Book of Shadows

by Alexandra Sokoloff

This time the woman didn’t pause. “I’m a witch. That’s with a W,” she said pointedly to Landauer.

  Again, Garrett heard the Mexican mechanic’s hoarse voice in his head: Bruja. And again, he felt a prickling at the back of his neck.

  The woman was watching him. Garrett realized that she was still standing. He rose and indicated the chair that she had been ignoring. “Please sit down—let me get some information here,” he said, reseating himself and reaching for a report form. After a moment she sat, her back straight as a dancer’s.

  “Your name?”

  “Tanith Cabarrus.” Garrett could feel Landauer’s eyebrows raising across the aisle. She spelled it and Garrett wrote the alien-sounding words.

  “Address and phone?”

  “411 Essex Street, West, Salem, 01970.”

  Garrett sat back in his chair, trying to keep his face neutral. Salem. It figured. All the New Age loons in the state congregated in Salem, milking tourists looking to be titillated with gruesome stories of the town’s famous witch trials. Garrett was feeling his lack of sleep as a building irritation, coupled with the increasing doubt that anything constructive would come out of this odd interview. Still, it wasn’t hard to look at Tanith Cabarrus.

  “And occupation is . . .” he trailed off, reluctant to say the word. She looked fleetingly amused.

  “You can put down that I own a bookstore.”

  Garrett glanced up at her. “Do you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She was young to own her own business and Garrett had to admit it gave her a bit more credibility. “So why don’t you tell us what you know?” he suggested. He was expecting her to describe vague details from a dream, so what came next threw him.

  “It was a ritual killing. The killer cut something into her body, here.” She put her hand on her abdomen, under her breasts.

  Garrett and Landauer were wide awake, now. In fact, they were speechless. Garrett’s mind was racing: had details of the crime scene been leaked? But by whom? A worker at the dump, a cop, the family?

  Then she added, “And I think . . .” She paused and her eyes went distant and cold. “He took her head.”

  “You got a name for us? Address? Identifying details?” Landauer drawled, feigning boredom.

  She looked at the big man. “Do you dream addresses, Detective? That’s a pretty advanced technique, as dreamwork goes. I’ll have to get your secret out of you, sometime.” She turned back to Garrett before Landauer could muster a response. “I didn’t see him. Just a shadow.”

  “How do you know it was a him, then?” Garrett asked sharply.

  She gave him a withering look. “Surely you know women don’t do this kind of thing, Detective.”

  She happened to be right, but he didn’t care for the imperious tone. “Anything else?” he asked, his voice brittle.

  “Yes.” She looked across the desk, directly at him. “That boy you arrested didn’t do it.”

  Again he felt as if the earth had shifted under him. “How do you know we arrested someone?”

  She arched her eyebrows. “It’s all over the morning news.”

  Garrett remembered the students with their damned camera phones. These days onlookers couldn’t wait to sell their footage to CNN. They’d have a circus on their hands, now. And the main act was sitting right in front of him.

  “So if he didn’t do it, who did?”

  Her gaze grew cloudy. “Someone older than that boy. And powerful.” Her dark eyes rested on his. “And sick,” she said bleakly. “Very sick.”

  “You dreamed all this.” Garrett’s voice sounded thick to his own ears.

  “I had three dreams. Actually, one dream, three times. On these dates.” She took a pocket calendar from her bag and removed a Post-it, which she handed across the desk to him. She had written three dates:

  June 21

  August 1

  September 21

  “It was the same each time. A man in a ritual triangle, lit by fire, using a dagger to cut into the body of a—young person. And then picking up a sword . . .” She swallowed, looked away.

  Garrett was unnerved. The dagger, the sword . . . it’s all so specific. He fought for objectivity. “So if you ‘dreamed’ this before, why is this the first time we’re hearing about it?”

  “It’s not,” she said. There was ice in her voice. “The first time, I hoped it was just a dream. The second time I knew it wasn’t, and I called here—the police station. I was told no such killings had occurred. This time—when I saw the news—I came in.”

