Dark Magic (Harbinger P.I. Book 3) by Adam J Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

place and then I ran into you at the cemetery. It was coincidence. I swear it. My spying days are over now.”
    I moved closer to him. He was a small guy and I towered over him. He shrank back slightly but the dumpster prevented him from escaping. If it wasn’t there, I was sure he would have fled by now. “What do you mean they’re over now? So you were spying on me before?”
    He shook his head so vigorously that his glasses were in danger of flying off his face. “No, no, not you. I never spied on you.”
    “Who then?”
    He swallowed and looked down at the ground nervously.
    “Who were you spying on, Wesley?”
    He looked up at me with pleading eyes. “It was a long time ago. Last year. It doesn’t matter now.”
    I also put two and two together but, unlike Wesley, I was pretty sure I’d come up with the correct answer. His interest in my work and close proximity to my office made it obvious who he’d been spying on last year. “Sherry Westlake,” I said.
    His eyes went even wider and he looked up and down the alley as if expecting my predecessor to be standing there. “Don’t tell her,” he said. “Please.”
    “How the hell would I tell her? Sherry Westlake disappeared on Christmas Day.”
    “I know that. But you P.I.s are tight, aren’t you? And you all work for the same parent company or something, right? I mean, if anyone knows where she is, it will be you. Am I right?”
    “You’re wrong. I have no idea where she is, or even if she’s still alive.”
    “Okay,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “That’s good.”
    “You seem pretty scared of her,” I said.
    “Yeah, well, she had her suspicions that I might be watching her and she told me, in no uncertain terms, to keep away from her.” He rubbed his throat and said, “She pinned me against a wall and held a knife to my throat.”
    Way to go, Sherry , I thought. “It sounds like you deserved it, Wesley.”
    He shrugged. “I was only taking a few photos and following her around now and then. This town is too quiet to make a living as a reporter. Sure, I have the store but journalism is my true passion. And the only way to get any good stories is to follow you guys around. You always know where the action is.”
    “But you didn’t get any stories from following Sherry,” I told him. “I read your articles online. You never wrote about her.”
    “I was going to publish a big story,” he said. “An investigation into the life of a preternatural investigator. I was going to ask some hard-hitting questions too, like who are the P.I.s, what company do they work for, and are they needed in a society where nobody believes in the supernatural anymore. It was going to be a great piece and it might have made my name known to some of the big-hitters like the Boston Globe or even the New York Times .”
    “But you didn’t publish it,” I said.
    He shook his head. “I couldn’t, could I? While I was writing it and…observing…Sherry Westlake, that church thing happened and the feds were suddenly crawling over everything to do with her. They came to town asking questions, wanting to know who had hired her, who visited her office, that kind of thing. When they went to search her office, the place was empty, cleaned out like she’d never been there at all. The feds were fuming over that.”
    I nodded. The Society would have cleaned the place to prevent Sherry’s notes and computer falling into the wrong hands. “So you were following Sherry just before she disappeared. Did the FBI take your photos and research?”
    “No way, I never told them anything. I didn’t want them to think I was involved in any way. That might make me a suspect.”
    I considered the implications of what he’d just told me. If he’d been spying on Sherry Westlake just before the church massacre, his photos and records of her movements might contain a clue about what happened in Clara. Sherry must have had some knowledge about the church to be investigating