Find Desiree Stone.
Simple objective. How simple the execution of that objective would be remained to be seen. To find her, I was pretty sure we’d have to find Jay Becker or at least follow his tracks. Jay, my mentor, and the man who’d given me my professional maxim:
“No one,” he told me once near the end of my apprenticeship, “and I mean, no one, can stay hidden if the right person is looking for him.”
“What about the Nazis who escaped to South America after the war? No one found Josef Mengele until he’d died peacefully and free.”
And Jay gave me a look I’d become accustomed to during our three months together. It was what I called his “G-man look,” the look of a man who’d done his time in the darkest corridors of government, a man who knew where bodies were buried and which papers had been shredded and why, who understood the machinations of true power better than most of us ever would.
“You don’t think people knew where Mengele was? Are you kidding me?” He leaned over our table in the Bay Tower Room, tucked his tie against his waist even though our plates and table crumbs had been cleared, impeccable as always. “Patrick, let me assure you of something, Mengele had three huge advantages over most people who try to disappear.”
“And they were?”
“One,” he said and his index finger rose, “Mengele had money. Millions initially. But millionaires can be found. So, two”—his middle finger joined the index—“he had information—on other Nazis, on fortunes buried under Berlin, on all sorts of medical discoveries he’d made using Jews as guinea pigs—and this information went to several different governments, including our own, who were supposedly looking for him.”
He raised his eyebrows and sat back smiling.
“And the third reason?”
“Ah, yes. Reason number three, and the most important—Josef Mengele never had me looking for him. Because nobody can hide from Jay Becker. And now that I’ve trained you, D’Artagnan, my young Gascon, nobody can hide from Patrick Kenzie, either.”
“Thank you, Athos.”
He made a flourish with his hand and tipped his head.
Jay Becker. No one alive ever had more style.
Jay, I thought as the subway car broke from the tunnel into the waxy green light of Downtown Crossing, I hope you were right. Because here I come. Hide-and-seek, ready or not.
Back at my apartment, I stashed the twenty grand in the space behind the kitchen baseboard where I stow my backup guns. Angie and I dusted off the dining room table and spread out what we’d accumulated since this morning. Four photographs of Desiree Stone were fanned out in the center, followed by the daily progress reports Trevor had received from Jay until he disappeared thirteen days ago.
“Why did you wait so long to contact another investigator?” I’d asked Trevor Stone.
“Adam Kohl assured me he’d put another man on it, but I think he was stalling. A week later, they dropped me as a client. I spent five days looking into every private investigator in the city who had an honest reputation, and eventually settled on the two of you.”
In the dining room, I considered calling Hamlyn and Kohl, asking Everett Hamlyn for his side of the story, but I had the feeling they’d stonewall me. You drop a client of Trevor Stone’s stature, you’re not going to be advertising it or gossiping about it to a fellow competitor in the trade.
Angie slid Jay’s reports in front of her and I looked through the notes we’d each taken in Trevor’s study.
“In the month after her mother died,” Trevor told us after we came in off the lawn, “Desiree suffered two separate traumas, either of which would have devastated a girl on their own. First, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and then a boy she’d dated in college died.”
“How?” Angie said.
“He drowned. Accidentally. But Desiree, you see, had been, well, insulated most of her life by her mother and me. Her entire existence up until her mother’s death had been charmed, untouched by even minor tragedy. She always considered herself strong. Probably because she was headstrong and stubborn like me and she confused that with the kind of mettle one develops under extreme opposition. So, you understand, she was never tested. And then with her mother dead and her father lying in intensive care, I could see that she was determined to bear up. And I think she would have. But then came the cancer revelation followed almost immediately by the death of a former suitor. Boom. Boom. Boom.”
According to Trevor, Desiree began to disintegrate under the weight of the three tragedies. She became an insomniac, suffered drastic weight loss, and rarely spoke as much as a full sentence on any given day.
Her father urged her to seek counseling, but she broke each of the four appointments he made for her. Instead, as Lurch, the Weeble, and a few friends informed him, she was sighted spending most of her days downtown. She’d drive the white Saab Turbo her parents had given her as a graduation present to a garage on Boylston Street and spend her days walking the downtown and Back Bay greens of the Emerald Necklace, the seven-mile park system that surrounds the city. She once walked as far as a stretch of the Fens behind the Museum of Fine Arts, but usually, Lurch informed Trevor, she preferred the leafy mall that cuts through the center of Commonwealth Avenue and the Public Garden that abuts it.
It was in the Garden, she told Trevor, that she met a man who, she claimed, finally provided some of the solace and grace she’d been searching for throughout the late summer and early autumn. The man, seven or eight years older than her, was named Sean Price, and he too had been rocked by tragedy. His wife and five-year-old daughter, he told Desiree, had died the previous year when a faulty air conditioning unit in their Concord home had leaked carbon monoxide into the house while Sean was out of town on business.
Sean Price found them the next night, Desiree told Trevor, when he returned home from his trip.
“That’s a long time,” I said, looking up from my notes.
Angie raised her head from Jay Becker’s reports. “What’s that?”
“In my notes, I have it that Desiree told Trevor that Sean Price discovered his wife and child almost twenty-four hours after they died.”
She reached across the table, took her own notes from where they lay by my elbow, leafed through them. “Yup. That’s what Trevor said.”
“Seems a long time,” I said. “A young woman—a businessman’s wife and probably upscale if they were living in Concord—she and her five-year-old daughter aren’t seen for twenty-four hours and nobody notices?”