“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 amounts of red blood cells, something that would have been in abundance if he’d cleaned up here after the shadow murders, but nada. Neither was my cane picking up the potion. I panned the apartment for any energetic anomalies before stepping out.
I still didn’t like Eldred’s access to everything, but at the very least it made him a good witness.
If he cooperates.
I returned to the library, where the arriving members and staff were filling out pre-interview paperwork. The actual interviews were being conducted in the meeting room in back. I knocked and entered to find Hoffman standing over Eldred, who was sitting with his arms folded.
“And I told you this was off record!” Hoffman shouted.
Color inflamed his cheeks, and his eyes were bulging from their bags.
I hurried over. “What’s going on?”
Spiking his pen against his pad, Hoffman sat down with an explosive huff. “Eldred here is being a pain in the ass is what’s happening. I’ve already explained that this is a voluntary process. Nothing he says can incriminate him or anyone else unless he chooses to say it on record.”
“I won’t be saying anything without the club’s lawyers present,” Eldred shot back.
“Why?” Hoffman challenged. “You hiding something?”
It looked as if Hoffman had met his match, but he was also on the verge of alienating our best potential witness, if he hadn’t already.
“Whoa, all right,” I said, sitting on Eldred’s other side. “Let’s all just take a few deep breaths here.”
I took the paper Eldred had signed—damp and wrinkled from Hoffman seizing it at some point—and flattened it out. “Speaking as someone who’s had plenty of dealings with the NYPD, including being arrested and serving probation, this by itself protects you. A lawyer will tell you the same thing.”
Eldred’s eyes fell to the paper.
“I met you last night,” I said, then chuckled. “I was actually that guy who showed up late. How long have you worked here?”
His shoulders retracted with importance. “Forty-two years.”
“Wow, and you’ve lived here that whole time?”
“About half.”
“Can I ask what brought you here?”
“The previous doorman was my father.”
I’d managed to build a little rapport, but I could tell it was already wearing thin.
“You know, when I was up in the lounge, I noticed a bottle of scotch. Discovery Select? That’s not one I’m familiar with. Is it connected to the club?”
I sensed that Eldred liked being a know-it-all, and his ready answer confirmed it.
“It was a label Strock created in honor of the Discovery Society. It hadn’t gone public yet.”
Probably why the perp chose it. They’d known Strock would drink and distribute it among the fellows. Though Hoffman still looked as if he’d bitten into a raw lemon, he kept quiet as he jotted down the info.
“We have a few questions about people coming in and out of the club,” I said. “You’re clearly in the best position to answer them, but if you’d rather not, we understand.” I glanced over at Hoffman, who was looking back at me in disbelief. “I’m sure we can piece together that info from the staff,” I finished.
Eldred scoffed. “They wouldn’t know.”
“Well, it won’t hurt to ask them, right?”
“What kind of questions?” he asked, as if his time were important.
Hoffman allowed a grudging nod. My gamble had worked. We had him.
“For starters, do you keep a record of everyone who comes and goes?” I asked.
He held up the tablet from the night before. “It’s all here. I check everyone in and out.”
“Does anyone ever get in who shouldn’t?”
“Our security is subtle but state of the art. We have rare collections to protect. Short of disabling the system and battering the door down”—He narrowed his eyes at Hoffman—“no one enters who shouldn’t.”
Hoffman cleared his throat. “Is it possible for anyone to come into the club and then hide till it closes?”
“No, it’s not,” Eldred stated.
“Have you ever seen a visitor or staff member somewhere in the club they shouldn’t be?” I followed up.
“I have, as a matter of fact. And I don’t mind telling you it was Ludvig Lassgard.”
I pictured my happy, cross-eyed friend from the night before. The same person Sunita had named.
“What was he doing?” Hoffman asked.
“He was in a restricted room. The door was secured, but he claimed it was open and that he’d thought it was one of the public displays.” Eldred scowled. “He plays the fool, but Ludvig knows exactly what he’s doing. I’ve watched him. He’s cleverer than he lets on. Did you know we had two pieces go missing last month?”
I straightened. “From the collection? What were they?”
“I’m not sure. I happened to overhear Walter talking about it. I brought up my suspicions about Ludvig, but Walter wanted to ensure it wasn’t a stocking error before implicating anyone, especially his protégé.”
Could explain why he was being so stern with Ludvig last night, I thought.
“Can you give us a minute?” I said to Eldred, standing and angling my head for Hoffman to follow. Grunting, he pushed himself from his chair and limped over to the far corner of the meeting room.
“Is Lassgard coming?” I whispered.
“Supposed to be. We contacted everyone who was listed as staff or a member.”
