Page 117 of Dead Beat

“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.”