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

iron-haired man was shouting and waving his hands as Sup Squad members ordered him to the ground at rifle point. I almost didn’t recognize him without his hat and uniform, but the purple mole beside his nose was a giveaway.

“His name’s Eldred,” I said to Hoffman. “He’s the doorman.”

By the time we arrived, officers had patted him down, and he was sitting grumpily against the wall in an undershirt tucked into pressed gray slacks.

“What are you doing here?” Hoffman demanded. “Place is supposed to be closed.”

“I have an apartment in the building,” Eldred snapped back, making his mole bounce. “Did you know that door you just battered is hand carved? It goes back to the society’s founding!”

“Like I give a shit,” Hoffman snarled. “Anyone else live here besides you?”

When Eldred compressed his thin lips, I assumed the role of Good Cop and placed a restraining hand on Hoffman’s arm. “Robert Strock was killed last night and Walter Mims earlier this morning,” I said. “That’s three fellows in the last week, and all under similar circumstances.”

Eldred glanced over at me. Though he was trying to remain indignant, I could see that the news upset him.

“We’re just trying to find and bring the killer to justice,” I said.

“I’m the only one who lives here,” he allowed. “But wait until the endowment hears about this.”

“You can start by telling your endowment we have a no-knock warrant.” Hoffman flapped the paper in front of his face. “If they have a fucking problem, they can take it up with the judge.”

Though Hoffman was being needlessly rough, at least he’d recovered his spirit. We soon received the call that the five-story club was secure; Eldred was the only one here. Leaving him with an officer, we split up, each with our assignments. Mine was to go room-by-room, searching for any traces of the bonding potion.

I revisited the library and the meeting room, the last place I’d seen Strock and Mims alive. The staircase to the basement Sunita had mentioned was located in the back of a small storage room. I descended, flipping switches as I went, and stepped into an open area, the high ceiling helping temper my underground phobia. A pair of climate-controlled cases stood against a wall, holding several leather-bound books and exploration artifacts.

I looked them over before shifting to my wizard’s senses.

Something stirred, making my skin prickle. It was a suggestion more than a presence, a shadow, but Sunita had been right to call it dark. It was also hungry. I tried to draw a sharper bead on it, but like an eye floater, every attempt only pushed it further away until I couldn’t sense it anymore.

A bleed from the shadow realm?

Or from the past; it was hard to say. I spent another few minutes trying to find it again before returning upstairs, relieved to be above ground again. Though the basement had been cool, my shirt clung damply to my back.

On the second floor, I arrived at the next location of interest: the club lounge. It was a cozy room with wood paneling and leather chairs. The Sup Squad had already pulled liquor bottles from cabinets and set them on the small bar.

As I passed my cane over the assemblage, it wiggled.

The hunting spell honed in on a mostly full bottle of single-malt scotch labeled Discovery Select.

I pictured Strock shooting the potion-laced drink before last night’s meeting and Walter sipping it on ice after. Now both were dead. Sunita’s teetotalling had likely spared her—for now, anyway. Before coming, we’d upped the police protection around her. She was the final living fellow, and I wanted to keep it that way.

“Bag this bottle as evidence,” I told an officer.

As I stepped out, I nearly ran into Hoffman coming from another room holding a thick ledger.

“Mims’s office,” he said. “Can’t get onto his computer yet, but it looks like he kept physical records of the club’s inventory. I’ll have it scanned for Vega so she can start going through it. Find anything?”

The shadow in the basement wouldn’t mean anything to him, so I told him about the hit on the bottle in the lounge.

“Good, we’ll check it for prints. The zoo crew’s just arriving,” he said, nodding at the staircase going down. “I’ll get started on the interviews.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

We had worked out the questions for the summoned members and staff ahead of time, and I trusted him to more or less follow my part of the script until I joined him.

I made a circuit of the remaining floors and collection rooms. None left the same impression I’d felt in the basement. At the end of the hallway on the top floor, I arrived at an open door to what must have been Eldred’s apartment. As the club’s lone resident, he had unfettered access to the collections as well as to the bottles in the lounge.

Leading with the hunting spell, I entered. The space was small, an efficiency really, featuring a solid brown area rug and sparse but immaculate furnishings. A pair of slippers sat in precise alignment beneath a bed whose covers had been tucked and folded. The bedside table held a sleeping mask and earplugs.

Control freak much?

I glanced over a wall-length bookcase holding several literary novels and a line of cookbooks. A few travel photos and artifacts adorned the shelves. Judging from his impressive record collection, Eldred’s true passion was jazz. Probably how someone so tightly strung unwound in the evenings.

I snapped several pictures with my phone to look back over later.

Next I poked through a pair of unremarkable closets, then his bathroom. His cabinet held a few medicines, the only prescription bottle for something called Fludrocortisone. “Take twice a day with meals for low blood pressure,” the label read. I snapped a photo, then closed the cabinet with a snort. Eldred struck me as anything but low blood pressure.

Spritzing his shower and sink with a homemade solution, I opened my wizard’s senses. The solution was designed to react with even trace