Book of Shadows

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  In the patrol car en route to the psychiatric ward, Smithfield kept up a steady stream of muttering and periodic screaming about being attacked. She claimed there were demons inside her.

  On admission the patient continued to repeat her belief that there are demons inside her and that they “tricked her” into letting them in. She begged repeatedly for help and screamed not to be left alone. She would not respond to questions about her perceptions but seemed preoccupied with internal stimuli. It is likely that she is experiencing both auditory and visual hallucinations.

  Blood and urine screens for alcohol and illicit drugs are positive for significant amounts of the hallucinogen atropine, which indicates possible drug-related psychosis in addition to an organic condition.

  PAST PSYCHIATRIC HISTORY: Patient has an arrest record for fraud, and served nine months in MCI Framingham. During the first months of her sentence she received numerous official write-ups for fighting and “antisocial behavior.” Patient has a series of vertical scars on her left wrist, suggesting at least one past suicide attempt.

  ASSESSMENT AND PLAN: Patient clearly suffers from a psychotic condition that may prove to be chronic paranoid schizophrenia, quite possibly exacerbated by the use of hallucinogens. The use of antipsychotic medication is indicated and will be initiated. We will continue to carefully monitor Ms. Smithfield’s safety, given her dangerously self-destructive behavior.

  There were more documents, and Garrett had no doubt as to their authenticity; there was no more meticulous researcher than Carolyn. And he, of course, had never bothered to check. He felt sick, betrayed—and more than that, like a complete and utter fool.

  The phone buzzed on his desk, and he reached for it. “Garrett,” he said, his voice hollow.

  “Got that analysis for you, chief,” Warren Tufts said on the other end. Garrett sat up straighter, but he knew what Tufts was going to say next. “You were right on the money. The wine in that glass was laced. Atropine.”

  Landauer met him in the smoky dark of the Hibernian, with its polished and endless bar and Irish soundtrack, and there were no “I told you so’s,” no recriminations, only the warm and hulking presence of a partner and friend. Of course, Garrett was fairly certain Land had told Carolyn about Tanith to begin with, but that was for his own good, obviously saving him from himself.

  “She was running a phony fortune-telling business, swindled people out of their money. Then a complete mental collapse, institutionalization, delusions, schizophrenia . . . she’s as loony as Moncrief.” Garrett swallowed the rest of his Jameson’s, chased it with a Harp, and nodded to the bartender for more. “I’ve been a total ass.” He was aware he was slurring.

  “You’re always a total ass, Rhett,” Landauer said, and Garrett knew he was forgiven. Garrett was not about to be so kind to himself. He spoke harshly.

  “She dosed me with belladonna last night.”

  Landauer looked at him over his beer. “No shit? How was it?”

  Garrett gave him a thin smile “I feel like I was hit by a T. But last night . . . it was wild. Hallucinations . . .” He trailed off as memories of sex, of flight, raced through him . . . then the image of the Camaro, the dark shadow of the man, the shadow’s sudden flight. “It felt wicked real.”

  The bartender brought their next round and Garrett swallowed his whole. The lights blurred to a comfortable haze around him. “Here’s the thing,” he said slowly, so there would be minimal slurring. “Belladonna. She’s working so hard to get this kid Jason out, you know what I’m saying? Do you think she’s in on it? He got the drug from her; they’re using these girls for some rituals . . .” He suddenly remembered. “There was a girl—same age as Erin—in her shop. Fuck knows what all she’s in to.” He slammed his hand on the bar.

  Landauer looked him over. His face was red from the whiskey, but his eyes were still focused and sharp. “Yeah, she played you good, bro. And maybe her head’s not screwed on so tight. But murder? There’s a difference between kinky and hinky.”

  Garrett felt himself swaying on the bar stool. “Dunno . . .” he muttered. Suddenly Landauer’s hand was under his arm, and he realized that his partner had just barely stopped him from falling off the seat.

