Book of Shadows

Chapter Fourteen

As the partners spread their reports and notes and tapes out over the long table in the back of the detectives’ bureau, the reality of the mountain of work they had ahead of them sank in. Since their arrival at the landfill yesterday morning, they had worked the case nonstop, without enough of a break even to do more than file the most preliminary notes in the murder book. They were starting from scratch.

They began by setting up the two typists Malloy had provided (not for the detectives’ convenience, Garrett knew well enough) with the witness interview tapes to transcribe.

Back at the long table of files, Garrett looked over the clear plastic evidence crates and spotted the maroon leather-bound book in a top crate.

He reached for a box of latex gloves and slipped a pair on to take the book from the crate, then sat at the table with it. It was heavy, the blood-colored leather soft to the touch.

He opened the cover of the book. The pages were fibery, document quality, giving the volume an antique feel, and the writing was completely hand-blocked, in black calligraphy pen—and completely incomprehensible: a twiglike alphabet that looked vaguely familiar, but was no language that Garrett could name.

Garrett carefully turned the pages with gloved hands. Amid the writing there were drawings as well, including sketches of pentagrams… and on later pages, the number 333 and the triple triangle design that had been carved into Erin Carmody’s torso.

He spoke aloud to Landauer. “He’s got those triangles and 333 in this book, too, but the writing’s in some kind of code.” Landauer glanced up from the witness report he was detailing, stood, and came around the table to look.

“Is that a language?” Garrett asked him.

Landauer frowned down at the stick letters on the page. “It looks familiar, but I can’t place it.”

Garrett sat back against his chair, in a fog of sleeplessness. The logo he’d seen on Moncrief’s laptop screen ran through his head again, like a mad chant:

He was suddenly aware of the weight of the book in his hands. The thick pages, the look of the lettering, the whole feel of it—all made him profoundly uncomfortable. He realized that even with latex gloves on, he had no desire to be touching it.

He shoved back his chair and stood. “I’m going over to the lab to see if they can translate this thing.”

Landauer nodded distractedly, already moving back to his witness reports. “Get an ETA on the prints and blood.”

The crime lab was a short walk down a connecting corridor that overlooked the dim and sickly lights of the Lower Roxbury hood. Garrett brooded on the notion of premeditation as he walked with the heavy book. The volume had an odd feeling in his hands that he couldn’t identify but which he didn’t like, a sense almost of malevolence. That, of course, was nonsense. But what if Jason had plotted Erin’s death in the book? If he had written anything down, that would go to premeditation.

Garrett walked faster, and turned in through the door of the lab.

“Hello, young Garrett! Thanks for the OT!” A cheery voice called out from a desk as Garrett stepped through the gate at the counter.

Criminalist Warren Tufts was a veteran, nearing seventy but wiry and spry and perpetually delighted with his job. He tipped precariously back in his swivel chair and eyed the book in Garrett’s hands. “Bearing gifts, I see. What new treasure do you have for us this fine evening?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. It’s the suspect’s, but it’s in some kind of code.” Garrett opened the book randomly on Tuft’s desk. “Need to get it translated.”

Tufts scowled down at the twiglike letters. “I’m no good with code. It’s all Greek to me! Henderson’s in Alaska. I’ll have to outsource this. There’s a guy at MIT we use. Is it a rush?”

Garrett paused. It was as far as he was concerned. “Yes,” he decided. As he handed over the book, he felt a strange reluctance to part with it. “And can you make a copy for me? I’d like to take a look through myself, tonight.”

“Right you are.” As Tufts got up and moved toward the file room, Garrett looked over the rows of steel counters at the back of the lab. Two counters were crowded with individually bagged pieces of trash, and Garrett recognized the refuse taken from the landfill. He frowned, remembering something.

“Hey, Tufts. We took some burned flowers from the landfill. Did you get anything on those?”

The criminalist stuck his head out the file room doorway. “Don’t think they’ve been processed yet. Burned flowers?”

“Yeah. Scorched.”

“What’ve they got to do with all this?”

“I don’t know,” Garrett said, and shook his head. “I don’t have a clue.”

Twenty minutes later he was back in the homicide room, with a thick pile of photocopied pages and the original book. He’d prevailed on Tufts to make a second copy so he could take the original with him in case he needed it—for what, he had no particular sense, only that it could be important.

Landauer sat at the long table, hunched over a laptop, a stack of reports in front of him. He looked up at Garrett with a glazed look in his eyes. They both contemplated the piles of files and random pages stacked all over the table. A thick silence fell.

Garrett cleared his throat. “I’m thinking my place. Order porterhouse and Caesars from Dino’s. Eat, write, nap. Eat, write, nap.”

Landauer exhaled. “I am so with you, Rhett.” They both reached out and started packing boxes of documents.

