Page 118 of Dead Beat

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.”

43

Darlington was shocked to see Tripp coming down the stairs.

“Were you in Alex’s room?” he asked.

Tripp scoffed unconvincingly. “Of course not.”

“What are you doing up here?”

“Running an errand.”

“For Dawes?”

“Why are you giving me a hard time?” Tripp said. “I’m always in the house.”

“Please don’t act as if that’s something I approve of even if I agreed to it.”

“Why can’t you just treat me like a person?”

“Because you’re not a person.”

“Are you?”