Book of Shadows (5 page)

•
Research into Satanic Coven activities has revealed that 333 is being used as a New World Order hypnotic keyword . . .

•
WARNING: Can such noble aims and desires be thwarted by Satan? Why would the Abyss then have a gematria number of 333 and the man have a number of . . .

•
In certain Black Magick Satanic rituals, a key participant is often heard chanting “333—333” at the end of the ritual . . .

•
Satanic 333 Skyscraper Looks Down on Useless Feeders and Slaves

•
Erstwhile Satanic Master, I am sent into the 333 current for Choronzon to use against the Paradigm . . .

Garrett sat back, feeling as if he needed a serious shower.

A voice above him barked, “Hey. Dreamboy.” Garrett started, looked up to find Laudauer grinning down at him. “Talked to the roommate up in Amherst. She says Erin was on her way out to a club on Kenmore Square last night.” Landauer gave him a look of sly triumph. “Get this. The club’s called Cauldron.”

835 Beacon Street, Kenmore Square. The neighborhood was shady, with junkies and crack whores lurking in the shadows of the three-story building: a warehouse, with its few windows painted black from the inside and no identifying signage. An enormous bouncer hovered at the door with beefy bare arms crossed, dressed in a black hood and studded leathers like a medieval executioner. Garrett and Landauer flashed tin at him and walked past the
DRESS CODE ENFORCED
sign into the castlelike gloom of Cauldron. They stood in the black-lit entry hall with the pulse of synthesizers throbbing through them, blinking as their eyes adjusted to the dark. The walls around them were a bloody red; the ceiling two stories above was crisscrossed with ghostly lengths of white cheesecloth. Black leather booths and a few counters with high stools ringed the walls; the booths were framed in iron with heavy crimson drapes, some of which were already drawn across the entrances, creating cocoons of privacy. Four huge black columns sectioned off the packed dance floor; dozens of heavy linked chains hung from the ceiling, surrounding the dancers in a cagelike cube. The dense crowd of young patrons was costumed to the hilt; makeup
ran down their sweating faces like black tears as they undulated inside the chains.

The two detectives moved through the roar of the crowd, reeling at the assault of pulsing music, lasers, and flickering silent German Expressionist films projected on several walls, with their crooked buildings and monstrous shadows. Young people dressed in leather, chain mail, even dragon wings, milled and drank and slouched on large black cubes. A stocky long-haired blond man at one of the tall tables was completely naked, his entire body painted bright blue. A young woman with candy-apple red hair sidled by them, wearing only strips of wide red vinyl tape across her breasts and pelvis.

Garrett heard Landauer mutter beside him, “Freak, freak, freak-azoid . . .” Garrett looked at his partner and saw equal parts of lust and loathing on his face. He himself could feel the throb of the music through his body, down to his pelvis, an insistent, sexual pulse.

His own taste in music ran to classic rock, on the Irish side: U2, the Pogues, Van the Man, of course the Stones, who were Irish in spirit. But he’d always been drawn to the haunting music of The Cure, whose dark and driving “M” he recognized playing now.

As he paused to listen, the pounding of the music turned into something else, a feeling of . . . import, almost of being watched. Garrett turned in the crowd, staring through the flashing lights and flickering projections . . .

Landauer nudged his arm, breaking the spell, and nodded toward the long oval bar. The partners split up, moving to opposite sides. Garrett stepped between two bar stools, his eyes taking in a banner above the mirror advertising an upcoming
SAMHAIN PARTY—Bands All Night, Costume Contests.
The corseted magenta-haired barkeep gave him a bold and appreciative once-over before Garrett leaned across the bar and flashed his badge, forcing himself to keep his eyes well above her pushed-up breasts.

“Boston PD,” he shouted, and put Erin’s photo on the glossy wood. “Did you see this girl in here last night?”

The bartender squinted with raccoon eyes, shrugged. “Wearing what?” she shouted back.

