Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1) (20 page)

BOOK: Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)
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“All right.” I laced my fingers, save my splinted pinky, and bent them back until they cracked. “The message on the rector’s back translates to ‘Black Earth.’ ”

“What does it mean?” she asked, jotting it down on a notepad.

“I don’t know.”

She stared up at me as though there had to be more. I shrugged.

“I gave you three days for
that
?” She threw her pen at the pad.

The pen ricocheted and collided into a propped-up frame, knocking it onto its felt back. When I reached forward to right it, I saw it held a photo of a smiling Detective Vega—white teeth and all—clutching a giggling boy of five or six, her chin propped on his feathery curls.

“Your son?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, her frustration seeming to have gotten lost for the moment. She took over the task of righting the frame, angling it toward her, where I could no longer see the photo.

“Good-looking kid,” I said. But then so was his mother. And I’d been right about her smile—wow. I blamed Thelonious for flicking my 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 suit, nodded earnestly. “I’ll run it right over.” He collected the bag and note and hustled out.

Vega turned toward me. “Guess we’ll be in touch.”

My legs wobbled slightly as I stood with my cane, unable to meet her eyes.

“Guess so,” I replied.

35

From One Police Plaza I caught an express subway to Midtown and then hurried the pair of blocks to the New York Public Library.

The looming bite-mark analysis had collapsed my window for finding and stopping the spell supplier, but I had the church in my sights. The next step was finding out what I could about Bartholomew Higham, the man who had been interred in that tomb. Someone at St. Martin’s, probably Malachi, had been interested in him in the days leading up to the rector’s murder.

I jogged up the marble steps to the library, passing between the iconic stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, and entered through the soaring central portico. Inside the vast stone hall, I paused to get my bearings and strategize. Because the Order was listening in—and without a strong threshold to buffer me—I was trying to veil my intentions with innocent curiosity. Whether it was working or not, I didn’t know and couldn’t afford to care.

The clock was ticking.

Near the information desk, I eyed a bank of computers, their screens inviting me to search the library’s online catalogue. I took a tentative step forward. Almost immediately, the screens began to flicker.

Dammit.

I hailed a slender, smooth-faced man behind the information desk, and he came around. His subtle aura told me he had a little bit of faery in him—not enough to cast glamours or even basic magic, but enough to make him interesting.

“Excuse me,” I said. “My eyes are really sensitive to computer glow. Would you mind entering a search for me?”

“Certainly,” the part-fae replied.

I gave him the name and dates and stood safely back. A moment later he returned with a neat hand-printed list of sources. “Most of the hits are with the
New York Evening Post
,” he said, looking over the slip of paper. “That’s going to be in our newspaper archives, on microfilm. Will you need help with that as well?”

Because the microfilm machines were mechanical rather than digital, they would be mostly safe from my wizarding aura. “I should be all right, thanks,” I replied. “But if you could tell me how to get there?”

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in front of a machine, a stack of small boxes holding thick rolls of film beside me. I loaded a roll and scrolled to the March 1814 issue that corresponded with the first hit. Images of aged paper and antiquated print shot past the viewer.

I soon reached the article I wanted. It was an announcement that Bartholomew Higham had been appointed the fifth rector of St. Martin’s Cathedral.

So, Father Richard’s distant predecessor.
I jotted the fact down in my notepad, using a pencil in a box of them beside the machine. The write-up contained info about Higham’s studies and past offices, but nothing to indicate who he really was. The subsequent articles were little more than mentions—ceremonies or functions that the rector had attended or presided over.

But the next one caught my eye:

EXODUS FROM ST. MARTIN’S

I read the article with growing interest, mixing in what I knew of Manhattan’s history. In the early days, the land north of present-day downtown had consisted largely of farms and fields. Graveyards, too—some of them massive, like the one Effie had been buried in. As development moved up the island, many of the graveyards were dug up and the bones relocated. Unbeknownst to his congregation, Reverend Higham had accepted thousands of remains, for a fee. When the deed came to light, the congregation feared the “fell and malevolent spirits” he had surely brought into their hallowed sanctum. Many parishioners left the church.

Was this the history Father Richard had found so troubling? Father Vick had mentioned something about the church not always having been represented by honorable men.

The final hit was an obituary for Higham, only a month after his actions had been exposed.

 

Suddenly this morning, in the 52d year of his age, the Right Reverend Bartholomew Higham of Saint Martin’s Cathedral in the City of New York, was seized with an attack of apoplexy which proved fatal.

 

I scrolled past his honorariums to the obituary’s abrupt end.

 

Due to his condition, Reverend Higham will not lie in state. A Rite of Transfer of the Body will be conducted in private.

 

His condition? I tapped the end of the pencil between my teeth as I reread the obituary. Apoplexy, which was old-time speak for a brain hemorrhage or stroke, shouldn’t have affected the man’s appearance.

A thought hit me, and I bit down on the pencil.

Had he been Father Richard’s predecessor in more ways than one? Murdered, too? And if so, why the cover up? Was someone trying to keep the power of the church, already shaken by scandal, from becoming further compromised?

Or had his murder been sanctioned by the Church itself?

Something told me the answer was in the cathedral archives, and it was
that
which had bothered Father Richard.

The bottom of the page showed an image of the early nineteenth century reverend in a black cassock and stole. He exuded an intense, aristocratic air. I centered the viewer on his face and zoomed in. Parted, graying hair fell to a wiry set of mutton chops growing wild from his jowls. His lips were pressed to his teeth, as though in malice. While the look might have been standard for the time, something about the man seemed … off. I zoomed in on his staring eyes and stiffened.

I’d seen eyes like that in my own work. They were the eyes of someone entranced.

The part-fae, who seemed to materialize at the very moment I needed him, helped me print off the obituary from the microfilm machine, and I hurried from the library with just enough change in my pocket to call Father Vick.

I needed to find out what Malachi had dug up in the church archives.

With my gaze fixed on a corner payphone, I never saw the man who staggered into my path. We collided, my cane clattering to the sidewalk. Something fell from him, as well. The ragged man dropped to his hands and knees and began slapping the sidewalk for what I quickly understood were his glasses.

“Over here,” I said, spotting them beside a tree planter.

I stooped and lifted his glasses by a temple bound in thick tape. I looked from the greasy Coke-bottle lenses to the man, whose stringy hair draped his bowed head, and then back to the lenses.

Well, damned if I hadn’t just found the East Village conjurer.

36

I held the conjurer’s glasses toward him and watched as he took and pressed them onto his black-whiskered face. In a city of six million, what were the chances? Then again, the nearby park had long doubled as a staging area for the homeless, who shuffled in and out of the library during the day for the bathrooms and newspapers. The conjurer had likely joined their ranks, because it was
definitely
him.

“Hey, are you all right?” I asked.

I drew closer but didn’t attempt to help him to his feet for fear he would startle. He blinked as his magnified eyes floated upward. It was hard to tell where they were aimed, exactly. But his head soon cocked to the side, and something like recognition took hold in his swimming gaze.

BOOK: Demon Moon (Prof Croft Book 1)
8.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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