“She didn’t. But her asshole boyfriend did.”
Garrett stared at the bassist. “Did what?”
The tall young man didn’t look away from him. “Came to a gig. That jock.”
“Kevin Teague?” Garrett demanded. The bassist nodded. “Which gig was that?”
“It was at Cauldron.”
Garrett looked at Landauer. Teague had said he’d never been to Cauldron. Garrett felt his pulse speeding up. “When was that?”
“About . . .” The bassist stopped, thinking. “September seventh. He stood in front of the stage the whole time just staring at Jason, real asswipe stuff. And then followed him out to the parking lot and beat the shit out of him.”
“Teague,” Garrett repeated.
“Yeah. Teague.”
“Did you guys report it?” Garrett asked, even knowing there was no way.
Hartlaub rolled his eyes. The bassist lifted his shoulders, resigned. “We weren’t there. The pussy just jumped him. Split his lip, broke a rib. What do you do?”
I knew that arrogant shit was up to no good, Garrett thought to himself. But killing Erin to get back at Jason? That’s a stretch.
He circled the rehearsal space, trying to collect his thoughts. He spotted a stack of flyers on the low, burn-scarred table, reached, and casually picked one up. “So what does this mean—‘Current 333’?”
The keyboardist shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Garrett stopped, looked at him. “You don’t know? It’s the title of your CD.”
Hartlaub looked uncomfortable. “That was Jason’s trip. Something about entropy.” He glanced toward the bass player. “ ‘Chaos magic,’ he said. It sounded—you know—edgy. He wrote a couple of songs about it—Choronzon, the Master of Hallucinations.”
Choronzon, again.
Garrett realized with a start that he hadn’t yet listened to the CD they were talking about, though he’d been meaning to all along. He mentally kicked himself for the oversight. There could be any number of emotional or virtual clues in the music or lyrics.
“So what is that, satanism? Black magic?” Garrett asked aloud.
“Jason called it ceremonial magic,” the bassist said. “He was reading Aleister Crowley, especially.” Garrett thought again that Hartlaub might be the front man, but formal education or not, it was this bassist who had it going on.
“But ceremonial magic wasn’t something you practiced or believed?” Garrett asked the bassist.
“No,” Hartlaub scoffed.
“Hell, no,” murmured the bassist. And the drummer shook his mop of hair.
“Do you know if he attended any group ceremonies, or hung out with other practitioners?”
The bassist and Hartlaub looked at each other. “Nothing like that,” the bassist answered. “It was just a slam at the colonel—you know, his father—the whole military/religious thing. The old man’s a fascist, always trying to force Jason into ROTC, used to not let him play, that shit. So what was guaranteed to piss him off the most?”
Hartlaub jumped in. “But then it started getting whacked.”
“Whacked how?” Landauer asked.
Hartlaub just shook his head. The bassist answered slowly. “We’d be laying a track and he’d start chanting in the middle of a song and go on and on, we couldn’t get him to stop. It was like he was gone.” The young man, who towered over Garrett by four or five inches, grimaced in what looked very much like revulsion. “And when we played it back—”
“Shut up, Danny,” Hartlaub warned.
“Come on, you know it’s—”
Garrett stepped between them. “This is a murder investigation,” he reminded Hartlaub coldly, and the keyboardist backed down instantly. Garrett turned to the bass player.
“When you played it back, what?”
The bassist’s voice dropped. “There were other voices on the recording. Not ours. This—babbling—river of voices, all at once.”
Garrett was aware of Landauer tensing in recognition just as he did. And Landauer didn’t even know about the voices Garrett had discovered on Jason’s interview tape; Garrett hadn’t remembered to tell him. That’s three times, now, the babble of voices. What the fuck is that about?
“Freaked me the fuck out,” the drummer mumbled, off in his own world. There was a distinct chill in the room.
“So—what?” Landauer suddenly said, too loudly. “You thought he was pranking you? Fucking with the sound?”
