Cover

DENNIS
LEHANE

SACRED

Dedication

For Sheila

Epigraph

Do not give dogs what is sacred;

do not throw your pearls to pigs.

If you do, they may trample them underfoot,

and then turn and tear you to pieces.

—MATTHEW 7:6

PART ONE

GRIEF RELEASE

1

A piece of advice: If you ever follow someone in my neighborhood, don’t wear pink.

The first day Angie and I picked up the little round guy on our tail, he wore a pink shirt under a gray suit and a black topcoat. The suit was double-breasted, Italian, and too nice for my part of town by several hundred dollars. The topcoat was cashmere. People in my neighborhood could afford cashmere, I suppose, but usually they spend so much on the duct tape that keeps their tail pipes attached to their ’82 Chevys, that they don’t have much left over for anything but that trip to Aruba.

The second day, the little round guy replaced the pink shirt with a more subdued white, lost the cashmere and the Italian suit, but still stuck out like Michael Jackson in a day care center by wearing a hat. Nobody in my neighborhood—or any of Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods that I know of—wears anything on their head but a baseball cap or the occasional tweed Scally. And our friend, the Weeble, as we’d come to call him, wore a bowler. A fine-looking bowler, don’t get me wrong, but a bowler just the same.

“He could be an alien,” Angie said.

I looked out the window of the Avenue Coffee Shop. The Weeble’s head jerked and then he bent to fiddle with his shoelaces.

“An alien,” I said. “From where exactly? France?”

She frowned at me and lathered cream cheese over a bagel so strong with onions my eyes watered just looking at it. “No, stupid. From the future. Didn’t you ever see that old Star Trek where Kirk and Spock ended up on earth in the thirties and were hopelessly out of step?”

“I hate Star Trek.”

“But you’re familiar with the concept.”

I nodded, then yawned. The Weeble studied a telephone pole as if he’d never seen one before. Maybe Angie was right.

“How can you not like Star Trek?” Angie said.

“Easy. I watch it, it annoys me, I turn it off.”

“Even Next Generation?”

“What’s that?” I said.

“When you were born,” she said, “I bet your father held you up to your mother and said, ‘Look, hon, you just gave birth to a beautiful crabby old man.’”

“What’s your point?” I said.

The third day, we decided to have a little fun. When we got up in the morning and left my house, Angie went north and I went south.

And the Weeble followed her.

But Lurch followed me.

I’d never seen Lurch before, and it’s possible I never would have if the Weeble hadn’t given me reason to look for him.

Before we left the house, I’d dug through a box of summer stuff and found a pair of sunglasses I use when the weather’s nice enough to ride my bicycle. The glasses had a small mirror attached to the left side of the frame that could be swung up and out so that you could see behind you. Not quite as cool as the equipment Q gave Bond, but it would do, and I didn’t have to flirt with Ms. Moneypenny to get it.

An eye in the back of my head, and I bet I was the first kid on my block to have one, too.

I saw Lurch when I stopped abruptly at the entrance of Patty’s Pantry for my morning cup of coffee. I stared at the door as if it held a menu and swung the mirror out and rotated my head until I noticed the guy who looked like a mortician on the other side of the avenue by Pat Jay’s Pharmacy. He stood with his arms crossed over his sparrow’s chest, watching the back of my head openly. Furrows were cut like rivers in his sunken cheeks, and a widow’s peak began halfway up his forehead.

In Patty’s, I swung the mirror back against the frame and ordered my coffee.

“You go blind all a sudden, Patrick?”

I looked up at Johnny Deegan as he poured cream into my coffee. “What?”

“The sunglasses,” he said. “I mean, it’s, what, middle of March and no one’s seen the sun since Thanksgiving. You go blind, or you just trying to look hipper’n shit?”

“Just trying to look hipper’n shit, Johnny.”

He slid my coffee across the counter, took my money.

“It ain’t working,” he said.

Out on the avenue, I stared through my sunglasses at Lurch as he brushed some lint off his knee then bent to tie his shoelaces just like the Weeble had the day before.

I took off my sunglasses, thinking of Johnny Deegan. Bond was cool, sure, but he never had to walk into Patty’s Pantry. Hell, just try and order a vodka martini in this neighborhood. Shaken or stirred, your ass was going out a window.

I crossed the avenue as Lurch concentrated on his shoelace.

“Hi,” I said.

He straightened, looked around as if someone had called his name from down the block.

“Hi,” I said again and offered my hand.

He looked at it, looked down the avenue again.

