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

caged ceiling bulbs, and I dispersed my shield. Ambulance attendants idled around a pair of empty gurneys. A pair of officers emerged from a stairwell.

“Any witnesses?” Hoffman asked the officers.

“If so, no one’s talking.”

“They’re not even opening their doors,” the other one said. “We did an entire vertical tour. The whole tower looks like a frigging ghost town.”

“Damn Stiles,” Hoffman muttered. “Well, go on and check out the other towers.”

The officers glanced at each other nervously before pacing out the front door.

“Who’s Stiles?” I asked.

“Runs the east towers.”

“Is he the manager?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hoffman said. “Victims are down here.”

“Down, you said?”

“Got a problem with that, Merlin?”

A nauseating blend of heat and cold broke out across my face as pressure began to build against my chest. Other than my major phobia of being underground?

“No,” I wheezed.

5

I followed Hoffman’s wide frame and wavering flashlight down two flights to a littered landing. A stench of stale urine pervaded the space, undercut by the ripeness of recent death.

“Down here,” Detective Vega called from beyond a propped-open door.

Hoffman and I descended another short flight of steps, arriving in a boiler room fit for an eighties slasher film. A convolution of old pipes and valves ran around the cold, damp space. We stepped over soiled clothes and brown drug envelopes until we arrived in a back room.

Vega, in her black suit and blouse, was talking to a member of what appeared to be a forensic team. A crime-scene light glared hot over a pair of draped bodies. I couldn’t imagine the heat was helping the smell.

Vega finished her conversation with the technician and turned toward us.

“So what’s going on?” I asked, my throat tight around my words.

Vega trained her dark eyes on the bodies. “The victims were killed sometime last night. Maintenance man found them a couple hours ago.”

“Hoffman said the cause of death was torn jugulars?”

Hoffman was grunting goodbye to the forensic team as they began to file out around us. “We won’t know until the autopsy,” Vega replied. “But it’s the most visible sign of trauma.”

“And no blood?”

“Not enough blood. I’ve seen opened throats before. They leave small ponds.”

I tucked my cane under an arm and accepted the pair of latex gloves she handed me. As I donned the gloves, I made a cursory assessment of the covered bodies. The two were sitting side by side against the opposite wall, only their ratty shoes showing. “Could their throats have been slashed after they were dead?” I asked. “Maybe they OD’d.”

Hoffman huffed, but didn’t say anything. He seemed better behaved around Vega.

“Some drug stuff was found on them,” Vega allowed. “But the attack would had to have happened after the blood started to thicken and settle, and that takes about eight, ten hours.”

“But you don’t think that’s what happened.”

Light gleamed from her pulled-back hair as she shook her head. She led me to the closer body and lowered the sheet from his face.

His youth struck me first. A white male, he couldn’t have been older than twenty, twenty-one. A tousle of rust-colored hair topped a gaunt, rigid face. His gaping eyes were dilated, either from death or fear.

“Ready for the rest?” Vega asked.

“I think so.”

She dropped the drape to his chest, exposing the man’s throat. Or what was left of it. His trachea had been cracked in two and forced aside. Rags of flesh and gray vessels hung from the gaping wound, as though powerful jaws had clamped down and shaken violently.

I glanced over the young man’s sweatshirt and faded denim jacket. “I see what you mean about the blood,” I said. With the condition of his throat, the man’s clothes should have been painted black. But except for a few flecks, they could have been fresh off the Salvation Army rack.

“Take a look at the skin around the wound,” Vega said.

I leaned closer until I recognized a pattern. Like a dinner plate that had been licked clean, only a few thin, rust-colored streaks remained. Whatever had killed this young man had sucked out his blood, then lapped up the stray splashes with its tongue.

I swallowed hard against a tide of bile. “And the other victim?”

“Same,” Vega said.

I stood back to indicate I’d seen enough.

“Forensics took saliva samples,” she said, replacing the drape over the victim’s face. “Also picked up some potential trace evidence, including fresh bullet casings. But with the backlog and that we’re dealing with junkies…”

“It’s going to take weeks,” I finished for her.

“Try months. I was lucky to get forensics to even come down here. So, what could we be looking at?”

I pulled off my gloves, remembering to pocket them. The last time I’d left gloves at a crime scene, a demon had cast from the sweat inside them. “Well, not your garden-variety killer, that’s for sure.”

“You hired him for that?” Hoffman said.

Vega turned her back on him. “Reminds me a little of the disembowelment cases.”

“There are similarities,” I said. “But lower demons wouldn’t have stopped with blood. They would’ve cleaned out the vital organs, derived as much sustenance from the victims as they could.”

“What about a greater demon?” Vega asked.

I suppressed a proud smile. Vega had made a radical transition in her thinking that few could have managed without heavy meds. But we weren’t talking about a greater demon either—the Order would have picked up its presence. Sure, they had missed Sathanas, but he’d been partially hidden by the powerful energy that flowed around St. Martin’s Cathedral. No such energy existed around Ferguson Towers.

In response to Vega’s question, I shook my head.

Her brows folded in. “Well, what does that leave?”

I flipped through a mental reference of supernatural beasties in greater New York. Werewolves had crossed my mind when I first saw the throat—the moon cycle was right—but while werewolves were maulers, they weren’t bloodsuckers. Ditto ghouls and trolls, who left very little of their victims intact, gnawing down to bones, and often eating those, too.

Conversely, vampires would do a great job of explaining the lack of blood, but not