Sacred (10 page)

“Why not him? I mean, if he’s the one who’s lying?”

“Because there’s more of you to burn, Manny.”

Manny bit his upper lip and tears welled in the pockets of his eyes. “Tell them the truth, John.”

“Fuck off, Manny.”

“Tell them!”

“I’ll tell them!” John screamed. “But not because of you. ‘Why not burn him?’” he mimicked. “Some friend. If we get out of this, I’m telling everyone you wept like an old woman.”

“I did not.”

“Did too.”

“John,” Angie said, “who screwed with Patrick’s bank account and credit cards?”

He looked at the floor. “I did.”

“How?” I said.

“I work for the IRS,” he said.

“So you’ll fix it?” Angie said.

“Well,” he said, “actually it’s a lot easier to wreck than it is to fix.”

“John,” I said. “Look at me.”

He did.

“Fix it.”

“I—”

“By tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I can’t do that. It’d take—”

I stood over him. “John, you can make my credit disappear, and that’s a very scary thing. But I can make
you
disappear, and that’s a little more scary, wouldn’t you say?”

He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat for a moment.

“Tomorrow, John. Morning.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

“You make other people’s credit disappear?” I asked.

“I—”

“Answer him,” Bubba said, looking down at his shoes.

“Yes.”

“People who try to leave the Church of Truth and Revelation?” Angie said.

Manny said, “Hey, wait a minute.”

Bubba said, “Who’s got a match?”

“I’ll shut up,” Manny said. “I’ll shut up.”

“We know all about Grief Release and the Church,” Angie said. “One of the ways you deal with naughty members is to screw with their finances. Correct?”

“Sometimes,” John said, his lower lip protruding like a kid caught looking up the girls’ dresses in school.

I said, “You have people working in all the good
companies, don’t you, John—the IRS, police department, banks, the media, where else?”

His shrug was constricted by the ropes. “You name it.”

“Nice,” I said.

He snorted. “I don’t see anyone complaining when Catholics work for those same organizations. Or Jews.”

“Or Seventh-Day Adventists,” Bubba said.

I looked at him.

“Oh.” He held up a hand. “Sorry.”

I bent down by John, placed my elbows on his knees, and looked up into his face.

“Okay, John. Here’s the important question. And don’t even think about lying to me.”

“That would be bad,” Bubba said.

John glanced nervously at Bubba, then back at me.

“John,” I said, “what happened to Desiree Stone?”

“Desiree Stone,” Angie repeated. “Come on, John. We know she was treated by Grief Release.”

John licked his lips, blinked. He hadn’t spoken in over a minute and Bubba was getting restless.

“John,” I said.

“I know I had a lighter around here somewhere.” Bubba looked bewildered for a moment. He patted his pants pockets, then suddenly snapped his fingers. “Left it downstairs. That’s what I did with it. Be right back.”

John and Manny watched him jog toward the stairs at the end of the loft, the hammering clunk of his combat boots echoing off the beams overhead.

As Bubba disappeared downstairs, I said, “Now you’ve done it.”

John and Manny looked at each other.

“He gets like this,” Angie said, “you never know what he’ll do. He tends to get, you know, creative.”

John’s eyes spun in their sockets like saucers. “Don’t let him hurt me.”

“Not much I can do, if you don’t tell us about Desiree.”

“I don’t know anything about Desiree Stone.”

“Sure you do,” I said.

“Not like Manny does. Manny was her primary counselor.”

Angie and I swiveled our heads slowly, looked at Manny.

Manny shook his head.

Angie smiled and walked over to him. “Manny, Manny, Manny,” she said. “The secrets you keep.” She tilted his chin until he was looking in her eyes. “’Fess up, muscle boy.”

“I have to take this shit from that psychotic, but I ain’t taking it from no fucking girl.” He spit at her and she leaned back from it.

“My,” she said. “You get the feeling Manny spends way too much time at the gym? You do, don’t you, Manny? Lifting your little weights and pushing smaller guys off the StairMaster and telling all your steroid buddies about the bimbo you used and abused the night before. That’s you, Manny. That’s you all over.”

“Hey, fuck you.”

“No, Manny. Fuck you,” she said. “Fuck you and die.”

And Bubba came bounding back into the room with an acetylene torch screaming, “Suc-
cess
! Suc-
cess
!”

Manny screamed and bucked against his ropes.

“This is getting good,” one of the Twoomey brothers said.

“No!” Manny shrieked. “No! No! No! Desiree Stone came to the Therapeutic Center on November nineteenth. She, she, she was depressed because, because, because—”

“Slow down, Manny,” Angie said. “Slow down.”

