Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

As he followed the young man through the graves, Garrett pulled the envelope from his pocket and examined it. It was a CD in a white sleeve, with Erin’s name written on it. The CD inside was unmarked.

Garrett strode faster to overtake the bassist. “Danny,” he called. The young man turned around, and looked startled to see Garrett. He stopped beside a tomb and waited, with a hunch in his shoulders, as Garrett caught up.

Garrett stopped in front of him, smiled, spread his hands as he glanced back toward the grave site. “I thought you didn’t know Erin.”

“I don’t,” the musician began.

“Yet you come to her funeral and you leave her this?” Garrett held the CD up between his fingers.

Danny stared at Garrett, and Garrett saw a mixture of conflicting emotions on his face: confusion, a flash of anger, a hint of what looked like contempt.

“It’s from Jason,” the young man said.

Now Garrett stared at him.

“He called me and asked me to bring it here, today.”

“From where?” Garrett demanded.

Danny gave him an odd look. “From jail.”

“I mean, where did you get the CD? We cleaned out his room.”

“It was in our rehearsal space,” Danny said patiently. “He called me and asked me to get it.”

“What’s on it?” Garrett was furious with himself for not searching the room.

Danny stared at him stonily. “I didn’t play it. It’s private.”

“Do you not realize that this is a murder investigation and you could be charged with withholding evidence?”

Danny looked startled, then straightened his shoulders and said in a steady voice, “Jason is my friend, man. I can’t believe he killed anyone. Whatever he was into, I don’t believe that. He wanted her to have it”—he nodded at the CD in Garrett’s hand—“so I brought it.”

He met Garrett’s eyes and did not look away. And then Garrett nodded, dismissing him.

As Danny started off across the grass, Garrett suddenly called after him, “Wait.”

The tall young man turned back, impassive.

Garrett stood, for a moment just collecting his thoughts, unsure of what he wanted to say, only that there was something. And then he found himself asking a question that surprised him. “Did you guys do a gig on August first?”

The bassist thought for a second. “Yeah, in Saratoga.”

“Saratoga Springs? New York?” Garrett asked.

“Right.”

“Was Jason with you for that one?”

Danny frowned. “Yeah.”

“The whole time?” Saratoga Springs was at least a ten-hour drive.

Danny looked bewildered. “Yeah. We drove up together, did the gig, spent the night in a motel, drove back. Why?”

Garrett didn’t answer, because he didn’t quite know himself… only that August first was one of the dates that Tanith Cabarrus had given him.

He shook his head, and after a time, Danny turned and continued walking through the gravestones.

The skies opened up just as Garrett got to his Explorer, and he sat back with the rain pounding on the roof and bouncing off the windshield and started the engine, then slid the CD into his player and sat back to listen.

It was completely unexpected, the music, nothing heavy or hard, nothing like the death metal that had been on the Current 333 CD, but a simple, haunting track, and a single vocal.

Garrett sat back against the seat and listened to Jason Moncrief sing.

Garrett leaned back against the headrest. Fuck me . He stared out at the drenching rain, with blood pounding in his head.

He didn’t kill her.

The moon was rising through the tall windows of the detectives’ bureau. The glass bricks of the lower floors glowed pale green.

Hunched at his work pod, Garrett had been staring at the Missing Persons reports for some time now, as if a name would somehow miraculously appear on the dates he was checking. There was nothing. There simply were no missing persons on or around the dates Tanith had given him.

But her voice kept insisting.

“There are three dead already.”

And the sweet, haunting lyrics of Jason’s song to Erin refused to go away.

Garrett stood and walked down the back stairs (the DNA stairs, he always thought of them, the double spiral staircase in the back of Schroeder), with the tall clear glass windows looking out onto the darkened adjoining strip of park, and crossed the lobby to the complaint desk, where walk-ins and call-ins could make reports. The desk was generally staffed by rookies or even cadets, and rookies made mistakes.

He was in luck; tonight there was an actual sergeant behind the desk, with a crew cut and handlebar mustache. Garrett leaned in to the counter. “I need to know if any missing persons were reported on or around these dates.” He passed the sergeant a Post-it with the dates June 21 and August 1 . “Anything around those dates.” He paused, then took a shot. “I’m thinking it would be a young woman.” Garrett had meant that the report would be about a missing young woman, but the desk sergeant misunderstood.

“Yeah, a streetwalker did come in—August one sounds right. Said a friend of hers never came back from a date.”

Garrett stared at him, fury building. “Where the fuck is the report?”

The sergeant’s guard went way up and Garrett knew he had to contain himself if he was going to get what he needed.

“She didn’t fill one out. She came in less than twenty-four hours after this hooker ‘disappeared.’ I told her we couldn’t take a report on an adult until forty-eight hours had passed.” The sergeant shrugged, defensive. “She never came back in.”

All kinds of bells were going off inside Garrett. Tanith Cabarrus was right—there was another. A prostitute. And he’d initially thought the killer might have mistaken Erin for a prostitute. He felt a building rage that none of this had been recorded and that he had been a breath away from missing it entirely.

“I need a name. A description,” he ground out.

The sergeant bristled. “She was a hooker,” he said, as if that covered everything. “Eighteen, nineteen. Using, twitchy. Wig and dark glasses, like she was in disguise. Said her and her friend were working Chinatown.” Then something flickered in his face. “She had a food name…” he paused, thinking. “Bree. She said her name was Bree.”

A couple of years back Garrett had dated a vice cop named Stoney—Melissa Stone. Her name conjured a rush of erotic flashbacks: fucking in backseats; up against the rough brick wall of an alley; Garrett standing, shaking, sweating, Stoney on her knees, wide lips wrapped around him; Garrett’s fingers up inside her and Stoney shuddering as he pressed against her from behind…

She’d been working undercover in the BPD’s “Operation Squeeze”: an aggressive series of busts of prostitutes and johns in the gentrifying Chinatown district. When Garrett was being honest with himself he had to admit it gave him an illicit thrill to hook up with a pretend hooker. Landauer had taunted him unmercifully and Stoney was no fool, either; she’d called him on it, Garrett was unable to deny the charge, and ultimately Stoney couldn’t get past it. The problem with dating a cop was that they read you too well.

All of that played for a moment on Stoney’s face when she looked up from her desk in the vice squad room and saw him coming. Garrett was selfishly gratified to see an involuntary ripple of attraction as well, her own rush of erotic memories, quickly covered.