Sacred

  And most of these cars end up on the Lynnway, a stretch of Route 1A that cuts over the Mystic River, and is lined from end to end with car dealerships and garages. Most of those dealerships and garages are legitimate, but several aren’t. That’s why most Bostonians who get their cars stolen shouldn’t even bother checking their LoJack satellite-tracking system—it will just beep from a spot in the depths of the Mystic, just off the Lynnway. The tracking system, not the car. The car’s in pieces and those pieces are on their way to fifteen different places within half an hour after you parked.

  “Crazy Davey isn’t pissed about his son’s death?” I said.

  “I’m sure he is,” Captain Groning said. “But there’s not much he can do about it. Oh, sure, he gave us all the usual ‘My son don’t do coke’ bullshit, but what else is he going to say? Luckily, the way the mob’s all messed up around here these days, and Crazy Davey not even being in the running for a slot, I don’t have to care what he thinks.”

  “So Crazy Davey’s small-time?” I said.

  “Like a guppy,” Captain Groning said.

  “Like a guppy,” I said to Angie.

  And got another kick.

  14

  The offices of Hamlyn and Kohl Worldwide Investigations occupied the entire thirty-third floor of the John Hancock Tower, I. M. Pei’s icy skyscraper of metallic blue glass. The edifice consists of sheets of mirrored glass, each twenty feet high and sixty feet long. Pei designed them so that the surrounding buildings would be captured in the glass with perfect resolution, and as you approach, you can see the light granite and red sandstone of Trinity Church and the imposing limestone of the Copley Plaza Hotel trapped in the smoked blue of merciless glass. It’s not all that unattractive an image, really, and at least the sheets of glass don’t have a habit of falling out like they used to.

  Everett Hamlyn’s office faced the Trinity Church side and you could see clear to Cambridge on a sharp cold night like tonight. Actually, you could see clear to Medford, but I don’t know anyone who’d want to look that far.

  We sipped Everett Hamlyn’s top-shelf brandy and watched him stand by his sheet of glass and stare out at the city laid in a carpet of lights at his feet.

  He cut a hell of a figure, Everett did. Ramrod straight, skin so tight to his hard frame that I often thought if a paper cut appeared in the flesh, he’d burst wide open. His gunmetal hair was trimmed tight to the scalp, and I’d never seen so much as a hint of stubble or shadow on his cheeks.

  His work ethic was legendary—the one who turned on the lights in the morning and shut them off at night. A man who’d been overheard more than once saying that any man who needed more than four hours of sleep couldn’t be trusted, because treachery lay in sloth and a need for luxury and more than four hours’ sleep was a luxury. He’d been with the OSS during World War II, just a kid then, but now, more than fifty years later, he still looked better than most men half his age.

  Retirement would come for Everett Hamlyn, it was said, the same night death did.

  “You know I can’t discuss this,” he said, his eyes watching our reflections in the glass.

  I met his eyes the same way. “Off the record, then. Everett, please.”

  He smiled softly and raised his glass, took a parsimonious sip of brandy. “You knew you’d find me alone, Patrick. Didn’t you?”

  “I assumed I would. You can see your light from the street if you know what square to look for.”

  “Without a partner to protect me if you both decided to double-team me, wear an old man down.”

  Angie chuckled. “Now, Everett,” she said, “please.”

  He turned from the window, a twinkle in his eyes. “You are as ravishing as ever, Angela.”

  “Flattery won’t deflect our questions,” she said, but a blush of rose lit the flesh under her chin for a moment.

  “Come on, you ol’ smoothie,” I said. “Tell me how good I look.”

  “You look like shit, dear boy. Still cutting your own hair, I see.”

  I laughed. I’d always liked Everett Hamlyn. Everyone did. The same couldn’t be said of his partner, Adam Kohl, but Everett had an effortless ease with people that belied his military past, his stiff bearing and uncompromising sense of right and wrong.

  “Mine’s all real, though, Everett.”

  He touched the hard stubble atop his head. “You think I’d pay to have this on my head?”

