Kenzie-Gennaro 3 - Sacred by Dennis Lehane

Author:Dennis Lehane
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

20

For the next few minutes, none of us spoke. We sat in our booth as the rain spewed against the windows and the wind bent the row of royal palms along the boulevard, and we ate our sandwiches.

Nothing, I thought as I chewed my sandwich without really tasting it, was as it seemed just fifteen minutes ago. Angie had been right the other night—black was white, up was down.

Desiree was dead. Jeff Price was dead. Trevor Stone had hired Jay not just to find his daughter, but to kill her.

Trevor Stone. Jesus Christ.

We had taken this case for two reasons—greed and empathy. The first was not an honorable motive. But fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, particularly when you haven’t worked in several months and your chosen profession isn’t known for its workmen’s comp bennies.

But it was still greed. And if you accept a job because you’re greedy, you can’t really bitch too much when your employer turns out to be a liar. The pot calling the kettle black and all that…

However, greed wasn’t our only motivation. We’d taken this case because Angie had looked at Trevor Stone with sudden recognition—the recognition of

185 one griever upon meeting another. She’d cared about his grief. I had, too. And any lingering doubts I’d had disappeared when Trevor Stone showed us the shrine he’d erected to his lost daughter.

But it hadn’t been a shrine. Had it?

He hadn’t surrounded himself with photos of Desiree because he needed to believe she was alive. He’d filled his room with his daughter’s face so his blood could feed off his hate.

Once again, my perspective of prior events was reshaping, transmogrifying, reinventing itself until I felt increasingly stupid for ever trusting my initial instincts.

This case, I swear.

“Anthony Lisardo,” I said to Jay eventually.

He chewed his sandwich. “What about him?”

“What happened to him?”

“Trevor had him whacked.”

“How?”

“Laced a pack of cigarettes with coke, gave it to Lisardo’s friend—what was his name, Donald Yeager—and Yeager left the pack in Lisardo’s car the night they went to the reservoir.”

“What,” Angie said, “the coke was laced with strychnine or something?”

Jay shook his head. “Lisardo had an allergic reaction to coke. He’d collapsed once at a college party when he was dating Desiree. That was his first heart attack. And that was the first and only time he was stupid enough to try coke. Trevor knew about it, laced the cigarettes, the rest is history.”

“Why?”

“Why’d Trevor kill Lisardo?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “Man had a problem sharing his daughter with anyone, if you know what I mean.”

“But then he hired you to kill her?” Angie said.

“Yup.”

“Again,” Angie said. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down at the table.

“You don’t know?” Angie said.

His eyes widened. “I don’t know. What’s so—”

“Didn’t she tell you, Jay? I mean, you were ‘with’ her these past few weeks. Didn’t she have some idea why her own father would want her, oh I dunno, dead?”

His voice was hard and loud. “If she did, Ange, she didn’t want to talk about it, and now she’s sort of beyond the point where she can.

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