  “I’m driving you home, Rhett. You sleep this one off and we’ll talk in the morning.”

  Whiskey on top of belladonna did not turn out to be the happiest of combinations. Sometime during a brutal night Garrett woke from an instantly forgotten nightmare to find himself drenched in sweat, his head and throat burning up. He threw off his sheets and lay back with his head throbbing, feeling as if the bed were rocking.

  Flying . . .

  He licked sweat from his lips, wondering if he had it in him to make it to the bathroom for water.

  And then he heard movement in the living room.

  Adrenaline shot through him and he sat up, straining to hear.

  Silence . . . nothing but the sense of presence . . .

  . . . and then the slow scrape of wood against wood . . .

  A window?

  Garrett reached to his bed stand, eased open the drawer, and withdrew his Glock.

  He stood noiselessly . . . and had to brace himself against the wave of dizziness. He felt weightless, incorporeal. Every muscle in his body was tensed as he moved naked to the bedroom door and put his head against the door frame to look out into the hall.

  Pitch-black and no sound.

  Garrett barely breathed.

  There was no stirring from the living room—only that certainty of presence.

  Garrett slipped through the doorway and eased into the hall, one slow barefoot step in front of the other on the hardwood floor. His heart was racing, his mouth dry as dust.

  At the end of the hallway he pressed his back against the wall and listened. Nothing.

  Slowly, slowly, he peered around the corner . . . and his eyes widened.

  The living room was dark and empty—but all the windows were wide open. The curtains billowed, breathing at the frames. Garrett spun to the front door. It, too, was open into the night.

  There was a sound behind him and Garrett twisted around again, his weapon aimed in front of him—

  Tanith stood on the other side of the room, naked, perfect body gleaming in the moonlight, her dark hair spilled around her shoulders—

  She held a large book open in her hands, offering it to him . . .

  And behind her in the window, yellow eyes gleamed in the darkness—then leapt forward . . . a dark, thick hulk, hurtling toward him . . . and the leathery shape of wings . . .

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Garrett jerked upright.

  He was in bed, in the dark, in a cold sweat.

  Alone.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Garrett had never before, in any way, experienced any doubts about reality. The very idea that reality could be in question had never occurred to him. He found himself now in a profound state of unsettlement, something he didn’t like at all.

  He circled his living room in the subdued light of dawn, checking the windows and door again. They were all locked, as they had been since he’d awakened.

  You were drugged. Get over it, he ordered himself as he poured and drank cup after cup of coffee, alternating with whole bottles of water at a time, hoping to flush the residuals of the psychotropic from his system.

  And possibly it was more than the drugs. The woman is an expert hypnotist. If she could do what she did with the Dragon Man, she could induce hallucinations. Or memories, even.

  So his mind said. His body, though . . . his body felt as sore as if . . .

  As if he had flown.

  It felt real. It all feels real.

  When the night’s dream stubbornly refused to fade from his mind, he sat down at his computer and Googled “atropine” and “belladonna.”

  After a half hour of clicking through articles, he sat back in his chair, limp with relief. Every personal and medical account he’d read of experiences with
belladonna reported the same symptoms: hallucinations of flying so real that at the time the subject was convinced that he or she had actually flown. He had also found an article documenting the use of belladonna in a ritual known as sex magick, in which orgasm was the trigger for hallucinatoric flight.

  “Nothing but drugs,” Garrett muttered, his voice sounding hollow.

  And yet, the Camaro. There was something about it that gnawed at him. It had seemed, in a hallucination of hyper-clarity, particularly real, and significant.

  Look, Tanith’s voice whispered in his mind, and he felt the sound in his whole body.

  He swiveled in his chair, rotating away from the desk. The chair came to a slow stop, facing the dining-room table.

  And the murder book.

  Tanith standing naked in the moonlight, holding the open book out toward him . . .

  Garrett stood and crossed to the book. He opened the stiff blue cover, flipped through pages—and stopped on a witness report from the landfill, the list of makes and models of cars that the landfill’s office manager had made.