Garrett’s house, north of Logan Airport, was the house he’d grown up in, his parents’ house, in a crowded lower middle-class neighborhood that had gentrified in the precrash housing boom. Garrett was the fifth son in an Irish Catholic family, the late-in-life mistake, conceived when his mother was forty-nine and his father fifty-five. Garrett was ten years younger than the next youngest of his brothers, who had always been more like uncles to him than siblings, and he guessed he could thank the papal ban on contraception for his very existence, but with what he saw daily as a cop he was the most fervent advocate of birth control he knew. If there was a way to put it in the water he would vote for it, no questions asked.

His parents were dead, now; his father from complications from alcoholism just over four years ago, and his mother simply followed in her sleep a mere three months after. Some people would call that love.

Garrett’s brothers and their families were long gone out of state: New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine—and rebel Paulie to Fort Lauderdale. Garrett had inherited the house, and after the obligatory mourning period he’d slowly rehabbed the place, discarding furniture untouched since the sixties and revealing clean lines and antique moldings and gorgeous hardwood floors under his mother’s wallpaper and fussy Irish lace and religious bric-a-brac.

Just having his own walls around him now was rejuvenating. The delivered meal and another round of showers had energized both detectives, and three hours into it they had made real headway on the charging document, using the murder book and their notes from Amherst to draw up a complete chronology and fill in about a third of the reports they needed. Tufts called in with another nail in Jason Moncrief’s coffin: some of the fingerprints in Moncrief’s Mustang were a match for Erin’s. However, the lab had found no blood residue on the dagger they had taken from Moncrief’s room.

The partners took a break for cannoli and channel-surfed through the news. The stations were falling all over themselves to profile Jason: rich kid, young mother, older father high ranking in the navy. Young mother did very well in the divorce and had husband-hopped ever since, every time doing better, while Jason was shuffled from private school to military school, his behavior deteriorating with each successive transfer.

Poor little rich kid. Garrett had no sympathy. Still, he was hearing nothing that would necessarily indicate a budding young psychopath.

“He did a Jim Morrison,” Landauer summed up, and when Garrett looked at him, he said, “Moncrief. Rebelled against a colonel father. Got into all that spooky shit. Classic Apollonian-Dionysian conflict.”

“Land,” Garrett said blandly, hiding his shock; his sometimes Neanderthal partner never failed to surprise him. “I didn’t know you could even spell Dionysian.”

“Who said I could?” Landauer said. He stood and stretched and then retired to the spare bedroom for a nap. Garrett took their plates into the kitchen, and after a hesitation, decided to allow himself a beer. When he returned to the living room he could hear wall-shaking snores rumbling from down the hall.

The descent of night had given Garrett his second wind. He pressed on, with a Guinness in front of him and case files and crime-scene photos spread out around him on the long dining table he always ended up using as a desk. It was tedious work but strangely satisfying to him, building a case. He usually enjoyed the process, watching links emerge. But there were contradictions here: he was seeing two conflicting tracks to the evidence, and that was troubling. It seemed clear from the phone logs on both cell phones and the text messages that Erin had gone with Jason voluntarily to the Cauldron club on the night of her death. Still, Garrett knew not just from police work but from personal experience that young women have a terrible blind spot for what they think are bad boys, and a frightening naïveté about the dangers of experimenting with the wild side. As a musician Jason would have a certain troubadour allure, but there were dark currents there, an apparently fatal undertow.

Next he considered Jason’s roommate. Bizarre as Bryce Brissell’s story was, there was a ring of truth to it. Excuse the pun, Garrett thought grimly. And Landauer might not be so far wrong about Jason faking scary effects.

Garrett reached for the copy of the tape he’d made of Jason in his room, and rewound it to listen from the beginning again. He fast-forwarded through his own recitation of the Miranda warning.

“Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”

“Suuure…” Moncrief drawled.

“Jason, what’s Current 333?”

“Choronzon.”

Garrett frowned at the word. He rewound the tape and listened again. Jason’s voice was slow and slurred.

“Choronzon.”

“Corazon? You mean, ‘heart’?” Garrett asked him on the tape.

“Hardly.” Jason’s voice mocked. “Choronzon.”

Then Garrett sat up in his chair, listening more intently. There was a faint whispering in the background. At first he thought it was just the hiss of tape, but the sound increased. Whispering. Not just one person, either, but an overlap of voices behind his own and Jason’s voices.

“I don’t know what that means. Can you explain it?”

“The Lord of Hallucinations,” Moncrief said in that dreamy, slurred voice.

“Really. You mean, a drug?”

“I mean the Master of the Abyss.”

The whispering was louder now, and Bryce Brissell’s story came back to Garrett. “I would wake up in the middle of the night because there was this whispering. Babbling, actually, like a lot of voices all at once, on top of each other.”

This is crazy, Garrett thought. The stereo must still have been on. The whispering was on the CD.