“Wow,” I said, “you can’t tail someone for shit but at least your social skills are honed to the quick.”

His head turned as slowly as the earth on its axis until his dark pebble eyes met mine. He had to look down to do it, too, the shadow of his skeletal head puddling down my face and spreading across my shoulders. And I’m not a short guy.

“Are we acquainted, sir?” His voice sounded as if it were due back at the coffin any moment.

“Sure, we’re acquainted,” I said. “You’re Lurch.” I looked up and down the avenue. “Where’s Cousin It, Lurch?”

“You’re not nearly as amusing as you think you are, sir.”

I held up my coffee cup. “Wait till I’ve had some caffeine, Lurch. I’m a certified bust-out fifteen minutes from now.”

He smiled down at me and the furrows in his cheeks turned to canyons. “You should be less predictable, Mr. Kenzie.”

“How so, Lurch?”

A crane swung a cement post into the small of my back and something with sharp tiny teeth bit into the skin over the right side of my neck and Lurch lurched past my field of vision as the sidewalk lifted off itself and rolled toward my ear.

“Love the sunglasses, Mr. Kenzie,” the Weeble said as his rubbery face floated past me. “They’re a real nice touch.”

“Very high-tech,” Lurch said.

And someone laughed and someone else started a car engine, and I felt very stupid.

Q would have been appalled.

“My head hurts,” Angie said.

She sat beside me on a black leather couch, and her hands were bound behind her back, too.

“How about you, Mr. Kenzie?” a voice asked. “How’s your head?”

“Shaken,” I said. “Not stirred.”

I turned my head in the direction of the voice, and my eyes met only a hard yellow light fringed by a soft brown. I blinked, felt the room slide a bit.

“Sorry about the narcotics,” the voice said. “If there had been any other way…”

“No regrets, sir,” a voice I recognized as Lurch’s said. “There was no other way.”

“Julian, please give Ms. Gennaro and Mr. Kenzie some aspirin.” The voice sighed behind the hard yellow light. “And untie them, please.”

“If they move?” The Weeble’s voice.

“See that they don’t, Mr. Clifton.”

“Yes, sir. I’d be happy to.”

“My name is Trevor Stone,” the man behind the light said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

I rubbed at the red marks on my wrists.

Angie rubbed hers, sucked a few gulps of oxygen from what I assumed was Trevor Stone’s study.

“I asked you a question.”

I looked into the yellow light. “Yes, you did. Very good for you.” I turned to Angie. “How you doing?”

“My wrists hurt and so does my head.”

“Otherwise?”

“I’m generally in a foul mood.”

I looked back into the light. “We’re in a foul mood.”

“I’d assume so.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Witty,” Trevor Stone said from behind the soft light and the Weeble and Lurch chuckled softly.

“Witty,” the Weeble repeated.

“Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro,” Trevor Stone said, “I can promise you that I don’t want to hurt you. I will, I suppose, but I don’t want to. I need your help.”

“Oh, well.” I stood up on wobbly legs, felt Angie rise beside me.

“If one of your morons could drive us home,” Angie said.

I gripped her hand as my legs swayed back against the couch and the room tilted to the right just a bit too much. Lurch pressed his index finger into my chest so lightly I barely felt it, and Angie and I fell back into the couch.

Another five minutes, I told my legs, and we’ll try it again.

“Mr. Kenzie,” Trevor Stone said, “you can keep trying to get up from that couch and we can keep knocking you back down with a feather for at least another, oh, thirty minutes by my estimate. So, relax.”

“Kidnapping,” Angie said. “Forced incarceration. Are you familiar with those terms, Mr. Stone?”

“I am.”

“Good. You understand that they’re both federal crimes, carrying pretty stiff penalties?”

“Mmm,” Trevor Stone said. “Ms. Gennaro, Mr. Kenzie, how acquainted are you with your own mortality?”

“We’ve had a few brushes,” Angie said.

“I’m aware of them,” he said.

Angie raised her eyebrows at me. I raised mine back.

“But those were brushes, as you said. Quick glimpses, here and gone. You’re both alive now, both young, both with reasonable expectations that you’ll be here on this Earth thirty or forty years from now. The world—its laws, its mores and customs, its mandatory sentences for federal crimes—holds sway over you. I, however, don’t have that problem anymore.”

“He’s a ghost,” I whispered, and Angie elbowed me in the ribs.

“Quite right, Mr. Kenzie,” he said. “Quite right.”

