Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

“Can you be any more specific than that? A day?”

Hartlaub assumed a serious and deferential expression, but those big brown eyes were watching the detectives carefully. “Yeah. nine-eleven.”

Garrett frowned. Something already sounded off. “So two weeks ago today. Don’t you rehearse more often than that?”

“Hell, yeah,” Hartlaub said, resentment plain in his voice. “He just wasn’t showing up. Then he fucking missed a gig. We were always hauling ass to cover for him. So—we voted, and he was out.”

That’s interesting, Garrett thought. I bet Jason wasn’t happy about that. He looked over at Landauer, who nodded slightly, tapping his unlit cigarette against the edge of a speaker. Garrett pulled out a pocket calendar and looked back to the keyboardist.

“You told him he was out that Tuesday, then? September eleventh?”

“Right,” Hartlaub said heavily.

Garrett made a note on the calendar. “And?” he prodded.

“He lost it. Totally. Broke things.” The kid’s eyes were oblique. “Kicked in a drum.” Behind him, the drummer roused himself from his haze to nod vigorous assent. “He did that.” Hartlaub nodded toward the wall, where there was a hole in the Sheetrock the size of a fist, with cracks radiating out from it in the plaster—a brutal punch. Garrett saw Landauer raise an eyebrow, and Garrett himself had a flashback to the feeling of Jason’s uncanny strength when he’d attacked Land in the dorm room.

“Would you say that was typical of Jason—that kind of temper?”

“No,” the bassist suddenly spoke. Danny Coyle.

“Last few months, though…” Hartlaub looked away.

“What?” Garrett prodded.

Hartlaub shrugged. “He was different.”

“How long have you known him?”

“We’ve been playing since eighth grade.” That was the tall bass player again, in a quiet voice.

Hartlaub shot him an oblique look and continued himself. “Last year we were really going, you know, getting some serious gigs. But this summer he started fucking up, big time.”

“Where were you all on Friday night?” Garrett asked without any change in tone. He had not forgotten Frazer’s profile of the “youth subculture” killers: the bandmates who had sacrificed their classmate to the devil.

Hartlaub started to answer, then his eyes widened, and he spoke slowly. “We had a gig at Man Ray. It was big—the equinox party.”

Another equinox party.

The bandmates were nodding assent. “From when to when?” Garrett queried.

Hartlaub answered again. “Got there at nine to set up. We went on, like, eleven… did three sets, broke it all down after.”

They would check that alibi, but Garrett didn’t think Hartlaub would be stupid enough to offer it if it wasn’t true. “Was Jason supposed to do that gig with you?”

“Oh, yeah,” Hartlaub said, and his voice was tight. “Why do you think he was so pissed?”

“Have any of you heard from him or seen him since that rehearsal two weeks ago?”

“No,” Hartlaub said, and the other boys echoed him.

Garrett suddenly shifted focus. “Did you know Erin Carmody?”

“No,” Hartlaub said. Garrett looked to the other two boys, who shook their heads.

“She never came to any rehearsals?”

“No.”

“How about performances? Gigs?”

“No,” Hartlaub said. Again, the bassist shook his head in agreement, and a beat behind, the drummer mirrored him.

“Are you sure?” Garrett pulled out a photo of Erin, the radiant senior portrait, and moved around to each of the musicians in turn, so all the boys could see. He was watching their faces carefully. Again, universal head shaking, more seriously sober than Garrett was expecting. The bassist turned his head away from the photo in what looked like genuine emotion. He spoke, and his voice was tight.

“She didn’t. But her asshole boyfriend did.”

Garrett stared at the bassist. “Did what?”

The tall young man didn’t look away from him. “Came to a gig. That jock.”

“Kevin Teague?” Garrett demanded. The bassist nodded. “Which gig was that?”

“It was at Cauldron.”

Garrett looked at Landauer. Teague had said he’d never been to Cauldron. Garrett felt his pulse speeding up. “When was that?”

“About…” The bassist stopped, thinking. “September seventh. He stood in front of the stage the whole time just staring at Jason, real asswipe stuff. And then followed him out to the parking lot and beat the shit out of him.”

“Teague,” Garrett repeated.

“Yeah. Teague.”

“Did you guys report it?” Garrett asked, even knowing there was no way.

Hartlaub rolled his eyes. The bassist lifted his shoulders, resigned. “We weren’t there. The pussy just jumped him. Split his lip, broke a rib. What do you do?”

I knew that arrogant shit was up to no good, Garrett thought to himself. But killing Erin to get back at Jason? That’s a stretch.

He circled the rehearsal space, trying to collect his thoughts. He spotted a stack of flyers on the low, burn-scarred table, reached, and casually picked one up. “So what does this mean—‘Current 333’?”

The keyboardist shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Garrett stopped, looked at him. “You don’t know ? It’s the title of your CD.”

Hartlaub looked uncomfortable. “That was Jason’s trip. Something about entropy.” He glanced toward the bass player. “ ‘Chaos magic,’ he said. It sounded—you know—edgy. He wrote a couple of songs about it—Choronzon, the Master of Hallucinations.”

Choronzon, again.

Garrett realized with a start that he hadn’t yet listened to the CD they were talking about, though he’d been meaning to all along. He mentally kicked himself for the oversight. There could be any number of emotional or virtual clues in the music or lyrics.

“So what is that, satanism? Black magic?” Garrett asked aloud.

“Jason called it ceremonial magic,” the bassist said. “He was reading Aleister Crowley, especially.” Garrett thought again that Hartlaub might be the front man, but formal education or not, it was this bassist who had it going on.

“But ceremonial magic wasn’t something you practiced or believed?” Garrett asked the bassist.

“No,” Hartlaub scoffed.

“Hell, no,” murmured the bassist. And the drummer shook his mop of hair.

“Do you know if he attended any group ceremonies, or hung out with other practitioners?”

The bassist and Hartlaub looked at each other. “Nothing like that,” the bassist answered. “It was just a slam at the colonel—you know, his father—the whole military/religious thing. The old man’s a fascist, always trying to force Jason into ROTC, used to not let him play, that shit. So what was guaranteed to piss him off the most?”

Hartlaub jumped in. “But then it started getting whacked.”

“Whacked how?” Landauer asked.

Hartlaub just shook his head. The bassist answered slowly. “We’d be laying a track and he’d start chanting in the middle of a song and go on and on, we couldn’t get him to stop. It was like he was gone.” The young man, who towered over Garrett by four or five inches, grimaced in what looked very much like revulsion. “And when we played it back—”

“Shut up, Danny,” Hartlaub warned.

“Come on, you know it’s—”

Garrett stepped between them. “This is a murder investigation,” he reminded Hartlaub coldly, and the keyboardist backed down instantly. Garrett turned to the bass player.

“When you played it back, what?”

The bassist’s voice dropped. “There were other voices on the recording. Not ours. This—babbling—river of voices, all at once.”