Book of Shadows

Chapter Four

How do you show a father his headless child?

It was obscene that anyone should witness a parent’s private grief in this abomination of a circumstance, but no detective was naïve to the fact that in this world there are fathers who kill their children, who sexually assault them, mutilate them. And so Garrett and Landauer stood stoically against the wall of the autopsy lab, breathing in the astringent bite of formalin and the stench of decaying membranes, while the morgue attendant lifted the sheet from Erin Carmody’s savaged body, and their eyes never left William Carmody’s face as he looked down on his ruined daughter. Garrett had seen faces that seemed to age overnight. Carmody’s face aged in a single, agonized second.

He hadn’t brought his wife, but his lawyer (which earned an eyebrow raise from Landauer). The lawyer waited in the hall while Carmody confirmed the ID, pointing silently to a crescent-shaped scar on Erin’s arm. When Carmody stepped back out into the corridor he looked ravaged, gray with shock, his lips a thin hard line, but his control was impeccable. He said nothing, no “Get him,” no “Avenge my little girl,” not a word.

He gave terse, controlled answers to their questions. Erin was a sophomore at Amherst, a business major who’d been an honor student at her prep school; she had a basketball-star boyfriend from a good family, she’d talked to her parents on Friday afternoon and gave no indication whatsoever of something troubling her.

Good girl, from a prominent family… even in the face of the father’s grief Garrett was painfully aware it was a nightmarish scenario from the press standpoint. Every single move they made would be under a microscope.

The lawyer spoke just one sentence: “What are you doing?”

Carmody sat stoically silent as the detectives outlined the facts as they knew them—until the mention of ritualistic elements. The businessman looked from one detective to the other in dazed incomprehension.

“Those—cuts—are satanic?”

“We don’t know, sir. Someone seems to be trying to make it look that way. We’ll know more after the exam.” Garrett carefully avoided the word “autopsy.”

Carmody was quiet for a long moment, and the detectives remained still, their gazes lowered to the polished linoleum of the hall. Somewhere a fan whirred. Then Carmody’s voice broke for the only time, as he asked, “And her head?” His whole body seemed to palsy as he said the word.

“We don’t know, yet, Mr. Carmody.” Garrett felt a twist of fury in the core of him. “We will find him, sir. We will get him.”

And for a moment, staring hard into the father’s eyes, he felt he had helped.

Carmody and his lawyer left; the detectives stayed. The autopsy had been expedited.

“The perks of power,” Landauer said as they gowned up in the morgue anteroom with its long observation window into the autopsy lab. Garrett was silent, thinking of Carmody’s tortured face. The man certainly had assumed he had power, until today’s stark proof of what an illusion human power really is.

The detectives returned to the refrigerated lab, now gowned and masked, wearing latex surgical gloves on their hands and paper caps on their heads and paper booties over their shoes. Edwards was waiting for them, looking like an oversized elf in his green surgical scrubs.

Merciless overhead lights blazed down on the table, and Garrett flinched inwardly at the sight. The headless torso was on its back, the slashed neck raw and exposed, providing a gaping view of ragged tissue and severed windpipe. The corpse had begun to pass out of rigor mortis and lay less rigidly against the polished steel.

Edwards adjusted the microphone attached to the collar of his scrubs, snapped on a pair of sterile latex gloves, then picked up Erin’s chart and began to dictate. “This is case number 10-3760, Erin Carmody, a well-developed, well-nourished eighteen-year-old Caucasian female. The head and left hand of the victim are missing. The remaining torso is fifty-nine inches long and the weight is 104 pounds.”

Edwards nodded to Hernandez, the slight, delicately featured morgue assistant, who turned on the X-ray board to light up several rows of film. Edwards studied the ghostly images, then turned from the light board and moved to the head of the table. He bent over the corpse, examining the stump of the neck through the magnifier. “The severance plane is located between C-4 and C-5, the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. There is a single slice across the neck, cleaving completely through the thyroid cartilage, through the arteries, across the vertebral column. The wrist amputation shows the same kind of cut.” The M.E. paused, his deceptively jovial face knotted in concentration as he studied the muscle fibers. He spoke more slowly. “This was a highly sharpened blade, and long enough to cut cleanly across the entire expanse of neck. There are no hesitation marks, no sawing motions; the blow was delivered with extreme force. This was not accomplished with a knife or a hatchet. My guess would be a sword.”

Garrett felt a shock of unreality as he stared across the girl’s headless body at his partner. “A sword?”

Landauer’s returning look above his surgical mask was equally unnerved. He cleared his throat, glanced to the M.E. “How often do you see that?”