The yellow light swung away from my eyes, and I blinked into the black space that replaced it. A pinpoint of white in the center of the black pirouetted into several larger circles of orange and expanded past my field of vision like tracers. Then my vision cleared, and I was looking at Trevor Stone.

The top half of his face seemed to have been carved from blond oak—cliffs of eyebrows cutting shadows over hard green eyes, an aquiline nose, and pronounced cheekbones, flesh the color of pearl.

The lower half, however, had caved in on itself. His jaw had crumbled on both sides; the bones seemed to have melted somewhere into his mouth. His chin, worn to a nub, pointed straight down at the floor within the casing of a rubbery flap of skin, and his mouth had lost all shape whatsoever; it floated within the mess of his lower face like an amoeba, the lips seared white.

He could have been anywhere from forty to seventy years old.

Tan bandages covered his throat in patches, wet like welts. As he stood from behind his massive desk, he leaned on a mahogany walking stick with a gold dragon’s head handgrip. His gray, glen plaid trousers billowed around his thin legs, but his blue cotton shirt and black linen jacket clung to his massive chest and shoulders as if they’d been born there. The hand gripping the cane looked capable of crushing golf balls to dust with a single squeeze.

He planted his feet and shook against the cane as he stared down at us.

“Take a good look,” Trevor Stone said, “and then let me tell you something about loss.”

2

“Last year,” Trevor Stone said, “my wife was driving back from a party at the Somerset Club on Beacon Hill. You’re familiar with it?”

“We throw all our functions there,” Angie said.

“Yes, well anyway, her car broke down. I was just leaving my office downtown when she called, and I picked her up. Funny.”

“What?” I said.

He blinked. “I was just remembering how little we’d done that. Driven together. It was the sort of thing that had become a casualty of my commitment to work. Something as simple as sitting side by side in a car for twenty minutes, and we were lucky if we did it six times in a year.”

“What happened?” Angie said.

He cleared his throat. “Coming off the Tobin Bridge, a car tried to run us off the road. A carjacking, I believe it’s called. I had just bought my car—a Jaguar XKE—and I wasn’t about to give it up to a pack of thugs who thought wanting something was the same thing as being entitled to it. So…”

He stared out a window for a moment, lost, I can only assume, in the crunching of metals and revving of engines, the smell of the air that night.

“My car flipped onto the driver’s side. My wife, Inez, couldn’t stop screaming. I didn’t know it then, but she’d shattered her spine. The carjackers were angry because I’d destroyed the car they presumably thought of as theirs already. They shot Inez to death as I tried to remain conscious. They kept firing into the car, and three bullets found my body. Oddly, none caused critical damage, though one lodged in my jaw. These three men then spent some time trying to light the car on fire, but they never thought to puncture the gas tank. After a time, they grew bored, and left. And I lay there with three bullets in my body and several broken bones and my wife dead beside me.”

We’d left the study and Lurch and the Weeble behind and had made our way unsteadily into Trevor Stone’s rec room or gentleman’s parlor or whatever one called a room the size of a jet hangar with both a billiard and snooker table, cherrywood backing to the dart board, a poker table, and a small putting green in one corner. A mahogany bar ran up the east side of the room with enough glasses hanging overhead to get the Kennedys through a month of partying.

Trevor Stone poured two fingers of single-malt into his glass, tilted the bottle toward my glass, then Angie’s, and both of us refused.

“The men—boys, actually—who committed the crime were tried rather quickly and convicted and recently began serving life without possibility of parole at Norfolk, and that’s as close to justice as there is, I guess. My daughter and I buried Inez, and that should have been it except for the grief.”

“But,” Angie said.

“While the doctors were removing the bullet from my jaw, they found the first sign of cancer. And as they probed deeper they found it in my lymph nodes. They expect to find it in my small and large intestines next. Soon after that, I’m sure, they’ll run out of things to cut.”

“How long?” I said.

“Six months. That’s their opinion. My body tells me five. Either way, I’ve seen my last autumn.”

He swiveled his chair and looked out the window at the sea again. I followed his gaze, noted the curve of a rocky inlet across the bay. The inlet forked and thrust out into something that resembled lobster claws, and I looked back to its middle until I found a lighthouse I recognized. Trevor Stone’s house sat on a bluff in the midst of Marblehead Neck, a jagged finger of landscape off Boston’s North Shore where the asking price for a house was slightly less than that for most towns.

“Grief,” he said, “is carnivorous. It feeds whether you’re awake or not, whether you fight it or you don’t. Much like cancer. And one morning you wake up and all those other emotions—joy, envy, greed, even love—are swallowed by it. And you’re alone with grief, naked to it. And it owns you.”

