Book of Shadows

CHAPTER Forty

She was gone.
None of the neighbors questioned by the officers had any idea she was leaving. Her utilities and mortgage payments were on auto-pay; the mail had been stopped. Her car was gone. There was no forwarding message on her voice mail; there was no personal computer in the shop or upstairs; she had no e-mail accounts that anyone could find. The cat was gone; her desk and personal drawers had been cleaned out.
The detectives seized samples of belladonna from the shop. More ominously, a doll was found on the premises in the shape of Landauer: the same proportions, dressed in a suit, with a crude badge pinned to its chest.
Cabarrus’s sudden flight confirmed departmental suspicions that she was involved somehow with Landauer’s poisoning. The belladonna seized from her shop, the threat that the detectives had witnessed in the bull pen (You’re done . . . ), and the weird doll were enough to justify a BOLO: wanted for questioning.
But so far there were no leads on her. She was “in the wind,” as was said in law enforcement, and Garrett thought that in this case the term was more literal than anyone might suspect.
He had more time than he wanted to think about all of these things as he camped out in the hospital beside Landauer’s bed, where his partner lay with a machine breathing for him. So far there had been no improvement.
He watched as the lung machine inflated Landauer’s chest in a slow and horribly artificial-seeming rhythm. I’ll find her, Land. I swear to you, I will.
When Garrett heard about the Landauer doll, he had risked Malloy’s wrath—and disciplinary action—to sneak into the crime lab to see Tufts. Tufts showed him the doll, and Garrett understood why the other detectives, particularly Malloy, had reacted so strongly. It was a crude and alien thing, burlap hand-sewn in the shape of a man and dressed in some doll-clothes version of a blue suit, with a metal badge pinned to the chest.
“What’s inside it?” Garrett asked Tufts.
“A mix of herbs—”
“Belladonna?” Garrett demanded.
“No belladonna,” said the criminalist. “Mostly common garden herbs—maybe a bit more common if you’re a witch! Mugwort, hensbane, dragon’s breath . . . and tobacco.”
Garrett stared at him. “Tobacco.”
Tufts shrugged. “And hair.” He opened a manila envelope, and removed a glassine bag. “Dirty blond, curly.”
Now, in the hospital room, Garrett looked at his comatose partner . . . dirty blond curls crushed against the pillow.
She’d made a voodoo doll, or whatever a witch would call it.
And yet, the tobacco in the doll . . .
In his head, Landauer’s voice came to him, unbidden. “I haven’t had one since she walked into the office that day. F*ck knows I’ve tried. I just can’t.”
Either way, she owed Garrett some answers, and he was going to get them.
He had an entirely different reason than the rest of the police for wanting to find Tanith. Whether or not she had put Land into the coma, she was the most likely person Garrett knew to be able to get him back.
And time was running out.
Palmer and Morelli had a whole new crime scene’s worth of evidence to process. Garrett knew they’d be doing exactly what he’d be doing: tracking the missing McKenna, questioning his neighbors and the managers and owners and workers at the landfill, seeking out family; while they collected lab reports on the blood samples and eye, looking for matches with Amber and Erin and trying to determine the identity of whoever’s blood was on the third altar and in the handprint on the front door.
But they would be looking at all that evidence through the prism of Malloy’s directive: to keep their focus on Jason Moncrief as the killer. And beyond that, Garrett knew Carolyn would fight not to have any other murders tied into the Carmody case. Garrett had not seen her since she had hurled Tanith Cabarrus’s arrest file at him that day, but he knew how her mind worked, and he had watched the song-and-dance the department was doing for the media to keep McKenna out of the papers. Trying to prove another murder would muddy the solid case the state had against Moncrief. Carolyn was not about to fall into the trap of bringing new charges that might jeopardize her existing case.
All of which meant that key evidence could be overlooked for political expedience.
Garrett sat holding his partner’s calloused hand while his mind raced through possibilities. He didn’t believe McKenna was a victim. The former foreman had intimate knowledge of the landfill, its entrances and routines, making it a natural dumping ground for him. He had an isolated house, perfect for the kinds of rituals (Garrett’s mind shifted away from dwelling on the particulars) that someone had been doing in that cellar. And Tufts had let Garrett in on the fact that books and printouts on demonology, including volumes by the ubiquitous Aleister Crowley, had been found in McKenna’s house. He fit Dr. Frazer’s profile of the “Self-Styled Satanist.”
Palmer and Morelli would no doubt try to question Jason to determine whether he had any kind of connection with McKenna, and also to try to pin down a connection with Tanith. Evidence at McKenna’s house would be cross-matched with hair, fiber, and DNA taken from Tanith’s house and shop, and from Jason’s room and car.
Yes, Palmer and Morelli would be doing it by the book. The problem was, they didn’t have time for the book. Even expedited, DNA reports took a minimum of two weeks and it was October 28. Which meant just three days before Halloween . . .
Samhain, Garrett’s mind whispered.
“Samhain is the eve, when those who love the lost will grieve. Three to die to do the deed . . .”
They didn’t have time for DNA.
And there was another unease that Garrett didn’t even let himself look at too closely. He’s holding them, she’d said. Their souls are trapped.
He looked at his partner, attached to machines by tubes.
Trapped.
But Garrett had an idea of how to find her.