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

She had been yanking disposable gloves and shoe covers from the cartons and now shoved a pair of each into my hands. She had everything on before I’d even figured out the gloves. I had just pulled on the second shoe cover when a hairnet snapped over my ears. Detective Vega, in a blue hairnet of her own, stuffed my stray strands beneath the elastic with a studious frown that might have been endearing if she weren’t going about the job so roughly.

She stood back and looked me over. “I hope I don’t have to tell you that anything you see or hear is strictly confidential. You tell so much as your cat, and the deal’s off. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said.

I was pretty sure Detective Vega wasn’t aware I owned a cat—much less one that talked.

“At least we know blood doesn’t bother you,” she muttered.

She was referring to the fact I’d been pretty well covered in it when she arrested me. Good one, Detective. Without waiting for a response, she stepped past the policemen and into the sacristy.

10

I was only aware I’d begun to submit to the calming power of the cathedral when the room into which I followed Detective Vega blew the gathering quiet from my cells. I leaned against my cane, faint and breathless. Something must have come over my face as well.

“You all right?” Vega asked. “Need a mask?”

I shook my head. The smell of death was bitter, but it wasn’t that. I blinked and moved my gaze over the small room a second time.

The white sacristy, where the holy services were prepared, was blood-smeared and ransacked. Cabinets had been opened, drawers ripped from their slots, candles, chalices, and vestments spilled. To my right, old ritual books had been removed from a vault and torn asunder, the brittle pages scattered. On the other side of the room lay the murdered rector.

I had seen bodies before—I didn’t always get to amateur conjurers in time—but this wasn’t a case of a nether creature feeding to sustain its form. No, the scene spoke to fury, and something far more troubling. Glee.

My ears picked up the police chatter outside, apparently filling in a newcomer:

“…gold chalice…” “…face beaten to a jelly…” “…don’t hardly look like a person.”

The white sheet covering the rector’s body featured a spreading red-brown stain over a misshapen mound of head. At the end closer to me, the dusty soles of formal shoes were splayed downward.

Though I cleared my throat, my next words came out as scratches. “Where’s the writing?”

Detective Vega stepped toward the body, the first time I’d seen her do anything gingerly, and lifted the sheet. I tilted my head. Having something to analyze helped. The words had been drawn vertically on his white-robed back, left and right sides. The ink of choice appeared to have been the rector’s blood.

“Aren’t there any photos?” I asked.

“They’re being rendered,” she snapped. “Mean anything to you?”

“Well, your people were right. It is ancient. A precursor to Latin, in fact.”

“What’s it say?”

I pulled a flip-top notepad from a coat pocket and slid a short green pencil from its metal spiraling. “The language isn’t one of my fluencies, unfortunately.” I wrote down the message, letter for letter. “It’s going to take a bit of research.”

Vega’s eyebrows did the collapsing-down thing again.

I shrugged a sorry.

“You done?” she asked from her stooped-over position.

I looked over the writing once more and made a couple more notes. Despite the chilling medium, the penmanship had a certain elegance. Farther up the tent Detective Vega had made of the sheet, I glimpsed what looked like a sticky flap of scalp. I looked away and nodded quickly.

Outside the room, we dropped our bits of protective covering into a trash bag.

“How long?” she asked.

“To figure out the message?” I made a puttering sound with my lips. “A couple of days? It’s a rare language,” I explained before she could voice the protest gathering on her face.

She sighed harshly. “Any idea who else in the city would know it?”

“I’ll add that to my honey-do list.”

She fixed me with another warning look as she reached inside a jacket pocket. “I’m taking you at your word.” Her first two fingers returned with a business card, which she held an inch from my face. “A ‘couple of days’ is Saturday. I’ll expect a phone call by then. You don’t want me to come looking for you.”

“I can think of worse things.” I flashed a grin.

The juvenile comment kept her chocolate-brown eyes on mine, which enabled me to accept the card with one hand while unclasping and hiding away the NYPD tag with the other. Classic misdirection.

Detective Vega didn’t notice. After telling me I could find my own way home, she left me for her investigative team. I looked around for Father Vick as I descended the steps of the chancel, but the nave was empty now of church officials. Maybe they were being questioned.

At the bronze doors of the cathedral, another uncomfortable wave rippled through me, but my powers were back. Which got me thinking. The murder probably hadn’t been the work of a supernatural entity. Even if one had managed to get itself invited into the sanctuary, the threshold would have stripped its powers. It wouldn’t have been able to maintain its form inside.

So we were dealing with a human. And given the excessive violence of the act, likely someone with a vendetta against the rector. But then what did the message mean?

I pulled out my notepad as I started toward the Wall and re-read my translation:

Black Earth

Yeah, I’d held back on Detective Vega. But to get those six months wiped, I needed to not only interpret the message but point her in the direction of an arrest. And that second part was going to take time. Fortunately, I had a resource in mind. I’d get that ball rolling while I worked on how and why a shrieker had been summoned the night before. Which reminded me, I