“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.”