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  “How many customers today?”

  Landauer grimaced. “They average 2,250 a day.”

  Garrett’s heart sank. “So this morning . . .”

  “Over nine hundred by noon. Got a patrolman getting Closed Mouth Mary to write down every make, model, and color she can remember, but we’re not talking rocket scientist here. And yeah, she collected a few checks, but it’s mostly a cash business. I don’t think we’ll be pulling devil-boy’s name and coordinates off one of those stubs.”

  The big detective paused, puffed in smoke. “There is something, though.” He exhaled a noxious cloud and nodded up the trash mountain in the direction of the body. The sun was sinking in the sky, throwing long shadows over the hills. “That whole area was scheduled to be capped this morning—they bulldoze dumploads of dirt, cover it up, level it off.” He indicated a high heap of dirt on the flat road above the trash pit. “Thing is, this morning the front-loader broke down, threw the schedule off.” He pointed to the gigantic vehicle next to the pit.

  “So she would have been completely covered if there hadn’t been that glitch,” Garrett said slowly. She wasn’t meant to be found. And that meant carving the numbers and symbol was a private ritual, not meant for anyone else to see.

  “He’s familiar with the operation and schedule of this particular landfill, then,” he said aloud with cautious excitement. “A worker, or landscaper or contractor.”

  “That’s the best case,” Landauer said with a nod. “The catch is, a lot of these loads that get emptied are from Dumpsters that get picked up all over the city. Someone coulda just tossed her in the nearest one of those—it gets picked up—and she gets dumped out with the rest of the trash. The Dumpster trucks back up to the pit and are emptied hydraulically, so the driver wouldn’t even see what he was dumping.”

  Garrett fought a wave of disappointment. “What about the guy who found her?”

  “Worker who came up to repair the dozer.”

  Garrett’s eyes immediately traced the distance between the bulldozer and the body far below. A hundred yards, minimum. Landauer watched him calculating.

  “Guy’s got good eyes,” Garrett said slowly.

  “Says he saw seagulls fighting over something,” Landauer offered, his voice flat.

  Garrett glanced at his partner sharply. “You don’t believe him?” In fact, the gulls were still circling above, hoping to return to their interrupted meal.

  Landauer spat. His face was neutral. “Guy’s skittish, that’s all.”

  Garrett found the mechanic in the office trailer. He sat in front of a raggedy corkboard bristling with invoices and flyers, his hands tearing apart a whitefoam coffee cup, a precise quarter inch at a time. He was short and built like a bull, with dark copper skin and an Aztec nose. He hunched in the metal folding chair as if trying to disappear into it.

  Garrett’s Spanish was serviceable, but the bilingual version of Severo’s story was identical to what Landauer had related in English. Landauer was right, though; the Mexican was decidedly jumpy—eyes shifting around the room, sweating profusely even in the cold of the underheated trailer.

  “Tienes calor?” Garrett asked. Are you hot? The lone space heater was on the other side of the room; Garrett couldn’t feel any heat coming from it at all.

  “Poco,” the mechanic said, and his eyes shifted away again. His fingers found the cross at his neck.

  “You seem nervous,” Garrett remarked in Spanish.

  The mechanic half shrugged. “It is a terrible thing,” he answered.

  “It is,” Garrett agreed. “Una infamia.” An outrage. It was one of the first Spanish words he’d learned on the street and it seemed to express what he felt better than any English word that existed.

  “Pero—es todo?” Garrett pressed. Is that all? The mechanic dropped his eyes. Garrett looked at the litter of white chips at the man’s feet. “I think you are afraid,” Garrett challenged.

  The mechanic stiffened, but said nothing.

  “Porque?” Garrett demanded. Why?

  The mechanic glanced toward the screened front window, in the direction of the trash hill. The sun was a bloody crimson ball on the horizon.

  “Bruja,” he mumbled, and Garrett’s flesh rippled again.

  Witch.

  Chapter Three

  It was dark by the time they arrived back at police headquarters, One Schroeder Plaza, in Lower Roxbury. The neighborhood’s dirty sidewalks and barred windows and shady denizens were living, blighted proof that not all of Boston had been transformed by gentrification.

  Garrett had put in a call to Lieutenant Malloy from the landfill office, requesting a conference with Dr. Frazer, the forensic psychiatrist, in attendance. If they could make a convincing case that the killing had the earmarks of a serial, it would expedite lab tests and move their Jane Doe (who was not, as it turned out, irradiated) to the head of the autopsy line. The lieutenant’s office had called on the ride back informing them that Dr. Frazer would not be available until the next day, and with the order to meet the lieutenant in the conference room as soon as they returned.