Garrett looked over the room, the wildly costumed patrons. The bartender had a point; their own parents wouldn’t know them. He glanced down at the blond girl in the photo and had a moment of disconnect.
What was a girl like Erin, a textbook preppie, doing in a place like this to begin with?

It seemed highly unlikely, yet he knew well enough that teenagers and college students had worlds of secrets they kept from their parents, and even the closest families might have no clue what was going on with their progeny.

Another thought occurred to him as he looked back at the corseted bartender, her lush breasts lifted and displayed as if on a plate.

Was Erin also dressed in some kind of fetish wear last night? Did the killer mistake her for a prostitute, an easy victim?
Hookers and runaways were the number one choice of target for sexual predators and serial murderers; they were easy to grab and almost never missed. And Cauldron was in a notoriously bad neighborhood, the perfect stalking ground for an opportunistic killer.

Or was the killer right here in the club with her?

As Garrett thought it, he felt again the unmistakable sensation of eyes on the back of his neck, someone watching him. His whole skin prickled, and he whipped around to stare into the undulating crowd.

Dozens of alien-looking faces gazed back at him expressionlessly, a congregation of the damned.

The sense of presence was strong, but any watcher was perfectly camouflaged in the masses; everyone in the room looked capable of ritualistic murder.

Garrett shook his head and turned back to the bartender, who shot him another lazily inviting look. He ignored the look, and with more difficulty the breasts, as he took back Erin’s photo, then turned and scanned the room more slowly, his head vibrating with the music. His gaze stopped on the DJ booth and the shadowy dreadlocked figure working in the cold blue light of an overhead spot. The black-haired young man behind the turntables was half Johnny Depp, half vampire, with an Elizabethan shirt open to his waist and a silver pirate skull around his neck. His cool mascaraed
eyes didn’t miss a trick as he surveyed the dance floor from the elevated booth.

Garrett started across the floor, and the music segued into an eerie set of guitar chords, with ghostly lyricless vocals layered on top . . . the haunting opening of “Gimme Shelter” . . . as familiar to him as a prayer and as incongruous and as fitting in the setting as any song he could imagine. The dancers around him slowed their feet, swaying hypnotically to the dreamlike spell of the music. After a moment Garrett kept moving, weaving through writhing couples who turned slowly to look at him with pale, painted faces as he made his way forward. He approached the stairs and lifted his gaze to the sound booth. The booth was plastered in band flyers and posters; Garrett’s eyes flicked over unfamiliar names: Incus. Scissorkeep. Nitzer Ebb. Rasputina. There were a few he recognized: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Christian Death, Sisters of Mercy, Ministry.

DJ Depp’s eyes grazed over Garrett, and though it was more than clear Johnny Boy knew a cop when he saw one, Garrett gave him the obligatory “Boston PD” and badge routine, shouting over the music. The DJ nodded, and looked over the photo that Garrett extended. Garrett gave him a beat to take Erin in, and asked, “Was she here this week?”

The DJ didn’t hesitate. “Last night. Vanilla, but good dancer.”

Garrett felt a rush of anticipation at the sudden, unexpected break. “Was she with someone?”

The DJ’s hands moved over the sound board in time to the music, making several minute adjustments to the sound levels as he spoke. “Yeah. A regular. Guitarist. Prepster gone bad.”

“Got a name?” Garrett found himself holding his breath. The DJ paused, then turned to the wall of posters behind him, pulled a glossy flyer down. Garrett took it, stared down at the photo image of four sullen, black-haired, black-clad musicians, shot from above in distorted fisheye, posed close, with faces raised skyward under a large inverted cross.

The DJ pointed to one of the pale, upturned faces. “Moncrief. Jason.”

Garrett made a quick phone call from the relative quiet of the restroom corridor. The DMV check gave Jason Moncrief’s address as Morris Pratt Hall, Amherst College. Erin’s dorm. The throbbing music segued into another dark piece with a ghostly Irish influence as Garrett found Landauer in the Cauldron crowd and filled him in, shouting over the banshee wail of violins and harmonica. He watched Landauer’s eyes take on a sudden gleam in the dark.

