The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 11

  She slammed the door.

  The driver side door cannoned opened, and she dropped behind the wheel. “I had the pleasure of meeting your department chair last week,” she said, throwing the gearshift into drive. The car jumped from the curb and into traffic. “He told me you’re a professor of the arcane?”

  So that’s where Snodgrass had gotten the report.

  “Ancient mythology and lore, actually. It’s a graduate-level course.” Or was.

  Detective Vega gave no sign she’d heard me as she swung south onto Park Row and switched on the siren. Cars honked and edged from her path. She accelerated, knocking past an obstinate taxi. Not even a backward glance.

  “How are you with ancient languages?”

  “Huh?” When I realized I was white-knuckling the door handle, I relaxed my grip and brought both hands to my cane. “Ancient languages? Not bad. I mean, I’m fluent in a couple, familiar with several others.”

  “Good.”

  I waited for more, but her dark eyes remained narrowed on the traffic in front of her. It was the same ruthless look she’d fixed on my court-appointed attorney while testifying against me last fall.

  Police Plaza disappeared behind us. “Hey, uh, what about my meeting with the probation officer?”

  Instead of answering, Detective Vega lowered her window. We were entering the shadow of the barrier that separated the Financial District from the rest of Manhattan. I dipped my head to take in the grim concrete span. Following the Crash, public outrage had fallen on the banking class. Detonating bombs around their buildings had become a popular pastime.

  Now Wall Street featured an actual wall again, even if it was located a few blocks north, on Liberty Street. No small irony there.

  At an entrance for official vehicles, Detective Vega held up the ID that dangled around her neck. Armored guards in shield sunglasses looked from her to me, then motioned us through with assault rifles. The skyscraper-lined corridors beyond were strangely silent.

  “There’s been a murder at St. Martin’s,” Detective Vega said.

  I stiffened. “The cathedral?” Sited on a fount of ley energy, it was the oldest and among the most powerful places of worship in the city.

  “No, the Caribbean island,” she replied, giving me a dry look. And you’re a professor? it seemed to ask. I’d gotten that look a few times. “I’m not going into details other than to say the rector’s body was found in the church sacristy this morning. There was some writing at the scene our language people couldn’t make sense of. They’re thinking it’s ancient.”

  Well, that explained things. “And you want to see if I can decipher it?”

  “Boy, you’re sharp.”

  “What are you offering?”

  When her eyebrows pressed together, I remembered how quick she was to anger. “Excuse me?” she challenged.

  “You’re contracting my services, right? Shouldn’t there be a fee or something?”

  While it was true I could use the extra money, this was about getting some things straight. First, probation or not, I wasn’t hers to muscle around. I had enough going on in my own life at the moment. Second, we weren’t friends. I didn’t owe her any kindnesses. Especially since she was the reason I was about to get drop-kicked from Midtown College. If she wanted her back scratched, she was damn sure going to run her nails up and down mine.

  Hmm. Probably could have phrased that better.

  “Your fee,” she said evenly, “is me not collaring your ass for failure to show. How’s that sound?”

  I shook my head against the rest. “Nice try.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know I was going to be late. You parked with a view of the checkpoint well before I showed up. Forty minutes, I’m guessing.” I nodded toward the hood. “Engine was cold.”

  She glanced over as though taking some measure of me.

  While it was true wizards possessed an enhanced awareness, catching subtleties that most overlooked, I was presently blowing an ass-load of smoke. I had no idea what temperature the engine had been.

  “It doesn’t change the fact you were late,” she said.

  She’d bought the bluff, but I could see she wasn’t going to budge on her position.

  “Well, what were you preparing to offer?” I asked.

  She blinked twice quickly. A tell.

  “All right,” I said, drumming my fingers over my cane as I thought aloud. “You had no intention of paying me. I’m on probation, a criminal. I know how that would look—even inside the NYPD. I get it. So, I’m guessing it was some kind of commutation of my sentence?”

  Another rapid blink.

  “A year?” I pressed, my heart already accelerating at the possibility. A year would take care of the second half of my probation. I’d be a free man. And if, come Monday’s hearing, I was no longer under the NYPD’s thumb, I might actually have a crack at saving my job.

  “A month,” Detective Vega countered sharply.

  My hope shattered like a clay pigeon. I could see in her set expression she wasn’t going to let herself be talked into a full year. She already hated that I’d made her feel transparent. My mistake, I realized now.

  We were slowing past a police cordon and into a mayhem of squad cars that fronted St. Martin’s. Detective Vega knifed into a too-small space and twisted to look me full in the face.

  “If whatever information you provide leads to an arrest,” she said, “I’ll consider upping it to six.”

  I understood some wizards could peer into souls. It wasn’t a gift I possessed—or even desired, for that matter—but I had developed a decent ability to read people. And what I saw beyond the façade of Detective Vega’s hard eyes was the bone-weary fatigue of a detective whose resources were being stripped at the same time murders in the city were soaring. She needed all the breaks she could get.

  “A year,” I tried again.

  “Six months.”

  I glimpsed something else, but before it took on contours, Vega turned and banged her door into the squad car beside ours. Conversation over.

  After edging out, she paced toward an approaching officer who looked to be managing the outdoor scene. When she pointed back in my direction, I squeezed out too, though with less property damage. I stood with my cane, peering at the cathedral’s stately bronze doors, then up the soaring Gothic spire shimmering with ley energy. Back down, to the right, tombstones stood in the gated churchyard I used to play in. I had attended St. Martin’s as a boy, when my family still lived in the city.