“The other fellow, Sharma, said the same thing about him sketching around the collection rooms.”
“Probably pawning antiques on the side,” Hoffman said. “That’s the club’s problem. I’m trying to catch a killer here.”
“Right, but what if one of the items compelled him. Remember the infernal bags last year? That all started with a necklace some guy found in the ruins of the Financial District. Cursed items pop up every so often, compelling people to kill, often people with no histories of criminality or violence.”
“Well, how do we know he wasn’t the one compelled?”
He squinted past me at Eldred
, who’d picked up the form he had signed and was reading it over. I could tell by Hoffman’s expression, he was doing the Vince Cole thing again, holding stubbornly to his favorite suspect.
“I don’t like him,” he muttered.
“Well, I can’t say I’m a huge fan either, but we have more people to talk to, and Ludvig should be at the top of that list.”
Hoffman’s phone rang, and he dug it out of a pocket. “Hoffman,” he answered, then listened for several seconds. “No shit?” He moved the phone from his mouth. “We just got the data back on Mims’s phone,” he told me. “Someone called and talked to him right before he left his apartment and—” He moved the phone back to his mouth. “Him, huh? Okay, sounds good. Yeah, we’ll take it from there.”
“Who?” I mouthed, the suspense killing me.
As he continued to talk, Hoffman scribbled on his pad and turned it around for me to see. His eyebrows went up in a gesture of concession.
Ludvig Lassgard, it read.
30
I was still looking at what Hoffman had written, that Ludvig was the last to call Walter before he was killed, when my own phone began to ring.
“Hello?” I answered distractedly.
“Professor Croft,” came a prim voice.
For a moment I debated whether to fake a bad connection and end the call, but I cleared my throat. “Hi, Professor Snodgrass.”
“Yes, I’m calling because—well, first, how are you doing?”
The last time he’d seen me, my office had just blown up and I was half cooked, not that he’d shown any concern. The present show sounded forced, as if his wife had scolded and shamed him into it the night before.
“Better,” I replied.
“Yes, well, I apologize for reacting the way I did. I suppose it was the shock of—”
“Not to be rude,” I cut in, “but I’m in the middle of something pretty important.”
I looked over at Hoffman who was still on his phone, discussing Ludvig. I heard him say something about picking him up.
“Yes, fine, this will only take a minute,” Snodgrass said, sounding relieved to be past the niceties. “First, in light of yesterday’s events, I went ahead and canceled your remaining classes this week.”
“Appreciated,” I said, surprising myself by meaning it.
“You didn’t appear in any shape to teach, and I felt you could use the time to recover. It’s just for this week, though.”
Okay, now I was growing wary. “That was … thoughtful of you.”
“But what I really wanted to talk to you about was your lesson plans.”
God. He was not going to let that go. I very nearly ended the call, but his next words stopped me cold.
“What I could read of them looked remarkably … well, adequate. Organized, concise, supported by academic literature. To the extent mythology can be considered academic, but we won’t revisit that debate here. I do appreciate—that is to say, I’m glad to see you took the new requirement seriously.”
“My lesson plans?” I asked.
“Yes, while inspecting your office with an engineer I found them amid the debris. They were damaged, of course, but—”
“You found my lesson plans?”
“The only thing is, well, I hate to ask, but can you send me an unsullied version by Friday’s deadline? I’ll need it for the official file.”
I was too dumbfounded to react to his very Snodgrassian request.
I had never written any lesson plans. But I’d asked “Sven Roe” to.
I thought back to the security footage of the young man stooped before my office, bringing his pack around to his front. I was convinced he’d rendered the exploding sigil, but had he been sliding the lesson plans under my door? That didn’t explain away the fire circle he’d drawn a day earlier, though, or his insistence that I teach him magic. He was still a piece of the puzzle somehow.
My magic nodded in agreement.
“You didn’t throw them out, did you?” I all but shouted.
“Your tattered plans? No… I have them here in my office.”
“Okay, hold onto them,” I breathed. “I don’t have another copy, and I, ah, I’m going to need them to make a new one.”
“One of several duties a graduate assistant could have performed for you,” he reminded me, sounding especially smug—no doubt from my apparent sudden about-face in the compliance department. But I wasn’t thinking about his stupid requirement. I now had something tangible to hunt Sven.
“I’ll get over there as soon as I can,” I said.
I ended the call at the same time Detective Hoffman ended his.
“Lassgard was just picked up,” he said. “We’re getting the search warrants, but I want to head down to 1PP to see if we can get him talking. You already know him, so I want you there too. You did pretty good with what’s-his-name.” He jerked his thumb toward Eldred who was still at the table, then broke into a broad smile that lumped up his face. “I have a good feeling about this, Everson.”