“What do you think?” Garrett shouted into his partner’s ear.

“Hell, yeah, let’s go,” Landauer shouted back.

Garrett looked up at the massive, Gothic clock face on the wall. It was already half past midnight and a good hour and a half drive up to Amherst, and it was too much to hope (
Too easy
floated through his brain again) that they could make an arrest that night. But if there was even a remote possibility, they would do whatever it took. College students were apt to be up at all hours on a Saturday night, anyway, and there was much that could be useful about questioning a witness/potential suspect who had been awakened from a sound sleep.

The partners wound their way back through the gyrating crowd and ordered large coffees to go from the corseted bartender, who
flipped Garrett a suggestive “Come again,” before they turned away from the bar and headed for the road.

The road to Amherst was a dark and misty highway, the thick forest an oppressive tunnel around them: nothing but the dark silhouettes of trees and the occasional roar of a big rig at this hour. At the wheel, Garrett swilled coffee and stared out the windshield at the reflecting center line, his only guide through the drifting fog. Landauer smoked cigarette after cigarette; Garrett could feel lung cancer taking root from the secondhand smoke, and thought for the ten millionth time that he had to put a stop to it, somehow, soon . . .

But not tonight.

He hit the window button and let the cool night air blow against his face.

Garrett had lived in Massachusetts his entire life, but had never been to the town of Amherst until a month ago, on a weekend trip with Carolyn when she’d been a guest speaker at the summer session. He remembered uncomfortably that the trip had not gone well. Amherst was Carolyn’s alma mater, one of the most prestigious and elitist institutions in the country. Garrett admitted to a chip on his shoulder about his education: a BA in Criminal Justice at the truculently blue-collar U Mass, Boston, and he was the first of his father’s side of the family to finish an undergraduate degree at all. Amherst was U Mass’s opposite in every way, a rarefied world Garrett had never been part of, and it grated on him to see Carolyn so obviously in her element, speaking as an intimate to the sons and daughters of the richest men in the state, taking her privilege as a God-given right. Garrett had made unfortunate quips about blue blood and silver spoons and consequently there’d been “no dancing,” as Elvis Costello used to snarl euphemistically, that supposedly romantic weekend.

Garrett suddenly remembered that Carolyn was expecting him sometime that evening, and grabbed for his cell phone. He got her voice mail and left an update that was more professional than personal, but utterly failed to fool Landauer, who waggled his tongue
lewdly and pumped his hips like a spastic sixteen-year-old before lighting up yet another Camel and dropping his head back against the headrest, closing his eyes as he smoked.

Garrett punched off the phone and drained the last of his coffee, watching the signs for the Amherst turnoff and brooding about Carolyn and Erin. Both blond and beautiful, children of wealth—and now it seemed their best lead was, too.

Landauer suddenly spoke. “You know the part I don’t want to think about?” He crushed out his cigarette, stared out the passenger window into the rush of dark. “What’s he doing with the head and one hand?”

Garrett felt his stomach tighten. He didn’t want to know.

Sprawled on a hill overlooking the tiny, pastoral town, the college offered a breathtaking, panoramic view of blue sky and the Holyoke mountain range by day. But by night the campus was decidedly ominous, with turn-of-the-century lampposts beaming diffuse light through swirling fog, and footpaths gleaming in pale ribbons down the steep hills, under ghostly twisting trees.

Morris Pratt Hall loomed over a moonlit circle of lawn, a four-story nineteenth-century brick building. Farther up a hill a church spire stood oddly alone, a vaguely dangerous-looking needle with no church attached.

The detectives got out of the car and looked up through tree branches at the tall facade of the dorm. It was 2:00
A.M.
, but more than a dozen rooms on the side of the building they were facing were still lit up. Garrett started to shut his car door, then at the last moment, even though he was already armed, he reached into the backseat and grabbed the Taser that BPD issued all its officers, but which Garrett rarely carried. Landauer looked across the car roof questioningly and Garrett shrugged as he clipped it to his hip.