Book of Shadows

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—f*ck 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 f*cker.”
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.
“And try not to let them bring any laptops or cell phones with them,” Garrett instructed as they got back in their car to follow Jeffs over to Morris Pratt Hall.
In the car, Landauer glanced at the list on his legal pad and turned to Garrett. “Who’s it gonna be, Kemosabe?”
They had a choice now: question Erin’s boyfriend, who lived in campus-owned housing a few blocks from the school; question Erin’s roommate, Shelley Forbes; or search Jason’s and Erin’s rooms. Garrett was itching to get into Jason’s room, but it wasn’t going anywhere and their witnesses might, and the crime-scene van was still en route.
“The roommate,” he decided. “I want to see if she has anything to say about Erin and Moncrief before we talk to the boyfriend.”
While Jeffs and his officers rousted students out of their rooms and secured them in the downstairs lounge of the dorm, Garrett and Landauer met Erin’s roommate, Shelley, in a downstairs suite of Morris Pratt, where she’d been moved when the campus police sealed off the girls’ room. The wide window had a view of the oddly churchless steeple. Shelley Forbes was preppily pretty, but nowhere near Erin’s league, despite some obvious surgical enhancements: a nose job and breast job, at least, Garrett thought, on top of expensive corrective orthodontia. That kind of early plastic surgery was always unnerving to him. Braces, sure, but what kind of parent buys their teenage kid a boob job?
Shelley was presently red-eyed, shaken, and crying copiously in the way that only teenage girls seem to be able to cry. Garrett’s micro-recorder was rolling on the coffee table in front of her. They were going to have to do a lot of fast-forwarding later.
“It’s s-so h-horrible,” she sobbed. It was, in fact, horrible, but Garrett could see Landauer straining to keep a semi-compassionate look on his face.
“Shelley, when Detective Landauer talked to you on the phone, you told him Erin had gone to the Cauldron club on Friday night. How did you know that? Did she tell you specifically?”
“She had a flyer for some party she left on her desk,” she sniffled.
An equinox party, Garrett thought. And Samhain is next, his mind continued, unbidden.
Shelley’s face crumpled. “It was him, wasn’t it? He killed her. That freak Jason.”
Garrett kept his voice neutral. “Why would you say that?”
“They said on TV it was satanic. He’s into all that.”
The damn media. It’s going to be hard to get any kind of uncorrupted version of the story.
Now that Shelley was wound up, she kept going. “And he was always hanging around. Following her. Texting her.”
The partners exchanged a glance. Nothing about that in the campus security file.
“Did she report this to the hall coordinator, or school officials?”
Shelley shook her head, sniffling. “I told her to. Erin never wanted to make waves, you know? That’s just not how she w-was . . .”
“Can you tell us what any of those messages said?”
She shook her head again. Garrett made a mental note to comb through Erin’s and Jason’s e-mail, not that he wouldn’t have.
“Shelley, did Erin say she was going with Jason on Friday, or did you see them leave together?”
“No, but why else would she go to a Goth club like that?” The partners looked at each other, not following. Garrett raised an eyebrow, and waited. Shelley’s voice rose, defensive. “That’s where his freak band plays.”
Garrett was trying to reconcile a massive logical contradiction. “But—if he was stalking her, why would she go at all?”
Shelley’s voice rose. “It was like—a spell. She was upset after she broke up with Kevin, and he just moved in on her, that’s all.”
Now Garrett was completely confused. He latched on to the most obvious point. “Erin broke up with Kevin?” Kevin Teague was the boyfriend.
“It was crazy. She wasn’t acting like herself at all.” Shelley un-crumpled an already soggy Kleenex, blew her nose.
“When was this?”
Shelley shrugged listlessly. “A couple weeks ago, I guess.”
“And did Erin start seeing Jason before or after the breakup?”
Now the girl flared up. “She wasn’t seeing him. He was hanging around, okay?”
Garrett increasingly felt lost in a miasma. “Did she tell you she felt threatened? Did she seem afraid?”
“Well, of course she was afraid. He’s a freak.” She dissolved into sobs. “ I told her he was bad news . . .”
