Book of Shadows

Chapter Ten

Upstairs on the third floor, the black curtains were drawn at the windows of Jason’s room and the room was dark as night, with only an ultraviolet light on to illuminate the space. Garrett had to suppress a shiver as they stepped into the dim room; the memory of their disturbing encounter with Jason was too close to the surface. The distorted white faces of Jason’s band glowed eerily from the poster on the wall.

Lingg’s moon face gleamed at the detectives in the dark as he filled them in with a morose optimism. First, he lifted the Luminol-sprayed sheets from the bed. Irregular splotches glowed green in the UV light. “Definitely semen. Hardly surprising to find in the room of a college male. However…”

Lingg stepped to the closet in the purple-tinged darkness and indicated a massive pile of dirty clothes on the closet floor. “We took these jeans from the top, there.”

He held up a pair of pencil-leg black jeans. There were a few luminous dots on the outside of the pants legs (matching the now brilliantly glowing stick-on stars on the ceiling above them) but when Lingg turned the top of the pants inside out, the whole crotch area lit up with shining streaks.

“Blood and semen, both.” Lingg’s face was lit up as well, with a faint purplish tinge.

Garrett and Landauer looked at each other in the spooky glow of the light. Landauer said what they all were thinking. “Twenty says we get his and hers DNA. Proves he fucked her.”

“Fucking isn’t killing,” Garrett said, almost to himself. He added, more loudly, “We’re going to need more. Everything we can get. There’s something else—” But he never got to complete his sentence. As he turned in the dark room, he saw red, malevolent eyes glowing from a corner, and a blur of movement, some huge shape poised to spring—

Garrett yelled. Landauer and Lingg spun in the darkness, Landauer grabbing for his weapon. Garrett lunged at the window curtains, ripped them open. Sunlight blazed into the room, dazzling them.

Garrett turned and stared toward the corner, blinking against the sudden light. There was nothing, no one there: just a narrow, full-length mirror on the wall.

“Jesus Holy Christ, Rhett,” Landauer gasped. “What the fuck?”

Garrett gazed at the mirror. His pulse was still going a mile a minute. What the fuck is right. “Sorry,” he said finally. “Sorry. I thought I saw…” But there was no describing what he thought he’d seen. Great. I’m hallucinating now. That’s helpful.

“Some sleep would be good,” he managed.

The other two men stared at him, then Landauer reholstered his weapon. Lingg diplomatically turned away and crossed to the door, where a crate of evidence bags was set in the hall outside, to bag and tag the jeans. Jenny-or-Jerri slipped back into the room with her camera slung over her shoulder, while Landauer stepped to the closet, scanning the shelves and floor. He pointed for the assistant’s benefit. “Take all his shoes… let’s see if we can get a match to soil from the dump.”

Garrett looked around the room, letting his heartbeat return to normal. He saw black fingerprint powder dusted on surfaces, and felt a sudden certainty that they were going to find Erin’s prints in the room.

A cell phone was on the bed table, plugged into a charger. The guitar still lay on the bed, where Jason had put it down the night before, and Garrett realized with a slight shock that it was just twelve hours ago, now.

He picked up the phone and flipped it open. The screen photo was the cover image of the band’s CD, with its ominous triangles. Garrett punched up Contacts and scrolled down. There was an E listed, and he recognized the number programmed into the address book as the one he had for Erin Carmody. Next he punched up the list of recent calls and found several calls to Erin over the last week, mostly at night, some of twenty- and thirty-minute duration.

So she wasn’t hanging up on him.

The last call was Friday at 8:08 P.M. Garrett flipped over to the text message record and again found scattered messages to Erin’s number, in text shorthand: some messages that he recognized and others that were more obscure. Maddeningly, it was not a brand of phone that showed the entire conversation; they would have to subpoena Erin’s phone records for her responses, if there were any.

Garrett scrolled down. The first several texts were brief and innocuous; variations on YT? And WU? You there? and What’s up? And WAN2TLK, which he assumed translated as Want to talk.

He moved on to one he didn’t recognize: BOOMS, and for a moment simply felt old. He scrolled farther and paused at one of the messages, startled.

Tuesday 12:01 A.M.: GNSD.

He recognized the combination of letters from some old interdepartmental memo on Leetspeak and texting abbreviations: Good night, sweet dreams…

He frowned, and scrolled more slowly, now. On Friday at 8:08 P.M., not long before Erin and Jason were both seen dancing at Cauldron, there was a message that read simply: BRT, which he knew meant Be right there.

