Book of Shadows

Chapter Twelve

Garrett recognized the round-faced, curly-haired hall coordinator from the night before (God… just the night before…). The partners sat in Kurt Fugate’s one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor, his perk for managing the building and all its student residents. Jeffs stood against the wall, watching.

Fugate was a senior, older than their other interviewees, but so far the most nervous; he was mature enough to be suitably shaken by Erin’s death. He sat in an armchair, relating what he’d told Jeffs. “All these rooms are supposed to be double occupancy. Jason only had a single because his roommate requested a transfer. Urgently.”

Seated uncomfortably on the futon couch, Garrett had a sudden flash of Jason’s stretched-out face, the wolfishly lolling tongue…

Fugate swallowed coffee from a school mug and continued. “Bryce came to me to request the transfer. He wouldn’t give any specific reason—he really didn’t want to talk about it at all. But he said he didn’t want to stay another night.” He glanced at Jeffs, back to Garrett. “If you ask me, he was scared.”

“Scared how?” Garrett pressed.

Fugate looked at him straight on. “He had a suitcase with him when he talked to me. He really wasn’t going back up there.”

Garrett glanced at Landauer. “But he wouldn’t give any details.”

The hall coordinator shook his head. “No. Sorry. He didn’t want to talk about it.”

“No problem. We’ll be speaking to him.” Garrett made a note, then looked up. “Did you know Jason yourself?”

“Only by sight. There are 120 kids in the hall, it’s a new school year… I just hadn’t gotten to know everyone.”

“Did Erin Carmody ever complain to you about being stalked?”

The young man looked horrified. “God, no. I would have—done something.”

Garrett nodded thoughtfully, and met Landauer’s eyes, while he said aloud to Fugate, “Thanks. You’ve been a huge help.”

They were in luck: Bryce Brissell was on campus, working in the scene shop in the theater building, just a few buildings away. There was building going on in the dim space backstage, muffled hammering and sanding and sawing from the scene dock and the costume shop, and the smell of paint.

Bryce was tall, pale and gangly, almost two-dimensionally thin, with a long shock of diagonally cut, dyed auburn hair that kept falling into his startlingly green eyes. Contacts, Garrett thought. The boy wore his sexuality on his sleeve. He even gave Garrett a furtive look as he folded himself into a battered armchair in a grouping of sprung sofas and davenports in the curtained wings backstage. It didn’t take much prodding for him to open up about Jason. He pulled out clove cigarettes, prompting Landauer to dig out his own Camels, and articulated for the micro-recorder, everything with a dramatic delivery and fluttering hands that Garrett could feel grating on Land without even having to look at him.

“I left because I couldn’t live with him,” Bryce said, taking a nervous drag on his cigarette. “It was the black magic. At first I thought he was just posing—the whole death metal thing, yada yada, scary scary. But he just got more and more into it. I knew he was doing rituals in the room. At first I could tell because of the candles, nothing but black. He got into using different bizarro oils, I think for spells. He had all those creepy books—I swear, I didn’t even like sleeping in the same room with them.” Bryce looked off toward the curtained wings. A single ghost light on a tall pole shone on the stage like a torch, a halo of light. “And then things started to go really weird,” Bryce said softly.

“Weird how?” Garrett prompted.

Bryce paused, and the reluctance suddenly seemed genuine. “There were these smells in the room, even when he wasn’t there,” he said slowly. “Like, burning. I could feel these—drafts—even when the windows and door were closed. And sounds. I would wake up in the middle of the night because there was this whispering.” He stopped, frowned. “Babbling. Like a lot of voices all at once, on top of each other. But there was no music playing, no TV, no iPod, nothing. He’d be sitting cross-legged on the bed, just him, staring into space…” Bryce shivered, and Garrett thought of Jason’s black, dilated eyes. “And then he’d look at me… and his eyes… his eyes were so empty.”

Despite himself, Garrett felt a chill. Bryce exhaled smoke and touched his lip before he continued.

“Okay, and I do props, right? And I’d been collecting some stuff for a bill of one acts: Pinter, Beckett, Ionesco. Well, one night I was studying alone in the room and I heard a phone start to ring behind me. Not a cell phone, but one of those old-time phones, a Sultan?” He looked at the detectives and lowered his voice.

