We’d left the study and Lurch and the Weeble behind and had made our way unsteadily into Trevor Stone’s rec room or gentleman’s parlor or whatever one called a room the size of a jet hangar with both a billiard and snooker table, cherrywood backing to the dart board, a poker table, and a small putting green in one corner. A mahogany bar ran up the east side of the room with enough glasses hanging overhead to get the Kennedys through a month of partying.
Trevor Stone poured two fingers of single-malt into his glass, tilted the bottle toward my glass, then Angie’s, and both of us refused.
“The men—boys, actually—who committed the crime were tried rather quickly and convicted and recently began serving life without possibility of parole at Norfolk, and that’s as close to justice as there is, I guess. My daughter and I buried Inez, and that should have been it except for the grief.”
“But,” Angie said.
“While the doctors were removing the bullet from my jaw, they found the first sign of cancer. And as they probed deeper they found it in my lymph nodes. They expect to find it in my small and large intestines next. Soon after that, I’m sure, they’ll run out of things to cut.”
“How long?” I said.
“Six months. That’s their opinion. My body tells me five. Either way, I’ve seen my last autumn.”
He swiveled his chair and looked out the window at the sea again. I followed his gaze, noted the curve of a rocky inlet across the bay. The inlet forked and thrust out into something that resembled lobster claws, and I looked back to its middle until I found a lighthouse I recognized. Trevor Stone’s house sat on a bluff in the midst of Marblehead Neck, a jagged finger of landscape off Boston’s North Shore where the asking price for a house was slightly less than that for most towns.
“Grief,” he said, “is carnivorous. It feeds whether you’re awake or not, whether you fight it or you don’t. Much like cancer. And one morning you wake up and all those other emotions—joy, envy, greed, even love—are swallowed by it. And you’re alone with grief, naked to it. And it owns you.”
The ice cubes in his glass rattled, and he looked down at them.
“It doesn’t have to,” Angie said.
He turned and smiled at her with his amoeba mouth. His white lips shook with tremors against the decayed flesh and pulverized bone of his jaw, and the smile disappeared.
“You’re acquainted with grief,” he said softly. “I know. You lost your husband. Five months ago, was it?”
“Ex-husband,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “Yes.”
I reached for her hand, but she shook her head, placed her hand on her lap.
“I read all the newspaper accounts,” he said. “I even read that terrible ‘true crime’ paperback. You two battled evil. And won.”
“It was a draw,” I said and cleared my throat. “Trust me on that.”
“Maybe,” he said, his hard green eyes finding my own. “Maybe for the two of you, it was a draw. But think of how many future victims you saved from those monsters.”
“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “with all due respect, please don’t talk to us about this.”
“Why not?”
She raised her head. “Because you don’t know anything about it, so it makes you sound like a moron.”
His fingers caressed the head of his cane lightly before he leaned forward and touched her knee with his other hand. “You’re right. Forgive me.”
Eventually she smiled at him in a way I’d never seen her smile at anyone since Phil’s death. As if she and Trevor Stone were old friends, as if they’d both lived in places where light and kindness can’t reach.
“I’m alone,” Angie had told me a month ago.
“No, you’re not.”
She lay on a mattress and box spring we’d thrown down in my living room. Her own bed, and most of her belongings, were still back in her house on Howes Street because she wasn’t capable of entering the place where Gerry Glynn had shot her and Evandro Arujo had bled to death on the kitchen floor.
“You’re not alone,” I said, my arms wrapped around her from behind.
“Yes, I am. And all your holding and all your love can’t change that right now.”
Angie said, “Mr. Stone—”
“Trevor.”
“Mr. Stone,” she said, “I sympathize with your grief. I do. But you kidnapped us. You—”
“It’s not my grief,” he said. “No, no. Not my grief I was referring to.”
“Then whose?” I said.
“My daughter’s. Desiree.”
Desiree.
He said her name like it was the refrain of a prayer.
His study, when well lighted again, was a shrine to her.
Where before I’d seen only shadows, I now faced photos and paintings of a woman in nearly every stage of life—from baby snapshots to grade school, high school yearbook photos, college graduation. Aged and clearly mishandled Polaroids took up space in new teak-wood frames. A casual photo of her and a woman who was quite obviously her mother looked to have been taken at a backyard barbecue as both women stood over a gas grill, paper plates in hand, neither looking at the camera. It was an inconsequential moment in time, fuzzy around the edges, taken without consideration of the sun being off to the women’s left and thereby casting a dark shadow against the photographer’s lens. The kind of photo you’d be forgiven if you chose not to incorporate it into an album. But in Trevor Stone’s study, framed in sterling silver and perched on a slim ivory pedestal, it seemed deified.
