I didn’t think I’d actually have to do anything. We simply had to wait.”
“Were the societies involved in the murders of those other girls? Colina and Daisy and the rest?”
Again he glanced behind her. “Directly? I’ve wondered that myself over the years. But if any of the societies had solved the riddle of creating a nexus, why would they have stopped at one? Why not use that knowledge? Barter it?” He picked up his pipe. “No, I don’t think they were involved. This town is a peculiar one. The Veil is thinner here, the flow of magic easier. It eddies in the nexuses, but there is magic in every stone, every bit of soil, every leaf of every old elm. And it is hungry.”
“The town …” Alex remembered the strange feeling she’d had at the crime scene, the way it had mirrored the map of the New Haven colony. Dawes had said that rituals worked best if they were built around an auspicious date. Or an auspicious place. “That’s why you chose that intersection to kill Tara.”
“I know how to build a ritual, Alex. When I want to.” Hadn’t Darlington told her that Sandow was a brilliant Lethe delegate? That some of the rites he’d fashioned were still in use?
“You killed her for money.”
“For a great deal of money.”
“You took the payoff from the board of St. Elmo’s. You told them you could control the location of the coming nexus.”
“That I would prepare a site. I thought all I had to do was wait for the cycle to run its course. But it didn’t happen. No one died. No new nexus formed.” He shook his head in frustration. “They were so impatient. They … they said they would demand their money back, that they would go to the Lethe board. They had to be appeased. I created a ritual I knew would work. But I needed an offering.”
“And then you found Tara.”
“I knew her,” Sandow said, his voice almost fond. “When Claire was sick, Tara got her marijuana.”
“Your wife?”
“I nursed her through two bouts of breast cancer and then she left me. She … Tara was in my house. She heard things she probably shouldn’t have. I was not focused on discretion. What did it matter?”
What did it matter what some town girl knew? “And Tara was nice, wasn’t she?”
Sandow looked away guiltily. Maybe he’d fucked her; maybe he’d just been happy to have someone to talk to. That was what you did. You made nice with clients. Sandow had needed a sympathetic shoulder and Tara had provided it.
“But then Darlington found the pattern, the trail of girls.”
“The same way I did. I suppose it was inevitable. He was too bright, too inquisitive for his own good. And he always wanted to know what made New Haven different. He was trying to make a map of the unseen. He brought it up to me just in passing, an academic exercise, a wild theory, a possible subject for his graduate work. But by then—”
“You’d already planned on killing Tara.”
“She’d taken what she’d heard at my house and built a nice little business on it, dealing to the societies. She was in too deep with Keys and Manuscript. The drugs. The rituals. It was all going to come crashing down. She was nineteen, a drug user, a criminal. She was—”
“An easy mark.” Just like me. “But Darlington would have figured it out. He knew about the girls that had come before. He was smart enough to connect them to Tara. So you sent the hellbeast to consume him that night.”
“Both of you, Alex. But it seems Darlington was enough to sate the beast’s appetite. Or maybe he saved you in some final, foolish act of heroism.”
Or maybe the monster hadn’t wanted to consume Alex. Maybe it had known she might burn going down.
Sandow sighed. “Darlington liked to talk about how New Haven was always on the brink of success, always about to tip over into good luck and good fortune. He didn’t understand that the city walks a tightrope. On one side, success. On the other, ruin. The magic of this place and the blood shed to retain it is all that stands between the city and the end.”
This town has been fucked from the start.
“Did you do it yourself?” Alex asked. “Or did you not have the balls?”
“I was once a knight of Lethe, you know. I had the will.” He actually sounded proud.
Isabel had said that Sandow was sleeping off