There was also one message on Saturday: YT? You there?

That last message was time-stamped 1:23 P.M., approximately twelve hours after Erin’s murder.

Garrett stood beside the desk in a fog.

“You are not looking happy,” Landauer observed from across the room. Garrett stepped to him, showed him the phone, watching him as he scrolled through the received calls.

“GNSD?” Landauer frowned.

“ ‘Good night, sweet dreams.’ I don’t know BOOMS.” He looked at his partner. “I gotta say. This is looking more like dating than stalking.”

“Could be, Rhett. But that kid is not right.” Landauer glanced toward the bed—held up his bandaged arm for emphasis. “Erin wouldn’t be the first one to say yes to someone she shouldn’t have. However it started out, what happened at the end there weren’t no date.”

“But look at the last message,” Garrett persisted. There was a knot in his stomach that wouldn’t go away. “He texted her at 1:23 Saturday afternoon, looking for her.”

Landauer glanced at the message. “Yeah, or he wanted to make it look that way. The kid is weird, but so far no one’s saying he’s stupid.” Garrett looked at him. Laudauer shrugged. “Playin’ devil’s advocate. So to speak.”

Garrett handed the cell phone to a patiently waiting Lingg to enter into evidence. Landauer drifted back to the closet while Garrett stepped to the bookshelf to look at the books, scanning over the odd names: Magick in Theory and Practice. The Vision and the Voice. He turned to Lingg and pointed at the books. “These are going with me. This shelf. I’ll sign for them.”

“Sure,” the criminalist said, nodding.

While Landauer busied himself with the closet drawers, Garrett tried the computer, a Dell laptop. The screen saver dissolved up, a field of black with a single line of white text:

Garrett stared at the rhyme, recognizing “Do what thou wilt” as something Jason had said to them last night. The phrase was no less disturbing in the daylight. After a moment he tried clicking into the My Documents files, but the files were password protected, as were Moncrief’s online accounts.

He motioned to Jerri-Jenni-whoever-the-fuck to take the laptop, then stopped and looked into the young woman’s fresh face, and it clicked. “Jenna,” he said.

“Yes?” She cocked her head toward him, surprised.

“What does BOOMS mean in text?” Garrett asked.

“Bored out of my skull,” she answered promptly.

Garrett looked at her. “Would you text that to someone you planned on killing?”

Jenna’s eyes widened slightly. “Um… depends on how bored I was. I kinda doubt it, though.”

Garrett nodded, frowning. “Yeah.” And his thoughts were swirling again, and the knot was back in his stomach.

After a moment Jenna turned away with the laptop. Garrett moved back to the desk and opened the long top drawer to look down on a mad scatter of pens, pencils, club tickets, band postcards, legal pads, batteries, pills, Jolly Rancher candies, Dubble Bubble gum. Nothing eye-catching at first glance, and Garrett was inclined to move on—then he spotted an antique-style metal key. He reached with a gloved hand and picked it up, examining it.

“You find a lockbox in the closet?” He spoke aloud to his partner.

“Nope,” Landauer answered. He’d started on the bureau drawers.

Garrett turned from the desk with the key and scanned the room. His eyes stopped on the black-quilted bed. He crossed the room and crouched beside it, picking up the black comforter to look below. In the dark space under the bed, amid an unnerving collection of dust mice, was a battered, antique-looking box. “Hey. Land.”

Landauer stepped over from the dresser while Garrett lifted the box onto the bed and unlocked it, opened the lid. They looked down on a startling collection of objects: black candles, a tarnished silver hand mirror, an oil lamp, a cup, a bell, a jar of salt, a vial of oil, a hexagonal metal container with punched-out holes that Garrett recognized from his altar-boy days as a censer, for burning incense—and a thick book of photo album size covered in bloodred leather. Garrett lifted the book, curious… but his attention was immediately drawn to the two long, thin objects wrapped in black silk, lying beneath the volume. He picked one up and unwrapped it. In the folds of the silk lay an intricately carved red hardwood wand with a large cloudy crystal at the tip. Garret rewrapped the wand and replaced it in the box, then picked up the other black-wrapped object. He could tell what it was instantly. He lay it carefully down on the bed and folded back the silk. The detectives looked down on a gleaming silver dagger.

Landauer exhaled above him and Garrett realized he’d been holding his breath as well. There was a quiet thrill in Land’s voice as he spoke.

“Now we’re cooking with gas.”