I did too, so why was my magic urging me to find Sven instead?
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to start without me.”
Hoffman’s smile shrank. “What the hell for?”
“That call I got was a potential lead on Sven Roe.”
“Guy who blew your door off the hinges? Screw him. If he’s involved, we’ll squeeze the info from Lassgard.”
“Look, I happen to agree with that reasoning, but…” There was nothing to do but level with him, even as the flesh around his eyes trembled angrily. “Well, my magic’s telling me otherwise.”
“Your magic,” he spat.
“The same magic that led us here,” I reminded him.
Glancing back at Eldred, Hoffman grumbled a few choice words before whistling a member of the Sup Squad over. “Take him where he needs to go,” he said of me.
“Thanks, I’ll call you as soon as I have something.”
Before I could turn, he grabbed the shoulder of my coat and aimed a thick finger at my face. “You heard the mayor, we only have till tonight. You leave me hanging, and I’ll take your ass down with me.”
“Noted,” I said.
Snodgrass wasn’t in his office when I arrived at Midtown College, but he’d left the plans in a folder with the department secretary. I hustled it to the faculty restroom on the second floor and sealed the door with a locking spell.
Let’s see what you left me, Sven…
The four pages inside were both fire and water damaged and barely holding on by a staple. They were the lesson plans for my class all right, but why would he have labored over them if he’d planned on killing me the next morning? Another of his games, like debating me in class or going by a pseudonym that turned out to be a rearrangement of my own name? Whatever the reason, he’d clearly put thought into the plans, which was a godsend. Mental efforts imprinted almost as well as emotions.
I wasted no time building a casting circle and uttering the appropriate chants. Within minutes, wispy essence was curling from the pages into the opal end of my cane. The cane stiffened and kicked hard in my grip, as if hooking a fish. I pulled back until I had a clear direction and grinned.
Got you.
The hunting spell led me through Midtown until I was looking up at an iconic landmark. From the strength of the spell, I’d known Sven was close—so close that I dismissed my Sup Squad driver and jogged after the spell on foot—but I hadn’t been expecting the iconic entrance to Grand Central Terminal.
I passed under the Pershing Square Viaduct, entered the Terminal, and accessed the main concourse. From there, I followed the spell down a few ramps until it pulled me into a side stairwell. My chest started to tighten and my breaths to speed up—my longstanding phobia of going underground. The sounds of commuters and trains faded, and before long, I was in a restricted area of the station.
I crept down a steel staircase and through dust-covered machine rooms with giant rotary converters that once powered the o
ld trains. Spots that could have been blood dotted the floor every few feet.
At a rusty metal door on which a faded “61” had been stamped, I realized where I was. The fabled Track 61, a hidden line that once spirited U.S. presidents from Grand Central to an elevator below the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Defunct for almost a century, it made for a great hiding place.
I inspected the riveted frame. On the floor, I caught the edge of a familiar sigil. Angular like the one Claudius had found in the aftermath of the explosion at my office, this one was intact and humming.
So Sven did set the trap yesterday.
After sliding my lesson plans under?
It didn’t make sense, but my priority right now was to find Sven.
I drained off the energy of the sigil and tested the door. It was locked, but a few grains of dragon sand in the keyhole remedied that. The melted bolt plopped to the floor as I eased the door open and pushed light from the shield enclosing me. The space beyond was bisected by a single track, a network of metal beams and pillars supporting the tunnel.
My spell tugged toward a lone box car in the center of Track 61.
I resisted the impulse to enclose the car in a sphere and pull out the available oxygen, rendering its occupant unconscious. If the door was warded, the car would be too, and that collision of magic could have ugly consequences. Right now Sven held the defensive advantage. Better to make him come to me.
“Sven Roe?” I called. “It’s Professor Croft.”
The words echoed briefly, the stuffy air down here quickly smothering them. Inside the box car, something scuffed.
“I’m alone,” I said. “I just want to talk to you.”
A moan grew into words: “Go away…”
Dark flames whooshed up on either side of the car and took humanoid forms.
Fire golems. Great.
And the two were armed with steel cables. I moved back as the lead golem lashed his cable, producing a whipcrack inches from my face. His buddy followed suit, his own crack leaving an imprint of flames in front of my retracted pelvis.
Sorry, guys, but Ricki may want another kid.
With a shout, I enclosed the lead golem in a sphere, while pulling a vial of ice crystals from a coat pocket. I’d gone to the ice well a couple times lately, but I was two for two, and if it wasn’t broke…
Shadow Duel (Prof Croft Book 9) Page 18