Urgent.
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:
There is no grace, there is no guilt. This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!
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, p
encils, 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.”
Chapter Eleven
They drew the curtains and Lingg moved in with the Luminol. The UV light revealed no obvious traces of blood on the dagger. There were more sensitive tests to be done in the lab, but suddenly Landauer looked up at Garrett in the purplish dark.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Garrett nodded slowly. “We’ve got it.”
There were still dozens of witnesses to question—dorm residents, professors, advisers—and countless personal belongings to sort through, not to mention e-mails, phone records, and Jason’s car to be processed. But with the semen and blood on the jeans, if the DNA matched Erin’s, and the presence of a dagger in Jason’s room, plus the CD case with its symbols corresponding to the carvings in Erin’s body, and the testimony of the roommate and the DJ at the club, they likely had more than enough circumstantial evidence to charge Jason.
“I’m thinking we want to get home and try to talk to this kid before he’s lawyered up to the gills,” Landauer said, his voice faraway. “We’ve got a shitload here, G-man. If our luck holds he might just cop to it all.”
“Okay,” Garrett said, feeling both electrified and hazy from lack of sleep. They could go through Moncrief’s personal effects back at Schroeder, while they waited for results of lab tests, and their IT expert could get into Moncrief’s and Erin’s laptops. “Let’s think. What do we still need to get done, here?”
“Moncrief’s car. Check with Jeffs if there’s any student interviews we should know about. And we’re out of here.”
Garrett nodded. “I want to talk to the other members of the band, too,” he said abruptly. But they were not Amherst students; he’d already run DMV checks.
He turned to survey the room again. The red leather-bound book was still lying on the bed beside it, unopened, and he made another move to reach for it—
“Detectives.” Both of them turned toward the terse voice behind them.
Sergeant Jeffs was standing in the doorway, an intent look on his face. “I’ve got someone you’re going to want to talk to.”
Chapter Twelve
Garrett recognized the round-faced, curly-haired hall coordinator from the night before (God . . . just the night before . . . ). The partners sat in Kurt Fugate’s one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor, his perk for managing the building and all its student residents. Jeffs stood against the wall, watching.
Fugate was a senior, older than their other interviewees, but so far the most nervous; he was mature enough to be suitably shaken by Erin’s death. He sat in an armchair, relating what he’d told Jeffs. “All these rooms are supposed to be double occupancy. Jason only had a single because his roommate requested a transfer. Urgently.”
Seated uncomfortably on the futon couch, Garrett had a sudden flash of Jason’s stretched-out face, the wolfishly lolling tongue . . .
Fugate swallowed coffee from a school mug and continued. “Bryce came to me to request the transfer. He wouldn’t give any specific reason—he really didn’t want to talk about it at all. But he said he didn’t want to stay another night.” He glanced at Jeffs, back to Garrett. “If you ask me, he was scared.”
“Scared how?” Garrett pressed.
Fugate looked at him straight on. “He had a suitcase with him when he talked to me. He really wasn’t going back up there.”
Garrett glanced at Landauer. “But he wouldn’t give any details.”
The hall coordinator shook his head. “No. Sorry. He didn’t want to talk about it.”
“No problem. We’ll be speaking to him.” Garrett made a note, then looked up. “Did you know Jason yourself?”
“Only by sight. There are 120 kids in the hall, it’s a new school year . . . I just hadn’t gotten to know everyone.”
“Did Erin Carmody ever complain to you about being stalked?”
The young man looked horrified. “God, no. I would have—done something.”
Garrett nodded thoughtfully, and met Landauer’s eyes, while he said aloud to Fugate, “Thanks. You’ve been a huge help.”
They were in luck: Bryce Brissell was on campus, working in the scene shop in the theater building, just a few buildings away. There was building going on in the dim space backstage, muffled hammering and sanding and sawing from the scene dock and the costume shop, and the smell of paint.
Bryce was tall, pale and gangly, almost two-dimensionally thin, with a long shock of diagonally cut, dyed auburn hair that kept falling into his startlingly green eyes. Contacts, Garrett thought. The boy wore his sexuality on his sleeve. He even gave Garrett a furtive look as he folded himself into a battered armchair in a grouping of sprung sofas and davenports in the curtained wings backstage. It didn’t take much prodding for him to open up about Jason. He pulled out clove cigarettes, prompting Landauer to dig out his own Camels, and articulated for the micro-recorder, everything with a dramatic delivery and fluttering hands that Garrett could feel grating on Land without even having to look at him.
“I left because I couldn’t live with him,” Bryce said, taking a nervous drag on his cigarette. “It was the black magic. At first I thought he was just posing—the whole death metal thing, yada yada, scary scary. But he just got more and more into it. I knew he was doing rituals in the room. At first I could tell because of the candles, nothing but black. He got into using different bizarro oils, I think for spells. He had all those creepy books—I swear, I didn’t even like sleeping in the same room with them.” Bryce looked off toward the curtained wings. A single ghost light on a tall pole shone on the stage like a torch, a halo of light. “And then things started to go really weird,” Bryce said softly.
“Weird how?” Garrett prompted.
Bryce paused, and the reluctance suddenly seemed genuine. “There were these smells in the room, even when he wasn’t there,” he said slowly. “Like, burning. I could feel these—drafts—even when the windows and door were closed. And sounds. I would wake up in the middle of the night because there was this whispering.” He stopped, frowned. “Babbling. Like a lot of voices all at once, on top of each other. But there was no music playing, no TV, no iPod, nothing. He’d be sittin
g cross-legged on the bed, just him, staring into space . . .” Bryce shivered, and Garrett thought of Jason’s black, dilated eyes. “And then he’d look at me . . . and his eyes . . . his eyes were so empty.”
Despite himself, Garrett felt a chill. Bryce exhaled smoke and touched his lip before he continued.
“Okay, and I do props, right? And I’d been collecting some stuff for a bill of one acts: Pinter, Beckett, Ionesco. Well, one night I was studying alone in the room and I heard a phone start to ring behind me. Not a cell phone, but one of those old-time phones, a Sultan?” He looked at the detectives and lowered his voice.
“It was the prop phone. It was ringing in the closet. But it was a prop phone. No cords. No wires.”
Garrett and Landauer eyed each other, and Bryce stiffened at their obvious skepticism. “I swear to God, it’s true. That’s when I packed up, right then and there. Whatever he was into, I wasn’t going to live in the same room with it.”
“So you felt in danger?” Garrett suggested.
“Yes, I felt in danger,” Bryce said, affronted. “What do you think I’ve been saying?”
Garrett tried to steer the interview back to something solid. “Did you ever see Jason with Erin Carmody?”
Bryce shook his head, hair flopping.
“She never came to the room?”
“Not that I knew of.”
“Did Jason ever speak about her?”
“No. It’s not like he talked a lot, though. Mostly he acted like I wasn’t there. He was always off on his own trip.” Bryce stared off toward the stage and shivered. “My dad was batshit that I moved off campus and lost the whole semester deposit. But look what happened.” He looked at the detectives with wide eyes. “What if I’d stayed?”
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