Chapter 42
The crucible could handle physical damage, but what Alex had been through was something different.
They got her tucked under the covers in the Dante bedroom and Dawes had him light a censer full of palo santo.
Darlington had expected a hunt through the archives for a spell or a ritual, but instead, Dawes gathered rosemary, rue, hyssop, water sweetened with honey.
“They’re cures for banishing evil spirits,” Dawes said. “Alex’s grandmother was from Salonika, and I thought the connection might help her heal.”
When she was settled, they joined Turner downstairs in the kitchen. He was sipping coffee at the small breakfast table, his jacket thrown over the back of his chair.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Sleeping,” Darlington said. “Beyond that, I don’t know.”
Dawes had started pulling different items from the pantry and the refrigerator.
“We can just order something,” he offered.
She cast him a disdainful glance. “I already planned duck for lunch and I’ll thank you not to start managing the meals in this house. What happened at the day care?”
“The demon was just too strong.”
Turner shook his head. “I didn’t realize they could feed from multiple souls at once.”
“None of us did,” Darlington admitted. “They’re adapting.”
Clever not smart. But clever could be more than enough.
“Whatever that was,” Turner said, “Alex can’t go in again.”
“What happened to being called?”
“Being called by God isn’t a guarantee. It just means you show up for the battle.”
Dawes slammed down a cutting board. “Stop talking about her like she’s Joan of Arc.”
But Turner wasn’t having it. “You know what this is and so does she. Whether you’re at Lethe or the PD. It doesn’t matter how corrupt or flawed the institution is. That doesn’t change the job. We are the shepherds.”
Darlington couldn’t hide his surprise. “You’re quoting the Lethe handbook?”
“You think I didn’t read it before I said yes to all this?
Cover to cover. I thought you were all playacting, kids in a parking lot with a Ouija board, trying to feel powerful.
But I took the job and I intend to get it done.
The next monster that comes through could come after my mother or my brother.
” He gestured to Dawes. “Or your sister in Westport. I’m not going to let that happen. ”
Dawes set down her knife. “There’s a half-moon on Thursday.”
“And?” said Turner.
“It’s a night of portent,” Darlington explained. “A tipping point, when light and dark exist in equilibrium. It’s the right time to bring the artifacts together.”
“Did you call Penny?” Dawes asked.
Darlington did his best not to squirm. “I texted her. She seemed willing enough.”
“I bet.”
“She’s in Scroll and Key?” Turner asked.
“She was,” Darlington said. “Now she’s on their board. She can get me in.”
A silence seemed to crowd into the kitchen, filling the room.
As hard as things had been, they had somehow gotten used to that reality—waiting for the chimes, hunting demons, studying the puzzle the first pilgrims had left behind, hoping for a little more knowledge.
But there would be no sudden moment of clarity, no assurance from on high that they knew the right path forward, that the artifacts were legitimate, that the golem was benevolent, that there really was a way out of this.
They had no choice but to hurl themselves into the dark and hope a path would appear before them.
It was Turner who spoke first. “There’s something I want to show you before our meeting this afternoon.”
“What meeting?” Dawes asked.
“At Skull and Bones,” Darlington said. “There’s a good chance they’re responsible for Turner’s drowning victim.”
Dawes hacked at an innocent carrot. “Are we sure that’s wise right now?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. They didn’t need attention from the societies or the Lethe board. “But I’m not sure there will ever be a right time.”
“There’s a pattern,” Turner said. “I’m more sure of it than ever. I didn’t just look at missing persons. I looked at unsolved homicides, suicides, accidental deaths. This is going all the way back to the late 1800s, when they started keeping real records.”
“You said Kylie Sanz was out partying with friends the night she went missing,” Darlington said. “Was that a Thursday?”
“No, stay with me here, because they don’t make it that easy. I got to thinking about Jennie Cramer and how muddy the timeline around her disappearance ended up. It was a big advantage for the Malleys’ defense at her trial.”
First the handbook and now this. Not so long ago Turner would have dismissed anything a delegate of Lethe brought to him. Instead, he’d taken the possibility of a connection to the old case seriously.
“Kylie Sanz’s blood alcohol was off the charts, and she was on a party boat, so the answers seemed obvious. She drank too much, did something stupid, and her friends were too wasted to realize she’d gone over the side.”
“But the evidence says otherwise.”
Turner nodded. “She disappeared off that boat on Tuesday. I don’t know where she went but her body wasn’t found until Saturday. I think she died on a Thursday.”
“Rituals don’t have to be performed on Thursday nights,” Dawes noted. “It’s only done that way because of tradition.”
“But if you didn’t want Lethe looking over your shoulder? Darlington and Alex are occupied every Thursday night. The societies know exactly where they’ll be. That’s the perfect time to run a secret ritual—unsanctioned and unsupervised.”
“What about the finger?” Darlington asked. “The one Reiter made Mercy give to Alex. Even if we can’t run DNA or fingerprints—”
“We don’t need to,” said Turner. “I thought it looked familiar, but it took me a minute to put it together.” He drew a file out of his briefcase and set it down on the table.
Dawes wiped her hands and joined them.
A mugshot was clipped to the first page. A young man with a shaved head stared back at them, his skin fish-belly white, his eyes bored and sullen.
“Teddy Rinearson,” said Turner. “Serial loser. In and out of lockup for petty theft, vandalism, public intoxication, and assault. Every time he came through we had to clear his possessions, and the one thing Teddy never, ever hocked was his dad’s class ring.
