The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

five times hard, the blows resounding up and down the hallway. A moment later, the door opened onto a tall woman in a white robe, graying hair pinned back from a worried face. She wasn’t another vampire, in any case.

“You must be the detectives,” she said.

“Detective,” Vega corrected her, leaving me to explain myself.

“Consultant,” I muttered.

“Well, come in,” Mrs. Poole said, standing to one side and closing the door behind us.

We stepped into a carpeted administrative office. “Please, have a seat.” Mrs. Poole gestured to a pair of chairs in front of a desk. She closed the door to a back room—her living quarters, I surmised by the tabby cat that had begun to poke its head into the office. Mrs. Poole joined us on the other side of her desk.

“Thanks for seeing me on short notice.” Vega scooted her chair forward.

“Anything I can do to help,” Mrs. Poole said. “But what is this about, exactly?”

Good question, I thought. Arnaud sent us to you with absolutely no explanation as to why. And yet he seemed determined that we come out here—and not just to keep us away from Ferguson Towers. Vega already agreed to that.

I snuck a peek at Vega, wondering how she planned to proceed.

“There was a murder in lower Manhattan a couple of nights ago,” she began. “Two residents of a housing project had their necks bitten into. They died from loss of blood.”

“Oh my,” Mrs. Poole said, touching her own throat. “I’m very sorry to hear that, but I’m not sure what that has to do with me or my school.”

Vega had given the bare facts to see if they would prompt the headmistress to volunteer something. She hadn’t. I scooted my own chair forward, trying to anticipate Vega’s next move.

“Are you aware of any cases like that in the area?” Vega asked.

“People having their throats bitten?” The lines of Mrs. Poole’s face deepened. “Why, no, Detective.”

“And your students are all okay?” Vega asked. “No attacks on campus?”

“No, nothing like that.” Her eyes moved between us, as though beginning to sense we had come on a blind cast.

Something Arnaud had said through Zarko was sticking in my head: After that, we’ll see where the situation stands, how adept you’ve proven yourselves. It was that last part: how adept you’ve proven yourselves. He wanted us to find something. He had already sent us to Sonny, the vampire strip club owner, and now here. There had to be a connection.

“Well, if anything comes to you,” Vega was telling the headmistress, “here’s my card.”

“Sorry I couldn’t be of more assistance.” Mrs. Poole rose as Vega did.

“Um, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I just have a couple of questions.”

“No you don’t,” Vega said.

“I do, actually.”

“I’m sorry,” Vega said to Mrs. Poole. “My consultant suffered some head trauma earlier. He thinks he’s an investigator now. That was all. We’ll be leaving now.”

“Have any of your girls left school since the start of the semester?” I asked quickly.

“Well, ah … two, actually,” Mrs. Poole said.

“Did they give reasons?” I leaned away from Vega, who had seized my arm and was trying to haul me to my feet.

“Sheila’s family moved to the west coast, and Alexandra left for unspecified reasons.”

I gripped the chair’s armrests. “Did Alexandra’s parents sign her out?”

“She didn’t have parents. She was a ward of the state. A private donor sponsored her attendance here.” Mrs. Poole’s eyes shifted between us in growing anxiety as we continued to struggle. “But Alexandra turned eighteen this summer. She was a legal adult and didn’t need permission to leave the school. She’d been having some problems. Perhaps that’s why she left.”

Vega’s grip eased from my arm and she turned toward the headmistress. “What kind of problems?”

“Oh, well, acting out, unexplained absences. A search of her room didn’t turn up anything suspicious, but her behavior was enough to put her on probation and into mandatory counseling.”

“Do you have her sponsor’s contact information?” Vega asked. “Also, a photo of Alexandra would be helpful.”

“That would be in our admissions office,” Mrs. Poole said. “I can make a copy of her file.”

“Please do.” Vega sat back down as Mrs. Poole left the room. When I started to speak, she said, “Not a word.”

I crossed my arms and quietly considered how Arnaud’s two so-called leads might overlap. If there was a similarity between Sonny and the boarding school, it was young women. What if this Alexandra had gotten fed up with school and moved to the city? With few work prospects, she might have had no recourse but the Forty-second Street clubs. I pictured her arriving at Seductions, gazing up at the lurid flashing marquee, then making the stomach-curdling decision to cross the threshold.

What then? Had Sonny bitten her? Turned her? My fists clenched at the idea of that sleazeball feeding on her foot. Had she become the creature we’d faced in the storm lines? Sonny swore he didn’t turn his girls into anything, but there was a first time for everything.

Out of the blue, Vega said, “Why would Arnaud protect the killer while leading us to who she is? It doesn’t make any goddamned sense.”

“No, it doesn’t. But vampires often follow their own logic.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

I grimaced, but I had to admire her. Even with her son missing, she was still thinking about how to apprehend the creature and spare the residents of Ferguson Towers an all-out war.

“Sorry,” Mrs. Poole said, returning to the office a few moments later. “It took a minute for the copier to warm up. Here’s Alexandra’s student file. I found an extra photo.”

Vega accepted the stapled-together packet and looked it over. I scooted nearer and checked out the photo paper-clipped to the first page. The face above the girl’s collared school uniform was sullen but pretty. Dark auburn hair fell in layers down the front of her shoulders. I tried to line the face up with the creature we’d battled in the storm line, but there was no resemblance. The girl’s