  Garrett and Landauer headed across the lobby, an expanse of polished stone that had earned the relatively new, glass-and-granite building the nickname “the Marble Palace.” Just before they stepped into the elevator, Garrett got the call: the State Police responding that there were no females of Jane Doe’s age range reported missing in the state in the last week. Garrett punched off, shaking his head at Landauer, who mumbled an expletive.

  Lieutenant Malloy was already in the second-floor conference room, seated rigidly at the head of the table as the detectives walked in. Garrett as always braced himself as he stepped across the threshold; relations between Garrett and the lieutenant had become increasingly strained as Garrett’s solve stats climbed.

  He took a breath and stopped at the end of the table. “Lieutenant, I just need five minutes to put out a wider Missing Persons search—”

  “We know who she is,” Malloy cut him off.

  The older man slid a printout of a scanned photo across the table. Garrett stepped to the edge of the table and looked down. The photo was a high-quality portrait of a girl with shining blond hair and blue eyes, the face and figure and clothes of a prom queen. A society girl. “Erin Carmody,” the lieutenant said, and waited for the name to sink in.

  “Carmody,” Landauer repeated. “W. P. Carmody? Aw, hell.”

  Hell is right, Garrett thought, and wondered briefly why this should be any more distressing than the killing of any young woman, a waitress, a prostitute. W. P. Carmody was the corporate and family name of a major Boston office supply company that the original William Carmody had started in the 1860s as a rubber stamp company, offering free delivery by horse and wagon. The modern corporation was the official paper goods supplier of the Boston Red Sox, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the New York Yankees, sponsored the postgame show after Red Sox games, and had built a state-of-the-art gymnasium at the current William Carmody’s alma mater, Amherst.

  They weren’t going to have to worry about expediting any lab work, now. But everything had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

  “She was a sophomore at Amherst,” Malloy said, his spit-and-polish formality seeming even more brittle than usual. “Her roommate called her parents this afternoon to say that Erin didn’t come home last night and she hadn’t seen her all day. Carmody called an hour ago. The daughter is eighteen, five-six, 116 pounds.”

  “Hell,” Landauer said again, in confirmation, staring down at the photo.

  The lieutenant didn’t say so, but Garrett imagined Carmody had called him directly. Either the lieutenant, or maybe the police commissioner himself.

  Malloy was speaking. “Carmody’s on his way over to the M.E.’s office to do the ID.” He looked across the table at Garrett grimly. “How bad is it?”

  Garrett shook his head. “As bad as it can be.”

  There was a heavy silence in the room. They all knew
how bad it could be.

  “Rape?” the lieutenant asked, tightly.

  “Blood on her thighs and pubic region,” Garrett said. “But the kill looks quick.” That, at least, was a relief to say. “A single stab wound at sternum level, from the back. The decapitation was postmortem. There were . . . ritualistic aspects.”

  “Ritualistic how?” The lieutenant’s voice had an ominous edge.

  Garrett and Landauer exchanged a glance. Malloy was a devout Catholic, the protégé of a highly religious former mayor, and Garrett knew the mere suggestion of satanism was going to chafe. “There are symbols carved into the body,” Garrett said. “We’ll have to research it, but it looks occult.” He reached for a pad of paper and drew a rough approximation of the three triangles, the number 333.

  The lieutenant looked both outraged and skeptical, and with good reason. In truth, crimes with “occult” elements rarely had anything to do with satanism or witchcraft. Despite a wave of purportedly satanic crimes in the 1980s, and another rash of “satanic ritual abuse” cases in the nineties that were exposed as mass hysteria, so-called occult crimes generally turned out to be clumsy postmortem attempts to mislead investigators and disguise the much more mundane motives of the real killers or, in a few infamous cases, were misidentified as occult by overzealous authorities.

  “It wasn’t done for show,” Garrett clarified. “We think he didn’t expect the body to be found. This was his own private deal. And he’s definitely organized; there was planning here. He’s not going to present as a raving nutcase. I’ll set up a psych consult with Dr. Frazer ASAP.”

  The lieutenant sat back, and his face was stony. “This is going to be as high profile as it gets. Everything you do will be under scrutiny.” The look he gave Garrett fairly shouted that he didn’t think Garrett was up to it.

