Book of Shadows (28 page)

He’d pulled up thirty feet of chain when it finally surfaced: a thick black rubber bag, the size of a small sleeping bag, attached to the chain, with water weight at least two hundred pounds; Garrett was unable to lift it farther.

Then again, he didn’t want to. Despite the encasing rubber and the cold air, he could smell it from ten feet above.

Fog rolled across the Channel as the men gathered on the concrete walkway in the first gray light of dawn: Landauer, Medical Examiner Edwards, the uniforms securing the scene, all postponing the inevitable. No one likes a floater. Even if this one wasn’t technically floating. They knew what they were in for when Edwards unzipped the bag: a nightmarish stew of bones floating in white adipocere, slippery as soap, but with an unsoaplike, unbearable stink.

Edwards stood looking down at the bag. “Can you estimate a date of death?” he said to Garrett, finally.

“August first,” Garrett said with certainty. Landauer looked at him, but said nothing.

Edwards shook his head. “Then my strong suggestion is we have the bag transported to the lab without opening it, and freeze it for several hours before we proceed with an examination.”

“A-fucking-men,” Landauer mumbled.

“There’s one thing I need to know first,” Garrett said, unable to wait, although he would have staked his life that he knew the answer already. He stepped toward the wet black bag and the other men drew back.

“Hold the zipper up with one hand,” Edwards instructed. So nothing would spill out, he meant.

Garrett held his breath as he stooped to unzip the bag slightly.

But one brief and horrifying glance into the grisly soup was all he needed. The liquefied corpse was missing its head.

“So were you plannin’ to fill me in, or do you have a new partner, now?” Landauer’s voice was genuinely bitter through the sarcasm and Garrett squirmed inside with guilt as they faced off in the detectives’ bureau. Out the windows behind them, the sky wept a dismal gray rain.

“It was the Dragon Man,” Garrett said. “I stayed with him for a while when I dropped him off. Some of what he said in the car made sense. He came up with Binford Park, and that he saw a man drop Amber in the harbor. So I . . . followed up,” he finished lamely.

“That nutball strung enough words together for you to find a body chained up like that,” Landauer said flatly. “That’s what you’re going to tell Malloy.”

“There was no head,” Garrett said softly. “And Jason was in Saratoga with the band that night. He’s got three alibi witnesses.”

“Aww, fuck this.” Landauer batted one of the rolling desk chairs with one meaty hand; it careened, crashing into a desk. “That’s where you’re going with this? Moncrief is innocent?”

“What if he is?”

“What if
she’s
covering for him?”

This stopped Garrett, and Land moved in for the kill. “Do you not remember Frazer’s profile? ‘A lone occult practitioner’? ‘The killer will often attempt to insert him or
herself
into the police investigation’?” Landauer glared at him like an angry bull. “She came to
us,
bro. You ever asked yourself what she wants out of this?”

Someone cleared his throat from the doorway and the partners turned to see Detective Morelli standing against the jamb. “Lieutenant wants to see you.”

______

Garrett stood at the conference table in front of a stony lieutenant and an even stonier Carolyn. He tried to keep his face, his voice, everything about him noncombative.

“Edwards says the pelvic bones indicate the victim was a young woman, in her teens or early twenties,” he said. “Amber Bright was reported missing on August second, and she was seventeen years old. She was booked for solicitation in January but the ID and name she gave in intake were false. We are presently attempting to identify her; we have her booking photo in the NCIC database. The decomposition of the body we found is such that it’s impossible to fix a time or date of death, but Edwards estimates a month or more. The decomposition is also too advanced for us to know if there were carvings in the torso, but the head is missing, like Erin Carmody’s—”

“What about the hand?” Malloy demanded.

“Neither hand was taken,” Garrett answered. “But there are three things that tie the two murders together so far: the missing heads, the age and sex of the victims, and the dates of the murders.”

“How the dates?” There was an edge in Carolyn’s voice.

Garrett turned toward her. “Erin Carmody was killed on September twenty-one, the autumnal equinox, which is a pagan holiday. Amber Bright disappeared on August one, which is also a pagan holiday called Lammas. Both holidays are celebrated in the satanic tradition as well, and we’ve already established a satanic connection.”

Garrett paused, steeling himself internally, before he continued in the most neutral voice he could muster. “On the night of August one, Jason Moncrief was in Saratoga Springs at a band gig. He drove ten hours that day in a car with his three bandmates, then was onstage with them from 8:00
P.M.
to midnight; he remained in the bar with the band until closing, and then slept in a motel room with the three other band members before they drove back to Boston the next day.”

The silence coming from Carolyn and Malloy was so thick Garrett could feel himself starting to choke on it. Landauer wouldn’t look at him.

“I hope you’re not suggesting that Jason Moncrief has an alibi for this murder, Detective,” Malloy said, and his voice was like ice. “You said the decomposition was too advanced to fix a date. You’re only assuming the date, from the word of a prostitute.” In his mouth the word had the force of biblical condemnation. “Further, you haven’t even identified the corpse as Bright’s.”

Garrett kept his face and voice steady. “I think there are too many similarities to ignore—”

Malloy spoke over him. “I might add that the witness who you say led you to discover this second body is suspect at best. Quite frankly I’m still unclear on the thought process that led to these conclusions.”

Garrett could feel heat in his face. “The witness has been sleeping across from the park where Amber Bright made her last phone call—”

Malloy interrupted him again. “All you have is speculation. Work the cases, Detectives. No assumptions. And I don’t want to see any premature speculation in the media. This will not turn into a circus, do you understand me?”