  “Hey!” Detective Vega had finished signing in with the officer and was waving for me to follow.

  I eyed the wrought doors of the cathedral again, sweat breaking across my upper back. I mentioned my phobia of being underground? Places of worship were almost as anxiety-causing. In this case, though, it wasn’t that such places repulsed me, but that I seemed to repulse them.

  “Croft!” she snapped.

  I watched her watching me, one hand bracing the strong curve of her cocked hip. Her NYPD shield glinted at her belt, and I could see the bulge of a sidearm holstered beside it, beneath her jacket. Six months was no guarantee of salvation, but it was half my remaining sentence.

  I took a deep breath and made my head nod.

  “Coming.”

  9

  My legs seemed to be hauling large iron balls as I ascended the three steps leading to the set of bronze doors. Detective Vega powered right between them, but I had to stop.

  In addition to being places of worship, religious houses had a long history of providing sanctuary against evil. The longer-standing the house, the stronger the protection—especially if the house stood on a fount of ley energy. The protection was felt most palpably at thresholds, and St. Martin’s threshold was all but thrusting me back into the street.

  It wasn’t that I was evil, but I had that little Thelonious problem. He wasn’t demonic, per se, but as an incubus, he gave off a similar vibe. And thresholds weren’t in the bu
siness of splitting hairs.

  I peered past the doorway into the vaulted interior. Detective Vega was already passing through a propped-open set of glass doors to the deep pew-lined nave, where police personnel consulted and a few robed church officials drifted in monastic sorrow. Realizing I wasn’t behind her, Vega turned and gestured sharply.

  “Croft,” she whispered.

  At the sound of my name, one of the church officials raised his head and moved toward me. He wore a white tunic over a long black cassock. What looked like a grieving stole, heavy and dark, draped his neck. When his face swam from the gloom, I recognized him.

  “Is that Everson Croft?” he asked, stopping a few feet from me. His parted red hair was going white, I saw. And he sported a trim beard now, denser around his lips, like an unintended goatee. But his eyes were the same seashell blue I remembered from childhood.

  “Father Victor,” I said, smiling.

  He had been in charge of the youth programs when I attended, and I remembered him as good-humored and kind, a natural with kids. He had risen in the church ranks since, and word on the supernatural street was that he performed shadow exorcisms. My kind of guy.

  “Please, I still go by Vick,” he said. “How long has it been? Fifteen years?”

  “Closer to twenty.” I caught myself stubbing a toe against the concrete. Even though Father Vick’s tone wasn’t the least bit insinuating, my long absenteeism still stirred up a cloud of guilt. I struggled to meet his eyes. “Listen,” I said, “I’m really sorry about your rector.”

  I hadn’t known the man. The rector from my time had retired, his replacement coming from another diocese.

  Father Vick nodded. “Yes. A terrible thing.”

  “I’m actually here to help with the investigation, as a consultant.”

  I peeked past him to where Detective Vega appeared on her last nerve.

  Father Vick stepped to one side and made a humble gesture with his arm. “Please, do come in.”

  At those words, the threshold relented. Invitations to enter calmed them. A clammy wave of nausea rippled through me as I stepped inside, but it was better than being burned like a square of toast. Even so, I felt a good chunk of my wizarding powers fall away.

  That was something else thresholds could do.

  Father Vick placed a comforting hand on my upper back and guided me into the nave. Something about his touch, which hummed with the supernatural power of faith, and the fact he was two inches taller than me, evoked memories of being a young parishioner here.

  “Thank you,” I said, the sanctity of the cathedral reducing my voice to a whisper.

  “I know you have work to do,” he said, “but I hope we’ll have the opportunity to catch up soon.”

  He slipped a card into my hand as he left me with Detective Vega.

  “Old friend?” she asked when he was out of earshot.

  “Something like that.” I tucked his card into my pocket.

  “Well, don’t get too cozy. At this point everyone in here’s a suspect.”

  I snorted. “Reminds me of another case.”

  She shot me a dark look. We both knew the NYPD hadn’t had sufficient cause to try me. But in their nigh-impossible campaign to clear cases, all sorts of protocols were being skirted, if not sledge-hammered. Though I hadn’t been charged with murder, getting the obstruction charge to stick had no doubt been sufficient to toss the case into the “good enough” basket.

  “Here,” she said, clipping a plastic card to my coat lapel, the big NYPD letters stamped in yellow.

  “Am I being deputized?”

  She frowned. “This way.”

  I followed her down the cathedral’s center aisle. To either side, muted light fell through steep Gothic windows. Ahead of us, a majestic stained-glass window glowed softly. During services, I used to study its depiction of hallowed saints and angels, one of them my forebear, Michael. The sections of colored glass seemed to endow them with magic. With that pleasant memory came others: the smells of starched suits and faint perfumes, the warmth of the cushioned pew beside my Nana, her hand absently stroking my hair.

  Grandpa had never joined us, for reasons I wouldn’t understand until much later.

  We climbed the wooden steps to the chancel, ducked under a ribbon of police tape, and rounded a cloth-draped altar. A pair of policemen stood guard at a door on the left. A table beside them held a set of cardboard cartons.

  “The body’s still inside, but it’s covered,” Vega told me. “We’re waiting on forensics, so you’ll need to put these on.”

  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.