  “Everett,” Angie said, “if you’d please tell us why Hamlyn and Kohl dropped Trevor Stone as a client we’ll be out of what little hair you have left. I promise.”

  He made the smallest movement with his head, one that I knew from experience was a negative motion.

  “We need some help here,” I said. “We’re trying to find two people now—Desiree Stone and Jay.”

  He came around to his chair, seemed to study it before he sat in it. He turned it so that he was facing us directly and placed his arms on his desk.

  “Patrick,” he said, his voice soft and almost paternal, “do you know why Hamlyn and Kohl offered you a job seven years after you’d turned down our first offer?”

  “Envy of our client base?”

  “Hardly.” He smiled. “Actually, Adam was dead set against it at first.”

  “I’m not surprised. No love lost there.”

  “I’m sure of that.” He sat back, the brandy snifter warming in his palm. “I convinced Adam that you were both seasoned investigators with an admirable—some would say astonishing—case clearance rate. But that wasn’t all there was to it, and, Angela, please don’t take any offense at what I’m about to say, because none is intended.”

  “I’m sure I won’t, Everett.”

  He leaned forward, held my eyes with his own. “I wanted you, Patrick, specifically. You, my boy, because you reminded me of Jay and Jay reminded me of myself at a young age. You both had smarts, you both had energy, but there was more to it than that. What you both had that is so rare these days is passion. You were like little boys. You’d take any job, no matter how small, and treat it like a big job. You see, you loved the work, not just the job. You loved everything about it, and it was a joy to come to work those three months the two of you worked together here. Your excitement filled these rooms—your bad jokes, and your sophomoric high jinks, your sense of fun, and your absolute determination to close every case.” He leaned back in his chair and sniffed the air above him. “It was a tonic.”

  “Everett,” I said, but stopped there, unsure what else to say.

  He held up a hand. “Please. I was like that once, you see. So when I tell you Jay was as close to a son as I’ve ever had, do you believe me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And if the world were more populated with men like him and myself and even you, Patrick, I think it would be a better place. The raging ego of a proud man, I know, but I’m old, so I’m entitled.”

  “You don’t look it, Everett,” Angie said.

  “You’re a dear child.” He smiled at her. He nodded to himself and looked down at his brandy snifter. He carried it with him as he left his chair again, crossed back to the window, and stood looking out at the city. “I believe in honor,” he said. “No other human attribute deserves the exaltation honor does. And I’ve tried to live my life as an honorable man. But it’s hard. Because most men aren’t honorable. Most people aren’t. To most, honor is an antiquated notion at best, a corrosive naïveté at worst.” He turned his head and smiled at us, but it was a tired smile. “Honor, I think, is in its twilight. I’m sure it will die with the century.”

  “Everett,” I said, “if you could just—”

  He shook his head. “I can’t discuss any aspects of Trevor Stone’s case or Jay Becker’s disappearance with you, Patrick. I simply can’t. I can only tell you to remember what I’ve said about honor and the people without it. And to fend for yourselves with that knowledge.” He walked back to his chair and sat in it, turned it halfway back to the window. “Good night,” he sa
id.

  I looked at Angie and she looked at me and then we both looked at the back of his head. I could see his eyes reflected in the glass again, but they weren’t looking at my reflection this time, only his own. He peered at the ghostly image of himself trapped and swimming in the glass and the reflected lights of other buildings and other lives.

  We left him sitting in his chair, staring out at the city and himself simultaneously, bathed in the deep blue of the night sky.

  At the door, his voice stopped us, and it bore a tone I’d never recognized before. It was still rich with experience and wisdom, still steeped in lore and expensive brandy, but now it carried the barest hint of fear.

  “Be careful in Florida,” Everett Hamlyn said.

  “We never said we were going to Florida,” Angie said.

  “Be careful,” he repeated and leaned back in the chair to sip from his glass of brandy. “Please.”

