Bloodfever by Karen Marie Moning Read Free Book Online Page B

was working on my sister’s case.”
    â€œAnd when did you see him last?”
    â€œI told you that, too. Yesterday morning. He stopped by the bookstore.”
    â€œWhy did he stop by the bookstore?”
    â€œOh, for heaven’s sake, I told you that, too. To tell me he’d reviewed her case and there was still no new evidence and that he was sorry but it was going to have to stay closed.”
    â€œDo you expect me to believe Inspector O’Duffy, who incidentally has a lovely wife and three children he takes to church every Sunday, followed by brunch with his in-laws—a family outing he’s missed only four times in the past fifteen years, and then for funerals—bypassed that in favor of making an early morning, personal visit to the sister of a deceased murder victim to tell her an already closed case was staying closed?”
    Well, fudge-buckets. Even I was gripped by the illogic in that.
    â€œWhy didn’t he use the phone?”
    I shrugged.
    My interrogator, Inspector Jayne, waved the two officers flanking the door from the room. He pushed up from the table and circled it, stopping behind me. I could feel him back there, staring down at me. I was acutely aware of the ancient stolen spear tucked into my boot, inside the leg of my jeans. If they charged and searched me, I was in big trouble.
    â€œYou’re an attractive young woman, Ms. Lane.”
    â€œPoint?”
    â€œWas there something going on between you and Inspector O’Duffy?”
    â€œOh, please! Do you really think he’s my type?”
    â€œWas, Ms. Lane. Do I think he
was
your type. He’s dead.”
    I glared up at the Garda looming over me, trying to use dominant body posture to intimidate me. He didn’t know how bad my day had already been, or that there wasn’t much in the human world that frightened me anymore. “Are you going to arrest me or not?”
    â€œHis wife said he’d been distracted lately. Worried. Not eating. She had no idea why. You know?”
    â€œNo. I told you that, too. Half a dozen times now. How many more times do we have to go over this?” I sounded like a bad actor in a worse movie.
    He did, too. “As many times as I say we have to. Let’s take it from the beginning. Tell me again about the first time you saw him here at the station.”
    I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
    â€œOpen your eyes and answer the question.”
    I opened my eyes and stared daggers up at him. I still couldn’t believe O’Duffy was dead. Royally screwing up my world, he’d had his throat cut holding a scrap of paper with my name and the address of the bookstore written on it. It hadn’t taken long for his brothers in—well, not exactly arms, the Dublin police don’t carry guns—to come looking for me. I’d spent the morning battling Shades and a death-by-sex Fae, discovered something monstrous lived beneath Barrons’ garage right behind my bedroom, and now I was in the police station being interrogated on suspicion of murder. Could my day get any worse? Oh, they’d not pressed formal charges, but they’d sure used scare tactics on me back at the bookstore, making them think they were. And they’d made it clear they’d jump on any reason they could find to back me up against a wall and start snapping mug shots. I was a stranger in this city, nearly all the answers I gave sounded evasive because they were evasive, and O’Duffy’s Sunday morning visit to me really did look suspicious.
    I repeated the story I’d told an hour ago, and an hour before that and an hour before that. He asked the same questions he and two men before him had asked, all morning and a good part of the afternoon—they’d let me stew for forty-five minutes while they went to lunch and came back smelling scrumptiously of vinegary fish and chips—phrased in minutely different ways, all designed to trip me up.