The three musicians were silent. “Yeah,” Hartlaub finally said, flatly. “Sure.”
There was a long silence, which Garrett finally broke. “When you heard Erin Carmody was dead and Jason was arrested, what did you think?”
“Complete freakout,” the drummer muttered from the drum set.
Garrett glanced to him. “You were surprised?”
“Whoever thinks that shit is going to happen?” Hartlaub said.
“Did you think it was possible?” Garrett said, looking around at all the boys.
The bassist glanced toward the hole in the wall, but said nothing.
Hartlaub shrugged . . . then for a moment, he looked bleak, older than his years. “Something wasn’t right.”
“Ever get the sense this kid wasn’t right?” Landauer said as they walked over dirty sidewalks back to the Cavalier, with traffic blowing by them on the industrial street. “At least now we know why. His daddy was a sumbitch. Explains everything. My daddy was a sumbitch, too. Whose wasn’t? Nowadays that’s supposed to mean something.” Land waggled his fingers like a distressed drag queen. “Boo fucking hoo.”
Garrett let all that pass. “Teague lied about never going to Cauldron,” he said.
Land shook his head. “You know, Rhett, I knew you were gonna be all over that. Why don’t you just admit you have a hard-on for that guy?”
“I’m just saying—he lied.” He’s an asshole, with a temper, he’s a lot stronger than Jason, and he was pissed.
“Bottom line, his alibi’s gold,” Landauer reminded him. It was true. Kevin Teague had spent the night of Erin’s murder on a basketball court in full view of hundreds of sports fans, then on a bus full of his teammates plus four coaches and assistant coaches, and then in a hotel suite in Connecticut with five other people. Unless he had hired someone to kill Erin, he had had nothing to do with it.
And Garrett had to admit, everything else the band had said pointed to Jason, not Teague. It was all starting to sound like a broken record. A disturbed kid, possibly psychotic. A perfect match for Frazer’s profile. But there were some things that didn’t fit, that twisted and poked at Garrett like broken glass.
They had reached the Cavalier, and as Landauer stepped off the curb onto the street, Garrett suddenly spoke. “You catch that about the babbling voices?”
Landauer’s face tightened. “Kid is a musician. Sound technician,” he reminded Garrett.
“It was on our interview tape, Land.” Garrett put his hands on the top of the Cavalier and looked across at his partner as cars raced by behind him. “I played it back and I heard it.”
Landauer looked back at him for a minute. “The stereo was on, remember? Don’tcha think that might account for any—babbling?” He shook his head. “Don’t let all this freak you out, G. Kid’s in jail. What’s he gonna do?” He pulled open the passenger door and lowered himself into the car. After a moment, Garrett did the same.
Inside, as Garrett started the engine, Landauer leaned forward and switched on the radio.
“In our top local news, the district attorney’s office will seek charges of first-degree murder for Amherst sophomore Jason Moncrief in the killing of W. P. Carmody heiress Erin Carmody. Carmody’s mutilated body was found in the Pine Street landfill on Saturday morning. Both students were residents of Morris Pratt Hall on the Amherst campus; authorities are investigating rumors that Moncrief may have been stalking Carmody.”
“Sounds like Shelley’s been talking,” Landauer grunted. Garrett frowned; he’d been thinkin
g the same thing.
The female anchor continued. “Sources speculate that there were satanic aspects to the killing.”
“Look what you learn on the radio,” Landauer said with exaggerated delight. “There are satanic aspects to our killing.”
The radio anchor continued, in that oh-so-serious news voice. “Assistant District Attorney Carolyn Carver announced the charges on the courthouse steps.”
Carolyn’s smooth, silky voice replaced the announcer’s. Garrett felt himself start to harden, even hearing her on the radio. “The state is certain that the grand jury will hand down charges of murder in the first degree in this incomprehensible crime.”
Landauer glanced toward Garrett. “She’s a star.”
