The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Read online

  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 fairy 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.

  “Y-y-you-y-you!” He stood and shuffled backwards in a pair of ragged tennis shoes.

  I was pretty sure he didn’t recognize me. The only time we’d been this close, he’d been out like a light, the filaments of his mind blown. This was mental illness talking. I decided to use it to my advantage, ethics be damned. I needed to find out where he’d gotten the spell to summon a shrieker.

  “Is that Clifford?” I asked, affecting pleasant surprise. “Wow, I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays.”

  He hesitated, his grimy fingers wringing between the flaps of an army surplus jacket.

  I patted my chest. “St. Martin’s outreach service?”

  I was trying to present myself as harmlessly as I could, but at mention of the church, Clifford’s face contorted in what seemed pain. Tendons popped from his shaggy neck. His thick lips sputtered, but the words, as well as his breath, were trapped in his shuddering chest. When a bluish shade of burgundy spread from his cheeks to his forehead, I reached out a hand.

  “Hey, are you—”

  “Demon!” he shrieked, stumbling backwards.

  Demon? Was he picking up the shadow of Thelonious I carried? Sometimes the mentally afflicted were also endowed with powers of perception.

  “No, no,” I tried, “I’m with St. Martin’s—”

  “Demon!” he repeated. “You are of your father SATAN and he was a MURDERER and abode NOT in the truth because there is NO truth in him and when he speaketh a LIE he speaketh of his own for he is a LIAR and deceiveth the whole world and he was cast OUT into the earth and his angels were cast out with him…” His words expired in a straining gasp, even as his lips continued to move. But in the mash-up of biblical passages, I’d picked up a theme.

  “Who lied?” I asked.

  “The demon,” he whispered. “The demon in the glass.”

  “Demon in the glass?”

  He jabbed a finger at my chest, the bugging madness of his eyes replaced by the roundness of fear. He babbled and staggered backwards. When he tripped over an ankle-high fence bordering the lawn that hedged the library, he screamed and fell. I rushed to help him, even as his backpedaling heels kicked up chunks of brown sod and his cries grew more piercing.

  I only realized a loose crowd had gathered when one of their members spoke.

  “Hey, man,” an edgy voice said. “What’s your problem? Leave the dude alone.”

  I turned. The dozen or so homeless advancing on me were in their twenties and thirties. They had been working students before the Crash: bartenders and baristas. Cut off from income, they’d given the middle finger to their massive student debt. Even now they wore their scavenged coats and patched pants with defiant pride, as though they were all members of the same clan. A clan Clifford belonged to more than I did. I was the outsider here.

  I watched two young women separate from the group to help Clifford up.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said, taking a step toward them. “I actually know him.”

  The man who’d first spoken drew up in front of me, black discs in his stretched earlobes, fierce judgment in his eyes. “Leave him. The Fuck. Alone.”

  The others took up positions around me. Geez, what was i
t about me that inspired a let’s-beat-his-ass mentality? Whatever the reason, I had a lot to piece together and not a lot of time to do it.

  “All right,” I said, showing my palms. “I just caught Clifford on a bad day.”

  The group let me edge from their circle, then formed a barricade in case I changed my mind and made another go for their compatriot. I watched as, with hard backward glances, they escorted Clifford away. As much as I needed answers, I let him leave. I’d gotten some information, scattered though it was.

  I wheeled and strode for the payphone. Demon in the glass, demon in the glass. What in the hell did it mean? As my reflection rose up in the phone’s steel body, I saw the answer.

  The mirror in Clifford’s apartment. It had been in the summoning room, intact, the first time I’d seen it. But on my second visit, the mirror was shattered, its round frame a mouth of silver shards. I imagined Clifford driving a fist against it in fear and horror before he clunked off with his trunk.

  I thought back to the apartment of the Chinatown conjurer. Yes, there had been a mirror in Chin’s summoning space, as well. And the crime photo in the Scream showing Flash’s apartment? Another mirror.

  The spells had never been written down and distributed, as I’d first thought. No, someone had contacted the conjurers, using their mirrors as portals, promising them God only knew what—money, power, salvation—and then dictating spells that would summon shriekers. And I now had a good idea who that someone was. I lowered my gaze to my chest.

  Clifford had pointed right at him.

  Protruding from my shirt pocket was the folded-over printout of the obituary I’d slid there. For the minute or so we’d talked, Clifford had been at eye level with the reverend’s sideways face and dark stare. The reverend was the man he’d been referring to as a liar. He was the demon in the glass, and likely the hooded figure Effie’s friend had seen creeping around the tomb—not Malachi.

  I pulled the obituary from my pocket and stared at the image.