Book of Shadows

Chapter Thirty-eight

It was an eternity before the crime-scene van arrived, and the ambulance. Garrett was running down the dirt road as soon as he heard the sirens and the approach of vehicles, running and shouting. “Don’t touch anything!”

He strode to meet Lingg as the crime-scene tech emerged from the van, followed by other HazMat-suited crew. “The place is booby-trapped,” Garrett rasped out. “I think there are psychotropic drugs painted on the doorknobs, maybe other places. Land touched them—I didn’t.”

Lingg looked at him questioningly for a split second, but then nodded. “You stay, Detective,” he said, and his voice was kind. “Stay here.”

Garrett was about to protest, but found his legs buckling underneath him. And as he braced himself against the side of the van, he saw something that turned his bowels to water.

In the long grass beside the van were burned footprints.

The EMTs carried a raving and cursing Landauer out in a strait-jacket. Garrett thought, half-consciously, that the shaken looks on the faces of the EMS guys must match his own.

As they muscled Landauer into the ambulance, a dark Lexus pulled up into the dirt road. Garrett turned… and through his numbness felt dull surprise to see Dr. Frazer emerge from the car. He crossed the drive to stand with Garrett. “Malloy wants this handled in-house,” the psychiatrist said softly. “What happened?”

“The doorknob,” Garrett said again. His voice shook. “He said it was sticky. Ten minutes later he was…” He looked toward the ambulance, where Landauer was still ranting, his voice by now bloody raw and hoarse from abuse, starting to fade, but barely. “Probably belladonna,” Garrett said bleakly. “I told the EMTs so they don’t give him anything that would react…” He slowed, and swallowed, trying to block out his partner’s invective. He was sickly glad the words were in Latin so he wouldn’t have to know what Land was saying.

A tech slammed shut the doors, mercifully cutting off the hoarse shrieks. Garrett and Frazer watched as the ambulance pulled away.

They joined Lingg at the crime-scene van and both suited up in white HazMat jumpsuits. “Don’t touch anything,” Lingg instructed the other men. “Even with gloves. Walls, doors, furniture—we have no idea what might be tainted.” He turned to Garrett and Frazer. “Probably whatever psychotropic it is was mixed with DMSO for rapid absorption into the skin.” He handed both of them helmets with respirators. “We don’t know how much might be airborne, either. Detective Garrett, we’ll follow your lead.”

“Straight down to the cellar,” Garrett said through a dry mouth.

Inside the house all walked gingerly, single file, careful not to brush against the doors or walls.

The cellar door still stood open; the stairs plunged precipitously into darkness. Behind Garrett, Lingg switched on a halogen lamp and shined it down the stairs to illuminate the musty cavern below.

The light was harsh, blue-white, and created stark shadows in the dingy basement. The painted triple triangle symbol was huge on the wall, and 333 was traced on the wall opposite, with more scrawls of text surrounding it. Garrett recognized some Latin words; others were unreadable. He flinched at the sight of the altar against the wall with its gruesome human candleholder, and turned his head away, though he knew there were worse sights in store.

He reluctantly turned his gaze toward the triangle in the center of the cellar. It glowed with phosphorescence on the packed earth floor, the lines now smudged and blurred from Garrett’s scuffle with Landauer. Garrett focused on the three pedestals, one at each point of the triangle in the dirt.

And he froze.

The heads were gone.

Garrett stared. Each stone shelf held three fat black candles—and a dark blotch, something dried and dark, but there was no sign of the heads.

Garrett’s mind did a weird, nauseating flip. But I saw them. Not candles. Heads.

“Their heads were there,” he croaked out. Lingg and Frazer looked toward him. “On the altars.”

Lingg shined the lamp into the triangle. The stone pedestals were clearly bare, except for the candles and dark blotches on each.

“I saw them,” Garrett insisted. “They were on the altars. Three heads.”

Frazer and Lingg exchanged a wary glance. “Was there anyone else in the cellar with you?” Frazer asked, his voice maddeningly neutral.

Garrett was reeling. “I don’t know, I…”

His mind was racing, out of control. Was the killer here? Was he in the cellar with us? Did he take them out from under my nose?

He had run, left Landauer and run…

Garrett suppressed a shudder… and remembered the overpowering feeling of being watched when he stood under the cellar door. He spun to look up the stairs.

No one in the doorway.

But there was another dark smear centered above the door frame, and something in the center of the smear: a small blackish rounded lump that appeared to be nailed to the wall. Garrett turned to one of the techs beside him and took his light from him. He shined the light up the stairs, focusing on the lump.