“It was the prop phone. It was ringing in the closet. But it was a prop phone. No cords. No wires.”

Garrett and Landauer eyed each other, and Bryce stiffened at their obvious skepticism. “I swear to God, it’s true. That’s when I packed up, right then and there. Whatever he was into, I wasn’t going to live in the same room with it.”

“So you felt in danger?” Garrett suggested.

“Yes, I felt in danger,” Bryce said, affronted. “What do you think I’ve been saying?”

Garrett tried to steer the interview back to something solid. “Did you ever see Jason with Erin Carmody?”

Bryce shook his head, hair flopping.

“She never came to the room?”

“Not that I knew of.”

“Did Jason ever speak about her?”

“No. It’s not like he talked a lot, though. Mostly he acted like I wasn’t there. He was always off on his own trip.” Bryce stared off toward the stage and shivered. “My dad was batshit that I moved off campus and lost the whole semester deposit. But look what happened.” He looked at the detectives with wide eyes. “What if I’d stayed?”

As they walked out the dark hall toward the red light of the EXIT sign, Garrett looked to Landauer, who was tapping out a cigarette. “What do you think?”

Landauer grimaced. “Drama queen. Literally.” He widened his eyes like an ingénue. “ ‘The phone was ringing in the closet,’ ” he said, fluttering his hands as he mimicked Bryce’s voice. He dropped the lisp. “The phone is definitely the only thing in the closet.”

“If you’re finished—” Garrett began.

“I’m makin’ a point, here,” Landauer growled, holding up a warning finger.

“Which is?”

“Moncrief doesn’t like having a gay roommate and he hazes Tinker Bell till he leaves. Moncrief’s a musician. Sound effects: babbling voices, ringing in the closet.”

Garrett stopped and looked at his partner, who stood with the unlit cigarette in his hand. He had the strong feeling Landauer was trying to explain away something he didn’t want to look at. But we both saw it, Land: Jason’s stretched-out face and black basketball eyes. We heard that rasping, inhuman voice…

Garrett suddenly felt the hair on the back of his neck rise, the same absolute sensation of being watched that he’d experienced at Cauldron.

He turned sharply and stared into the dark of the hall.

They were alone, nothing in the corridor with them but the glowing red patches of the EXIT lights.

Get a grip, he told himself. Get some sleep.

Land was staring at him, and he shook his head. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Jason was hazing him. I don’t know what to think. I think I’m too tired to think.”

“You and me both,” Landauer admitted. He looked back toward the stage with a frown. “But something’s hinky about that story and I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it.”

Outside the theater building, they saw the media had found them. Microwave-dished vans from different news stations dotted the campus, shooting atmospheric footage. Jeffs’s officers had established a no-media zone around Morris Pratt Hall, but news choppers hovered above, shooting from the air what they could not get from the ground. Garrett stood and watched as a suited reporter with a fresh haircut and a mike chased down a couple of backpacked students. Everyone in the continental U.S. knows Jason Moncrief killed her, by now. Signed, sealed, delivered.

The partners met Lingg and Jenna in the parking lot at the side of the dorm, where they were processing Moncrief’s car, a black late-model Mustang hardtop convertible. The kid was no pauper.

Lingg turned away from the car with a grin. “Happy New Year, Detectives. We found Erin’s phone. Under the passenger seat. And more semen and blood traces in the back.”

Slam dunk.

In his oddly maternal way, Lingg suggested that Jenna drive the Cavalier back to Boston so Garrett and Landauer could catch an hour’s nap in the CSU van, and the partners gratefully accepted, each taking a piece of the floor in the back. Garrett folded his suit coat under his head and lay back with his eyes shut. He was nearly dead, yet his mind was racing, cataloguing.

At this rate the lab would find traces of Erin’s blood on the dagger, Moncrief would give them a full, voluntary confession and agree to a plea, and they’d be closing the book on this one within the week. A dream case. All the glory and none of the hassle. And what was so wrong about that?

“There is no grace, there is no guilt…”

Garrett spoke aloud to his partner from where he stretched on the floor of the van. “I was wrong. You were right. It’s the kid.”

For a moment he thought Landauer was already asleep. Then his voice came, disembodied, from the other side of the van. “This is a weird one. It baffles the fuck out of me.”

Garrett said slowly, “Yeah.”

And then they were out.