  Garrett scanned the list, and his index finger stopped on a line.

  Dark blue Camaro.

  There were no license plates noted; the list was only the office manager’s recollection of the cars she had let through the gate that day.

  Garrett stared into space, then pawed over the scattered files and notepads on the table. He stopped still . . . lunged forward and seized one battered notebook: his scribbled notes from Tanith’s session with the Dragon Man.

  He paged back and stopped again—on the partial plate number the Dragon Man had given her: TOR 9.

  And he had a sudden, shocking vision of the plate that he had seen in the flying dream: TOR 963.

  One call to the DMV later, and one to the Pine Street landfill office, and then Garrett was in the shower, under water as hot as he could get it, trying to steam the cobwebs out of his head.

  He dressed, and finally felt steady enough to call Landauer. “I’ve got something weird,” he said into the phone.

  “What else is new?” came the inevitable response.

  Garrett didn’t laugh.

  Landauer sighed through the phone. “Ah, fuck.”

  Forty minutes later Land was slouched on Garrett’s sofa, legs sprawled, staring down at a sheet of paper. “Let me get this straight. Dragon Man gave you the partial plate number.”

  “Yes,” Garrett said. He did not mention his own sighting of the plate in the—dream. “And that dark blue Camaro on that page, with license plate TOR 963, is registered to a John McKenna, who was employed at the Pine Street landfill until June fourteenth, when he failed to show up for work and never came back.” He didn’t say it aloud, but if Tanith was right about three victims, that had been just a week before the first killing.

  The partners looked at each other silently from opposite sides of the room. “Whaddaya know . . .” Landauer said softly. “He got a sheet?”

  Garrett shook his head once. “Not to speak of. A drunk and disorderly last year, pled out; one DUI five years ago. High school dropout. Spotty employment history, mostly manual labor. But a homeowner,” he added. “Out in Lincoln. Not married.”

  Laudauer raised his eyebrows. “So he’s got himself some privacy.”

  They sat with it. Garrett’s eyes strayed to the printout of Mc-Kenna’s DMV photo: a red-bearded, stocky, hard-bitten man of forty-three. “A lost soul. Alone in the world,” Tanith’s voice whispered in his head.

  Landauer rubbed his jaw. “We’ve got a suspect in custody. Charged.”

  Garrett lifted his hands. “Could be nothing. We pay him a visit.”

  Landauer weighed it, nodded. “Okay, Rhett. It’s your rodeo.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Lincoln, Massachusetts, was a rural town in Middlesex County, west of Boston. The brilliance of the autumn leaves on the trees lining the highway made the journey feel like driving into a painting. Red and gold and amber and orange leaves swirled across the road in front of the Cavalier, giving Garrett an uneasy stabbing reminder that Halloween was mere days away.

  McKenna’s employee file contained a note that McKenna had not returned several phone calls made by the office manager to inquire after his whereabouts, and that there had been no machine to leave a message on. There still wasn’t, when Garrett tried the number himself. But according to the phone company the bills were still being paid, on auto-pay, as were the other utilities. His phone records would have to be subpoenaed for recent activity, but all indications were that McKenna was MIA.

  Landauer drove, as Garrett was still shaky from the lingering effects of belladonna. They did not speak for some time, while Landauer navigated west out of the city and onto Highway 2.

  As much as Garrett was trying not to think, the cattails along the side of the road kept reminding him of the crossed stalks of corn bound to the columns of Tanith’s store. He felt his face tighten and his gut roil with doubt, and he must have sighed or grunted because Landauer glanced over at him questioningly.

  Garrett shook his head. “Maybe this is all wrong. Cabarrus is a con artist. The fraud conviction. You were right: she’s been trying to insert herself into the investigation from the start.”

  Landauer was a beat slow in answering. “Except that we both know women don’t kill like that.”