“I understand, Shelley,” Garrett said soothingly, tamping down his impatience. “We just need to know what actually happened. Did Erin go to Cauldron often?”
“No. Never.” She folded her arms on her chest for emphasis.
“But you think she went with Jason on Friday night.”
“I could tell she was because she wouldn’t talk about it. She knows I can’t stand him.”
Garrett’s strong sense was that there was something more voluntary going on between Jason and Erin than Shelley wanted to admit. He sat back, trying to process, and looked at Landauer, who raised his hands and shot him back a look that clearly said, This one’s yours.
Garrett remembered his passing thought about fetish wear. “Was Erin dressed up when she went out to the club? Anything unusual?” He could see Landauer frowning his puzzlement on this one.
Shelley frowned, too. “Unusual?” Her voice registered disdain. “You mean Goth? That wasn’t Erin.”
Garrett wasn’t thinking Goth so much as leathers, fishnets, corsets. Despite what they already had on Jason Moncrief, he was fighting to keep his mind open to all possibilities. If Erin had been dressed like other patrons of the Cauldron club, it would have been easy to mistake her for a prostitute, and that could have made her a prime target for a trolling sex killer.
“How was she dressed, then?” he tried.
“I didn’t see her before she went out.”
Garrett thought for a moment, and suddenly threw a curve ball. “Did you know she was doing drugs?”
Through the tears, Shelley was immediately more alert—and evasive. “Not that I know of.” To the side of her, Landauer all but rolled his eyes. “He was, though,” Shelley said ominously.
“You mean Jason?” She nodded emphatically. “How do you know?” Garrett pressed.
“He was always high. Laughing at things that weren’t funny . . . looking at you without ever talking. His eyes were weird all the time.” She shivered. “He just wasn’t right.”
That’s looking like a consensus, Garrett thought bleakly.
“Shelley, have you seen Jason since Friday night?” he asked aloud. She shook her head. “He hasn’t come by the room?”
Shelley’s eyes widened in alarm at the thought. “No. He’s arrested now, though, isn’t he?”
“At the moment, yes, he’s in jail. Why? Did he ever threaten you?”
Her face darkened. “He looked at me. He knew I could see what he was, and he didn’t like it.” She crumpled into sobs again. “I told her. I told her . . .”
Garrett and Landauer were silent as they walked through the front entry of the dorm, onto the portico outside. Landauer lifted quizzical eyebrows, looked back toward the room. Garrett shook his head. “We’ll have to get a look at Erin’s text messages. Maybe there are e-mails. I wouldn’t buy into the stalking angle just on the roommate’s say-so. There was a lot of hedging going on there.”
Landauer tapped out a cigarette, brooding. Garrett stared across the campus green. His eyes stopped on the isolated church spire. It bothered him, for no reason he could name; some inescapable Catholic imprint, no doubt. “But I think she was being straight about Erin breaking up with the boyfriend. Wonder what he’s going to have to say about that?”
The boyfriend, Kevin Teague, lived in a campus-owned upper-classman house on nearby Overlook Drive.
Amherst had officially banned fraternities and sororities on campus in the eighties in an attempt to attract a more diverse student population, but no one would know it from looking at Campbell House. The sleek and sleepy young men who lounged on the deck chairs and tables on the front patio were classic preppies: jocks and business majors and future captains of industry. Or future felons, Garrett thought darkly, feeling the weight of the chip on his shoulder.
His eyes took in a litter of half-empty glasses and an abandoned kegger, remnants of what had obviously been a night of hard partying. The young men were quick to put together the presence of detectives with the morning’s headlines about Erin; Garrett and Landauer’s entrance caused a stir of whispers and stares.
Kevin Teague met them on the back deck, which was cluttered with a motley assortment of lounge chairs and more party detritus, including the faint smell of vomit toward one clump of bushes.
Teague was a type Garrett knew too well from his own high school and college sports days: genus jock a*shole bastard. He was dark-haired, square-jawed, and sullenly handsome, his body sculpted by steroids no doubt pressed on him by a zealous daddy or coach or both, and he looked more hungover than grief-stricken. He slumped in a lawn chair, sipping coffee from a mug Garrett suspected was laced with some hair of the dog. Land took out his pack of Camels, but didn’t light up.