  Garrett frowned and made a note on his pad to check tip calls made around the date she had listed.

  “I wrote down the dreams each time. I made copies, if that’s of any use.” She reached into her large tooled leather purse and removed three photocopied sheets of paper. He took them, glanced through them. Short phrases, images, impressions: Fire. A shadow moves in the triangle. There were sketches, too: a triangle drawn in red, scribbled flames.

  Garrett looked for a time at the triangle, and felt his stomach roil. A triangle. He didn’t like it. Not at all.

  She was speaking and he looked up, was struck again by the startling blackness of her eyes.

  “You need to know this. The dates are significant. They’re Sabbats—holy days in the pagan calendar. June twenty-first—the summer solstice. August first—Lammas. Friday night, September twenty-second, was Mabon, the autumnal equinox. The next Sabbat is five weeks away, and it’s the most powerful of the year . . .” She paused and said a word that sounded like “Sowwen.”

  Garrett frowned. “Spell that?”

  A look that might have been irritation crossed her face. She leaned over the desk and wrote on his pad. He smelled apple musk in her hair and heat shot through his groin. She straightened, turned the pad around to face him. He forced himself to look at the page in front of him. The word was Samhain— the word he’d seen on the banner at Cauldron.

  “Halloween, to you,” she said drily. “It’s the festival marking the end of summer and the beginning of winter. The Sabbats are power days, best for working rituals. And Samhain is the most powerful night of the year. So if he’s conjuring, which I think he is, whatever he’s doing will have the most powerful effect on that night. And that’s not good.”

  Garrett felt his sleeplessness like an undertow. None of this was sounding real at all. He had a sudden wave of paranoia that the dark woman was just playing with them . . . and then another wave that there was something huge that he was overlooking, something dangerous.

  At the other desk, Landauer suddenly leaned forward, with exaggerated interest and what Garrett recognized as an ominously friendly tone in his voice.

  “So . . . you’re in a coven?”

  The dark woman—Tanith—glanced at the larger detective. “No. I don’t like people much. I’m a solitary.”

  “A solitary . . . witch.”

  “Yes.”

  Landauer leaned back in his chair, and it creaked under his weight. “Show us.”

  She turned and looked at him full on, and her eyes were ice. “Show you what?”

  The big detective spread his hands jovially. “Show us some magic. Put a spell on me.”

  Garrett was about to protest, break it up, but something in the witch’s face kept him quiet. She was so still Garrett found he couldn’t breathe, himself. Then she walked three steps to Landauer’s desk and picked up his left hand. Landauer was startled, but quickly forced a neutral look onto his face. She turned his hand over and stared into his palm. Something unreadable flickered in her expression. She picked up his other hand and examined that one. Garrett was amused to see his partner squirm.

  She released both of Landauer’s hands, then reached into the front of her blouse and drew out the long silver chain she wore around her neck.

  The chain held a perfect, handmade three-inch silver dagger, with gemstones glittering in its hilt.

  Tanith pulled the chain over her head in one smooth gesture. She
stared down at Landauer, her eyes locked on his, and used the dagger to slice open her left middle finger. Blood dripped from the slash. She extended the finger to Landauer—a classic, deliberate fuck-you gesture—and said, “Suck it.”

  Landauer looked up at her, stupefied. “Wha . . .” He didn’t move. Garrett felt himself riveted.

  “You heard me,” she said with an uneven smile, and in that moment Garrett thought she did not look quite sane. “Are you afraid?”

  Landauer recovered his bravado. He took her extended hand with a smirk and lewdly closed his mouth around her finger, used his tongue to lick sloppily at the blood. Garrett felt himself bristling with a jealous possessiveness that he couldn’t have explained to himself. Across the room, Palmer and Morelli were frozen at their desks, openly gaping at the sight.

  Tanith stood with her legs braced until Landauer had completed his big show of sucking off her finger, and released her hand. She let her arm drop to her side. “You’re done,” she said flatly.

  Garrett didn’t miss the brief, jolted look on his partner’s face. He felt distinctly odd, himself.