I remembered it because Carmichael loved to bet Notre Dame, and I’d never seen a Notre Dame ring.
Teddy hasn’t enjoyed our hospitality for over a year.
Now it’s possible he went straight or that he skipped town and became somebody else’s problem.
But I don’t believe any of that. I think Teddy Rinearson is buried under Linus Reiter’s rosebushes at Sweetwell, and for some reason he wanted us to know it. ”
Turner set another file on the table.
“Who is she?” Dawes asked as she flipped the folder open.
“A Jane Doe. The ME put her age at around eighty. She was found frozen to death, sitting on a bench by the Pardee Seawall. She had no ID and she didn’t match any missing persons descriptions.
Again, the answers seemed obvious, just like with Kylie and that party boat.
Older woman, living on the street, doesn’t have any place to shelter for the night, dies from exposure. It happens.”
Darlington’s eyes scanned the page, seeking the answer. “What didn’t add up?”
“Her clothes were dirty, but she was clean, spotless really. No missing teeth. Her feet and hands were well cared for—the nails were yellow but clipped. There were no callouses, no grime. You don’t stay that way sleeping rough.
So I thought, okay, maybe she was a resident at a shelter or enrolled in a program.
Or maybe she was new to the hard life. She got evicted or maybe she’s a dementia patient that wandered off.
It was around Valentine’s Day and I remember going to all the retirement homes, seeing the decorations up.
Depressed the hell out of me. But there was no record of her and no one knew her.
I kept hitting dead ends, and eventually we had to move on.
Until I start looking through all these old missing persons cases and I come across a teenager who went missing in Mystic right around Valentine’s Day. ”
“A teenager?” Dawes asked.
“I know. Only seventeen. No possible connection.”
“Unless you know about magic,” murmured Darlington.
“I pulled their dental records, for the missing girl and for our elderly Jane Doe.”
Darlington pushed his chair back from the table. “And they matched.”
“They did. You told me what happened to Theo. Is this another demon at work?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“But you know what this is.”
Darlington met Dawes’s gaze. He didn’t want to believe it. The rest of Turner’s cases were mostly speculation, easy enough to dismiss if you wanted to. Not this one.
“It has to be Manuscript,” he said at last. They specialized in mirror magic, perception, beauty, influence. They could make or unmake superstars, quash scandals, stage comebacks.
Dawes was nodding. “They have plenty of youth glamours at their disposal, but they’re unstable. They don’t last much beyond a film shoot or an awards show. For something lasting…”
“They needed a sacrifice,” Turner finished. “So they went out and found one.”
But it was worse than that. “They didn’t actually need to. You can run a zhàn fàng glamour on a group, where each person contributes just a few years of their youth.”
“Instead of one person giving it all up?”
“That’s right.”
But why bother giving up a little when you could simply take everything for yourself?
No one had ever connected the death of the Bridegroom and his fiancée to a botched society ritual.
It had been written off as a murder-suicide.
Years before that Charles Baxter had been found with a scarab on his tongue and his scrotum burned to a lump of charcoal.
The only reason his body had been discovered was a freak storm that had shaken loose the soil on East Rock and sent his naked corpse tumbling onto a hiking trail.
And before that Bathsheba Smith had been found in the basement of the old medical school, stolen from her tomb.
The result had been a riot during which the good people of New Haven came close to burning the Yale campus to the ground.
Bodies raised questions; they became evidence. They led to public attention, investigations, long trials, media coverage. But if they were never found?
Darlington had accepted that Lethe was an empty promise, and he was no longer sure if he had ever really believed in the mission of the Ninth House or if he had simply been making excuses to be near magic.
Assassinations, influence campaigns, the swaying of outcomes in everything from Super Bowls to elections to wars to crop yields.
If those were the rituals on the books, what might the societies be doing off of them?
Murders or mistakes, these killings had continued, and Lethe had let it happen.
“Kittscher said they wouldn’t be missed,” Dawes said. “The people the pilgrims had to murder to walk the Gauntlet. Their lives were the price of admission.”
Where had they come from? Where had they been buried?
There were portals. Spells to hasten decomposition.
He’d watched his own parents consumed by hellfire.
They’d left nothing behind but a tangle of debt and a Manhattan brownstone buried beneath a massive mortgage.
Alex’s father had wanted her to disappear too, a liability to be wiped from the ledger.
“How much do you think Lethe knows?” Turner asked.
“Remember what I told you about institutional memory?” Darlington said.
“If you’re trying to get away with murder, that’s a feature, not a flaw.
We can’t be sure what anyone involved knows, not with all those prohibitions on students and alumni.
If this is all true, if Reiter isn’t just playing games with us, the societies have been getting away with this for a long time. ”
Turner tapped the files. “One of the things you learn about a perp is that, once they kill, it’s that much more likely they’ll kill again. Break a taboo and it stays broken. We can’t do anything about all the cases that might have come before.”
Darlington made himself look into the face of Teddy Rinearson, only twenty-five and buried in an unmarked grave. Had his father hoped his boy would go to Notre Dame? Did he still hope one day his son would call?
“We don’t have a warrant,” said Turner. “Anything we learn at Bones won’t be admissible in a court of law.”
Dawes touched her fingers to the Jane Doe’s file, as if she could offer comfort when the time for that had long since passed. “The alumni will close ranks to discredit us.”
“I still want to know,” said Turner.
“Me too,” said Dawes.
“Do you have Kylie’s file?” Darlington asked. “Photos?” At Turner’s nod, he said, “Meet me outside. I need something from the armory.”