Desiree Stone was a beautiful woman. Her mother, I saw from several photos, had probably been Latin, and her daughter had inherited her thick, honey-colored hair, the graceful lines of her jaw and neck, a sharp bone structure and thin nose, skin that seemed perpetually under the glow of sunset. From her father, Desiree had been bequeathed eyes the color of jade and full, fiercely determined lips. You noticed the symmetry of genetic influence most in a single photograph on Trevor Stone’s desk. Desiree stood between mother and father, wearing the purple cap and gown of her graduation, the main campus of Wellesley College framed behind her, her arms around her parents’ necks, pulling their faces close to hers. All three were smiling, robust with riches and health it seemed, and the delicate beauty of the mother and prodigious aura of power in the father seemed to meet and meld in the face of the daughter.
“Two months before the accident,” Trevor Stone said and picked up the photo for a moment. He looked at it, and the lower half of his ruined face spasmed into what I assumed was a smile. He placed it back on the desk, looked at us as we took the seats in front of him. “Do either of you know a private detective by the name of Jay Becker?”
“We know Jay,” I said.
“Works for Hamlyn and Kohl Investigations,” Angie said.
“Correct. Your opinion of him?”
“Professionally?”
Trevor Stone shrugged.
“He’s very good at his job,” Angie said. “Hamlyn and Kohl only hire the best.”
He nodded. “I understand they offered to buy the two of you out a few years ago if you’d come to work for them.”
“Where do you get this stuff?” I said.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“And it was a rather handsome offer from what I understand. Why did you refuse?”
“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not the power suits and boardroom type.”
“But Jay Becker is?”
I nodded. “He did a few years with the FBI before he decided he liked the money in the private sector more. He likes good restaurants, nice clothes, nice condo, that sort of thing. He looks good in a suit.”
“And as you said, he’s a good investigator.”
“Very,” Angie said. “He’s the one who helped blow the whistle on Boston Federal Bank and their mob ties.”
“Yes, I know. Who do you think hired him?”
“You,” I said.
&nbs
p; “And several other prominent businessmen who lost some money when the real estate market crashed and the S and L crises began in ’88.”
“So if you used him before, why’re you asking us for a character reference?”
“Because, Mr. Kenzie, I recently retained Mr. Becker, and Hamlyn and Kohl as well, to find my daughter.”
“Find?” Angie said. “How long has she been missing?”
“Four weeks,” he said. “Thirty-two days to be exact.”
“And did Jay find her?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Because now Mr. Becker is missing as well.”
In the city this morning, it had been cold but reasonable with not much of a wind, the mercury hovering in the low thirties. Weather that made you aware of it, but not enough to make you hate it.
On Trevor Stone’s back lawn, however, the wind screamed off the Atlantic and the whitecaps churned, and the cold hit my face like pellets. I turned the collar of my leather jacket up against the ocean breeze, and Angie dug her hands deep into her pockets and hunched over, but Trevor Stone leaned into the wind. He’d added only a light gray raincoat to his wardrobe before leading us out here, and it flapped open around his body as he faced the ocean, seemed to dare the cold to infiltrate him.
“Hamlyn and Kohl has returned my retainer and dropped my case,” he said.
“What’s their cause?”
“They won’t say.”
“That’s unethical,” I said.
“What are my options?”
“Civil court,” I said. “You’d take them to the cleaners.”
He turned from the sea and looked at us until we understood.
Angie said, “Any legal recourse is useless.”
He nodded. “Because I’ll be dead before anything gets to trial.” He turned into the wind again and spoke with his back to us, his words carried on the stiff breeze. “I used to be a powerful man, unaccustomed to disrespect, unaccustomed to fear. Now I’m impotent. Everyone knows I’m dying. Everyone knows I have no time to fight them. Everyone, I’m sure, is laughing.”
I crossed the lawn and stood beside him. The grass dropped away just past his feet and revealed a bluff of craggy black stones, their surfaces shining like polished ebony against the raging surf below.
“So why us?” I said.
“I’ve asked around,” he said. “Everyone I’ve talked to says you both have the two qualities I need.”
“Which qualities?” Angie said.
“You’re honest.”
“Insofar—”
“—as that goes in a corrupt world, yes, Mr. Kenzie. But you’re honest to those who earn your trust. And I intend to.”
“Kidnapping us probably wasn’t the best way to go about it.”
He shrugged. “I’m a desperate man with a ticking clock inside me. You’ve shut down your office and refuse to take cases or even meet with potential clients.”
“True,” I said.
“I’ve called both your home and office several times in the last week. You don’t answer your phone and you don’t have an answering machine.”
“I have one,” I said. “It’s just disconnected at the moment.”
“I’ve sent letters.”
“He doesn’t open his mail unless it’s a bill,” Angie said.
He nodded, as if this were common in some circles. “So I had to take desperate measures to ensure you’d hear me out. If you refuse my case, I’m prepared to pay you twenty thousand dollars just for your time here today and your inconvenience.”
“Twenty thousand,” Angie said. “Dollars.”
“Yes. Money means nothing to me anymore and I have no heirs if I don’t find Desiree. Besides, once you check up on me, you’ll find that twenty thousand dollars is negligible in comparison to my total worth. So, if you wish, go back inside my study and take the money from the upper-right-hand desk drawer and go back to your lives.”
“And if we stay,” Angie said, “what do you want us to do?”
