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

eyes to Vega’s left ring finger, which was unencumbered. Dream on, pal. I thought at my incubus. A homicide detective and a probationer?

“Something funny?” Vega asked, her face creasing with renewed sternness.

I’d snorted at my own thought, apparently. I tried to cover it up with a second snort meant to sound functional. “Allergies.”

“I thought you were pursuing some kind of lead.” She gestured to the pad. “Is there a group that goes by this name?”

I searched the wall of aged vertical filing cabinets behind her. I didn’t want to think about what would happen to Detective Vega if she showed up in that crazed cult’s midst. “It turns out there isn’t.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Guess we’re gonna have to see what we can do with this,” she said of the message, but without much hope.

I leaned forward. “Look, I know I come off as a smart aleck sometimes, but I meant what I said about Father Victor yesterday. It’s not in his nature to raise his voice, much less act violently. And I couldn’t find any connection between him and this Black Earth.” The image of the vicar’s ill face and bleeding nose wavered in my mind’s eye. “The man is under incredible strain. Arresting him would … well, not to sound overly dramatic, but it could kill him.”

I was thinking of Father Vick’s health as well as that of the cathedral.

Detective Vega shrugged. “We have to go where the evidence takes us.”

“Just make sure that’s what you’re doing.” Though I tried to offer it as a suggestion, it came out sounding critical. I expected her eyebrows to crush together, but instead, an odd look came over her face.

“Since we’re done here,” she said, “I’m gonna need you to hand over your notes on the case.”

“Yeah, sure.” In my relief, I quickly withdrew my notepad, tore out the pages relevant to the message, and pushed them toward her. My scribblings were mostly illegible, but she wasn’t trying to read them. Her dark gaze had remained fixed on my notepad.

“Lose something?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?”

She pulled open a desk drawer, reached inside, and held up a clear Ziploc bag. My stub of a pencil, which used to ride in the pad’s binding, was nested at its bottom. I almost asked where in the world she’d found it before realizing the Ziploc was an evidence bag.

“Now, do you want to tell me what in the hell’s going on with those other murders?”

I maintained a poker face while my thoughts shuffled madly. They stopped on the apartment of Chin Lau Ping. I thought I’d lost the pencil at the downtown checkpoint, but I’d last used it in Chinatown, to jot down Chin’s name. I must have set the pencil down when fixing his wallet.

Heat prickled over my face. “If you’re suggesting that pencil’s mine…”

“You have one just like it,” she said. “Or used to. I saw you using it in the cathedral. And you’re a nibbler, Croft.”

“Nibbler?”

But I knew exactly what she meant. When struggling for a thought, I had a habit of gnawing on my writing utensils. From across the desk, I could see the teeth impressions in the pencil’s green paint. My stomach performed a steep dip.

“We have your dental records on file, you know,” Vega went on. “Even with our strained budget, given the priority of the cases, I could have these marks analyzed inside of a day.”

Man, and I thought she’d been bluffing when she told the guards I was wanted in an investigation. Was she bluffing now? Detective Vega gave the bag a shake, her face frowning in impatience.

“I, ah—”

“Think before you answer,” she said. “Whether or not you had anything to do with the murder, lying about being at the scene of a crime—either before or after it was committed—is obstruction and a serious violation of your probation. That spells prison, Croft.”

“At least I wouldn’t have to worry about unemployment,” I muttered.

“What?” she snapped.

“My department chair knows about my probation. There’s going to be a hearing Monday, which means I’m out of a job.” I found my irritation at Snodgrass spreading to Detective Vega, for having talked to him. Or maybe I was just fed up with authority in general. I jabbed a finger at the bag. “That’s not my pencil,” I lied. “And if it is, I don’t know how it ended up wherever it did. Maybe someone found it on the street and wanted to give it a good home.”

“Yeah, the home of someone whose organs were cleaned out,” Vega shot back. “Not unlike the victim whose apartment we found you passed out in last year. You know something, goddammit.”

Though her dark eyes shimmered with anger, I could also see whatever it was I had glimpsed the day she’d driven me to the cathedral. Some deeper intelligence. She blinked rapidly, and the look was gone.

“I’m sorry, Detective,” I said, “but I don’t know anything more than what I’ve already told you.”

What was the alternative? Telling her who I was and why I had been tracking the conjurers? She wasn’t Father Vick. A story like that would land me in a pen with the poo slingers and droolers. And even if Vega accepted my story, I couldn’t very well share my suspicion that the spells had originated inside the church. That would only bring more heat on Father Vick.

Detective Vega stared at me another moment. When she saw I wasn’t going to answer, she shook her head and craned her neck toward the open office door.

“Hoffman!” she shouted.

A balding man with a greasy red face came hustling in. “What’s up?”

Vega scribbled my full name on her notepad, tore the page out, and set it and the evidence bag on the corner of her desk. Her eyes darted to mine as though to say, This is your last chance.

When I remained silent, she exhaled through her nose. “I need a priority bite-mark analysis done on this,” she said. “It’s for the disembowelment cases.”

Hoffman, in a brown polyester