Sacred

HAMLYN: If Mr. Stone agrees with our recommendation.

BECKER: Mr. Stone?

STONE: Convince me why I shouldn’t, Mr. Becker. This is my daughter’s life we’re talking about.

BECKER: Mr. Stone, I admit I’ve become frustrated by the lack of any physical evidence to either your daughter’s disappearance or this Sean Price she claimed to have met. And that frustration has caused some disorientation. And, yes, what you’ve told me about your daughter, what I’ve heard from witnesses, and undoubtedly her physical beauty has helped to create a sentimental attachment to her which is not conducive to a professionally detached investigation. All true. But I’m close. I’ll find her.

STONE: When?

BECKER: Soon. Very soon.

HAMLYN: Mr. Stone, I urge you to allow us to employ another operative on this case as chief investigator.

STONE: I’ll give you three days, Mr. Becker.

KOHL: Mr. Stone!

STONE: Three days to come up with tangible proof of my daughter’s whereabouts.

BECKER: Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you very much.

“This is bad,” I said.

“What?” Angie lit a cigarette.

“Never mind everything else in the transcript, look at Jay’s last line. He’s being obsequious, almost sycophantic.”

“He’s thanking Stone for saving his job.”

I shook my head. “That’s not Jay. Jay’s too proud. You get a single ‘thanks’ out of the guy, you probably just saved him from a burning car. He’s not a ‘thank you’ type of guy. He’s way too cocky. And the Jay I know would have been ripshit they even considered taking him off the case.”

“But he’s losing it here. I mean, look at his last few entries before they called that meeting.”

I stood up, paced back and forth along the dining room table. “Jay can find anyone.”

“So you’ve said.”

“But in a week on this case, he’d found nothing. No Desiree. No Sean Price.”

“Maybe he was looking in the wrong places.”

I leaned over the table, worked the kinks out of my neck, and looked down at Desiree Stone. In one photo, she was sitting on a porch swing in Marblehead, laughing, her bright green eyes staring directly into the lens. Her rich honey hair was in tangles and she wore a raggedy sweater and torn jeans, her feet bare, dazzling white teeth exposed.

Her eyes drew you in, no question, but it was more than that that kept you fixated on her. She had what I’m sure a Hollywood casting director would call “presence.” Frozen in time, she still radiated an aura of health, of vigor, of effortless sensuality, an odd mixture of vulnerability and poise, of appetite and innocence.

“You’re right,” I said.

“How’s that?” Angie said.

“She is gorgeous.”

“No kidding. I’d kill to look that good in an old sweater and torn jeans. Christ, her hair looks like she hadn’t brushed it in a week and she’s still perfect.”

I grimaced at her. “You give her a good run in the beautiful department, Ange.”

“Oh, please.” She stubbed out her cigarette, joined me over the photo. “I’m pretty. Okay. Some men might even say beautiful.”

“Or gorgeous. Or knockout, drop-dead, volup—”

“Right,” she said. “Fine. Some men. I’ll give you that. Some men. But not all men. Plenty would say I’m not their type, I’m too Italian-looking, too petite, too whatever or not enough of whatever else.”

“For the sake of debate,” I said, “okay. I’ll go along with you.”

“But this one,” she said and tapped Desiree’s forehead with her index finger, “there’s not a straight man alive who wouldn’t find her attractive.”

“She is something,” I said.

“Something?” she said. “Patrick, she’s flawless.”

Two days after the emergency meeting in Trevor Stone’s house, Jay Becker did something that would have proven he’d gone off the deep end if it hadn’t proven instead to be a stroke of genius.

He became Desiree Stone.

He stopped shaving, allowed his hair and appearance to become disheveled, and stopped eating. Dressed in an expensive, but rumpled suit, he retraced Desiree’s steps around the Emerald Necklace. This time, however, he didn’t do it as an investigator; he did it as she had.

He sat on the same bench in the Commonwealth Avenue mall, on the same stretch of grass in the Common, under the same tree in the Public Garden. As he noted in his reports, he initially hoped that someone—maybe Sean Price—would contact him, act on a perception that Jay was vulnerable, laid waste by loss. But when that didn’t happen, he instead tried to adopt what he assumed was Desiree’s mind-set in the weeks before she disappeared. He soaked in the sights she’d seen, heard the sounds she’d heard, waited and prayed, as she probably had, for contact, for an end to grief, for a human connection found and forged in loss.

“Grief,” Jay wrote in his report of that day. “I kept coming back to her grief. What could console it? What could manipulate it? What could touch it?”

Alone, for the most part, in the wintery parks, as a light snow misted across his field of vision, Jay almost didn’t see what had been in front of his face and rattling through his subconscious since he’d taken this case nine days before.

Grief, he kept thinking. Grief.

And he saw it from his bench on Commonwealth Avenue. He saw it from the corner of grass in the Common. He saw it from under the tree in the Public Garden.

Grief.

Not the emotion, but the small gold nameplate.

GRIEF RELEASE, INC., it said.

There was the gold nameplate on the facade of the headquarters directly across from his bench on Commonwealth Avenue, another on the door of the Grief Release Therapeutic Center on Beacon Street. And the business offices of Grief Release, Inc., were located a block away, in a red brick mansion on Arlington Street.

Grief Release, Inc. When it dawned on him, Jay Becker must have laughed his ass off.

Two days later, after reporting to Trevor Stone and Hamlyn and Kohl that he’d found enough evidence to suggest Desiree Stone had visited Grief Release, Inc., and that there was enough that was fishy about the organization to warrant it, Jay went undercover.

He entered the offices of Grief Release and asked to speak with a counselor. He then told the counselor how he’d been a UN relief worker in Rwanda and then Bosnia (a cover friends of Adam Kohl in the UN would back up) and that he was suffering a complete collapse of moral, psychological, and emotional strength.