Manny closed his eyes and took a deep breath, his face drenched in sweat.

Bubba sat on the floor and fondled his acetylene torch.

“Okay, Manny,” Angie said. “From the top.” She placed a tape recorder on the floor in front of him and turned it on.

“Desiree was depressed because her father had cancer, her mother had just died, and a guy she’d known in college had drowned.”

“We know that part,” I said.

“So, she came to us and—”

“How’d she come to you?” Angie said. “Did she just walk in off the street?”

“Yes.” Manny blinked.

Angie looked at Bubba. “He’s lying.”

Bubba shook his head slowly and turned on the torch.

“Okay,” Manny said. “Okay. She was recruited.”

Bubba said, “I turn this on again, I’m using it, Ange. Whether you like it or not.”

She nodded.

“Jeff Price,” Manny said. “He was the recruiter.”

“Jeff?” I said. “I thought his name was Sean.”

Manny shook his head. “That was his middle name. He used it as an alias sometimes.”

“Tell us about him.”

“He was the treatment supervisor at Grief Release and a member of the Church Council.”

“Which is?”

“The Church Council is like the board of directors. It’s made up of people who’ve been with the Church since its days in Chicago.”

“So, this Jeff Price,” Angie said, “where’s he now?”

“Gone,” John said.

We looked at him. Even Bubba seemed to be getting interested. Maybe he was taking mental notes for the day he’d start his own Church. The Temple Defective.

“Jeff Price stole two million dollars from the Church and disappeared.”

“How long ago?” I said.

“Little over six weeks ago,” Manny said.

“Which is when Desiree Stone disappeared.”

Manny nodded. “They were lovers.”

“So you think she’s with him?” Angie said.

Manny looked at John. John looked at the floor.

“What?” Angie said.

“I think she’s dead,” Manny said. “Jeff, you gotta understand, he’s—”

“A first-class bastard,” John said. “Coldest prick you’ll ever meet.”

Manny nodded. “He’d trade his mother to the alligators for a pair of fucking shoes, if you know what I mean.”

“But Desiree could be with him,” Angie said.

“I suppose. But Jeff’s traveling light. You know? He knows we’re looking for him. And he knows a girl as good-looking as Desiree kind of stands out in a crowd. I’m not saying she might not have left Massachusetts with him, but he would have cut her loose at some point. Probably as soon as she found out about the money he stole. And I don’t mean cut her loose like leave her behind at a Denny’s or something. He would have buried her deep.”

He looked down and his body sagged against the ropes.

“You liked her,” Angie said.

He looked up and you could see it in his eyes. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Look, I scam people? Yes. Right. I do. But most of these assholes? They come in bitching about malaise or chronic fatigue syndrome, how they’ll never get over having wet the bed as a child. I say, fuck ’em. They obviously have too much time and too much money on their hands, and if some of that
money can help the Church, all the better.” He stared up at Angie with a cold defiance that gradually warmed or weakened into something else. “Desiree Stone wasn’t like that. She came to us for help. Her whole fucking world caved in on her in a period of, like, two weeks and she was afraid she was going to crack up. You might not believe this, but the Church could have helped her. I really think that.”

Angie shook her head slowly and turned her back to him. “Save us some time, here, Manny. Jeff Price’s story about his family getting killed by carbon monoxide poisoning?”

“Bullshit.”

I said, “Someone infiltrated Grief Release recently. Someone like us. You know who I’m talking about?”

He was genuinely confused. “No.”

“John?”

John shook his head.

“Any leads on Price’s whereabouts?” Angie said.

“How do you mean?”

“Come on,” I said. “Manny. You can wipe out my credit and bank account, at night, in less than twelve hours, I’d say it’d be pretty hard to hide from you people.”

“But that was Price’s specialty. He came up with the whole concept of counter-ops.”

“Counter-ops,” I said.

“Yeah. Get to your opponent before they can get to you. Silence dissent. Do what the CIA does. All the information gathering, the sessions, the PIN test, that was all Price’s idea. He started that back in Chicago. If anyone can hide from us, he’s the guy.”

“There was that time in Tampa,” John said.

Manny glared at him.

“I’m not getting burned,” John said. “I’m not.”

“What time in Tampa?” I said.

“He used a credit card. His own. He must have been drunk,” John said. “That’s his weakness. He’s a drinker. We have a guy, all he does, day in day out, is sit by a computer linked up to all the banks and credit companies Price has accounts with. Three weeks ago, this guy, he’s staring at the computer screen one night and it starts making noise. Price used his credit card at a motel in Tampa, the Courtyard Marriott.”