  “I’m not so sure.” Garrett’s words tasted as bitter as they sounded. “This isn’t an ordinary woman. These weird rituals she does. The drugs. These young ‘clients’ of hers, coming in for spells. There’s no telling . . .” He stopped, staring blankly out at the cattails. “I never had any clue what she was capable of.”

  Landauer looked out the side window. After a moment he said, “You notice anything about me, last couple weeks?”

  Garrett looked at him, not understanding.

  Landauer waited. When Garrett said nothing, Land reached forward and slid open the ashtray in the dash. It was empty. It took Garrett a moment to register the significance.

  Landauer met his eyes for a moment, looked back at the road. “When was the last time you saw me with a butt in my hand?”

  Garrett’s mind raced wildly back through the last few days. But he’d seen Landauer with a cigarette, dozens . . .

  No, he realized. Holding a cigarette. Not lighting it. Not smoking it.

  “I haven’t had one since she walked into the office that day,” his partner said, not looking at him. “Fuck knows I’ve tried. I just can’t.”

  Now Garrett forced his mind back to the day in the bull pen: Landauer taunting Tanith: “Show me. Put a spell on me . . .” Tanith pulling the dagger from her blouse and cutting her finger . . . Landauer licking her blood . . .

  His partner was speaking again, his gaze fixed out the windshield. “I never thought anything could make me quit. Now, I don’t want it. Can’t do it. She says, ‘You’re done’—and I am.”

  Garrett stared at his partner. “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m sayin’ whatever she is, it’s not all bad.” He shrugged. “I’m never gonna repeat this to another living soul, but she mighta saved my life.” Then his face darkened. “If you ever say a word to Bette, so help me, I’ll kill you dead.”

  Garrett sat back against the seat and looked out at the flashing autumn colors of the trees, a blur of reds and oranges and ambers, like fire, like flight.

  The isolation of the town was an ominous factor, not a point in McKenna’s favor. A quaint Main Street gave way to old farm-style houses along a rural road with the distances between them growing larger and larger as the detectives drove on.

  McKenna’s house was outside the limits of what there was of the town, which a green-and-white population sign put at 9463. Landauer turned off a paved road to follow a dirt road through a barrier of trees that opened into what used to be farmland. The partners squinted through autumn sun at the house, an old Cape with paint peeling off the clapboards, a sagging porch. A junked car rested on its rims in the y
ard, and wind rustled through the elms, sending leaves swirling down like golden rain. As the partners got out of the car, Garrett saw a sludgy pond off the side of the house, and a shed with weathered, unpainted siding and double doors padlocked together. There was no sign of the dark blue Camaro.

  The grass around them was knee-high and Garrett found himself scanning for . . .

  Burned footprints . . .

  He shook off the image, wondering what he thought he was doing.

  As the partners started up toward the house, no dogs barked to warn of their approach, and there were no signs of any other animals, or people, or a working car or other vehicle, either. Rumpled curtains were drawn at all the visible windows.

  The porch steps creaked under Landauer’s bulk, a somehow ominous sound. He reached out for the doorbell. Surprisingly, the chime worked. The partners stood in the slight breeze as they waited in silence. Dry grass crackled in the fields around them. Garrett felt his stomach churn again, but it could have been the lingering effects of belladonna. The house didn’t feel occupied . . . and yet something was—

  Landauer frowned, squinting at the dirty screen door. “What the . . . ?” Abruptly he reached forward and pulled open the screen, to reveal a brown-red handprint smudged on the wood door beside the knob, with lines and whorls of fingerprints.

  No question. Dried blood.

  The partners looked at each other.

  Landauer leaned forward and pounded on the door with a meaty fist. The hollow booming echoed in the house. “Mr. McKenna, this is the police.” There was still no stirring, no sound.

  “McKenna’s missing . . .” Landauer pointed out. “Bloody handprint. Exigent circumstances. Reasonable suspicion of danger. I say we go in.”

  Garrett nodded in agreement. Both men unsnapped the holsters of their weapons.

  Landauer reached and grasped the doorknob. He frowned.