigator

cc: Mr. Hamlyn, Mr. Kohl, Mr. keegan, Ms. Tarnover.

Angie looked up from the reports and rubbed her eyes. We sat side by side, reading the pages together.

“Christ,” she said, “he is one thorough guy.”

“He’s Jay,” I said. “A model for all of us.”

She nudged me. “Say it—he’s your hero.”

“Hero?” I said. “He’s my God. Jay Becker could find Hoffa without breaking a sweat.”

She patted his report pages. “Yet he seems to be having trouble finding either Desiree Stone or Sean Price.”

“Have faith,” I said and turned a page.

Jay’s rundown of the six Sean Prices had taken three days and yielded a big goose egg. One was a recent parolee who’d been in prison until late December of 1995. Another was a paraplegic and shut-in. A third was a research chemist for Genzyme Corporation who’d been consulting on a project at UCLA throughout the autumn. Sean Edward Price of Charlestown was a marginally employed roofer and full-time racist. When Jay asked him if he’d recently been to either the Public Garden or the Boston Common, he responded, “With the fruits and the liberals and the fucking mud races asking for handouts so’s they can buy themselves some crack? They should throw a fence around the whole downtown and nuke it from space, pal.”

Sean Robert Price of Braintree was a chubby, bald salesman for a textile company who took one look at Desiree Stone’s photograph and said, “If a woman who looked like that glanced in my direction I’d have a cardiac on the spot.” Since he covered the South Shore and the upper Cape in his job, it would have been impossible for him to make trips into Boston without being noticed. His attendance record, his boss assured Jay, was flawless.

Sean Armstrong Price of Dover was an investment consultant for Shearson Lehman. He ducked Jay for three days and Jay’s daily reports began to show an inkling of excitement until he finally caught up with Price while Price entertained clients at Grill 23. Jay pulled a chair up to the table and asked Price why he’d been avoiding him. On the spot, Price (who mistook Jay for an SEC investigator) admitted to a fraudulent scheme in which he advised clients to buy blocks of stock in floundering companies that Price himself had already invested in through a dummy corporation. This, Jay discovered, had been going on for years, and during October and early November, Sean Armstrong Price had made several trips—to the Cayman Islands, Lower Antilles, and Zurich to bury money he never should have had.

Two days later, Jay noted, one of the clients Price had been entertaining reported him to actual SEC investigators and he was arrested at his office on Federal Street. Reading between the lines of the rest of the data Jay gathered on Price, you could tell he thought Price was too dumb, too transparently slick, and too obsessed with finance to ever dupe or form a connection with Desiree.

Outside of that minor success, however, Jay was getting nowhere, and five days into his reports his frustration began to show. Desiree’s few close friends had lost contact with her after her mother’s death. She and her father had rarely spoken, nor had she confided in Lurch or the Weeble. With the exception of the macing of Daniel Mahew, she’d been remarkably unobtrusive during her trips downtown. If she hadn’t been so beautiful, Jay noted once, she probably wouldn’t have been noticed at all.

Since her disappearance, she’d used none of her credit cards, written no checks; her trust fund, various stocks, and certificates of deposit remained untouched. A check of her private phone line records revealed that she had made no calls between July and the date of her disappearance.

“No phone calls,” Jay had underlined in red in his report of February 20.

Jay was not the type to underline, ever, and I could tell that he had moved beyond the point of frustration and injury to his professional pride and toward the point of obsession. “It’s as if,” he wrote on February 22 “this beautiful woman never existed.”

Noting the unprofessional nature of this entry, Trevor Stone had contacted Everett Hamlyn and on the morning of the twenty-third, Jay Becker was called to an emergency meeting with Hamlyn, Adam Kohl, and Trevor Stone at Trevor’s home. Trevor included a transcript with Jay’s reports:

HAMLYN: We need to discuss the nature of this report.

BECKER: I was tired.

KOHL: Modifiers such as “beautiful”? In a document you know will circulate throughout the firm? Where is your head, Mr. Becker?

BECKER: Again, I was tired. Mr. Stone, I apologize.

STONE: I’m concerned that you’re losing your professional distance, Mr. Becker.

HAMLYN: With all due respect, Mr. Stone, it is my opinion that my operative has already lost his distance.

KOHL: Without question.

BECKER: You’re pulling me off the case?