Book of Shadows

CHAPTER Twenty-three

Garrett fought his way to consciousness, past disturbing images of candles and inscriptions and burning parchment and severed human heads. Somewhere far away a phone was ringing.
He grabbed for his cell on the nightstand and mumbled “Garrett” into it without checking the number.
A husky female voice said, “Did you find her?”
What immediately ran through Garrett’s mind was Tanith, and he felt himself harden under the sheets in response. Luckily he asked, “Who is this?” to be sure.
There was a silence, then a wary voice. “Bree. Stoney told me to call.”
Garrett scrambled up to sitting, reached for the clock. 3:00 P.M. That made it the next day. He rubbed his face to wake up. “Can I meet you?”
It was a wintry afternoon, with high fast clouds and a chill wind whipping through the concrete corridors of Washington Street, a retail district where Boston teens still shopped for cheap Nikes, music, and books. Garrett drove past pushcart vendors selling backpacks and phone accessories and knockoff purses on the sidewalks.
Boston’s infamous Combat Zone, the downtown red-light district, was long gone. When real estate prices shot up in the eighties, the sleazy strip where adult bookstores and dance clubs and streetwalkers and dealers once blatantly hawked their wares had been inexorably gentrified and sanitized. Skyscrapers sprouted up, with their condos and office space and doormen and underground parking, and a pristine granite sidewalk had replaced the vomit-and-blood-stained concrete. But despite the surface polish, sex workers still prowled the nearby streets of Chinatown and Downtown Crossing.
Bree (“Just Bree,” she’d said on the phone) had directed Garrett to meet her at a dim sum restaurant, on a street where brick buildings and colorful awnings and vertical signs in Chinese lettering bloomed under the shadow of a thirty-six-story office tower. In a tight cotton tank top and jeans and platform shoes and tats, the lone young woman at the table looked like a college student—until she took off her sunglasses and Garrett got a look at her eyes. They were colder than December.
“She’s dead, isn’t she,” Bree said flatly.
“Why do you say that?” Garrett asked.
The girl looked at him in disbelief. “Homicide? How stupid do you think I am?” She lit a cigarette shakily and Garrett was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She brushed at them angrily. “So?” she demanded.
“What’s your friend’s name?” he asked.
“Amber,” Bree said, in a voice that dared him to mock it. “Just Amber,” she added.
“Amber,” Garrett repeated gently, and had a sinking feeling. “I don’t know that she’s dead. I hope not. That’s why I’m here. I need to know what you know.” He pulled out a pad. Bree stared at him stonily. He summoned patience, persuasion. “You reported her missing on August one. Why? What happened?”
“Nothing happened. Stupid f*cks wouldn’t even take the report,” she spat.
Garrett understood the anger. “I’m sorry. The desk sergeant was following protocol, but I think he was wrong. If there’s anything that you can tell me, I promise you I’ll make this a priority.”
The girl narrowed her eyes, weighing him, and finally spoke. “She called me the night before. She said she was in the park, and she had a date.” The girl’s eyes turned bleak. “Then she kind of joked—‘If I don’t come back you can have my boots.’ And you could tell it wasn’t really a joke, right? But when I asked her what was up, she said, ‘Nevermind, no big,’ and hung up.” Bree’s face trembled and she took a long drag on her cigarette. “She never showed up later that night—I’ve left about a million messages and she never returned one. No one’s seen her.” The tears threatened again, and her whole body was shaking.
This was not good in any way. Garrett tried to keep his face impassive. “Did she describe the guy? Anything?”
Bree shook her head, her eyes fixed on the table. “That was all she said. But she was weirded out. I could tell. God damn it . . .”
“All right, the park,” Garrett said quickly. “Where is that?”
“Couple blocks away. She went there for her breaks . . .”
“Show me.”
It was a sad little park, sandwiched between a disreputable parking lot and a construction site. It was probably the only remains of a long-gone church and no doubt slated for demolition along with every other building in the neighborhood. The scraggly lawns were sunburned and choked with weeds and the cement paths were littered with used condoms, fast-food wrappers crawling with ants, and shattered vodka bottles. A homeless man sprawled on a bench, dead to the world.
But as Garrett looked around him, he saw one valiant tree, with autumn leaves now red and brilliant as rubies, and there was a fountain in the center, long dry, with stone benches around it, and on the top of the fountain was an angel, stained and worn, but there was a ravaged beauty about it. Garrett didn’t have to ask Bree why Amber had gone to the park. It may have been small comfort, but there was comfort there.
The afternoon shadows were lengthening and the wintry wind flapped at his coat as he slowly scanned the park. He had no idea what he thought he would find. Amber had disappeared over two months ago, and turning up anything like evidence in a public park was about as likely as finding evidence in a landfill. And yet . . . there was some feeling about the park, almost a sense of déjà vu . . . it felt like a piece of the puzzle. So Garrett walked the littered paths. Bree at first trailed behind him, picking her way carefully around the scattered glass, teetering on her open-toed platform shoes, but she quickly gave up and sat on the lip of the fountain to light up a smoke. Garrett stopped and looked back to ask her, “Did she have a favorite spot?” And of course the girl pointed to a bench in full view of the angel.
