Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9) by Brad Magnarella (ereader with android .txt) 📕

my office. They’ll take care of the media outreach. Can I have a word, Croft?”

I followed him as he limped to a remote corner of the room.

“All right, look,” he said. “For both our sakes, we’re just gonna forget about last night. I don’t know what kind of magic juice you were tripping on, or what you thought you saw, but here’s the thing.” He glanced around before lowering his voice. “You might’ve been onto something with that lawyer friend.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“We’ve been going over the security footage from Goldburn’s building. The doorman’s helping us, a guy who’s been on the job twenty-odd years. Has his own apartment on the ground floor and everything. Anyway, the medical examiner narrowed the time of death to an eight-hour window between Friday night and Saturday morning. All the traffic in and out around that time was other residents and their visitors—the doorman knows ’em by name. No one came for Goldburn, but the camera caught him leaving Friday night. Switch to the outdoor cam, and guess who’s picking him up?”

“Vince Cole?” I asked.

“Vince fucking Cole,” Hoffman confirmed. “And neither one came back. Based on the examiner’s report and the footage, we secured a search warrant for Cole’s home and office. A good one this time, one that frigging suit can’t fight.” Hoffman looked so smug, I hesitated to share what I was thinking.

“You need to be extra sure it was him.”

Hoffman’s face darkened. “What do you mean?”

“There’s magic that can change someone’s appearance, make them a dead ringer for someone else. Don’t get mad, but a few years ago I used your likeness to enter the Financial District. All it took was a tuft of your hair.”

“You did what?”

I’d been holding onto that nugget for a while now, and I would be lying if I said a part of me didn’t relish his outrage. “My point is that the person you thought you saw on the camera may not have been him.”

“Goddamned magic-users,” he grumbled. “Well, we’ve got the warrant anyway. We’ll see what turns up.”

“What did the tox report say?”

Hoffman shook his head. “No poisons or drugs in his system at the time of death. Just alcohol. High levels, but nothing lethal.”

“Stomach contents?”

“Normal dinner-type crap.”

“Can you get me a sample?”

His swollen eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“I know you want to forget about the body shop, but what if my scrying spell didn’t crap the bed? No, just hear me out. Cole, or someone who’s assumed his form, picks up Bear from the apartment. They go to that bar and commiserate over Bear getting canned as CEO. All consistent with the evidence so far, right? When they leave, Cole has Bear drink something. Now what if it had a hallucinogenic effect, making Bear see and experience something that never happened? A scrying spell on a dead person isn’t an objective record—it shows what that person thought happened. Clearly, Bear was never at the body shop. He ended up somewhere else, where someone took his kidneys and then transported him back to his apartment.”

“What’s that got to do with his stomach?”

“If I can isolate what he drank, I might be able to track it.”

I watched the understanding dawn in Hoffman’s spent eyes. “All right, I’ll arrange for you to go over there and do your thing. Might take a couple hours to set up. In the meantime, be looking for this guy.”

“Who, Sven?”

“Might be a connection to the case, might not. Either way, we’ve got him on attempted murder. And if he’s throwing around fireballs, I’d damned sure rather it be you chasing him than me. Use the Sup Squad. I’ve got plenty to follow up on with Cole. Plus, it means I don’t have to deal with you.”

“Thanks.”

He paused to look over my battered, half-torched state. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” I gestured to his orthopedic boot. “How about you?”

He lifted it up a couple inches. “Metatarsal fracture. Four to six weeks. But wanna know something funny? Seeing you like this makes me feel a whole lot better about myself.” His lips bent into a grin as he set the boot down again.

I snorted. “Glad I could help.”

“Now go find the bastard.”

13

By the time I swapped for a fresh outfit, the explosives experts completed their analysis of my office. Trevor gave me the report. No conventional material, as expected, but they detected trace amounts of lurite.

“Mean anything to you?” he asked.

I’d helped develop the NYPD’s protocols for supernatural investigations and apprehensions. I’d also advised on their particle detection systems and what to look for. To date, the Sup Squad had only needed me a couple times to interpret findings. Both times I had quick answers, but this one was going to take a little research.

“Mind stepping into my temporary office?” I asked, opening the door to the faculty restroom from which I’d just emerged.

Trevor frowned slightly before following. Double-checking to ensure we had it to ourselves, I locked the door and made a sign near the lockers. A small portal opened to my interplanar cubbyhole. I felt inside until my hand closed around an old alchemy book.

“Let’s see…” I flipped open the gold-leaf pages of Verum Alchimia. “Lurite… Lurite….”

Trevor stood at attention beside the urinals, making a good show of accepting our meeting space as normal.

“Aha,” I said, stopping and scanning a half page of dense text. “Lurite is a byproduct of a reaction between silver and red tanzanite.” Meaning both had been components in the sigil that produced the fireball.

“What’s tanzanite?” he asked.

“A rare mineral, which helps us a lot. The red variety is hard to score.”

“Know any suppliers around here?”

“No, but I know someone who might.” Out of habit, I reached for my coat, which I usually draped over a stall when I changed in the faculty restroom, but I’d stuffed the burnt thing in the trash can. I checked that I had my cane and plastic bag of spell implements before unlocking the door. “I’m going to take a trip to talk to him.