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

mayor’s mansion rounded into view. The city used to give weekly tours of the mansion before the Crash, but I had never been back here. The yellow two-story house looked plantation style, with its wide front porch, second-story balcony, and line of stately columns. A handful of cars sat in spaces out front, including the sports car Moretti’s men had been driving.

Vega parked beside it.

“What’s our plan?” I asked.

“Let me do the talking.” Vega drew her sidearm and got out. I climbed from the passenger side and strained to reshape the shield so that it protected the two of us. My powers had recharged on the drive up, but remained short of full strength. “Notice anything strange?” she asked.

“No guards?”

“Bingo.”

Shots cracked from the sides of the house, sparking off the shield.

“Vigore!” I shouted, directing the force into a cluster of bushes to the left of the porch. In a burst of leaves, one of Moretti’s men somersaulted skyward. Vega aimed and shot twice. Both bullets found their target, silencing the man before he crashed to the ground. The man on the right side of the house stood to run. Vega shot him once in the back. He face-planted on the lawn and went still.

I caught up to Vega on the front porch, where she seized the door handle. She stood back and nodded at my cane. With another “Vigore!” the door blew inward. Vega entered low, swinging her firearm from side to side. I moved in behind her, the final tugs of the hunting spell indicating we had the right address.

“Mayor Lowder,” she called.

“In here,” a man’s voice answered from the next room.

We followed the voice to a large antique-furnished sitting room. To one side of a crackling fireplace, Budge was reclined in a leather chair, a brown bathrobe fastened loosely around his belly, his slippered feet propped on an ottoman. He peered at us over a pair of reading glasses, a newspaper spread over his lap.

“Detective,” he said, cordially. “And is that Everson Croft from the gala? Have a seat, have a seat.”

While he gestured to the other chairs in the room, Vega swept the space with her pistol before taking a position where she could watch both doors and the staircase. “I’ll stand, thank you,” she said.

Mayor Budge folded up the newspaper and dropped it on an end table. He swapped his reading glasses for his round pair and finger-combed the cowlick from his brow as he put them on. “Now, what’s this about a family emergency?”

Vega leveled her gun at him. “I’m going to be asking the questions.”

“Whoa there!” Budge showed his hands, his magnified eyes darting between us. “What do you think you’re doing? Hey, you’re a professor,” he said to me. “Talk some sense into her.”

“I think she’s about to make plenty of sense,” I said. “So why don’t you just settle in?”

Budge gave me a look that said, Has the whole city gone crazy?

“Why don’t we start with Mr. Moretti?” Vega said.

“Mr. Moretti? What about him?”

“When did you start contracting him to do jobs for you?”

“The man’s calling my office all the time, trying to get me to do him favors. You think I’d work with him?”

“Got a couple of his men in your yard who would probably say yes,” Vega said. “If I hadn’t shot them dead.”

“Moretti’s men?” Budge swept the hair from his brow again and leaned forward to peer out the window. When he looked back at Vega, his brow bent in confusion. He appeared at an honest loss, but then I remembered the gala and how quickly he could change his demeanor.

“Why don’t we start from the beginning,” Vega said. “When did you find out your wife had a daughter?”

Budge blinked his eyes. “Since before we were married.”

“Yeah, right,” Vega said. “When did you find out what she was?”

“Hey, what’s this about?” Budge asked. “How do you two know so much?”

Vega glanced over at me—not the reaction she was expecting either—before pressing on. “At what point did you decide you wanted her dead? When she left school? When you found out she’d changed?”

“Wanted her dead?” Budge looked from Vega to me in horror. “What is she talking about?”

“Look,” I said. “We know you hired vampire hunters to kill her. We also know you’ve been trying to eliminate anyone and anything that connects your wife—and you—to the creature. And that’s meant contracting out work to Moretti. Makes sense. Someone running for reelection in a close race would do anything to keep a homicidal creature from being attached to his name. Can you imagine what your opponent would do with that?”

“What is this?” he asked, his neck turning red. “Some sort of blackmail job? You trying to set me up for something?”

Vega ignored the act. “Just so you know, I’ve given all the information we’ve uncovered to a third party. If anything happens to us, that information goes public. The hit on Sonny, the attempted hits on us, your dealings with Mr. Moretti. Even if you never see the inside of a courtroom, you’re going to be slammed in the court of public opinion. You’ll be done.” Vega was lying about sharing the info with a third party, but damn, she was selling it well.

“If you have anything you’d like to amend,” I said to the mayor. “We’re all ears.”

Budge looked around the room before sighing and running his hands through his hair. “All right.” When he stood, Vega adjusted her aim, but he only lumbered to the fireplace. He leaned a forearm against the mantel so that he was staring into the flames. “Penny and I met at a dinner party back when I was a city commissioner. Boy, was she something. Turned every last head in the place, but for some reason she had eyes for me.” Budge snorted a laugh. “So we started dating. Before we got too serious, though, I had her checked out, you know?”

“By an investigator?” Vega asked.

“And a diviner,” Budge said. “An old man who