Book of Shadows (15 page)

He pulled his eyes away, cleared his throat. “So you see this kind of book a lot?”

She continued writing without looking up. “Any practicing magician keeps a grimoire.”

“In code?”

“It’s always preferable. The more effort you put into a spell, the more effective it will be. The extra concentration and work of writing in code focuses intent, and makes manifestation more likely.”

At the bottom of the page she added six double letters: NG, GH, EA, AE, OE, TH—and wrote the corresponding symbols beside them, then handed the sheet across the table.

“That’s it?” he said, staring down at the simple index with a sense of unreality.

“That’s it. Oh, and most of these letters can be reversed, so anytime you see a mirror image of one of these symbols, it’s really just the same letter.”

He looked up from the page, across the table at her. “Thank you. I—this is incredibly helpful.”

She looked down at the remaining pages in front of her. “I have to say, all of this is strictly Ritual Magick 101. That’s not the book of an accomplished magician; it clearly belongs to an acolyte. A dabbler. Anyone can get this stuff off the Internet.” She looked up at him. “It’s his book, isn’t it? Jason Moncrief.”

“I’m sorry, that’s confidential.”

She looked at him, then suddenly leaned across the table and slid her hand into the plastic sheathing the grimoire so that her palm lay flat on the leather cover. Garrett was so startled he didn’t have time to react. Her eyes were black and unfocused. Then her face cleared and she sat back, withdrawing her hand, before he could do or say anything.

She pushed back her chair and stood, pointing down at the book
with one finger. “This one has killed no one. Others have died. More will die. And you have the wrong man. And you know it.”

She turned without another word, and walked across the gleaming wood floor, up the stairs, and out.

THE HAND OF GLORY

To make a Hand of Glory, you must acquire a corpse no more than twenty-four hours dead. Sever the left hand at the wrist with a sharp knife.

Take a winding sheet and squeeze out the blood of the hand to dry it. A pound of flesh should be cut from the corpse and rendered down to produce a bowl of fat. Preserve then the hand for two weeks in an earthenware jar filled with salt, saltpeter, and black pepper—all well powdered and mix’t.

Remove the hand and dust off all of the powder. Place the hand in a hot oven that is fired with vervain and fir. Leave it for an hour and then remove. Mold the drying hand into a fist, with space in the center to take a candle.

Fashion a candle from the previously rendered corpse’s fat and virgin wax. The wick should be made from freshly spun flax. Coax the candle into the curled fingers, and squeeze them tightly, gripping the candle firmly in position. When complete with the candle fixed into the mummified fist, you have a Hand of Glory!

With a Hand of Glory, you have a power. You have magic! As you light the candle, you cast your spell: “Hand of Glory, Hand of Glory, put my foe to sleep, in a sleep that is fast and deep!”

Your intended victims will not be able to rouse themselves . . . you will be free to do whatever mischief you wish to do.

Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Zazas Zazas Nasatanada Zazas!!

Landauer lowered the translated page, shook his head to clear it, and looked over to where Garrett sat on the windowsill, nervously drinking coffee.

The dawn light was gray behind him, and Landauer’s face was gray as well. Garrett suspected it was not entirely because of the lighting.

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Garrett said quietly.

Landauer dropped the page down on the table, and was probably unaware that he wiped his hands on his pants after he did so. “So . . . this was in that—book.”

“Grimoire.”

“And you seriously think he took Erin’s hand to make a fucking candle out of it?”

“There’s the drawing of it, right there.” Garrett nodded to the grimoire, open to the page with the sketch of the Hand of Glory. “And the spell calls for a left hand . . .”

Landauer pushed the grimoire away from him at the table with a queasy expression that Garrett found painfully familiar; he remembered his own trouble touching the book. “This is some seriously sick shit we’re talking about, G.”

“Yeah.” Garrett stood, and walked around his living room restlessly. “But it’s a direct link between Moncrief’s grimoire and Erin’s murder: her left hand was cut from her body. And less than a month before her murder, Jason Moncrief wrote out a black magic spell that called for the left hand of a dead human being. I’d call that evidence of premeditation.”

“Yeah . . .” Landauer said. He looked down again at the open grimoire. “That’s some good work, there,” he said, finally.

“God bless Google,” Garrett said, keeping his voice even as he lied.

He had been back home just under two hours after he’d left, to find Landauer still sleeping hard in the bedroom. Garrett had stood in the hall feeling both as if he’d gotten away with something and as if he’d never been gone at all, that he’d simply fallen asleep in his chair and experienced a quickly fading but disturbing dream.

He’d spent most of the rest of the night using the code sheet Tanith had written out for him to translate the candle spell, and then the titles of the other spells in the grimoire to see if there was anything else that deserved immediate attention. Then he stashed Tanith’s code sheet in a desk drawer, looked up a rune substitution code online, and printed it out, to explain how he had been able to break the code. Tracks covered, no need to elaborate. And as long as it got done, what difference did it make how it got done?

Landauer looked at him appraisingly, but after a minute looked away. “Well, if it wasn’t a slam dunk before, it sure as shit is looking like one now.”

They finished the charging package together, with the Hand of Glory detailed under the section titled
“Motive,”
and at 10:00
A.M.
they were in the conference room on the second floor of Schroeder, drinking more coffee as Carolyn and Lieutenant Malloy read through the evidence at the long table.

“Spells,” Malloy muttered, with a tone of biblically righteous anger. “Black magic.”

Carolyn looked up from the charging package with that gleam in her eyes. “Gentlemen, this is very impressive. This is a solid suggestion of premeditation. We may very well be able to force a plea.”

