Sacred Read Free Page B

said.
    He nodded, as if this were common in some circles. “So I had to take desperate measures to ensure you’d hear me out. If you refuse my case, I’m prepared to pay you twenty thousand dollars just for your time here today and your inconvenience.”
    “Twenty thousand,” Angie said. “Dollars.”
    “Yes. Money means nothing to me anymore and I have no heirs if I don’t find Desiree. Besides, once you check up on me, you’ll find that twenty thousand dollars is negligible in comparison to my total worth. So, if you wish, go back inside my study and take the money fromthe upper-right-hand desk drawer and go back to your lives.”
    “And if we stay,” Angie said, “what do you want us to do?”
    “Find my daughter. I’ve accepted the possibility that she’s dead. I’m aware of the likelihood of that, in fact. But I won’t die wondering. I have to know what happened to her.”
    “You’ve contacted the police,” I said.
    “And they’ve paid me lip service.” He nodded. “But they see a young woman, beset with grief, who decided to go off on a jaunt and get herself together.”
    “And you’re sure that’s not the case.”
    “I know my daughter, Mr. Kenzie.”
    He pivoted on his cane and began walking back across the lawn toward the house. We followed and I could see our reflections in the large panes of glass fronting his study—the decaying man who stiffened his back to the wind as his raincoat flapped around him and his cane searched for purchase on the frozen lawn; on his left, a small, beautiful woman with dark hair blowing across her cheeks and the ravages of loss in her face; and on his right, a man in his early thirties wearing a baseball cap, leather jacket, and jeans, a slightly confused expression on his face as he looked at the two proud, but damaged people beside him.
    As we reached the patio, Angie held the door open for Trevor Stone and said, “Mr. Stone, you said you’d heard we had the two qualities you were looking for most.”
    “Yes.”
    “One was honesty. What’s the other?”
    “I heard you were relentless,” he said as he stepped into his study. “Utterly relentless.”

3
    “Fifty,” Angie said as we rode the subway from Wonderland Station toward downtown.
    “I know,” I said.
    “Fifty thousand bucks,” she said. “I thought twenty was insane enough, but now we’re carrying fifty thousand dollars, Patrick.”
    I looked around the subway car at the mangy pair of winos about ten feet away, the huddled pack of gangbangers considering the emergency pull switch in the corner of the car, the lunatic with the buzz-cut blond hair and thousand-yard stare gripping the hand strap beside me.
    “Say it a little louder, Ange. I’m not sure the G-boys down back heard you.”
    “Whoops.” She leaned into me. “Fifty thousand dollars,” she whispered.
    “Yes,” I whispered back as the train bucked around a curve with a metal screech and the fluorescents overhead sputtered off, then on, then off, then on again.
    Lurch, or Julian Archerson as we’d come to know him, had been prepared to drive us all the way home, but once we hit the stand-still traffic on Route 1A, after sitting in an earlier automotive thicket on Route 129 for forty-five minutes, we had him drop us asclose to a subway station as possible and walked to Wonderland Station.
    So now we stood with the other sardines as the decrepit car heaved its way through the maze of tunnels and the lights went on and off and we carried fifty thousand of Trevor Stone’s dollars on our persons. Angie had the check for thirty thousand tucked in the inside pocket of her letterman’s jacket, and I had the twenty thousand in cash stuffed between my stomach and belt buckle.
    “You’ll need cash if you’re going to start immediately,” Trevor Stone had said. “Spare no expense. This is just operating money. Call if you need more.”
    “Operating” money. I had no idea if Desiree Stone was alive or not, but if she was,