“Find my daughter. I’ve accepted the possibility that she’s dead. I’m aware of the likelihood of that, in fact. But I won’t die wondering. I have to know what happened to her.”
“You’ve contacted the police,” I said.
“And they’ve paid me lip service.” He nodded. “But they see a young woman, beset with grief, who decided to go off on a jaunt and get herself together.”
“And you’re sure that’s not the case.”
“I know my daughter, Mr. Kenzie.”
He pivoted on his cane and began walking back across the lawn toward the house. We followed and I could see our reflections in the large panes of glass fronting his study—the decaying man who stiffened his back to the wind as his raincoat flapped around him and his cane searched for purchase on the frozen lawn; on his left, a small, beautiful woman with dark hair blowing across her cheeks and the ravages of loss in her face; and on his right, a man in his early thirties wearing a baseball cap, leather jacket, and jeans, a slightly confused expression on his face as he looked at the two proud, but damaged people beside him.
As we reached the patio, Angie held the door open for Trevor Stone and said, “Mr. Stone, you said you’d heard we had the two qualities you were looking for most.”
“Yes.”
“One was honesty. What’s the other?”
“I heard you were relentless,” he said as he stepped into his study. “Utterly relentless.”
3
“Fifty,” Angie said as we rode the subway from Wonderland Station toward downtown.
“I know,” I said.
“Fifty thousand bucks,” she said. “I thought twenty was insane enough, but now we’re carrying fifty thousand dollars, Patrick.”
I looked around the subway car at the mangy pair of winos about ten feet away, the huddled pack of gangbangers considering the emergency pull switch in the corner of the car, the lunatic with the buzz-cut blond hair and thousand-yard stare gripping the hand strap beside me.
“Say it a little louder, Ange. I’m not sure the G-boys down back heard you.”
“Whoops.” She leaned into me. “Fifty thousand dollars,” she whispered.
“Yes,” I whispered back as the train bucked around a curve with a metal screech and the fluorescents overhead sputtered off, then on, then off, then on again.
Lurch, or Julian Archerson as we’d come to know him, had been prepared to drive us all the way home, but once we hit the stand-still traffic on Route 1A, after sitting in an earlier automotive thicket on Route 129 for forty-five minutes, we had him drop us as close to a subway station as possible and walked to Wonderland Station.
So now we stood with the other sardines as the decrepit car heaved its way through the maze of tunnels and the lights went on and off and we carried fifty thousand of Trevor Stone’s dollars on our persons. Angie had the check for thirty thousand tucked in the inside pocket of her letterman’s jacket, and I had the twenty thousand in cash stuffed between my stomach and belt buckle.
“You’ll need cash if you’re going to start immediately,” Trevor Stone had said. “Spare no expense. This is just operating money. Call if you need more.”
“Operating” money. I had no idea if Desiree Stone was alive or not, but if she was, she’d have to have found a pretty remote section of Borneo or Tangier before I blew through fifty grand in order to find her.
“Jay Becker,” Angie said and whistled.
“Yeah,” I said. “No kidding.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Six weeks ago or so,” I said and shrugged. “We don’t keep tabs on each other.”
“I haven’t seen him since the Big Dick awards.”
The lunatic on my right raised his eyebrows and looked at me.
I shrugged. “You can dress ’em up nice, you know? But you can’t take ’em out.”
He nodded, then went back to staring at his reflection in the dark subway window as if it pissed him off.
> The Big Dick award was actually the Boston Investigators Association’s Gold Standard Award for Excellence in Detecting. But everyone I knew in the field called it the Big Dick award.
Jay Becker won the Big Dick this year as he had last year and back in ’89 as well, and for a while rumors abounded in the private detective community that he was going to open an office of his own, break away from Hamlyn and Kohl. I knew Jay well, though, and I wasn’t surprised when the rumors proved false.
It wasn’t that Jay would have starved on his own. On the contrary, he was easily the best-known PI in Boston. He was good-looking, smart as hell, and could have charged retainers in the mid five figures if he chose. Several of Hamlyn and Kohl’s wealthiest clients would have happily crossed the street if Jay had opened his doors there. The problem was, those clients could have offered Jay all the money in New England, and he still couldn’t have taken their cases. Every investigator who signed a contract with Hamlyn and Kohl also signed a promissory note to the effect that should the investigator leave Hamlyn and Kohl, he agreed to wait three years before accepting any case from a client with whom he’d worked at Hamlyn and Kohl. Three years in this business might as well be a decade.
So Hamlyn and Kohl had a pretty good hold on him. If any investigator was good enough and respected enough, however, to jump ship from Everett Hamlyn and Adam Kohl and make a profit, Jay Becker was. But Jay was also shitty with money, as bad as anyone I’ve ever known. As soon as he got it, he spent it—on clothes, cars, women, leather sectionals, what have you. Hamlyn and Kohl paid his overhead, paid for his office space, provided and protected his stock options, his 401(k), his portfolio of municipal funds. They daddied him, basically, and Jay Becker needed a daddy.
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