Garrett stepped to the bench, scanning underneath and around it, saw piled trash and gum wrappers and cigarette butts, smelled a faint stench of vomit.
He straightened, and slowly sat on the bench, looking up at the angel.
And then he felt a prickle on the back of his neck, as tangible as fingers.
He stood, twisting to look behind him.
He saw a gnarled and dying tree, a crumbling stone wall, the skeletal girders of an unfinished building beyond. No one human.
But the feeling of being watched was overpowering.
Garrett took a few steps on the path, looking toward the skeleton of the building with its open tiers . . . and then froze, staring down to the side of him. Behind the bench were footsteps in the weeds . . . blurred, but unmistakable: scorched, blackened footsteps in the withered wildflowers . . . just like the burned footprints at the dump.
Someone stepped behind him and he spun—to face Bree. “What is it?” she asked him, her face pale and tight.
Garrett looked back at the scorch marks. “I don’t know.”
She followed his gaze to the blackened prints and frowned. “Freaky . . .” she said from far away.
Garrett got his digital camera from his Explorer and returned to the footprints. He clicked off photos and collected some of the burned flowers in several evidence bags. And again he heard Tanith’s voice in his head: “The demon scorches the flowers where it walks . . .”
While Bree watched him from the fountain, he stepped back and took several more shots of the park, of the benches, of the dry fountain with the angel, then circled back to Bree and sat on the rim of the fountain beside her. There was a pile of crushed cigarette butts at her feet. Garrett flipped open his notepad. “How old is Amber?”
Bree exhaled smoke from a fresh cigarette. “She said seventeen.” Bree shrugged with cynical skepticism.
“Do you have a photo of her?”
Bree’s eyes clouded. “Uh uh.” She sounded for a moment like a little girl. Then her face hardened again. “You could get a mug shot though.”
“Does she have a family somewhere?”
“If you want to call it that. She ran away when she was fourteen. Wanna know why?” Her gray eyes were challenging.
Garrett’s face tightened. It was always the same story. What people did to their kids could almost make him believe in demons. “I’m sorry,” he said inadequately. “But do you know where her family is?”
Bree crushed out a butt and lit yet another cigarette. “Maine somewhere. What difference does it make? They sure as shit don’t care.”
She was racked by a coughing fit. Garrett waited, thinking, Worse than Landauer. When she had control of herself again, he asked, “Bree, since she disappeared, have you felt in danger yourself?” She looked up, her eyes widening. He continued. “Have you ever felt you were being followed or—watched?” Garrett’s gaze went to the perimeter of the park, past the bench where he had been sitting before.
The girl’s eyes followed his. “I don’t think so,” she said warily. “What do you mean?” When Garrett hesitated, she asked raggedly, “Do you know who did it?”
“No, I don’t.” Garrett took out one of his cards. “But I want you to call me. If you feel—strange about anything, if anyone comes asking about Amber, if you just want to talk.” He wrote a number on the card. “And this is the number for Youth Services—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bree said wearily. “Stoney gave me the number.” She glanced away from him, up at the angel. “What else am I supposed to do, huh? These days? You tell me.”
______
Garrett’s guilt about keeping Landauer out of the loop had reached lapsed-Catholic proportions, so he phoned him from the car. Land sounded grumpy and Garrett guessed he’d pulled him away from his dinner. It was also entirely possible that his partner had spent the whole day in bed.
“Not an emergency,” Garrett said quickly.
“Then the f*ck you calling?” Landauer grumbled.
“Look, Land, I might have something. I found a missing person. A hooker named Amber. A friend of hers says she disappeared from around Chinatown on August one. Sixteen-, seventeen-year-old Caucasian. She hasn’t been seen since.”
Land was surly, but his brain was working. “There was no MP of that age range on the list.”
“I know. I checked with the front desk and her friend came in on the day after she disappeared. There was never an official report filed.”
There was a pause; Garrett could picture Landauer frowning, working it out. “How’d you know to—” he stopped. “August first. That’s one of those days Stevie Nicks gave you.”
Garrett shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel. He didn’t bother to correct Landauer with Tanith’s real name. “Yeah.”
The silence on the other end was ominous. “What does this have to do with Moncrief?” Landauer asked, finally. Garrett could hear the scowl in his voice.
“I don’t know, Land. But maybe there’s a witness. I’m going to follow up.”
Landauer sighed, martyred. “What time?”
Garrett could hear his reluctance and pounced on it. “Look, go back to your dinner. I can call you if there’s anything there.”
“You sure?”
“No problem,” Garrett said, keeping his voice casual. “I’ll fill you in in the morning.”
He disconnected, fought down another surge of guilt, and turned onto Highway 1 toward Salem.