Pet Psychic Mysteries Boxset Books 5-8 (Magic Market Mysteries Book 2) by Erin Johnson (simple ebook reader .txt) 📕

but I gave him a reassuring nod. I’d fill him in on my theory later. He turned back to Libbie. “Who’d you meet when the animals were delivered? Who was your contact?”

She stroked her wombat’s head. “It varied. We never got names. The guys didn’t seem like they wanted to talk. Not the friendliest.”

I sighed. Of course Ludolf wasn’t going to do grunt work himself—he’d distance himself, like he did with all of his underhanded dealings. But the more we learned, the more convinced I was that he was behind this.

Libbie shrugged. “Look, Malorie was up to all kinds of shady stuff—my two merkles? She had it coming. Plus she paid terribly.”

Peter frowned. “I thought she gave you a big severance payment when you left??”

Libbie snorted. “I asked for a raise and she said no. Then last week, I found that old photo of Malorie and the gang, and her tune changed.” She looked sheepish. “I, uh—didn’t exactly tell you guys everything the other night.”

Peter and I exchanged looks. He withdrew his wand and muttered a few words. The manila folder (which I’d given back to him) magically appeared in his free hand. He picked through it and withdrew the old photograph we’d found in the safe in the sanctuary’s office, the one from the first Night of the Phoenix party fifty years ago. He turned it around and showed it to Libbie. “This photo?”

She smirked and nodded. She leaned forward and pointed. “See here?”

Peter turned the photo so we could all see. She tapped the glossy print near the top, behind the crowd of smiling men and women in their finest.

“You have to look really closely, but check it out. That’s Richard Rutherford’s hand sticking out of a carnivorous plant.”

Peter and I exchanged wide-eyed looks, then scooted closer to the photo. Sure enough, among the lush foliage of the sanctuary was a plant taller than a man that looked a lot like a Venus flytrap. A limp hand hung out of it with a gaudy ruby ring on one finger.

Peter looked intensely at Libbie. “You’re sure that’s Richard Rutherford’s hand?”

She shrugged. “It’s his ring. I was cleaning up the office and found all these boxes of old photos. I figured I’d make a photo slide for the Night of the Phoenix event—kind of a look back at the last one. He’s featured in lots of other photos from that night wearing that ring—I remember it stood out to me because it was so over the top.”

I raised a brow. “And you showed this to Malorie?”

Libbie looked down at Cassie, who sniffed her cheek. She glanced back up at us. “I’m not proud of it, okay, but yeah, I showed it to Malorie. I figured it was proof that she killed her ex.”

I smirked. “So you mean you blackmailed her?”

Libbie rolled her eyes. “I told you she paid like detritus! I figured a little incentive for a raise wouldn’t hurt. Anyway, Malorie’s eyes got all wide and she was really upset. She paid me off but told me to leave.”

Peter cocked his head. “Let me get this straight—she fired you over the picture?”

I snorted. “It was probably that or the blackmail.”

Libbie waved it away with a fluttering of her hand. “It proved she killed him, once and for all. I agreed to leave with a large severance payment. I didn’t want to keep working for a killer anyway.”

Wow. Well, it wasn’t the information we’d been looking for regarding the Underground Animal Rescue, but it was a whole new angle on the case. The very tangled, messy case. I yawned again, and Peter shot me a look. He turned back to Libbie.

“Thank you for your help. We’ll be in touch.”

We rose, Daisy as well, and then Libbie leapt to her feet. “Listen, since you let me keep Cassie and…” She raised her brows. “And maybe as an incentive to not prosecute me for the whole blackmail thing…” She held up a finger then disappeared down the hall. When she came back, she had her wand out and three moving boxes hovered behind her. “When I left and packed up my stuff, I might just have taken the rest of the boxes of photos from the party fifty years ago.”

The boxes hovered closer to us.

“Here—just in case you can find more evidence in there. I took them as insurance—Malorie kept the original photo, but I figured there might be more evidence in there.”

Peter withdrew his wand and spelled the boxes closer.

I shot her a sassy look. “Thanks for handing over stolen evidence to the police.”

She had the decency to look sheepish.

While I wanted nothing more than to literally not rest until those shifters were freed, Peter convinced me I wouldn’t be any good to them as a sleep-deprived zombie. The three of us, plus Libbie’s boxes of photos, hiked back up to Peter’s flat and called it a night.

30

The Photograph

The next night was technically Peter and Daisy’s night off, so we grabbed ramen for everyone and headed over to Will’s clinic. We all sat around the lobby slurping up the warm, savory dish. I figured bribing them with ramen would do the trick. I wanted to see my friends, of course—but also begged for their help in searching through the boxes of old photographs Libbie had given us from the Night of the Phoenix event fifty years ago.

Piles of photos lay stacked on the coffee table among old magazines, on Heidi’s desk, and all over empty chairs. We’d been at it for half an hour already, in between bites of food, and found nothing new.

Will frowned, his bushy brows drawn together, chopsticks hovering over his bowl. “Okay, so you have photo proof that Malorie killed her first husband by feeding him to a carnivorous plant?” He shrugged. “That wraps up one mystery. And now you know that Ludolf’s likely been feeding her a pipeline of trapped shifters for her ‘sanctuary’ for ages. Malorie’s furious stepdaughter pushed her into the phoenix’s