  Garrett suppressed a surge of anger, kept his tone neutral. “We’re on it.” He hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Lieutenant, this kind of sex killing . . . there are probably going to be more. If there haven’t been already.”

  “Don’t speculate,” the lieutenant snapped. “I don’t need to hear any hunches, and I don’t need any creative ideas from you, Detective Garrett. I want this by the book—textbook.”

  “Yes sir,” Garrett said, fighting an urge to deck his superior officer.

  “Meet Carmody at the morgue. With kid gloves on.” Malloy stood, dismissing them.

  “Yeah, he loves your ass,” Landauer said sardonically as soon as they were out the door.

  “Wants me bad,” Garrett agreed. Landauer flipped him an affectionate bird and ambled off for a smoke break while Garrett headed back toward the homicide room, brooding.

  Malloy was the kind of Catholic Garrett had always despised: prudish, self-righteous, a Bible-thumper. Probably thinks I’m headed straight for hell.

  Then again, Garrett all too often had that effect on older authority figures.

  He knew it was his own ambition that rankled; he wore it on his sleeve. But he couldn’t help himself. It was something about Boston, the city itself, that inspired greatness, that demanded greatness, something beyond the ordinary. The gleaming gold of the State House dome, the cathedrals, Faneuil Hall, the ever-present ghosts of giants: Revere, Adams, Thoreau, the Kennedys—the history of extraordinary human achievement was thrust in your face from the time you were a kid: sports heroes, political heroes, authors, philosophers, presidents.

  Being a beat cop had been enough for Garrett’s father. It was not enough for him.

  He turned a corner and slowed. A blonde in a Givenchy suit was striding toward him, with the devastating legs of a runway model and the confidence of a CEO. She was all the way down the hall but he could feel a wave of heat, seeing her: Carolyn Davenport, assistant DA for Suffolk County. Male heads swiveled in her wake and Garrett was hit with an uncomfortable wash of pride, possessiveness, and unease.

  He couldn’t quite believe he was with her: heiress, star prosecutor, on a lightning track to a political career, following in her senator father’s footsteps. She and Garrett had fallen into bed (actually, against the wall) one night after a case he’d headed and she’d prosecuted, a triple homicide. He’d had more than his share of cop groupies and was aware of his own appeal to women: a cop’s rough-edged masculinity tempered with vestiges of altar-boy innocence, a fair education thrown in to sweeten the pot. And Carolyn had clearly been looking for a little walk on the wild side, which Garrett, no fool, was more than happy to provide, but he’d never expected her to stick. Her family money and pedigree put her way out of his league—he’d thought. But she’d seen something in him, a diamond in the rough, a restless drive that would take him out of the streets. On good days Garrett didn’t even feel like a project, but that maybe, just maybe, it was possible to grab the brass ring and ride the carousel all the way . . .

  She reached him, stopped a few paces in front of him, a professional distance away, feet planted, accusing. “You didn’t call me,” she said, lovely, pissed off.

  “We caught a case today—” he started.

  “You didn’t call me about the case.”

  It hit him what she meant. She wanted it.

  “We didn’t know what we had at first . . .” he said lamely. A lie. The truth was that he hadn’t thought of her at all.

  She fixed him with a cool blue gaze. “It’s a serial, isn’t it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, I’m on it. The school connection.” It took Garrett a second to remember that Carolyn had gone to Amherst, Erin’s college, before Harvard Law. “And of course, a woman’s touch.” She smiled at him, but he could see she was still put out about not getting the call directly from him.

  “You think it’s going to be kosher for you to take it—even though—”

  “Even though what?” There was a warning note in her voice.

  “Us,” he said, holding her eyes.

  She gave him a tolerant look. “Don’t you worry about the office. That’s my job.” He felt a flash of irritation at her certainty. It was inbred, a birthright . . . no one had ever denied her anything.

  There was no actual rule against cops and prosecutors fraternizing, but any hint of impropriety could be risky on a big case like this, and he felt a sharp reluctance to jeopardize this one in any way. But Carolyn had pull, to put it mildly.

  He glanced away. “I’m meeting the father.”

  Carolyn nodded, already briefed. “I’ll see him after the ID. The family needs to know we’re going to do everything, here.”

  He gave her a strange look. “Of course.”

  Her voice dropped without her face or posture changing, and he felt a thrill at her sultry tone. “Call me tonight, then.”

  “It’ll be late.” He tried to keep his voice even.

  She half smiled. “Of course.”

  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, contr
olled 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.