Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

Next he considered Jason’s roommate. Bizarre as Bryce Brissell’s story was, there was a ring of truth to it. Excuse the pun, Garrett thought grimly. And Landauer might not be so far wrong about Jason faking scary effects.

Garrett reached for the copy of the tape he’d made of Jason in his room, and rewound it to listen from the beginning again. He fast-forwarded through his own recitation of the Miranda warning.

“Do you understand these rights as I’ve explained them to you?”

“Suuure…” Moncrief drawled.

“Jason, what’s Current 333?”

“Choronzon.”

Garrett frowned at the word. He rewound the tape and listened again. Jason’s voice was slow and slurred.

“Choronzon.”

“Corazon? You mean, ‘heart’?” Garrett asked him on the tape.

“Hardly.” Jason’s voice mocked. “Choronzon.”

Then Garrett sat up in his chair, listening more intently. There was a faint whispering in the background. At first he thought it was just the hiss of tape, but the sound increased. Whispering. Not just one person, either, but an overlap of voices behind his own and Jason’s voices.

“I don’t know what that means. Can you explain it?”

“The Lord of Hallucinations,” Moncrief said in that dreamy, slurred voice.

“Really. You mean, a drug?”

“I mean the Master of the Abyss.”

The whispering was louder now, and Bryce Brissell’s story came back to Garrett. “I would wake up in the middle of the night because there was this whispering. Babbling, actually, like a lot of voices all at once, on top of each other.”

This is crazy, Garrett thought. The stereo must still have been on. The whispering was on the CD.

He’d turned it off himself, though.

I must have turned it down, not off. But even as he thought it, he clearly remembered punching the POWER button.

On the tape, his own voice continued:

“You know, I think it would help if you started from the beginning—”

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Garrett stared at the recorder as Moncrief’s voice intoned the words, and the whispering sped up in the background. Garrett could feel the hairs on his forearms raising.

“Jason, where is Erin?”

And then Garrett’s whole scalp buzzed, as that horrible, guttural voice blasted from the recorder:

“Zazas Zazas Nasatanada Zazas!”

He heard his own voice croaking: “Where is Erin?” And that snakelike hiss: “In hell.”

Then pandemonium. Landauer yelling, cursing, and Moncrief’s feral snarling, all over the wail of the— impossible— music, and the frantic, escalating babbling of voices…

Garrett quickly punched off the tape and sat back, as rattled as he had been the night before.

Whatever had been in that room with them was certainly capable of murder.

But what had been in that room?

He got up and paced the floor, staring toward the recorder. He suddenly crossed to the table and reached for the murder book, flipped pages until he found the interview form he’d filled out on Tanith Cabarrus. The orange Post-it she’d given him was still stuck to the report, with its ominous list of dates:

June 21

August 1

September 21

Garrett found himself suffused with an almost paralyzing agitation and dread. He remembered his intention to check Missing Persons, forgotten in the sudden rush to Amherst. Now he dropped into a chair and ripped through pages in the murder book to find where he’d filed the Missing Persons lists, under To Be Checked. He scanned the pages for the dates: June 21, August 1…

There were no MPs listed under either date.

He pushed back his chair and stood, catching his breath. All right, then. Nothing there.

But his heart refused to slow. He was in the grip of a certainty that whatever was going on, it was imperative to keep Jason Moncrief off the street.

He paced in a circle, with an agitation he couldn’t contain. Premeditation, Carolyn had said. If they could prove premeditation, she would be able to ask for a no-bail hold.

And then he knew. The book. He seized the volume bound in blood-colored leather and crossed to his favorite easy chair.

Fifteen minutes later he stood, with a rock in his stomach as he stared down at a drawing on a page. He was no closer to understanding the strange writing, but the illustration needed no interpretation: it was a crude sketch of a severed left hand, with a lit candle burning in the stiffened clutch of fingers.

Erin Carmody’s killer had taken her left hand.

Garrett reached for his phone and speed-dialed Tufts’s number at the lab… but before the connection went through he abruptly punched off, thinking.

He turned to his own book, the blue binder of the murder book, open to the witness report labeled “ Tanith Cabarrus, ” and looked down at the phone number under her name on the first line. After a long moment he picked up his cell phone again and dialed, only half-aware that he was holding his breath.

She answered on the second ring and the smoky voice electrified him. “Book of Shadows.”

So it was the bookstore number. He glanced at the clock. Nine-thirty. “Ms. Cabarrus?” he asked, though he knew it was.

There was a long pause and then she said, “Detective Garrett, is it?”

He was entirely startled. “How did you know?”

This time the pause was distinctly amused. “That’s my job, isn’t it?”

For the life of him he could not think of a response.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, finally, and he tried to focus.

“I know it’s late, but I have a piece of—evidence—that I think is important. And I thought, with your expertise, you might be able to tell me what it means.”

Another silence. “You mean, now?”

A vision of Tanith Cabarrus, with that tumbled hair around her face, those dark, lush lips against the phone, inflamed him.

He cleared his throat, blocked the thought. “If that’s at all possible.”

“What is this evidence?”

“I’d really prefer to show you and have you tell me.” He felt his words sounded vaguely obscene, and hoped she wasn’t thinking the same.

There was a very long silence. “Where are you?”

He could not at all gauge her reaction. “Near Logan.”

“You know I’m in Salem,” she pointed out.

“I do. But it’s not so far, this time of night. I could be there in forty minutes.” He waited through the silence.

“I’ll meet you halfway,” she said. “Do you know the Lamplighter, in Lynn? It’s right off 1A.”

Lynn was an older industrial center in the North Shore, halfway between Boston and Salem. Garrett began, “You really don’t have to do—”

She cut him off. “I’d prefer it.”

He was silent, awkward, wondering if she felt in some way threatened. “If you’re sure—”

“If it will help.”

“Half an hour, then,” he said, and the silence felt thick, intimate. “Thank you,” he added, formally, he hoped.

“Half an hour,” she said, and clicked off.

Garrett closed his phone. His stomach and groin muscles were taut, and he breathed out to settle himself. He stood and looked toward the hallway, the bedroom where Landauer was sleeping, with world-class snores, and he thought of Tanith again… the curves of her body, the silver dagger between her breasts…

Let him sleep, Garrett thought, and knew the thought had nothing to do with charity. But he’d never claimed to be a saint.