“I haven’t,” Edwards said shortly. “I’ll have to research types and variables.”

Garrett’s mind was racing. Ritual… ceremonial? “We’ll get the details into VICAP.” VICAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, maintained a database of details of violent crimes from across the country, which law enforcement officials could search for similar, possibly related crimes.

Edwards continued. “Decapitation was not the cause of death. The fatal wound was here, at the breastbone.” He indicated the knife wound in the chest, then stepped to the light board to the chest X-ray. “The knife blade entered the chest cavity in an upward thrust and severed the aorta, as you can see by the pooled blood in the thoracic cavity.” He traced a pen above a large shadowed area of the chest. “She would have been dead within minutes.

“The decapitation took place well before rigor mortis, probably no more than two hours after death. There are no defensive wounds, and the free histamine levels in her bloodstream indicate that there was no heightened trauma before her expiration.” Edwards paused and looked at both detectives in turn. “She was not tortured or unduly stressed before her death.”

There was a palpable relaxation in the room. The sound of cooled air blowing through the ventilation system seemed amplified.

Edwards looked over his clipboard and continued. “Furthermore, lab tests indicate that the blood on her thighs, and in her vagina, is menstrual blood.” He looked up at the detectives, waiting.

Garrett frowned. No undue stress… menstrual blood…

He spoke aloud. “So… there was no rape?”

Edwards nodded toward him. “There is no bruising and no tearing of the vaginal wall, which counterindicates sexual assault, although it is not conclusive. There was sex: semen was present in the vaginal canal and in the pubic region. Bear in mind the sex could have taken place postmortem. The semen samples have been sent over to Schroeder for DNA testing.”

Finally, some good news, Garrett thought. Again, the relief in the room was tangible.

“So with any luck we get a ding on CODIS.” Landauer exhaled.

Let it be so.

“There are no defensive wounds, and no ligature marks.” The M.E. picked up one arm, then the other, as gently as if the murdered girl had been his own daughter, displaying each arm for the detectives. He did the same with her legs and feet. “There are no track marks, either. But…” He looked up from the body, nodded toward his clipboard again. “The tox screen indicates significant levels of atropine in her bloodstream.”

The word was vaguely familiar, but Garrett couldn’t immediately call it up. The back of his neck was tingling, though.

“Atropine is a chemical used by the military as an antidote to nerve gas, and as a means of resuscitation,” Edwards continued.

Garrett frowned. Resuscitation? Antidote? That wasn’t why the word was familiar. “I don’t understand—”

Edwards lifted a finger. “Atropine is naturally occurring in belladonna, or deadly nightshade.” Now the tingling escalated to a buzz. Garrett could see Landauer struggling to place the reference, too.

“Isn’t that some—ritual thing?” Landauer asked. “Is it satanic?”

“Belladonna has been used throughout history in witchcraft rituals,” Edwards confirmed. “It’s a toxin and hallucinogen that reputedly induces the sensation of flying.”

Unbidden, the Mexican mechanic’s voice whispered in Garrett’s head: “Bruja.”

The men stared down at the carvings in the girl’s torso. Are we seriously standing here talking about witches? Garrett thought.

“More fucking rituals. Shit,” Landauer muttered. “You think he fed it to her?” All the men knew it was a rhetorical question—it was not the M.E.’s place to speculate, just report the facts.

Garrett tried a more specific question. “Is belladonna hard to get?”

“It’s a weed,” Edwards answered. “It grows domestically in this region. The berries are sold in those witch shops up in Salem. And it gets used as a recreational drug, mostly by teenagers, into the Goth scene.” Garrett could almost see the quotation marks around “Goth” as Edwards said the word.

“What about the carvings?” Garrett asked.

“Postmortem,” the M.E. said. “There are no hesitation marks. The characters are distinct and the proportions fairly regular, which might indicate that these are not improvised marks, rather, the person who did the cutting is very familiar with these symbols.” Edwards looked at the detectives. “And the knife is unusual. The regularity of the edges of both the stab wound to the chest and the carvings indicate the use of a double-edged blade with a needlelike point.” The M.E. paused. “A dagger.”

Another jolt. Garrett looked at Landauer, who was startled enough to stop fiddling with the unlit cigarette he held nervously in his fingers.

Edwards continued grimly. “And another thing. The lab identified the black substance on her shoulder.” He gave a nod to Garrett again. “You were right. It’s beeswax, with a common dye. Candle wax.”

Black candles and belladonna. A dagger and sword.

Laundauer exhaled. “Well, shit on a stick. If it’s not satanic, it’s a damn good fake.”