“Yes, she is,” Garrett agreed without inflection. In his mind he could see Tanith Cabarrus leaning across the table to put her hand on the grimoire, see her black eyes, hear her voice.
“You’re wrong. And you know it.”
He reached and turned up the radio, letting Carolyn drown out the voices in his head. “We are confident that we will win justice for Erin Carmody and her family.”
Garrett made the turn downtown, hoping to God that she was right.
Chapter Nineteen
The grand jury hearing went off without a hitch.
Garrett and Landauer spent a day testifying in the stifling conference room at Three Pemberton Square, the high-rise courthouse. Jason did not appear; the defendant’s attorney does not put up a defense for grand jury hearings, and all the state had to show was probable cause. Carolyn smoothly and expertly led the detectives through their recounting of the witnesses’ testimony, and after just an hour of deliberation the grand jury had handed down a true bill of indictment: murder in the first degree.
The detectives decided to take a well-deserved night off, but Garrett pled exhaustion to Carolyn and took a rain check on her offer of a debauched celebration. The real truth was that his gut was gnawing at him. His grand jury testimony had been an honest presentation of the facts as he knew them, but all his doubts about the case were raging. Most people they arrested were so obviously, patently guilty that Garrett never had any qualms. Even in the highly unlikely circumstance that the suspect was not guilty of what they’d arrested him for, he was without a doubt guilty of something.
But this case—there was nothing that felt right about it.
Now as the sun set outside his dining-room window, Garrett sat at the table that was never used for dining, surrounded by stacks of Jason’s belongings: the magic books, the bloodred leather grimoire, the file boxes containing the contents of Jason’s desk drawers and bookshelves.
Garrett pulled the grimoire toward him and opened the cover. The pages were dated, almost as if the book were a diary of sorts. Garrett stood and retrieved the substitution code Tanith had written for him from the desk drawer where he’d hidden it, then sat back down with it to translate the first date. Jason had begun the book in May, May 14. And according to his friends, his personality had changed radically over the summer, and not for the better. His behavior had become bizarre, he had violent outbursts, he was scaring people around him. Then on September 21, a girl he had known and likely dated, and had been with that night, was murdered.
How does that happen?
Garrett reached for a plastic evidence crate, the books and other items he had requested from Jason’s dorm room, and rooted around in it until he found the Current 333 CD. He rose and put the disc in his sound system, then stood in his living room, listening. It was death metal but with some sophisticated musicality going on (undoubtedly coming from the bass player, and possibly Jason himself). Garrett could hear the influence of The Cure, U2, R.E.M. The word “Choronzon” stood out immediately. “The Master of Hallucinations,” Jason had said, and now, listening to the music, Garrett caught the words “My Master” and “Mighty devil” and something that sounded like “Sacrifice to your will,” but Jason’s voice was little more than a growl and Garrett couldn’t be sure what he was hearing. He checked the CD for liner notes, but there were no lyrics.
He stared into space and thought for a moment, recalling the words of the tall bassist. “He was reading Aleister Crowley, especially.”
Garrett turned back to the box and lifted out the books, separating out the volumes written by Aleister Crowley. He sat with them and turned to the index of the first, Confessions, looking in the C’s for Choronzon and Current 333, and flipped to an inner page to read:
The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon . . . The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil in the only true sense of the word—that is, meaningless but malignant, in so far as it craves to become real. These forms swirl senselessly into haphazard heaps like dust devils, and each such chance aggregation asserts itself to be an individual and shrieks, “I am I!”
Garrett shook his head. Disturbing . . . but incoherent. He took another book from the pile, The Vision and the Voice, used the index again, to find:
And whoso passeth into the outermost Abyss—except he be of them that understand—holdeth out his hands, and boweth his neck, unto the chains of Choronzon. And as a devil he walketh about the earth, immortal, and he blasteth the flowers of the earth, and he corrupteth the fresh air, and he maketh poisonous the water; and the fire that is the friend of man, and the pledge of his aspiration, seeing that it mounteth ever upward as a Pyramid, and seeing that man stole it in a hollow tube from Heaven—even that fire he turneth into ruin, and madness, and fever, and destruction.