He’d turned it off himself, though.

I must have turned it down, not off. But even as he thought it, he clearly remembered punching the POWER button.

On the tape, his own voice continued:

“You know, I think it would help if you started from the beginning—”

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Garrett stared at the recorder as Moncrief’s voice intoned the words, and the whispering sped up in the background. Garrett could feel the hairs on his forearms raising.

“Jason, where is Erin?”

And then Garrett’s whole scalp buzzed, as that horrible, guttural voice blasted from the recorder:

“Zazas Zazas Nasatanada Zazas!”

He heard his own voice croaking: “Where is Erin?” And that snakelike hiss: “In hell.”

Then pandemonium. Landauer yelling, cursing, and Moncrief’s feral snarling, all over the wail of the—impossible— music, and the frantic, escalating babbling of voices…

Garrett quickly punched off the tape and sat back, as rattled as he had been the night before.

Whatever had been in that room with them was certainly capable of murder.

But what had been in that room?

He got up and paced the floor, staring toward the recorder. He suddenly crossed to the table and reached for the murder book, flipped pages until he found the interview form he’d filled out on Tanith Cabarrus. The orange Post-it she’d given him was still stuck to the report, with its ominous list of dates:

Garrett found himself suffused with an almost paralyzing agitation and dread. He remembered his intention to check Missing Persons, forgotten in the sudden rush to Amherst. Now he dropped into a chair and ripped through pages in the murder book to find where he’d filed the Missing Persons lists, under To Be Checked. He scanned the pages for the dates: June 21, August 1…

There were no MPs listed under either date.

He pushed back his chair and stood, catching his breath. All right, then. Nothing there.

But his heart refused to slow. He was in the grip of a certainty that whatever was going on, it was imperative to keep Jason Moncrief off the street.

He paced in a circle, with an agitation he couldn’t contain. Premeditation, Carolyn had said. If they could prove premeditation, she would be able to ask for a no-bail hold.

And then he knew. The book. He seized the volume bound in blood-colored leather and crossed to his favorite easy chair.

Fifteen minutes later he stood, with a rock in his stomach as he stared down at a drawing on a page. He was no closer to understanding the strange writing, but the illustration needed no interpretation: it was a crude sketch of a severed left hand, with a lit candle burning in the stiffened clutch of fingers.

Erin Carmody’s killer had taken her left hand.

Garrett reached for his phone and speed-dialed Tufts’s number at the lab… but before the connection went through he abruptly punched off, thinking.

He turned to his own book, the blue binder of the murder book, open to the witness report labeled “Tanith Cabarrus,” and looked down at the phone number under her name on the first line. After a long moment he picked up his cell phone again and dialed, only half-aware that he was holding his breath.

She answered on the second ring and the smoky voice electrified him. “Book of Shadows.”

So it was the bookstore number. He glanced at the clock. Nine-thirty. “Ms. Cabarrus?” he asked, though he knew it was.

There was a long pause and then she said, “Detective Garrett, is it?”

He was entirely startled. “How did you know?”

This time the pause was distinctly amused. “That’s my job, isn’t it?”

For the life of him he could not think of a response.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, finally, and he tried to focus.

“I know it’s late, but I have a piece of—evidence—that I think is important. And I thought, with your expertise, you might be able to tell me what it means.”

Another silence. “You mean, now?”

A vision of Tanith Cabarrus, with that tumbled hair around her face, those dark, lush lips against the phone, inflamed him.

He cleared his throat, blocked the thought. “If that’s at all possible.”

“What is this evidence?”

“I’d really prefer to show you and have you tell me.” He felt his words sounded vaguely obscene, and hoped she wasn’t thinking the same.

There was a very long silence. “Where are you?”

He could not at all gauge her reaction. “Near Logan.”

“You know I’m in Salem,” she pointed out.

“I do. But it’s not so far, this time of night. I could be there in forty minutes.” He waited through the silence.

“I’ll meet you halfway,” she said. “Do you know the Lamplighter, in Lynn? It’s right off 1A.”

Lynn was an older industrial center in the North Shore, halfway between Boston and Salem. Garrett began, “You really don’t have to do—”

She cut him off. “I’d prefer it.”

He was silent, awkward, wondering if she felt in some way threatened. “If you’re sure—”

“If it will help.”

“Half an hour, then,” he said, and the silence felt thick, intimate. “Thank you,” he added, formally, he hoped.

“Half an hour,” she said, and clicked off.

Garrett closed his phone. His stomach and groin muscles were taut, and he breathed out to settle himself. He stood and looked toward the hallway, the bedroom where Landauer was sleeping, with world-class snores, and he thought of Tanith again… the curves of her body, the silver dagger between her breasts…

Let him sleep, Garrett thought, and knew the thought had nothing to do with charity. But he’d never claimed to be a saint.