  Tanith wiped the bloody dagger off on the waistband of her skirt, put the chain back over her head, and dropped the knife back into her shirt, between her breasts. She turned to Garrett. “I take it we’re finished, here.”

  “Thanks for coming in,” Garrett fumbled, still not sure what in Christ’s holy name had just happened. “I—we’ll call you if we have questions.”

  Her smile twisted. “Of course you will.” She gathered her bag from the chair . . . then she turned back, and her eyes met his for a brief, veiled moment.

  “Do you believe in evil, Detective?”

  The question so startled him that he answered honestly. “Yes, I do.”

  She touched her finger to the triangle sketch she had given him, and held his gaze. “This is evil.”

  She turned and walked out through the work pods, with every detective’s eyes following her.

  Chapter Nine

  No sooner had the door closed behind her than Landauer threw back his head and wolf-howled. “She can ride my broomstick anytime.”

  Morelli and Palmer chuckled lewdly from behind their desks, and the tension was broken. Garrett fought down irritation, shook his head. “I have two words. Blood test.” Predictably his tone had no effect on the others; they continued to comment obnoxiously. Garrett tuned them out and looked down at his desk. The weird word stared up at him from his legal pad: Samhain.

  Five weeks away . . .

  He was tired . . . too tired to process what had just happened. But without thought he turned to his computer and typed “autumnal equinox” into the Google search box. He didn’t even have to click through a link to see that Friday had been the equinox, just as the—witch—had said.

  But he went no farther than that. His phone buzzed, and it was Carolyn. The search warrants were ready.

  The partners stopped briefly at the crime-scene lab to order a team with a van to meet them up at Amherst to process Jason’s and Erin’s rooms. In the elevator going down, both detectives slumped against the wall; Landauer closed his eyes. Garrett spoke aloud. “It was the equinox. Friday night.”

  Land didn’t open his eyes. “I know, G. It was in the paper on Friday, on the Calendar page. That New Age shit always is. She coulda gotten it from there. She coulda gotten the details about the head and carving from the news, already—fuck knows what’s been reported. We had three dozen dump workers tellin’ their wives all about it last night. Everyone’s out to make a buck.”

  Garrett was silent and Landauer finally opened his eyes. “You really want to go back up there and tell Malloy we just got a hot tip from Stevie Nicks?” He didn’t have to describe the scenario. Garrett could picture it just fine on his own. “We got a live suspect in custody, bro, so let’s never mind the spooky shit. We work the case—we nail this fucker.”

  The media was in full force outside the building: television vans with their microwave dishes and camera crews unloading equipment on the sidewalk while Armani-suited reporters and their scruffier print and radio colleagues hurried up the stairs, en route to the press conference. Garrett and Landauer took a quick left toward the back entrance of the building. At least they weren’t required at the briefing. The chief himself was sitting in on this one, with Malloy. Garrett wondered for a second if Malloy’s order to stay away from the press was partly to keep Garrett himself out of the limelight, and immediately thought, with some shame, that he himself would scathe any other detective unmercifully for that kind of self-serving arrogance. Land was right: work the case.

  They swung the Cavalier by the courthouse to pick up the warrants at the lobby desk, and then got back on 90 West toward Amherst. Thankfully the wooded road was nearly deserted on Sunday morning. They’d agreed to split the drive in two in order to get a nap apiece; at this point even forty-five minutes would be saving. Garrett won the coin toss and fell into a black hole of unconsciousness within seconds; he’d always been able to sleep in a moving vehicle. The motion was lulling, and he thought he did not dream, until he bolted out of sleep with the image of Jason’s stretched-taut face grinning at him from the dark.

  Landauer glanced at him from the driver’s seat. “Yeah,” he said. The radio was on; he was listening to a local news station. “Police spokesmen would not confirm the presence of satanic elements in the brutal slaying of Erin Carmody, daughter of the CEO of W. P. Carmody and Company. The headless body of the eighteen-year-old Amherst sophomore was found at a city landfill yesterday morning—”

  Garrett rubbed his stubbled face, trying to wake up. Land turned down the radio. “So far looks like no one’s spilled about the carvings. But they are on this satanic shit like white on rice.”