  PART TWO

  SOUTH OF THE BORDER

  15

  I’d never been on a private jet before, so I really had nothing to compare it to. I couldn’t even make a leap and compare it with being on a private yacht or a private island because I’d never been on one of those, either. About the only “private” thing I owned was my car, a rebuilt ’63 Porsche. So…being on a private jet was a lot like being in my car. Except the jet was bigger. And faster. And had a bar. And flew.

  Lurch and the Weeble picked us up at my apartment in a dark blue limousine, which was also a lot bigger than my car. Actually, it was bigger than my apartment.

  From my place, we drove down Columbia Road past several onlookers who were probably wondering who was getting married or which high school was holding a prom in mid-March at nine in the morning. Then we glided through rush hour traffic and the Ted Williams Tunnel to the airport.

  Instead of entering the traffic heading toward the main terminals, we looped around and headed toward the southern tip of the airport landmass, drove past several freight terminals and food packaging warehouses, a convention hotel I’d never even known was there, and pulled up in front of the General Aviation Headquarters.

  Lurch went inside as Angie and I rifled the wet and dry bar compartments for orange juice and peanuts, stuffed our pockets, and debated whether to clip two champagne flutes.

  Lurch returned, followed by a short guy who jogged to a brown and yellow minivan with the words PRECISION AVIATION on the side.

  “I want a limousine,” I said to Angie.

  “Parking in front of your apartment would be a bitch.”

  “I wouldn’t need my apartment anymore.” I leaned forward, asked the Weeble, “Does this thing have closets?”

  “It has a trunk.” He shrugged.

  I turned back to Angie. “It has a trunk.”

  We pulled in behind the van and followed it to a guard kiosk. Lurch and the van driver got out, showed their licenses to the guard, and he noted the numbers on a pad and handed Lurch a pass, which Lurch placed on the dash when he got back in. The orange barrier arm in front of the van rose and we drove past the kiosk onto the tarmac.

  The van pulled around a small building and we followed, and cruised along a path between two runways, with several more spread out around us, the pale bulbs of their lights glistening in the morning dew. I saw cargo planes and sleek jets and small white puddle-jumpers, fuel trucks and two idling ambulances, a parked fire engine, three other limousines. It was as if we’d entered into a formerly hidden world, which reeked of power and influence and lives so important they couldn’t be bothered with normal modes of transport or something so banal as a schedule designed by others. We were in a world where a first-class seat on a commercial airliner was considered second-class, and the true corridors of power lay before us dotted with landing lights.

  I guessed which was Trevor Stone’s jet before we pulled to a stop in front of it. It stood out even in the company of Cessnas and Lears. It was a white Gulfstream with the thin slanted beak of the Concorde, a body as streamlined as a bullet, wings tucked tight against the hull, a tail the shape of a dorsal fin. A mean-looking machine, a white hawk in holding pattern.

  We took our bags from the limousine and another Precision employee took them from our hands and placed them in the luggage compartment by the tail.

  I said to Lurch, “What’s a jet like this run—about seven million?”

  He chuckled.

  “He’s amused,” I said to Angie.

  “Busting a gut,” she said.

  “I believe Mr. Stone paid twenty-six million for this Gulfstream.”

  He said “this” Gulfstream, as if there were a couple more back in the garage in Marblehead.

  “Twenty-six.” I nudged Angie. “Bet the salesman was asking twenty-eight, but they talked him down.”

  On board, we met Captain Jimmy McCann and his copilot, Herb. They were a jolly pair, big smiles and bushy eyebrows raised behind mirrored glasses. They assured us we were in good hands, don’t you worry, haven’t crashed one in months, ha ha ha. Pilot humor. The best. Can’t get enough of it.

  We left them to play with their dials and their torques and think up amusing ways to make us lose bowel control and whimper, and we headed back into the main compartment.

  It, too, seemed bigger than my apartment, but maybe I was just star-struck.

  There was a bar, a piano, three single beds in the rear. The bathroom had a shower in it. Plush lavender carpeting covered the floor. Six leather seats were spread out along the right and left side and two of them had cherrywood tables riveted to the floor in front of them. Each seat reclined like a BarcaLounger.

