Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms as he stopped in front of the desk. “So you finally caught your big one,” she said, as if no time had passed.

“Yeah. And now I’m hoping it’s not even bigger than everyone thinks.” He said it bluntly and the change in her eyes made it clear she understood he wasn’t playing. She sat up straighter.

“What’s up?”

He stepped close to the desk and lowered his voice. “I need to find someone. Fast. A streetwalker named Bree, eighteen, nineteen years old, working Chinatown. Has a hooker friend who went missing in August, probably her same age.”

Stoney’s eyes darkened. “Jesus. I never heard about it—”

“Wasn’t reported.”

“But it’s connected to yours?” she asked uneasily.

“I don’t know yet. I’ve got to find this girl,” he said, and met her gaze. She looked away from his eyes.

“I’ll put the word out,” she said. “Your cell the same?”

“Yeah. I owe you, Stoney.”

“Yeah—you do,” she said. And from the flatness in her voice Garrett knew that he was not forgiven, and he was only lucky that Stoney was a good cop and would put that first.

A lead. Maybe a lead.

But the churning in his stomach made him think that this was a door he didn’t want to open.

In a ritual triangle, lit by flame, a shadow figure held a dagger up in the wavering yellow light. The voice was low and husky as it intoned the Latin words. “Choronzon, acerbus et ingens! Cede pectares cras nocte sumendus, alere flamman tuam. Do et dus. Date et dabitur vobis! Abyssus Abyssum invocat!”

The robed figure cast a parchment inscribed with the triangle sigils into the fire. Then the figure turned to the altar—to the severed head on the plate. And as the cloaked figure muttered in a building frenzy, the head’s eyes snapped open… and stared.

Garrett fought his way to consciousness, past disturbing images of candles and inscriptions and burning parchment and severed human heads. Somewhere far away a phone was ringing.

He grabbed for his cell on the nightstand and mumbled “Garrett” into it without checking the number.

A husky female voice said, “Did you find her?”

What immediately ran through Garrett’s mind was Tanith, and he felt himself harden under the sheets in response. Luckily he asked, “Who is this?” to be sure.

There was a silence, then a wary voice. “Bree. Stoney told me to call.”

Garrett scrambled up to sitting, reached for the clock. 3:00 P.M. That made it the next day. He rubbed his face to wake up. “Can I meet you?”

It was a wintry afternoon, with high fast clouds and a chill wind whipping through the concrete corridors of Washington Street, a retail district where Boston teens still shopped for cheap Nikes, music, and books. Garrett drove past pushcart vendors selling backpacks and phone accessories and knockoff purses on the sidewalks.

Boston’s infamous Combat Zone, the downtown red-light district, was long gone. When real estate prices shot up in the eighties, the sleazy strip where adult bookstores and dance clubs and streetwalkers and dealers once blatantly hawked their wares had been inexorably gentrified and sanitized. Skyscrapers sprouted up, with their condos and office space and doormen and underground parking, and a pristine granite sidewalk had replaced the vomit-and-blood-stained concrete. But despite the surface polish, sex workers still prowled the nearby streets of Chinatown and Downtown Crossing.

Bree ( “Just Bree,” she’d said on the phone) had directed Garrett to meet her at a dim sum restaurant, on a street where brick buildings and colorful awnings and vertical signs in Chinese lettering bloomed under the shadow of a thirty-six-story office tower. In a tight cotton tank top and jeans and platform shoes and tats, the lone young woman at the table looked like a college student—until she took off her sunglasses and Garrett got a look at her eyes. They were colder than December.

“She’s dead, isn’t she,” Bree said flatly.

“Why do you say that?” Garrett asked.

The girl looked at him in disbelief. “Homicide? How stupid do you think I am?” She lit a cigarette shakily and Garrett was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She brushed at them angrily. “So?” she demanded.

“What’s your friend’s name?” he asked.

“Amber,” Bree said, in a voice that dared him to mock it. “Just Amber,” she added.

“Amber,” Garrett repeated gently, and had a sinking feeling. “I don’t know that she’s dead. I hope not. That’s why I’m here. I need to know what you know.” He pulled out a pad. Bree stared at him stonily. He summoned patience, persuasion. “You reported her missing on August one. Why? What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Stupid fucks wouldn’t even take the report,” she spat.

Garrett understood the anger. “I’m sorry. The desk sergeant was following protocol, but I think he was wrong. If there’s anything that you can tell me, I promise you I’ll make this a priority.”

The girl narrowed her eyes, weighing him, and finally spoke. “She called me the night before. She said she was in the park, and she had a date.” The girl’s eyes turned bleak. “Then she kind of joked—‘If I don’t come back you can have my boots.’ And you could tell it wasn’t really a joke, right? But when I asked her what was up, she said, ‘Nevermind, no big,’ and hung up.” Bree’s face trembled and she took a long drag on her cigarette. “She never showed up later that night—I’ve left about a million messages and she never returned one. No one’s seen her.” The tears threatened again, and her whole body was shaking.

This was not good in any way. Garrett tried to keep his face impassive. “Did she describe the guy? Anything?”

Bree shook her head, her eyes fixed on the table. “That was all she said. But she was weirded out. I could tell. God damn it…”

“All right, the park,” Garrett said quickly. “Where is that?”

“Couple blocks away. She went there for her breaks…”

“Show me.”

It was a sad little park, sandwiched between a disreputable parking lot and a construction site. It was probably the only remains of a long-gone church and no doubt slated for demolition along with every other building in the neighborhood. The scraggly lawns were sunburned and choked with weeds and the cement paths were littered with used condoms, fast-food wrappers crawling with ants, and shattered vodka bottles. A homeless man sprawled on a bench, dead to the world.

But as Garrett looked around him, he saw one valiant tree, with autumn leaves now red and brilliant as rubies, and there was a fountain in the center, long dry, with stone benches around it, and on the top of the fountain was an angel, stained and worn, but there was a ravaged beauty about it. Garrett didn’t have to ask Bree why Amber had gone to the park. It may have been small comfort, but there was comfort there.

The afternoon shadows were lengthening and the wintry wind flapped at his coat as he slowly scanned the park. He had no idea what he thought he would find. Amber had disappeared over two months ago, and turning up anything like evidence in a public park was about as likely as finding evidence in a landfill. And yet… there was some feeling about the park, almost a sense of déjà vu… it felt like a piece of the puzzle. So Garrett walked the littered paths. Bree at first trailed behind him, picking her way carefully around the scattered glass, teetering on her open-toed platform shoes, but she quickly gave up and sat on the lip of the fountain to light up a smoke. Garrett stopped and looked back to ask her, “Did she have a favorite spot?” And of course the girl pointed to a bench in full view of the angel.