  Garrett licked his dry lips; his mouth and brain felt stuffed with cobwebs. “You want to pull over? I’ll drive.”

  Landauer gestured toward a road sign with an unlit cigarette and Garrett saw the turnoff to Amherst was only a few miles away. “You should’ve stopped,” he said, guilty.

  “Nah, you looked so pretty sleeping there, Rhett.” Landauer grinned at him. “Don’t sweat it, you won’t be thanking me on the drive home.”

  They drove through the stone gates of campus and stopped at the unmanned information kiosk. Garrett jumped out to grab a campus map, which they studied on the dashboard, locating the campus police building. Malloy had made the calls to the chancellor’s office to ask for cooperation and assistance from the campus police force. Of course with Carmody being a celebrity alumnus and a major donor, the school could not have been more obliging.

  The college was roughly divided into thirds: the academic and residential buildings, the athletic fields and facilities, and a plot of open land that housed a wildlife sanctuary and a forest. In the daytime the Victorian creepiness had retreated; the lush green knolls were dotted with large trees just starting to come into their autumn brilliance. The detectives motored the Cavalier past the Campus Center, a sprawling building with outdoor terraces, a campus store, and a coffeehouse. Farther on, original nineteenth-century red-brick buildings were interspersed with everything from a pale yellow octagonal structure to the latest garishly modern dorm. There were few students out yet, on Sunday morning; it was still just past eleven.

  The campus police building was a low brick structure across the lot from the back of the Campus Center.

  Not the head of the campus cops, but clearly his man in charge, Sergeant Jeffs, was there to meet the detectives and had obviously been instructed to bend over backward to accommodate the investigation. Jeffs was young, fit, and alert, which Garrett immediately appreciated; they’d be able to trust him with the secondary interviewing of potential witnesses. He ushered them into a meeting room in the bright and orderly six-room campus security building.

  Jeffs already had a file out on the table that turned out to be the answer to Garrett’s first question: “Did Jason Moncrief have any record of behavioral problems
, any incidents?”

  The young sergeant passed them the file. “We had an anonymous tip two weeks ago that he was dealing drugs. We entered and did a search of his room.”

  Garrett quickly scanned the file. “No warrant?” he asked.

  “Not required for dorm rooms. According to campus policy the students’ rooms are school property and we only need permission from the dean’s office to search, not from the individual students. It’s part of the student housing contract.”

  “Sweet,” Landauer murmured.

  “It’s common for university campuses,” Jeffs explained. “The school is in loco parentis. We didn’t find anything illegal, so no action taken . . .” A shadow passed over the sergeant’s face. “But this kid is no boy next door. He’s got a weird way about him.”

  “Got that right,” Land said fervently. Garrett nodded without speaking, and there was an uneasy silence in the small room. Garrett finally broke it.

  “You didn’t find any weapons in the search?” He was thinking of a dagger, the murder weapon.

  Jeffs tensed. “No. That would be automatic grounds for expulsion.”

  Garrett closed the file and sat back. “He’s a sophomore—no problems last year?”

  “Nothing that ever got reported. He was totally off our radar. And I checked the hospital, too, to see if there was anything medical or psychiatric we should know about.” Jeffs shrugged briefly, and there was frustration in the gesture. “Nothing. But after we talked to him we flagged his file. I have to say I’ve just been waiting for something ever since. You know, after Virginia Tech . . .” The sergeant’s face was troubled. “But I never in a million years thought it would be something like this.”

  Garrett met the young sergeant’s eyes with what he hoped was reassurance. “How could you?”

  Responding to Malloy’s request, Jeffs and the campus cops had sealed Erin’s room for processing as a crime scene, and Jason’s as well. Garrett asked Jeffs to take whatever men he had on duty and clear all students from the floors of the dorm where Erin’s and Jason’s rooms were located so the CSU could start on the rooms as soon as they arrived. The students would be held in the lounge and questioned individually.