Garrett pushed the book away from him, feeling a churning in his gut. That sentence: “He blasteth the flowers of the earth.”
The burned footprints and scorched flowers.
“And as a devil he walketh about the earth, immortal . . .”
Garrett immediately stood to shake off the thought, and walked the floor of the room. We don’t need to get caught up in any of this demon stuff.
“Sacrifice to thy will . . .”
He turned and looked back toward the pile of books on the table. But what if it goes to motive? Did Jason kill Erin as a sacrifice to this “demon,” Choronzon? Just as the three boys in Frazer’s psychological profile who killed their classmate as a sacrifice to Satan?
Garrett circled the table, tensely. He was no closer to understanding what Choronzon was; if anything he was more confused.
And it seemed to him that there was more than a little mental illness going on with this Crowley.
I need an interpreter, he thought, and immediately Tanith Cabarrus was in his mind.
He leaned across the table to pick up the last Crowley book again . . . then he froze, looking down.
There was a silver bookstore label on the back of the book, with an address:
Book of Shadows
411 Essex St., West
Salem, MA
978-555-0728
Book of Shadows. Garrett heard a feminine voice saying it. He turned to the table and grabbed the murder book on Erin Carmody. He turned to the police reports section and looked down at the page for his initial interview with Tanith Cabarrus. The address and phone number were the same as on the label.
Jason had gotten those books at Tanith’s shop.
She knew him.
Chapter Twenty
The wind was high that evening, frantic and gusting, and the moon fat and nearly full over the waving branches and rustling leaves, as Garrett drove into Salem Town.
Landauer had not picked up when Garrett called him, and Garrett had debated with himself less than ten minutes before he headed up to Salem on his own. For the first half of the drive he had wrestled with half a dozen ways to justify himself: it was their night off; Landauer had made it cheerfully clear that if Garrett called him for any reason whatsoever he was a dead man; Malloy would never approve of consulting with a professed witch so Garrett was forced to hide his activity; he didn’t want to rope Landauer into a wild goose chase, he didn�
��t want Land to catch shit from Malloy if he found out they were considering information given to them by a witch . . .
Then he gave up and admitted to himself that every one of his excuses was bullshit. He simply wanted to see the witch alone.
Miraculously he found a parking spot on Essex, and started off through the rippling wind, trees and bushes stirred into green frenzies around him, and onto the cobbled street of the pedestrian mall, the center of town. Entering the warren of narrow streets was like stepping back through time; the tight rows of colonial buildings were carefully preserved, with wrought-iron lampposts lining the walkways and antique signage hanging from hooks and chains above the shops. The town’s theme was inescapable: Essex Street and the town square were crowded with witch supply shops, psychics and tarot readers, and witch history museums, complete with soundtracks of howling winds and creaking doors piped out onto the sidewalks, enhancing the naturally atmospheric colonial storefronts and autumn wind rustling through the trees.
Garrett had learned the story in sixth grade, and it all was coming back to him now: the witch trials of 1692 that started with the “possession” and accusations of a handful of supposedly bewitched teenage and preteen girls and ended in the execution of twenty accused witches, and the imprisonment of 150 accused, five more of whom died in Salem Town’s wretched jail. It was a chapter in American history that had left a lasting impression on him, laced as it was with repressed sexuality, voodoo, magic, torture, execution, and the strong possibility of hallucinogens: Garrett remembered one theory that the witch hysteria was the result of the whole town being high on ergot, a psychedelic mold that grows on rye. And then with a ripple of unease he recalled that lurking in the shadows of the tale, documented in the court transcriptions, was the devil himself, to whom the accused witches had supposedly promised their souls.
Book of Shadows Page 12