Book of Shadows

CHAPTER Eight

Morning light glimmered around the edges of the buildings outside the glass corridor as Garrett and Landauer headed back from the conference room to the detectives’ room to catch up on their reports. They were both gravel-eyed and snappish from overdoses of coffee and sleeplessness . . . but they were also in hyperdrive. They were close. So close . . . and well within that golden forty-eight-hour window, when it was most likely that a crime would be solved.
Lack of sleep be damned, they were going to have to get back up to Amherst right away, this time with a warrant, as soon as Carolyn could get back with it, to search Jason’s room and Erin Carmody’s room and question Erin’s roommate and boyfriend and other kids in the dorm and teachers and whoever the hell they could get to talk about Erin and Jason Moncrief.
In the work pod opposite Garrett, Landauer was positively gleeful, despite his stubble, despite the adrenaline crash, despite his bitten arm. “For once it looks like that cream puff Frazer might actually earn his keep. Didja hear all that? Satanic books, satanic music, praying to Satan to make the band successful . . . we are home free, homes. Slam-f*cking-dunk,” he exulted.
It did seem like a dream come true, a perfect solve.
But now that they were out of the conference room Garrett was feeling alarm bells going off all over the f*cking place.
Something wasn’t right.
The kid was seriously wrong, that was a fact. Violent and weird and into drugs that were off the charts even for a seasoned junkie. Opportunity and means, check. Into the occult, check. The numbers added up, and the number was 333: Current 333, to be precise, whatever the hell that was. But . . .
But.
Jason Moncrief might be a nutcase, but he was nineteen years old. Nineteen. For a moment Garrett recalled the look in Jason’s eyes as the guard led him away.
A kid. A terrified kid.
For all its grotesque crudeness, the murder of Erin Carmody was a sophisticated crime. A man’s crime, not a boy’s, even if that boy was wealthy and prestigiously schooled. The decapitation, the carvings, the disposal of the body—all were precise and controlled. Mature.
Which meant—what?
“He didn’t do it.”
The voice came from above him, female, and Garrett had drifted so far off into his own thoughts that he wasn’t sure he’d heard it, or that he was even awake.
When he did focus, he was startled to see a woman of perhaps thirty standing in front of his desk, tall and willowy, dressed in a longish skirt over high boots, and a fitted blouse, all of a vaguely equestrienne style that was perfectly fashionable, but on this woman the effect was palpably sensual, with a hint of Victorian perversity. She was as Black Irish as the Black Irish come: eyes and eyebrows and long thick hair like coal, a pale yet still slightly olive-tinged complexion, sculpted cheekbones and full dark mouth, lips berry red, almost purple, like lush grapes, like wine . . .
Garrett pulled himself back from highly inappropriate thoughts and tried to concentrate.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I didn’t,” she said curtly. She was very edgy, holding herself stiffly. “I’m looking for the detectives handling the Erin Carmody killing.”
“That would be us,” Landauer offered, eager to get in on this. Garrett could see Palmer and Morelli, who had just arrived for the 8:00 A.M. shift, eyeing the woman from the coffee counter as well.
The dark woman looked the detectives over, one then the other, taking their measure, and Garrett felt her look go straight through him.
“I have information that might be pertinent to the case,” she said, finally. Garrett’s mind scanned through possibilities. Was she from Amherst? She was older than a college student, he was sure, but she might be a graduate student. She also looked like she could be a regular at that club, Cauldron; in fact, he had a nagging sense that he had seen her before—though surely he would have remembered.
“What information is that?” he said aloud.
“There are others.”
Garrett’s pulse spiked as he felt the pull of a real lead, real insight. “And how would you know that?” he asked drily, careful not to betray any excitement.
Again she hesitated; he sensed a strong reluctance to speak. “I dreamed it.”
Garrett’s excitement deflated. A loony toon. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Landauer untensing in his chair as well.
“You dreamed the murder,” Garrett said.
“I dreamed three,” she said, and loony toon or not, the tone of her voice compelled him. A weary look crossed her face. “Look, it’s what I do.”
“You dream,” Landauer said, insolently innocent.
She turned to look at him. “Among other things,” she agreed, without expression.
“So you’re a psychic,” Garrett said, to deflect the storm he could feel brewing. The department had used the input of psychics in the past; the concept wasn’t unheard of, but certainly Lieutenant Malloy had never approved that kind of input, and Garrett had never seen or heard of any particular success, himself.
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 f*ck-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.