Sacred

  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?

  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 so
meone—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.

  That night he attended an “intensive seminar” for acute sufferers of grief. Jay told Everett Hamlyn in a tape-recorded conversation during the early hours of February 27 that Grief Release categorized its clients as suffering from six levels of grief: Level One (Malaise); Level Two (Desolate); Level Three (Serious, with Hostility or Emotional Estrangements); Level Four (Severe); Level Five (Acute); and Level Six (Watershed).

  Jay explained that “watershed” meant a client had reached the point at which he would either implode or find his state of grace and acceptance.

  To ascertain whether a Level Five was in danger of reaching Level Six, Grief Release encouraged Level Fives to enroll in a Release Retreat. As luck would have it, Jay said, the next Release Retreat left Boston for Nantucket the next day, February 28.

  After a phone call to Trevor Stone, Hamlyn and Kohl authorized an expenditure for two thousand dollars and Jay left for the Release Retreat.

  “She’s been here,” Jay told Everett Hamlyn during their phone call. “Desiree. She’s been in the Grief Release headquarters on Comm. Ave.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There’s a bulletin board in the function room. All sorts of Polaroids on it—you know, Thanksgiving party, aren’t-we-all-perfectly-fucking-sane-now party, shit like that. She’s in one of them, at the back of a group of people. I’ve got her, Everett. I can feel it.”

  “Be careful, Jay,” Everett Hamlyn said.

  And Jay was. On the first day of March, he returned from Nantucket unharmed. He called Trevor Stone and told him he’d just arrived back in Boston and would be dropping by the house in Marblehead in an hour with an update.

  “You’ve found her?” Trevor said.

  “She’s alive.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “I told you, Mr. Stone,” Jay said with some of his old cockiness, “no one disappears from Jay Becker. No one.”

  “Where are you? I’ll send a car.”

  Jay laughed. “Don’t worry about it. I’m twenty miles away. I’ll be there in no time.”

  And somewhere in those twenty miles, Jay, too, disappeared.

  5

  “Fin de siècle,” Ginny Regan said.

  “Fin de siècle,” I said. “Yes.”

  “It bothers you?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  Ginny Regan was the receptionist at the business offices of Grief Release, Inc., and she seemed a little confused. I didn’t blame her. I don’t think she knew the difference between fin de siècle and a Popsicle, and if I hadn’t consulted a thesaurus before coming over here, I wouldn’t have, either. As it was, I was still making this shit up on the fly and I was starting to confuse myself. Chico Marx, I kept thinking, Chico Marx. Where would Chico take a conversation like this?

  “Well,” Ginny said, “I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure?” I thumped her desktop with the palm of my hand. “How can you not be sure? I mean, you talk about fin de siècle and you’re talking about some pretty serious shit. The end of the millennium, utter chaos, nuclear Armageddon, roaches the size of Range Rovers.”

  Ginny looked at me nervously as a man in a drab brown suit shrugged his way into a topcoat in the office behind her and approached the small gate that, along with Ginny’s desk, separated the lobby from the main office.

  “Yes,” Ginny said. “Of course. It’s very serious. But I was—”

  “The writing’s on the wall, Ginny. This society’s coming apart at the seams. Look at the evidence—Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center bombings, David Hasselhoff. It’s all there.”

  “’Night, Ginny,” the man in the topcoat said as he pushed the gate open by Ginny’s desk.

  “Uh, ’night, Fred,” Ginny said.

  Fred glanced at me.

  I smiled. “’Night, Fred.”

  “Uh, yes,” Fred said. “Well then.” And he left.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall over Ginny’s shoulder: 5:22 P.M. All the office staffers, as far as I could see, had gone home by now. All except for Ginny, anyway. Poor Ginny.

  I scratched the back of my neck several times, my “all-clear” signal for Angie, and locked Ginny in my benign, beatific, benevolent, lunatic stare.

  “It’s hard to get up in the morning anymore,” I said. “Very hard.”

  “You’re depressed!” Ginny said gratefully, as if she finally understood that which had been just beyond her grasp.

  “Grief-stricken, Ginny. Grief-stricken.”

  When I said her name, she flinched, then smiled. “Grief-stricken about, uh, fin-de-sickles?”

  “Fin de siècle,” I corrected her. “Yes. Very much so. I mean, I don’t agree with his methods, mind you, but maybe Ted Kaczynski was right.”

  “Ted,” she said.

  “Kaczynski,” I said.

  “Kaczynski.”

  “The Unabomber,” I said.

  “The Unabomber,” she said slowly.

  I smiled at her.

  “Oh!” she said suddenly. “The Unabomber!” Her eyes cleared and she seemed excited and freed of a great weight suddenly. “I get it.”

  “You do?” I leaned forward.

  Her eyes clouded over in confusion again. “No, I don’t.”

  “Oh.” I sat back.

  In the rear corner of the office, over Ginny’s right shoulder, a window rose. The cold, I thought suddenly. She’ll feel the cold air on her back.

  I leaned into her desk. “Modern critical response to the best of popular culture confuses me, Ginny.”

  She flinched, then smiled. It seemed to be her way. “It does.”

  “Utterly,” I said. “And that confusion leads to anger and that anger leads to depression and that depression”—my voice rose and thundered as Angie slid over the windowsill and Ginny’s eyes widened to the size of Frisbees as she watched me, her left hand slipping into her desk drawer—“leads to grief! Real grief, do
n’t kid yourself, about the decay of art and critical acumen and the end of the millennium and accompanying sense of fin de siècle.”

  Angie’s gloved hand closed the window behind her.

  “Mr….” Ginny said.

  “Doohan,” I said. “Deforest Doohan.”

  “Mr. Doohan,” she said. “Yes. I’m not sure if grief is the correct word for your troubles.”

  “And Björk,” I said. “Explain Björk.”

  “Well, I can’t,” she said. “But I’m sure Manny can.”

  “Manny?” I said as the door behind me opened.

  “Yes, Manny,” Ginny said with the hint of a self-satisfied smile. “Manny is one of our counselors.”

  “You have a counselor,” I said, “named Manny?”

  “Hello, Mr. Doohan,” Manny said and came around in front of me with his hand outstretched.

  Manny, I ascertained by craning my neck to look up, was huge. Manny was humongous. Manny, I have to tell you, wasn’t a person. He was an industrial complex with feet.

  “Hi, Manny,” I said as my hand disappeared into one of the catcher’s mitts attached to his wrists.

  “Hi yourself, Mr. Doohan. What seems to be the problem?”

  “Grief,” I said.

  “Lotta that going around,” Manny said. And smiled.

  Manny and I walked cautiously along the icy sidewalks and streets as we cut around the Public Garden toward the Grief Release Therapeutic Center on Beacon Street. Manny kindly explained that I’d made the common, understandable mistake of walking into the business offices of Grief Release when obviously I was seeking help of a more therapeutic nature.