Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

He spoke aloud to Landauer. “He’s got those triangles and 333 in this book, too, but the writing’s in some kind of code.” Landauer glanced up from the witness report he was detailing, stood, and came around the table to look.

“Is that a language?” Garrett asked him.

Landauer frowned down at the stick letters on the page. “It looks familiar, but I can’t place it.”

Garrett sat back against his chair, in a fog of sleeplessness. The logo he’d seen on Moncrief’s laptop screen ran through his head again, like a mad chant:

There is no grace, there is no guilt. This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!

He was suddenly aware of the weight of the book in his hands. The thick pages, the look of the lettering, the whole feel of it—all made him profoundly uncomfortable. He realized that even with latex gloves on, he had no desire to be touching it.

He shoved back his chair and stood. “I’m going over to the lab to see if they can translate this thing.”

Landauer nodded distractedly, already moving back to his witness reports. “Get an ETA on the prints and blood.”

The crime lab was a short walk down a connecting corridor that overlooked the dim and sickly lights of the Lower Roxbury hood. Garrett brooded on the notion of premeditation as he walked with the heavy book. The volume had an odd feeling in his hands that he couldn’t identify but which he didn’t like, a sense almost of malevolence. That, of course, was nonsense. But what if Jason had plotted Erin’s death in the book? If he had written anything down, that would go to premeditation.

Garrett walked faster, and turned in through the door of the lab.

“Hello, young Garrett! Thanks for the OT!” A cheery voice called out from a desk as Garrett stepped through the gate at the counter.

Criminalist Warren Tufts was a veteran, nearing seventy but wiry and spry and perpetually delighted with his job. He tipped precariously back in his swivel chair and eyed the book in Garrett’s hands. “Bearing gifts, I see. What new treasure do you have for us this fine evening?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. It’s the suspect’s, but it’s in some kind of code.” Garrett opened the book randomly on Tuft’s desk. “Need to get it translated.”

Tufts scowled down at the twiglike letters. “I’m no good with code. It’s all Greek to me! Henderson’s in Alaska. I’ll have to outsource this. There’s a guy at MIT we use. Is it a rush?”

Garrett paused. It was as far as he was concerned. “Yes,” he decided. As he handed over the book, he felt a strange reluctance to part with it. “And can you make a copy for me? I’d like to take a look through myself, tonight.”

“Right you are.” As Tufts got up and moved toward the file room, Garrett looked over the rows of steel counters at the back of the lab. Two counters were crowded with individually bagged pieces of trash, and Garrett recognized the refuse taken from the landfill. He frowned, remembering something.

“Hey, Tufts. We took some burned flowers from the landfill. Did you get anything on those?”

The criminalist stuck his head out the file room doorway. “Don’t think they’ve been processed yet. Burned flowers?”

“Yeah. Scorched.”

“What’ve they got to do with all this?”

“I don’t know,” Garrett said, and shook his head. “I don’t have a clue.”

Twenty minutes later he was back in the homicide room, with a thick pile of photocopied pages and the original book. He’d prevailed on Tufts to make a second copy so he could take the original with him in case he needed it—for what, he had no particular sense, only that it could be important.

Landauer sat at the long table, hunched over a laptop, a stack of reports in front of him. He looked up at Garrett with a glazed look in his eyes. They both contemplated the piles of files and random pages stacked all over the table. A thick silence fell.

Garrett cleared his throat. “I’m thinking my place. Order porterhouse and Caesars from Dino’s. Eat, write, nap. Eat, write, nap.”

Landauer exhaled. “I am so with you, Rhett.” They both reached out and started packing boxes of documents.

Garrett’s house, north of Logan Airport, was the house he’d grown up in, his parents’ house, in a crowded lower middle-class neighborhood that had gentrified in the precrash housing boom. Garrett was the fifth son in an Irish Catholic family, the late-in-life mistake, conceived when his mother was forty-nine and his father fifty-five. Garrett was ten years younger than the next youngest of his brothers, who had always been more like uncles to him than siblings, and he guessed he could thank the papal ban on contraception for his very existence, but with what he saw daily as a cop he was the most fervent advocate of birth control he knew. If there was a way to put it in the water he would vote for it, no questions asked.

His parents were dead, now; his father from complications from alcoholism just over four years ago, and his mother simply followed in her sleep a mere three months after. Some people would call that love.

Garrett’s brothers and their families were long gone out of state: New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine—and rebel Paulie to Fort Lauderdale. Garrett had inherited the house, and after the obligatory mourning period he’d slowly rehabbed the place, discarding furniture untouched since the sixties and revealing clean lines and antique moldings and gorgeous hardwood floors under his mother’s wallpaper and fussy Irish lace and religious bric-a-brac.

Just having his own walls around him now was rejuvenating. The delivered meal and another round of showers had energized both detectives, and three hours into it they had made real headway on the charging document, using the murder book and their notes from Amherst to draw up a complete chronology and fill in about a third of the reports they needed. Tufts called in with another nail in Jason Moncrief’s coffin: some of the fingerprints in Moncrief’s Mustang were a match for Erin’s. However, the lab had found no blood residue on the dagger they had taken from Moncrief’s room.

The partners took a break for cannoli and channel-surfed through the news. The stations were falling all over themselves to profile Jason: rich kid, young mother, older father high ranking in the navy. Young mother did very well in the divorce and had husband-hopped ever since, every time doing better, while Jason was shuffled from private school to military school, his behavior deteriorating with each successive transfer.

Poor little rich kid . Garrett had no sympathy. Still, he was hearing nothing that would necessarily indicate a budding young psychopath.

“He did a Jim Morrison,” Landauer summed up, and when Garrett looked at him, he said, “Moncrief. Rebelled against a colonel father. Got into all that spooky shit. Classic Apollonian-Dionysian conflict.”

“Land,” Garrett said blandly, hiding his shock; his sometimes Neanderthal partner never failed to surprise him. “I didn’t know you could even spell Dionysian.”

“Who said I could?” Landauer said. He stood and stretched and then retired to the spare bedroom for a nap. Garrett took their plates into the kitchen, and after a hesitation, decided to allow himself a beer. When he returned to the living room he could hear wall-shaking snores rumbling from down the hall.

The descent of night had given Garrett his second wind. He pressed on, with a Guinness in front of him and case files and crime-scene photos spread out around him on the long dining table he always ended up using as a desk. It was tedious work but strangely satisfying to him, building a case. He usually enjoyed the process, watching links emerge. But there were contradictions here: he was seeing two conflicting tracks to the evidence, and that was troubling. It seemed clear from the phone logs on both cell phones and the text messages that Erin had gone with Jason voluntarily to the Cauldron club on the night of her death. Still, Garrett knew not just from police work but from personal experience that young women have a terrible blind spot for what they think are bad boys, and a frightening naïveté about the dangers of experimenting with the wild side. As a musician Jason would have a certain troubadour allure, but there were dark currents there, an apparently fatal undertow.