Book of Shadows

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  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:

  June 21

  August 1

  September 21

  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 va
guely 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.

  Chapter Fifteen

  For the third time in twenty-four hours Garrett found himself driving out of town on a dark and largely deserted highway, through eerily drifting fog. The book was on the backseat, in a briefcase, wrapped in plastic. Above the trees the moon was high and bright, with Venus glimmering beside it, and Garrett felt wide awake, impatient, and adrenalized. An old rhyme ran through his head that he hadn’t even remembered knowing:

  Lynn, Lynn, city of sin.

  You never come out the way you went in.

  Ask for water, they give you a gin . . .

  The girls say no and then they give in.

  It’s the darndest city I ever been in.

  To silence the taunting rhyme he reached for the stereo dial and flipped around to talk radio, trying to catch up on how the case was being played in the media. He hit a weird kind of jackpot with a call-in talk show about youth and satanism. There were the requisite holy rollers and career Catholics claiming the devil’s work and the corruption of the younger generation. One nut job was really starting to foam at the mouth, quoting in an increasingly psychotic whine: “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God, and this is that spirit of Antichrist, and even now already it is in the world—”

  Garrett had had enough of the Bible in his youth to last a lifetime. He was reaching to switch stations when a new caller came on and a familiar word caught his attention. “Do you know what Halloween really is? All Hallows Eve, All Souls Day? It’s a Sabbat, a pagan festival. It was held to honor the Samhain, the “Lord of Death.”

  Garrett leaned forward and turned up the volume. “Samhain is the day when Satan himself comes to fellowship with his followers.”

  Despite himself, Garrett felt a chill. Thirty-six days to go . . . a voice whispered in his head.

  On the radio, the caller had worked himself into a high dudgeon. “And this is what we’re helping our children celebrate. Oh, we do it in the name of fun, but what is the real meaning? Is it still the same as in the old days? I say the answer is YES—”

  The talk-show host had had enough and abruptly moved on to the next caller, who was irate. “You people don’t even know the difference between Wicca and satanism. It’s ignorance like yours that led to real witch hunts. Witches don’t even believe in the devil. That’s a Christian superstition. That one’s all yours . . .”

  The devil, Garrett thought. Jesus Christ. The whole world’s gone batshit.

  He punched off the radio and made the turn off the highway into Lynn.

  The Lamplighter was exactly as Cabarrus had said, right off 1A, in the warren of streets that was downtown Lynn: an old-fashioned inn in the style of a hunting lodge, with beams and stonework and wide windows and a broad porch. The moon was high and silvery white above. Garrett got out of his Explorer and looked around at the half-full lot. He had no idea what kind of car she would have driven, and thought briefly of Landauer’s broomstick joke.

  He walked up the steps and pushed through the doors.

  Beyond a lobby with gleaming oak floors, a few stairs led down into a spacious lounge, with low tables around a towering river-rock hearth with a crackling fire.

  He saw her instantly; she sat alone at a table near the fire, the flames flushing her face. She wore a silver blouse and black skirt, and her dark riot of hair was for the moment pulled severely back. His memory had not exaggerated—she was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

  He was unable to do more than register a too-brief glance; she looked up almost immediately, directly at him. He moved down the stairs to cross to her table. Strangely, though half a dozen businessmen were scattered at the tables and at the bar, no one else in the room seemed to be looking at her. Garrett would have thought that no one would be able to look at anything else.

  He took the chair across from her, though he disliked having his back to the door, and edged a little sideways to give himself more of a vantage of the rest of the room. “I appreciate your meeting me. I’m sorry to disturb you so late.”

  “It’s not so late,” she said, without smiling.

  A waitress appeared by Garrett’s side with a coffeepot and he nodded for her to fill his cup. “Have you eaten?” he asked Cabarrus.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Another tonic,” she told the waitress.

  So no drinking, he thought, and felt an unprofessional stab of disappointment.

  Tanith looked at him, narrowing her eyes, and he had a sudden sense she had read his thought. He cleared his throat and reached down to remove the original bloodred leather book from the briefcase, carefully unwrapped the plastic. “I can’t give this to you—I brought it so you could look at it.”

  She was staring across the table with a completely unreadable expression. He opened the book, using the plastic wrapping as a glove, so she could see the odd writing. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

  She focused down on the writing for a moment, then glanced up at him as if suddenly realizing he was there, and frowned. “Of course. It’s a grimoire. A spell book. Of ritual magic. Where did you get it?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  She looked at him knowingly, and he had to shift his gaze. “The point is, it’s in some kind of code, and I—we need to break it, as soon as possible.” He put the book back in the plastic and handed over a few photocopied pages he’d selected before he left home. None of them had the number 333, the three triangles, or the sketch of the severed hand. He only hoped there was nothing sensitive in what he was giving her that could compromise the case.

  She glanced down at the pages, and an amused look flickered over her face. He sat forward. “What? Do you know what it is?”

  “The root of all evil.” He tensed, and she shook her head. “It’s a money spell. Get rich quick.” She held the pages between her fingers dismissively. “This really is amateur hour.”

  “But you can break the code?”

  She shrugged. “There’s nothing to break. It’s a straight-ahead substitution.”

  “What alphabet is it?”

  “They’re runes,” she answered.

  Runes. The name, as the letters, was vaguely, maddeningly familiar. “Isn’t that—some kind of a game?”

  “It’s a Viking alphabet. Rune stones are thrown for divination—to tell fortunes.”

  “Can you give me an index?”

  She turned over a photocopied page and took a silver pen from her bag, then swiftly wrote the alphabet from A to Z in a column on the left side of the page.

  A
/>   B

  C

  D

  E

  Then she started again from the top and began to fill in the corresponding letters in the twiglike alphabet, which was obviously something she knew well, because she did it unhesitatingly, without having to stop and think. He watched her as she wrote it out. The silver chain glimmered in the V of her neckline and he thought of the dagger between her breasts . . .

  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.