Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

On his way back toward the body, Garrett stopped a tech beside the parked crime-scene unit van and pointed out the flags he’d placed. “Get impressions of the treads in that area. And there are some burn marks in the grass—get some photos of those, too.”

Landauer met him on the road, his big face flushed red with heat despite the chill, and sucking smoke from probably his fifteenth Camel of the day. “See no evil, speak no evil,” he grumbled, exhaling and jerking a thumb back down the road toward the office trailer. He lit a second cigarette from the one he had burning, carefully dropping the butt into a metal Band-Aid box he carried around at crime scenes for that precise purpose. “These bozos don’t record names or plates, only vehicle size and classification of load. ‘Sanitation Truck, Pickup, Trailer, Truck, Dump Trailer.’ ‘Refuse, Stumps and Brush, Concrete, Rebar, Dirt/Asphalt, Brick.’ The attendant doesn’t even leave the trailer—just eyeballs the load through the window, weighs the truck on the in and out, and collects the cash. Next time I got a body to dump, I’m a comin’ here, too.”

“How many customers today?”

Landauer grimaced. “They average 2,250 a day.”

Garrett’s heart sank. “So this morning…”

“Over nine hundred by noon. Got a patrolman getting Closed Mouth Mary to write down every make, model, and color she can remember, but we’re not talking rocket scientist here. And yeah, she collected a few checks, but it’s mostly a cash business. I don’t think we’ll be pulling devil-boy’s name and coordinates off one of those stubs.”

The big detective paused, puffed in smoke. “There is something, though.” He exhaled a noxious cloud and nodded up the trash mountain in the direction of the body. The sun was sinking in the sky, throwing long shadows over the hills. “That whole area was scheduled to be capped this morning—they bulldoze dumploads of dirt, cover it up, level it off.” He indicated a high heap of dirt on the flat road above the trash pit. “Thing is, this morning the front-loader broke down, threw the schedule off.” He pointed to the gigantic vehicle next to the pit.

“So she would have been completely covered if there hadn’t been that glitch,” Garrett said slowly. She wasn’t meant to be found. And that meant carving the numbers and symbol was a private ritual, not meant for anyone else to see.

“He’s familiar with the operation and schedule of this particular landfill, then,” he said aloud with cautious excitement. “A worker, or landscaper or contractor.”

“That’s the best case,” Landauer said with a nod. “The catch is, a lot of these loads that get emptied are from Dumpsters that get picked up all over the city. Someone coulda just tossed her in the nearest one of those—it gets picked up—and she gets dumped out with the rest of the trash. The Dumpster trucks back up to the pit and are emptied hydraulically, so the driver wouldn’t even see what he was dumping.”

Garrett fought a wave of disappointment. “What about the guy who found her?”

“Worker who came up to repair the dozer.”

Garrett’s eyes immediately traced the distance between the bulldozer and the body far below. A hundred yards, minimum. Landauer watched him calculating.

“Guy’s got good eyes,” Garrett said slowly.

“Says he saw seagulls fighting over something,” Landauer offered, his voice flat.

Garrett glanced at his partner sharply. “You don’t believe him?” In fact, the gulls were still circling above, hoping to return to their interrupted meal.

Landauer spat. His face was neutral. “Guy’s skittish, that’s all.”

Garrett found the mechanic in the office trailer. He sat in front of a raggedy corkboard bristling with invoices and flyers, his hands tearing apart a whitefoam coffee cup, a precise quarter inch at a time. He was short and built like a bull, with dark copper skin and an Aztec nose. He hunched in the metal folding chair as if trying to disappear into it.

Garrett’s Spanish was serviceable, but the bilingual version of Severo’s story was identical to what Landauer had related in English. Landauer was right, though; the Mexican was decidedly jumpy—eyes shifting around the room, sweating profusely even in the cold of the underheated trailer.

“Tienes calor?” Garrett asked. Are you hot? The lone space heater was on the other side of the room; Garrett couldn’t feel any heat coming from it at all.

“Poco,” the mechanic said, and his eyes shifted away again. His fingers found the cross at his neck.

“You seem nervous,” Garrett remarked in Spanish.

The mechanic half shrugged. “It is a terrible thing,” he answered.

“It is,” Garrett agreed. “Una infamia.” An outrage. It was one of the first Spanish words he’d learned on the street and it seemed to express what he felt better than any English word that existed.

“Pero—es todo?” Garrett pressed. Is that all? The mechanic dropped his eyes. Garrett looked at the litter of white chips at the man’s feet. “I think you are afraid,” Garrett challenged.

The mechanic stiffened, but said nothing.

“Porque?” Garrett demanded. Why?

The mechanic glanced toward the screened front window, in the direction of the trash hill. The sun was a bloody crimson ball on the horizon.

“Bruja,” he mumbled, and Garrett’s flesh rippled again.

Witch.

It was dark by the time they arrived back at police headquarters, One Schroeder Plaza, in Lower Roxbury. The neighborhood’s dirty sidewalks and barred windows and shady denizens were living, blighted proof that not all of Boston had been transformed by gentrification.

Garrett had put in a call to Lieutenant Malloy from the landfill office, requesting a conference with Dr. Frazer, the forensic psychiatrist, in attendance. If they could make a convincing case that the killing had the earmarks of a serial, it would expedite lab tests and move their Jane Doe (who was not, as it turned out, irradiated) to the head of the autopsy line. The lieutenant’s office had called on the ride back informing them that Dr. Frazer would not be available until the next day, and with the order to meet the lieutenant in the conference room as soon as they returned.

Garrett and Landauer headed across the lobby, an expanse of polished stone that had earned the relatively new, glass-and-granite building the nickname “the Marble Palace.” Just before they stepped into the elevator, Garrett got the call: the State Police responding that there were no females of Jane Doe’s age range reported missing in the state in the last week. Garrett punched off, shaking his head at Landauer, who mumbled an expletive.

Lieutenant Malloy was already in the second-floor conference room, seated rigidly at the head of the table as the detectives walked in. Garrett as always braced himself as he stepped across the threshold; relations between Garrett and the lieutenant had become increasingly strained as Garrett’s solve stats climbed.

He took a breath and stopped at the end of the table. “Lieutenant, I just need five minutes to put out a wider Missing Persons search—”

“We know who she is,” Malloy cut him off.

The older man slid a printout of a scanned photo across the table. Garrett stepped to the edge of the table and looked down. The photo was a high-quality portrait of a girl with shining blond hair and blue eyes, the face and figure and clothes of a prom queen. A society girl. “Erin Carmody,” the lieutenant said, and waited for the name to sink in.

“Carmody,” Landauer repeated. “W. P. Carmody? Aw, hell.”