Hotter Than Helltown: An Urban Fantasy Mystery (Preternatural Affairs Book 3) by SM Reine

Author:SM Reine [Reine, SM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Iris Books
Published: 2014-06-23T05:00:00+00:00

Isobel was waiting for me in Fritz’s otherwise empty office. I mean, of course she was. It was nine o’clock in the morning and Lucrezia de Angelis was somewhere on the campus, so Isobel was in the one place where she was most likely to get caught.

And here I’d trusted Fritz to take her back to her RV after we were done in Helltown.

“Jesus, Izzy,” I said, slipping into the office and shutting the door behind me. “Are you trying to get caught?”

She looked irritated. “We were interrupted trying to leave. I’m hiding until Fritz can get me out of here. Have some faith, Cèsar.”

Isobel was doing a terrible job of hiding. Fritz had a corner office with huge windows and a great view of the entire grassy OPA campus. It also probably allowed anyone on the sidewalk to see us talking.

I shut the curtains so that the only light came from Fritz’s desk lamp.

“You can’t send Sister Catherine to prison,” Isobel said. “Or wherever it is you send people.”

“We have a detention center run by the Union,” I said, “and it’s a horrible pit of darkness where people who use demons as murder weapons deserve to go.”

“She didn’t do it,” Isobel said.

That was exactly what I was struggling not to think.

It didn’t make any rational sense. She had the victims’ hearts at her house. If that wasn’t incriminating evidence, then I didn’t know what was. But her reaction had been all wrong. She was still hiding something. I was beginning to suspect that “something” was that she was actually innocent.

Like I’ve said before, I have a pretty good gut instinct, but a gut instinct against a closet of body parts didn’t mean anything.

“Give me all your evidence for her innocence and I’ll let her go,” I said. “Better yet, find the real killer. I’ll wait here, twiddling my thumbs, until you get back.”

Isobel paced, twisting her hands together. “She’s a good person. She’s selfless. She couldn’t deny a beggar asking for a quarter, much less kill someone.”

“Look, I don’t think you know Sister Catherine as well as you think you do,” I said. I ticked off the reasons on my fingers. “She was hostile toward me when I initially questioned her at the soup kitchen. She just confessed—literally five minutes ago—that she’s responsible for the murders. We found a closet at her house with pieces of the fucking murder victims inside. This isn’t the kind of shit that innocent people do.”

“I bet that if you dig into it, you’ll find that the evidence was planted. And if Sister Catherine was hostile to you, then you were probably acting like a jackass,” Isobel said.

“Am I ever a jackass?” She opened her mouth. I cut her off with a gesture. “You know what, don’t answer that. You met Sister Catherine in Helltown. That alone says a lot about her character.”

She batted her eyelashes at me. “I live in Helltown sometimes.”

“Not really. You live in an RV and it’s sometimes in Helltown. Big difference.

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