Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

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.

Upstairs on the third floor, the black curtains were drawn at the windows of Jason’s room and the room was dark as night, with only an ultraviolet light on to illuminate the space. Garrett had to suppress a shiver as they stepped into the dim room; the memory of their disturbing encounter with Jason was too close to the surface. The distorted white faces of Jason’s band glowed eerily from the poster on the wall.

Lingg’s moon face gleamed at the detectives in the dark as he filled them in with a morose optimism. First, he lifted the Luminol-sprayed sheets from the bed. Irregular splotches glowed green in the UV light. “Definitely semen. Hardly surprising to find in the room of a college male. However…”

Lingg stepped to the closet in the purple-tinged darkness and indicated a massive pile of dirty clothes on the closet floor. “We took these jeans from the top, there.”

He held up a pair of pencil-leg black jeans. There were a few luminous dots on the outside of the pants legs (matching the now brilliantly glowing stick-on stars on the ceiling above them) but when Lingg turned the top of the pants inside out, the whole crotch area lit up with shining streaks.

“Blood and semen, both.” Lingg’s face was lit up as well, with a faint purplish tinge.

Garrett and Landauer looked at each other in the spooky glow of the light. Landauer said what they all were thinking. “Twenty says we get his and hers DNA. Proves he fucked her.”

“Fucking isn’t killing,” Garrett said, almost to himself. He added, more loudly, “We’re going to need more. Everything we can get. There’s something else—” But he never got to complete his sentence. As he turned in the dark room, he saw red, malevolent eyes glowing from a corner, and a blur of movement, some huge shape poised to spring—

Garrett yelled. Landauer and Lingg spun in the darkness, Landauer grabbing for his weapon. Garrett lunged at the window curtains, ripped them open. Sunlight blazed into the room, dazzling them.

Garrett turned and stared toward the corner, blinking against the sudden light. There was nothing, no one there: just a narrow, full-length mirror on the wall.

“Jesus Holy Christ, Rhett,” Landauer gasped. “What the fuck?”

Garrett gazed at the mirror. His pulse was still going a mile a minute. What the fuck is right. “Sorry,” he said finally. “Sorry. I thought I saw…” But there was no describing what he thought he’d seen. Great. I’m hallucinating now. That’s helpful.

“Some sleep would be good,” he managed.

The other two men stared at him, then Landauer reholstered his weapon. Lingg diplomatically turned away and crossed to the door, where a crate of evidence bags was set in the hall outside, to bag and tag the jeans. Jenny-or-Jerri slipped back into the room with her camera slung over her shoulder, while Landauer stepped to the closet, scanning the shelves and floor. He pointed for the assistant’s benefit. “Take all his shoes… let’s see if we can get a match to soil from the dump.”

Garrett looked around the room, letting his heartbeat return to normal. He saw black fingerprint powder dusted on surfaces, and felt a sudden certainty that they were going to find Erin’s prints in the room.

A cell phone was on the bed table, plugged into a charger. The guitar still lay on the bed, where Jason had put it down the night before, and Garrett realized with a slight shock that it was just twelve hours ago, now.

He picked up the phone and flipped it open. The screen photo was the cover image of the band’s CD, with its ominous triangles. Garrett punched up Contacts and scrolled down. There was an E listed, and he recognized the number programmed into the address book as the one he had for Erin Carmody. Next he punched up the list of recent calls and found several calls to Erin over the last week, mostly at night, some of twenty- and thirty-minute duration.

So she wasn’t hanging up on him .

The last call was Friday at 8:08 P.M. Garrett flipped over to the text message record and again found scattered messages to Erin’s number, in text shorthand: some messages that he recognized and others that were more obscure. Maddeningly, it was not a brand of phone that showed the entire conversation; they would have to subpoena Erin’s phone records for her responses, if there were any.

Garrett scrolled down. The first several texts were brief and innocuous; variations on YT? And WU? You there? and What’s up? And WAN2TLK, which he assumed translated as Want to talk.

He moved on to one he didn’t recognize: BOOMS, and for a moment simply felt old. He scrolled farther and paused at one of the messages, startled.

Tuesday 12:01 A.M.: GNSD.

He recognized the combination of letters from some old interdepartmental memo on Leetspeak and texting abbreviations: Good night, sweet dreams…

He frowned, and scrolled more slowly, now. On Friday at 8:08 P.M., not long before Erin and Jason were both seen dancing at Cauldron, there was a message that read simply: BRT, which he knew meant Be right there.

There was also one message on Saturday: YT? You there?

That last message was time-stamped 1:23 P.M., approximately twelve hours after Erin’s murder.

Garrett stood beside the desk in a fog.

“You are not looking happy,” Landauer observed from across the room. Garrett stepped to him, showed him the phone, watching him as he scrolled through the received calls.

“GNSD?” Landauer frowned.

“ ‘Good night, sweet dreams.’ I don’t know BOOMS.” He looked at his partner. “I gotta say. This is looking more like dating than stalking.”

“Could be, Rhett. But that kid is not right.” Landauer glanced toward the bed—held up his bandaged arm for emphasis. “Erin wouldn’t be the first one to say yes to someone she shouldn’t have. However it started out, what happened at the end there weren’t no date.”

“But look at the last message,” Garrett persisted. There was a knot in his stomach that wouldn’t go away. “He texted her at 1:23 Saturday afternoon, looking for her.”

Landauer glanced at the message. “Yeah, or he wanted to make it look that way. The kid is weird, but so far no one’s saying he’s stupid.” Garrett looked at him. Laudauer shrugged. “Playin’ devil’s advocate. So to speak.”