Malloy hesitated, then nodded acknowledgment. “Fine work,” he said gruffly, and Garrett felt a sharp stab of victory.

Take that, tight ass.

______

As Garrett walked back toward the homicide room, he heard a female voice behind him. “Detective Garrett.” For a split second, as he turned, he was sure he would see the witch.

It was Carolyn, of course.

She stopped at a formal distance, and looked him over. “You must be dead,” she said, but there was a suggestive warmth in her voice.

“I got a few hours,” he said, dismissing it.

Her eyes shone at him. “It’s a huge case, Garrett. Huge. You’ll get national attention, and you deserve it.”

He was annoyed at the thrill that gave him. “You may be right. Right now I just want to make sure it’s all lined up.”

“Well . . .” She glanced to the side to see if they were still alone. “Call me.”

“You know it,” he said automatically, but for once the thought didn’t give him an erotic charge.

He drove home on autopilot, and didn’t even remember how he got to the bedroom. The last image in his mind, before he fell into a comatose sleep, was the yellow flame of a lit candle clutched in a severed human hand.

Garrett jolted awake, and not because he was finished sleeping.

There was someone in the house.

It was dark, but he had no conception of what time it was. He heard nothing, could see nothing, but knew beyond doubt there was another person in the house with him. It was an unmistakable sense of presence.

He grabbed for the Glock in the top drawer of the bed stand, discarded the idea of clothes. Instead he threw off the bedcovers.

Naked, he eased into the hall, his heart pumping hard. It was dark, but there was a light at the end of it, dimmer than the living-room light would have been.
In the kitchen, then . . .

He stopped at the end of the hall, pressed against the wall, and steadied his weapon as he strained to hear.

There was a soft, hydraulic swish.
Refrigerator?

He carefully stuck his head around the wall of the hall to survey the dark living room. No one. Then he crossed the hardwood floor in swift steps, stalking barefoot, holding the Glock in a double grip before him, and peered around the separating wall into the kitchen.

Carolyn stood at the refrigerator, blond hair cascading around bare golden shoulders. She wore nothing but a clinging cream silk
teddy and held a dripping bottle of Cristal, and looked as out of place in his little kitchen as a runway model in a trailer park double-wide.

She swiveled on showgirl legs, surveyed Garrett’s Glock and his nakedness, and smiled a cat smile. “I hope you got some sleep. We have celebrating to do.”

She poured champagne into the two flutes she held carelessly in her left hand and walked barefoot and pedicured across the kitchen tiles to him. She stopped in front of him and gently pushed the gun aside. “Sorry,” she said briefly, barely glancing at it. She put a glass in his hand and clinked her own against it, then drained the flute as she leaned forward against him. There was nothing but the thinnest silk between his now aching hardness and the warm wet of her. Garrett ground himself forward as he drained his glass, then pushed her against the counter, pushed the silk aside, and eased the length of his shaft into her. Carolyn laughed deep in her throat and wrapped one sleek thigh around him as he bent her back on the counter, tearing the silk of her teddy down, exposing lush breasts that he pressed his palms into, feeling hard nipples against his hands as he thrust; spearing, slamming, into the wet suction of her cleft. He moved his mouth to her breasts, sucking greedily as he clutched the globes of her ass and his aching cock plunged deeper and deeper and she gasped into his ear. And as he ground himself into her, he had a flash of dark hair spilling on creamy skin and a gleaming dagger between perfect breasts and the thought made him explode in molten, volcanic waves, with an inarticulate cry as he collapsed into Carolyn’s heat.

He woke again, this time to full and painfully bright sun. He knew from the angle that it was way past dawn; it was not the shiny brightness of morning, but used daylight, afternoon daylight.

Waking more, he realized he was alone in bed. Carolyn was long gone, leaving a lingering scent of Dolce & Gabbana on the sheets. Her last words, before he’d dropped into a black abyss of sleep, had been, “I think you should meet my father.” And exhausted as he had been, Garrett had registered the words with an electric thrill.

Now, turning the idea over, he understood that he had passed some test, had graduated to a new level.
Meet the family.

He lay back on his pillow, marveling. This was turning into a hell of a fall. Even though all of this—the high-profile nature of the case, the apparently quick solve—was partly just luck. Then again, luck was possibly part of the ongoing test, with Carolyn. He suspected luck was toward the top of Carolyn’s internal list of non-negotiable requirements.

The thought gave him a twinge of discomfort he didn’t want to look at, so he glanced at the clock instead. 3:00. That was
P.M.
, which meant he’d slept nearly thirty hours, minus, of course, their little interlude.

But for once he didn’t feel any jolt of tension, of urgency to be somewhere. He stretched, savoring the feeling—and the warm fragrance of perfume and sex.

It’s not that they could stop working, never that. But the investigation had entered a new phase, a slower phase. Now they had to build an airtight case (unless the charging package proved to be enough to force a plea, which neither Garrett nor Carolyn thought was likely).

And they had time. Justice was slow. Realistically, after the arraignment, Jason Moncrief’s trial would not be for months. There was no longer that urgent rush . . .

The word
Samhain
flickered briefly in Garrett’s mind, spiking his pulse.

But he immediately shut down the thought. He would prove Jason did it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that would be that. There would be no replays, no more killing. Their suspect was in custody. The world was safe.

He threw back the bedclothes and stood.

It was 5:00
P.M.
before he rolled into Schroeder, and Landauer had barely preceded him. The big man looked him over knowingly. “You look
relaxed,
this fine evening, Rhett.”

Garrett allowed himself a small indiscretion. “Yeah, I just about got myself relaxed into a coronary.” He grinned at Landauer, the cat who ate the canary.