Garrett looked Teague over surreptitiously, noting a certain brutality in the linebacker hands, the square jaw. No way this guy would have been happy about being dumped, Garrett thought. Even though he probably had plenty of his own on the side.
He opted for a formal, subservient approach. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Teague.” As he’d expected, Teague didn’t bother to offer his first name instead.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, and looked over the lawn. “I can’t believe it.”
“You don’t mind if we tape this, do you?” Garrett took the micro-recorder from his jacket pocket. Teague’s eyes flicked at him warily, but he nodded assent. Garrett turned it on and identified himself and Landauer and the witness.
“Mr. Teague, when was the last time you saw Erin?”
Teague frowned. “Maybe Monday or Tuesday.”
“Not on Friday?”
“We had an away game. Connecticut.”
“I see,” Garrett said. “What about the last time you talked to her on the phone?”
Teague shrugged. “I don’t remember. “
“This week? Last week?”
“Season just started. Doesn’t give me a lot of free time.”
“I see,” Garrett repeated. “And Jason Moncrief?”
Teague looked at him sharply. “What about him?”
“You didn’t know him?”
“No. I mean, everyone knew who he was. He was kind of hard to miss.” Teague’s lip curled as he said it. Garrett silently noted the past tense.
“Hard to miss in what way?” he asked pleasantly.
“In a dipshit psycho way.”
Landauer and Garrett looked at each other. Land nodded something that looked like agreement. He held an unlit cigarette in his hand.
“So when did Erin break up with you?” Garrett asked, still pleasantly.
Surprise, then anger, flared behind Teague’s eyes. “It was mutual,” he said sullenly.
“I asked when,” Garrett said, not so pleasantly.
“Two weeks,” Teague ground out, and his gaze was murderous.
Two weeks. About the time Jeffs got an anonymous tip about Jason, Garrett noted to himself. “And she was seeing Jason Moncrief at that time.”
“Yeah. She was seeing him.” Teague’s tone added, “Bitch.”
“Odd that she didn’t tell her parents,” Garrett mused. “Her father was under the impression that you two were still an item.”
Teague smiled without humor. “I don’t know anything about that. I wasn’t keeping track of her.”
“Did you ever go to the Cauldron club, Mr. Teague?” Garrett asked. At the deck railing, he could see Landauer frowning at him—What gives?
“Why the hell would I go there?” Teague looked from one detective to the other.
“You weren’t there on Friday night?”
Teague stood, knocking over his coffee mug. “Look—you said you had questions about Erin. It’s shitty that she’s dead. But I’m not going to sit here and get interrogated. I was at a game with a whole team of guys. Talk to them. Talk to the coach. Erin was out with that freak and he killed her. If you have any more questions for me, you can ask my lawyer.”
“Pretty fast to lawyer up,” Garrett said softly as they walked back out to the car past the growing front-patio audience of ersatz frat boys.
Landauer looked at him. “A, these prep mommies and daddies teach their baby preps to scream for lawyers before they can walk. And B, you were coming at him like a suspect. ’Sup with that?”
Garrett didn’t know himself what he was trying to prove. “All I know is, that is not a guy who would be happy to have his girlfriend stepping out with a musician. And I don’t think the timing of that anonymous tip was a coincidence. I bet you a hundred right now, Teague made that call.”
“So then Teague kills Erin and carves satanic mumbo jumbo into her to frame Moncrief?” Landauer was skeptical. “I got a twenty says his alibi’s bulletproof. A*shole does not equal murderer.”
When the partners got back to Morris Pratt Hall, the white crime-scene van was parked outside. Inside the dorm, wide-eyed students stared from where they were corralled in the lounge as the detectives walked by the open double doors toward the elevators.
The lead criminalist, Lingg, a wiry, bespectacled scientist of mixed Asian descent, met them on Erin’s floor, with his young, tom-boyish assistant—Jenny? Jerri?— hovering behind, pulling a wagon filled with boxes and equipment. Lingg informed them that the team had already photographed and lasered for prints and vacuumed for hair and fiber that might tie Jason to Erin, then he indicated the open door of a room halfway down the hall. “It’s all yours. Flag anything you want us to bag, and we’ll start on the suspect’s room.”