“And?”

“And,” Manny said, “we had guys there in four hours. But he was gone. We don’t even know if it was him. The desk clerk told us it was a chick used the card.”

“Desiree maybe,” I said.

“No. This chick was blond, had a big scar on her neck. The desk clerk said he was sure she was a hooker. Claimed the card was her daddy’s. I think Price probably sold his credit cards or threw them out a window, let the vagrants find them. Just to screw with us.”

“Have any been used since?” Angie said.

“No,” John said.

“Kind of shoots holes in that theory, Manny.”

“She’s dead, Mr. Kenzie,” Manny said. “I don’t want her to be, believe me, but she is.”

We grilled them for another thirty minutes, but we didn’t come up with anything new. Desiree Stone had met, been manipulated by, and fallen in love with Jeff Price. Price stole $2.3 million that couldn’t legally be reported because it was from the slush fund Grief Release and the Church had built out of money bilked from members. At ten
A.M.,
February 12, Price accessed the
bank code for the account in the Grand Cayman Islands, wired the money into his personal account at Commonwealth Bank, and withdrew it at eleven-thirty that same morning. He walked out of the bank and disappeared.

Twenty-one minutes later, Desiree Stone parked her car at 500 Boylston Street, nine city blocks from Price’s bank. And that was the last anyone ever saw of her, either.

“By the way,” I said, thinking of Richie Colgan, “who runs the Church? Who’re the moneymen?”

“No one knows,” Manny said.

“Please.”

He glanced at Bubba. “Really. I’m serious. I’m sure the members of the council know, but not guys like us.”

I looked at John.

He nodded. “The head of the Church, in name, is the Reverend Kett, but nobody’s actually seen him in the flesh in at least fifteen years.”

“Maybe even twenty,” Manny said. “We get paid well, though, Kenzie. Real well. So we don’t complain, and we don’t ask questions.”

I looked at Angie. She shrugged.

“We’ll need a picture of Price,” she said.

“It’s on the diskettes,” Manny said. “In a file called PFCGR—Personnel Files, Church and Grief Release.”

“Anything else you can tell us about Desiree?”

He shook his head and his voice was pained when he spoke. “You don’t meet many good people. I mean, good. No one in this room is a good person.” He looked around at all of us. “But Desiree was. She would have been good for this world. And now she’s probably in a ditch somewhere.”

Bubba knocked Manny and John cold again, and then he and Nelson and the Twoomey brothers drove them out to a section of urban waste under the Mystic River Bridge in Charlestown. They waited for them to wake up with their hands bound and their mouths gagged. Then they booted them both out the back of the van, fired a couple of rounds into the ground near their heads until John whimpered and Manny wept. Then they drove off.

“People surprise you sometimes,” Bubba said.

We sat on the hood of the Crown Victoria, parked by the side of the road in front of Plymouth Correctional. From here we could see the inmates’ gardens and greenhouse, hear the boisterous sound of men playing basketball in the crisp air on the other side of the wall. But one look at the Cyclone fence stretched, coiled and vicious, around the top of the walls or the silhouettes of guard and rifle in the towers, and you couldn’t mistake it for anything but what it was—a place that caged human beings. No matter how you felt about crime and punishment, that fact was always there. And it was an ugly one.

“She could be alive,” Bubba said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“No, seriously. Like I said, people surprise you. You two told me before those shitheads woke up in my place, she Maced some guy once.”

“So?” Angie said.

“So it shows she’s strong. You know? I mean, you got a guy sitting beside you and you pull out a can of Mace and shoot it in his eyes? You know what kind of strength that takes? That’s a girl with some spine. Maybe
she found a way to get away from this guy, this Price shitbird.”

“But then she would have called her father. She would have made some sort of attempt at contact.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. You’re the detectives, I’m the moron going to jail for packing a piece.”

We leaned back against the car, looked up again at the granite walls and Cyclone fence, the hard, darkening sky.

“Gotta go,” Bubba said.

Angie hugged him tightly and kissed his cheek.

I shook his hand. “You want us to walk you to the door?”

“Nah. Feel like you were my parents on the first day of school.”

“The first day of school,” I said, “I remember you beat the hell out of Eddie Rourke.”

“’Cause he gave me shit about my parents walking me to the door.” He winked. “See you in a year.”

“Before that,” Angie said. “You think we’d forget to visit?”

He shrugged. “Don’t forget what I told you. They’ll surprise you, people.”

We watched him walk up the crushed shell and gravel walkway, his shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, the stiff breeze rising off the frozen furrows of vegetation in the fields and mussing his hair.

He went through the doors without a look back.