For a moment Garrett couldn’t make it out, then his stomach turned over. Beside him the tech squinted up toward the pool of light, and suddenly sucked in a breath. “Is that… Jesus.”

It was a human eye nailed to the wall.

The photos of the crime scene were strewn all over the conference table at Schroeder, and they were as bad as in Garrett’s memory: the triangle in the floor, with the stained pedestals; the sigils painted on the walls; the gruesome Hand of Glory; the eye nailed above the door.

“What the hell happened down there?” Malloy raged as he paced the room. It was a quiet, tight-lipped rage, which made it all the more ominous. Frazer sat in an armchair in a corner of the room, silent, watching.

Garrett was shaky from anxiety and exhaustion, and he had to fight to keep his voice steady. “Lingg thinks the perp mixed a psychotropic with DMSO for—”

“What the hell were you doing there to begin with?” Malloy’s voice ran over him.

Garrett breathed in to keep his face from betraying his loathing of the man. “We got a partial plate from the homeless man who witnessed Amber Bright’s abduction. The plate matched a vehicle registered to John McKenna, a foreman from the Pine Street landfill where Erin Carmody’s body was dumped. McKenna stopped coming to work on June fourteenth without giving notice and with no further communication with his employers.” He paused, and was grateful that for the moment Malloy was silent, simply processing.

“The eye nailed to the wall of the cellar is human, and this is a severed human hand.” Garrett pointed to the photo of the Hand of Glory with its burned-down black candle. “Officers are searching the scene for other human remains, but my guess is that we’re not going to find them.” He pointed to one of the photos of a stone pedestal. “Lingg confirmed that this is blood on each of the three altars.” Malloy recoiled at his use of the word.

“The lab is running the DNA to check against Erin Carmody’s and Amber Bright’s, but it’s going to take days for the results.” Garrett took a breath. “My guess is that the killer was using their heads on these altars.”

Malloy looked even more affronted. “Using the heads?”

“I believe McKenna was taking his victims’ heads to use in a black magic practice called necromancy—”

“McKenna?” The outrage was plain in the lieutenant’s voice.

“Yes, McKenna,” Garrett said. “I believe we should be shifting our investigative focus to him. It’s possible that McKenna is dead, a third victim, but he doesn’t fit the victim profile: two teenage girls and a middle-aged man? It doesn’t add up. We’ll need HazMat to okay us to go back in and process this scene, but in the meantime, I’m going to be delving into McKenna’s personal life and employment history, and tracking him down from his last known whereabouts—”

“Detective Garrett.” Malloy’s voice was sharp, and he held up a hand to stop him. Garrett fell silent. The lieutenant’s eyes bored into his face. “I understand that you claimed that there were human heads in the cellar. Yet no heads have been found at the scene.”

Garrett stiffened, sensing danger. He glanced toward Frazer, whose face was a blank. After a moment, Garrett answered carefully.

“It was very dark. I was attacked only seconds later. A lot was happening—”

Malloy stared him down. “Dr. Frazer is of the opinion that the psychotropics could have been airborne as well as absorbable by touch-contact.”

Garrett didn’t know where this was going, so he waited.

“I’m sending you for a full physical exam and blood tests,” Malloy said.

Every warning bell in Garrett’s nervous system suddenly went off. “I don’t think that’s necessary—” he began.

“I do,” Malloy cut through. “You’re to report to Dr. Ramos at Mass General in one hour for a full tox workup.”

Garrett stormed out of the conference room, cursing Malloy in his head, but in the end he stifled his rage and went to the hospital anyway, because that was where Landauer was. Once the initial fury had worn off he was operating in a daze, and the everyday chaos of Mass General, the milling families, the crying children and striding groups of medical personnel—wasn’t helping him focus. He headed for the ER, and though he was not family, a sympathetic nurse who understood about cops and their partners told him what they knew: Landauer was unconscious, in critical condition. The chemicals in his system were atropine and a variety of other toxins that should have been lethal; it was only because Landauer was so big that he was still alive.

They weren’t letting anyone see him yet, but the nurse promised to call Garrett as soon as they knew more.

Garrett thanked her dully. He turned away from the counter and felt grief and fury wash through him.

Landauer’s words—some of the last sane words he had spoken—kept going through Garrett’s head. I don’t know what she is, but she mighta saved my life.

Or ended it, Garrett thought grimly.

Now it was Tanith’s voice he heard:

“Do you know I could have booby-trapped the house, put a spell on the door against intruders, bound the book with toxins… so if you so much as touched a page you would die a slow death, untraceable—”

And what if she did? What if that was exactly what she did?

A rage began to build, a blind fury at Tanith Cabarrus.