The partners donned paper booties at the doorway and surveyed the room. Shelley was right about one thing: there was nothing remotely Goth about anything in Erin’s clothing or belongings. It was a college girls’ room, overwhelmingly decorated with floral linens, sparkly pillows, cute knickknacks, all of the highest quality without reflecting anything particularly unique or artistic about the taste of the inhabitants. Garrett and Landauer moved into the room like giants into a dollhouse, snapping latex gloves onto their hands.
“Make a wish,” Landauer said, meaning: What would you most like to find in this search?
Garrett thought for a moment. “The cell phone.”
Landauer snorted. “Good luck.” Of course Erin would have had it with her; it had likely been dumped by her killer, and it would take them days to get phone records.
Landauer gravitated toward the closet. There were two of them, both surprisingly large for the size of the room. Garrett’s eyes grazed the dresser and bed table. There was a stuffed school mascot, a jewelry tree, family photographs in both elegant silver and novelty frames. Garrett felt anger rising. This life, Erin’s life, had just begun. She never had a chance.
He forced down the emotion, forced himself back into processing mode, continuing his survey of Erin’s belongings.
Along with the family shots there was still a photograph of Kevin Teague on her dresser, which Garrett noted with interest. Keeping up appearances? Unwilling to let go? Or had she been involved with both boys at once?
He moved for the desk, zeroing in on the main thing he was looking for: Erin’s laptop. Of course, it was also top of the line. Garrett sat down at the desk to turn it on. These days, the key to a teenager’s life was in text: the text messages on smart phones and the e-mails and AIMs and Facebook and Twitter and MySpace pages. This generation was in constant communication with itself, and that could be of enormous help in this case. But as Garrett hit keys, he found the laptop was password-protected, and did not have an automatic log-on programmed in, meaning they’d have to get Erin’s password from AOL, or have a tech break it. Garrett guessed Erin would not have wanted to risk her roommate snooping; he got the distinct feeling that would not have been an unreasonable concern with Shelley.
He flagged the computer for Lingg to take and got up from the desk to scan the bookcase. The books on the shelves were mainly business textbooks and about a dozen classics from what was clearly an Intro to English Literature class. But Garrett also noted an Introduction to Astronomy textbook. So Jason wasn’t lying about that: they had a class together.
The CDs were predictable, sweet and lightweight pop: Snow Patrol and The Fray and John Mayer and Jack Johnson and Natasha Bedinger, but Garrett scanned through every title until he found what he was looking for.
Current 333. Jason’s CD.
Garrett stepped over to the closet, where Landauer was scanning Erin’s clothes with a slightly lost expression, and showed him the CD case. “On her shelf,” he said, nodding toward the bookcase.
Landauer raised an eyebrow. “Okay, so what are you thinking?”
Garrett paused. “Let’s say he gives this to her. If he’s stalking her, she’s going to throw it away, right? Or turn it in to the hall coordinator, or the school. But apparently she never contacted any authorities to complain.”
“Or—he left it for her without a note, and she stuck it on the shelf. Or the roommate did.”
Garrett turned the CD case over and frowned, feeling the weight in his hand. He flipped it open. There was no disc inside.
He turned in the room, focused on the sound system, on a shelf beside the desk. He walked two steps to the shelf, punched on the CD player, and pushed the EJECT button. The five-disc tray slid out. The Current 333 CD was in one of the slots.
Landauer lifted his eyebrows again, nodded thoughtfully.
“So what—he sneaks into her room and puts the CD in?” Garrett asked, with an edge.
“Not all that likely, “ Landauer conceded.
Shelley’s disjointed account was running through Garrett’s head. Despite a lot of denial from Erin’s friends, Jason and Erin seemed closer than anyone wanted to admit. Garrett was about to say so aloud when his cell phone buzzed. The number on the screen was Lingg’s, and it was followed by the number 911.
Urgent.