Chapter Thirty-six

Garrett had never before, in any way, experienced any doubts about reality. The very idea that reality could be in question had never occurred to him. He found himself now in a profound state of unsettlement, something he didn’t like at all.

He circled his living room in the subdued light of dawn, checking the windows and door again. They were all locked, as they had been since he’d awakened.

You were drugged. Get over it, he ordered himself as he poured and drank cup after cup of coffee, alternating with whole bottles of water at a time, hoping to flush the residuals of the psychotropic from his system.

And possibly it was more than the drugs. The woman is an expert hypnotist. If she could do what she did with the Dragon Man, she could induce hallucinations. Or memories, even.

So his mind said. His body, though . . . his body felt as sore as if . . .

As if he had flown.

It felt real. It all feels real.

When the night’s dream stubbornly refused to fade from his mind, he sat down at his computer and Googled “atropine” and “belladonna.”

After a half hour of clicking through articles, he sat back in his chair, limp with relief. Every personal and medical account he’d read of experiences with belladonna reported the same symptoms: hallucinations of flying so real that at the time the subject was convinced that he or she had actually flown. He had also found an article documenting the use of belladonna in a ritual known as sex magick, in which orgasm was the trigger for hallucinatoric flight.

“Nothing but drugs,” Garrett muttered, his voice sounding hollow.

And yet, the Camaro. There was something about it that gnawed at him. It had seemed, in a hallucination of hyper-clarity, particularly real, and significant.

Look, Tanith’s voice whispered in his mind, and he felt the sound in his whole body.

He swiveled in his chair, rotating away from the desk. The chair came to a slow stop, facing the dining-room table.

And the murder book.

Tanith standing naked in the moonlight, holding the open book out toward him . . .

Garrett stood and crossed to the book. He opened the stiff blue cover, flipped through pages—and stopped on a witness report from the landfill, the list of makes and models of cars that the landfill’s office manager had made.

Garrett scanned the list, and his index finger stopped on a line.

Dark blue Camaro.

There were no license plates noted; the list was only the office manager’s recollection of the cars she had let through the gate that day.

Garrett stared into space, then pawed over the scattered files and notepads on the table. He stopped still . . . lunged forward and seized one battered notebook: his scribbled notes from Tanith’s session with the Dragon Man.

He paged back and stopped again—on the partial plate number the Dragon Man had given her: TOR 9.

And he had a sudden, shocking vision of the plate that he had seen in the flying dream: TOR 963.

One call to the DMV later, and one to the Pine Street landfill office, and then Garrett was in the shower, under water as hot as he could get it, trying to steam the cobwebs out of his head.

He dressed, and finally felt steady enough to call Landauer. “I’ve got something weird,” he said into the phone.

“What else is new?” came the inevitable response.

Garrett didn’t laugh.

Landauer sighed through the phone. “Ah, fuck.”

Forty minutes later Land was slouched on Garrett’s sofa, legs sprawled, staring down at a sheet of paper. “Let me get this straight. Dragon Man gave you the partial plate number.”

“Yes,” Garrett said. He did not mention his own sighting of the plate in the—dream. “And that dark blue Camaro on that page, with license plate TOR 963, is registered to a John McKenna, who was employed at the Pine Street landfill until June fourteenth, when he failed to show up for work and never came back.” He didn’t say it aloud, but if Tanith was right about three victims, that had been just a week before the first killing.

The partners looked at each other silently from opposite sides of the room. “Whaddaya know . . .” Landauer said softly. “He got a sheet?”

Garrett shook his head once. “Not to speak of. A drunk and disorderly last year, pled out; one DUI five years ago. High school dropout. Spotty employment history, mostly manual labor. But a homeowner,” he added. “Out in Lincoln. Not married.”

Laudauer raised his eyebrows. “So he’s got himself some privacy.”

They sat with it. Garrett’s eyes strayed to the printout of Mc-Kenna’s DMV photo: a red-bearded, stocky, hard-bitten man of forty-three. “A lost soul. Alone in the world,” Tanith’s voice whispered in his head.

Landauer rubbed his jaw. “We’ve got a suspect in custody. Charged.”

Garrett lifted his hands. “Could be nothing. We pay him a visit.”

Landauer weighed it, nodded. “Okay, Rhett. It’s your rodeo.”