“Understood,” Landauer said stiffly.

Garrett escaped the room to the corridor. He felt wrung out by the meeting, but when he heard the clicking of high heels on the floor behind him he knew the ordeal wasn’t over. He turned to see Carolyn striding toward him.

“What are you trying to do?” It was rage in her voice—quiet, controlled, checked—but rage nonetheless.

“I’m trying to make sure we have the right guy locked up. I’m trying to make sure the real killer isn’t still out there. I’m trying to do my job,” Garrett said evenly.

“Don’t you dare suggest that I’m not,” she said, with that tightly reined anger.

“I would never do that,” Garrett said.

She walked a few paces in agitation. “I just don’t understand where this is coming from. We have a perfect case.”

Garrett summoned all the calm he had. “But what if it’s wrong? These are seventeen-, eighteen-year-old girls being killed, Carolyn. All I want is the right guy off the street.”

“No matter what it does to us?” Her emphasis was slightly on the “us.”

He felt a sick twist in his stomach. “I hope I just heard you wrong,” he said softly.

She shook her head in sheer disbelief. “I don’t think I know you at all.”

“Maybe you just never bothered to look,” he said, staring into her face. Her eyes widened . . . and then narrowed in fury. But Garrett no longer cared. He turned to walk away from her. As he reached for the handle of the EXIT door, he saw Landauer standing at the end of the corridor, watching them.

A bar was his first impulse. His second impulse came before the third shot of Jameson’s, before he was moved to start screaming along with the Drop Kick Murphys on the jukebox, although the raucous soundtrack continued in his head once he’d poured himself into his car.

And once again he was on the road to Salem.

It was dumping rain by then, raining so hard it was difficult for him to drive, and at one point he pulled off the road, staring out past his frantically beating wipers at the downpour, wondering if it was simply madness to continue.

He closed his eyes and had a vision of Tanith’s hands on the Dragon Man—so gentle—and so in command.

He opened his eyes and pulled back onto the road.

The shop was dark, as was the second story of the house. He stood dripping and freezing on the porch and rang the bell several times, while rain blew around him in gusts. There was no stirring from within.

He used the excuse of the whiskey to justify to himself what he did next.

He had a passable talent for breaking and entering, and not just as part of his police training. There was a time in his life, as with many teenage boys of a certain neighborhood and from a certain socioeconomic stratum, when he could just as easily have fallen on the wrong side of the law-and-order equation.

He picked the lock in under a minute and was inside the door.

In the dark the shop had a medieval apothecary look, with its thick glass jars of herbs and powders and the cases of crystals and wands. Outside, the rain thundered down, and a crack of lightning illuminated the room for a moment in ghastly grayish light.

Garrett’s heart was beating fast, and he felt a rush that he knew was familiar to criminals; the powerful effect of dominance, of conquest. He understood what he was doing was not merely immoral but also stupid in the extreme, but he continued anyway, walking noiselessly past bookcases with their mysterious volumes, on to the starry velvet curtain in the back. He stepped through into the reading room, with its lingering redolence of incense and concentrated darkness.

There was a spread of Tarot cards on the table, the pale cards with their faintly glowing symbols and names below:
The High Priestess, The Lovers, The Devil, Death
. The medieval images gave Garrett a sense of foreboding.

But it was the back room that drew him. He found the key in the standing cabinet where he’d seen Tanith take it from.

He used the key to unlock and open the door and was assailed by more darkness, and the faint phosphorescence of the pentagram within the circle inscribed on the floor. In this space there was no danger of light leaking through to the outside. He closed the door quietly behind him, muffling the sound of the rain, and felt along the wall for a light switch. His hand felt only the thick cloth that covered the walls; there were no protuberances that would indicate a switch. But he remembered there were candles everywhere. He reached into a pocket and switched on his Maglite, the small but powerful flashlight he carried on his key chain, and used the circle of light to guide him to the altar in the center of the pentagram. He
lit several candles and then stood while his eyes adjusted to the warm and flickering flames.

He glanced around the room and then back down at the altar—and was startled to see a wide, thick hand-bound book.
Jason’s grimoire?
His mind raced.
How did she . . .

But when he picked it up he realized it was not the same book, just disturbingly similar.

He hesitated . . . then stifled his conscience and opened it.

The pages were the same kind of handmade paper that Jason Moncrief’s grimoire had been fashioned of, and the writing was in code, not the twiglike runes, but something more scrolled and feminine, vaguely Celtic.

He paged through the book. The writing was incomprehensible, but there were rough drawings, of him, of Landauer. He turned pages with numb and building disbelief . . . and then stopped, staring down at a page with a sketch: the circle with the three triangles. The sigil of Choronzon.

He felt a rush of nausea, of fear . . . and then the sudden certainty that he was not alone. He whipped around—

Tanith stood behind him in the dark.

He had not heard the door open; it was closed behind her, as if she had passed through it. The thought unnerved him even more than having been caught.

Then the force of her fury hit him, although she said nothing and did not move; it was like hearing screaming in his head. Thunder boomed in the sky outside, shaking the windows of the house.

She strode forward, jostling him hard as she passed him, and slammed the cover of the book closed.

“What is that?” he demanded, without much force.

She turned on him in a rage. “Do you know it could have killed you, to open that without permission? 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 . . .” Her voice was low and lethal and he had no doubt she was serious.

“Did you?”

Her eyes blazed fire. “It’s what you deserve.”

That he couldn’t argue, but his face burned nonetheless.