  Five of the seats were empty. The sixth was occupied by Graham Clifton, aka the Weeble. I’d never even seen him leave the limousine. He sat facing us, a leather-bound notebook in his lap, a closed fountain pen on top of it.

  “Mr. Clifton,” I said, “I didn’t know you’d be joining us.”

  “Mr. Stone thought you could use an extra hand down there. I know the Gulf Coast of Florida well.”

  “We don’t usually need extra hands,” Angie said and sat down across from him.

  He shrugged. “Mr. Stone insisted.”

  I picked up the phone attached to my seat console. “Well, let’s see if we can’t change Mr. Stone’s mind.”

  He placed his hand on mine, pushed the phone back into the console. For such a small man, he was very strong.

  “Mr. Stone doesn’t change his mind,” he said.

  I looked into his tiny black eyes, and saw only my reflection blinking back at me.

  We landed at Tampa International at one, and I felt the sticky heat in the air even before our wheels touched down on the tarmac without so much as a bump. Captain Jimmy and copilot Herb might have seemed like goofball knuckleheads, and maybe they were in all other aspects of their lives, but by the way they handled that plane during takeoff, landing, and one bit of turbulence over Virginia, I suspected they could land a DC-10 on the tip of a pencil in the middle of a typhoon.

  My first impression of Florida after the heat was one of green. Tampa International looked to have erupted from the center of a mangrove forest, and everywhere I looked I saw shades of green—the dark blackish green of the mangrove leaves themselves, the wet gray-green of their trunks, the grassy small hills that bordered the ramps into and out of the airport, the bright teal tramcars that crisscrossed the terminals like something out of Blade Runner if it had been directed by Walt Disney.

  Then my gaze rose to the sky and found a shade of blue I’d never seen before, so rich and bright against the white coral arches of the expressway that I would have sworn it had been painted there. Pastels, I thought, as we blinked against the light streaming through the windows of the tramcar—I hadn’t seen this many assaultive pastels since the nightclub scene in the mid-eighties.

  And the humidity. Jesus. I’d gotten a whiff of it as I left the jet, and it was like a hot sponge had punched a hole in my chest and burrowed straight into my lungs. The temperature i
n Boston had been in the mid-thirties when we left, and that had seemed warm after such a long winter. Here, it had to be eighty, maybe more, and the moist, furry blanket of humidity seemed to kick it up another twenty degrees.

  “I’ve got to quit smoking,” Angie said as we arrived at the terminal.

  “Or breathing,” I said. “One of the two.”

  Trevor, of course, had a car waiting for us. It was a beige Lexus four-door with Georgia plates and Lurch’s southern double for a driver. He was tall and thin and of an age somewhere between fifty and ninety. His name was Mr. Cushing, and I had a feeling he’d never been called by his first name in his life. Even his parents had probably called him Mr. Cushing. He wore a black suit and driver’s cap in the broiling white heat, but when he opened the door for Angie and myself, his skin was drier than talc. “Good afternoon, Miss Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie. Welcome to Tampa.”

  “Afternoon,” we said.

  He closed the door and we sat in the air conditioning as he walked around and opened the front passenger door for the Weeble. Mr. Cushing took his place behind the wheel and handed three envelopes to the Weeble, who took one and handed two back to us.

  “Your hotel keys,” Mr. Cushing informed us as he pulled away from the curb. “Miss Gennaro, you are staying in Suite Six-eleven. Mr. Kenzie, you are in Six-twelve. Mr. Kenzie, you’ll also find in your envelope a set of keys to a car Mr. Stone has rented on your behalf. It’s parked in the hotel parking lot. The parking space number is on the back of the envelope.”

  The Weeble opened a personal computer the size of a small paperback, pressed a few buttons. “We’re staying at the Harbor Island Hotel,” he said. “Why don’t we all go back and shower and then we’ll drive to the Courtyard Marriott where this Jeff Price supposedly stayed?”