The ice cubes in his glass rattled, and he looked down at them.

“It doesn’t have to,” Angie said.

He turned and smiled at her with his amoeba mouth. His white lips shook with tremors against the decayed flesh and pulverized bone of his jaw, and the smile disappeared.

“You’re acquainted with grief,” he said softly. “I know. You lost your husband. Five months ago, was it?”

“Ex-husband,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “Yes.”

I reached for her hand, but she shook her head, placed her hand on her lap.

“I read all the newspaper accounts,” he said. “I even read that terrible ‘true crime’ paperback. You two battled evil. And won.”

“It was a draw,” I said and cleared my throat. “Trust me on that.”

“Maybe,” he said, his hard green eyes finding my own. “Maybe for the two of you, it was a draw. But think of how many future victims you saved from those monsters.”

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “with all due respect, please don’t talk to us about this.”

“Why not?”

She raised her head. “Because you don’t know anything about it, so it makes you sound like a moron.”

His fingers caressed the head of his cane lightly before he leaned forward and touched her knee with his other hand. “You’re right. Forgive me.”

Eventually she smiled at him in a way I’d never seen her smile at anyone since Phil’s death. As if she and Trevor Stone were old friends, as if they’d both lived in places where light and kindness can’t reach.

“I’m alone,” Angie had told me a month ago.

“No, you’re not.”

She lay on a mattress and box spring we’d thrown down in my living room. Her own bed, and most of her belongings, were still back in her house on Howes Street because she wasn’t capable of entering the place where Gerry Glynn had shot her and Evandro Arujo had bled to death on the kitchen floor.

“You’re not alone,” I said, my arms wrapped around her from behind.

“Yes, I am. And all your holding and all your love can’t change that right now.”

Angie said, “Mr. Stone—”

“Trevor.”

“Mr. Stone,” she said, “I sympathize with your grief. I do. But you kidnapped us. You—”

“It’s not my grief,” he said. “No, no. Not my grief I was referring to.”

“Then whose?” I said.

“My daughter’s. Desiree.”

Desiree.

He said her name like it was the refrain of a prayer.

His study, when well lighted again, was a shrine to her.

Where before I’d seen only shadows, I now faced photos and paintings of a woman in nearly every stage of life—from baby snapshots to grade school, high school yearbook photos, college graduation. Aged and clearly mishandled Polaroids took up space in new teak-wood frames. A casual photo of her and a woman who was quite obviously her mother looked to have been taken at a backyard barbecue as both women stood over a gas grill, paper plates in hand, neither looking at the camera. It was an inconsequential moment in time, fuzzy around the edges, taken without consideration of the sun being off to the women’s left and thereby casting a dark shadow against the photographer’s lens. The kind of photo you’d be forgiven if you chose not to incorporate it into an album. But in Trevor Stone’s study, framed in sterling silver and perched on a slim ivory pedestal, it seemed deified.

Desiree Stone was a beautiful woman. Her mother, I saw from several photos, had probably been Latin, and her daughter had inherited her thick, honey-colored hair, the graceful lines of her jaw and neck, a sharp bone structure and thin nose, skin that seemed perpetually under the glow of sunset. From her father, Desiree had been bequeathed eyes the color of jade and full, fiercely determined lips. You noticed the symmetry of genetic influence most in a single photograph on Trevor Stone’s desk. Desiree stood between mother and father, wearing the purple cap and gown of her graduation, the main campus of Wellesley College framed behind her, her arms around her parents’ necks, pulling their faces close to hers. All three were smiling, robust with riches and health it seemed, and the delicate beauty of the mother and prodigious aura of power in the father seemed to meet and meld in the face of the daughter.

“Two months before the accident,” Trevor Stone said and picked up the photo for a moment. He looked at it, and the lower half of his ruined face spasmed into what I assumed was a smile. He placed it back on the desk, looked at us as we took the seats in front of him. “Do either of you know a private detective by the name of Jay Becker?”

“We know Jay,” I said.

“Works for Hamlyn and Kohl Investigations,” Angie said.

“Correct. Your opinion of him?”

“Professionally?”

Trevor Stone shrugged.

“He’s very good at his job,” Angie said. “Hamlyn and Kohl only hire the best.”

He nodded. “I understand they offered to buy the two of you out a few years ago if you’d come to work for them.”

“Where do you get this stuff?” I said.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“And it was a rather handsome offer from what I understand. Why did you refuse?”

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not the power suits and boardroom type.”

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