“And I’m sorry about that,” Angie said. “But I have to have a little more sense of Trevor’s motives to believe he’d want to kill his own daughter.”

“The fuck do I know?” Jay hissed. “Because he’s crazy. He’s whacked and the cancer’s in his brain. I don’t know. But he wanted her dead.” He crumpled an unlit cigarette in his palm. “And now she is. Whether by his hand or not, she’s gone. And he’s going to pay.”

“Jay,” I said softly, “back up. To the beginning. You went on that Grief Release retreat to Nantucket, and then you disappeared. What happened in the interim?”

He kept his glare on Angie for another few seconds, then let it drop. He looked at me.

I raised my eyebrows up and down a couple of times.

He smiled and it was his old smile, his old self for a moment. He looked around the diner, gave one of the nurses a sheepish grin, then looked back at us.

“Gather round, children.” He rubbed crumbs off his hands and leaned back in his chair. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

21

The Grief Release retreat for Level Fives was held in a nine-bedroom Tudor on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound. The first day, all Level Fives were encouraged to join in a group “purging” session in which they’d try to shed their layers of negative aura (or “malapsia blood poisoning,” as Grief Release termed it) by talking in depth about themselves and what had led them there.

In the session, Jay, using the David Fischer alias, immediately identified the first “purger” as a fraud. Lila Cahn was in her early thirties and pretty, with the sinewy body of an aerobics junkie. She claimed to have been the girlfriend of a small-time drug runner in a Mexican town called Catize, just south of Guadalajara. Her boyfriend had ripped off the local consortium of drug lords, who had taken their revenge by kidnapping Lila and her boyfriend off the street in broad daylight. They were dragged by a gang of five men to the basement of a bodega, where her boyfriend was shot once in the back of the head. The five men then raped Lila for six hours, an experience she described in vivid detail to the group. She was allowed to live to serve as a warning to any other gringas who might think of coming to Catize and getting mixed up with the wrong element.

Once Lila finished her story, the counselors hugged her and complimented her on her bravery in retelling such a horrific story.

“Only problem was,” Jay told us in the diner, “the story was utter horseshit.”