The Girl and the Clock Tower Murder: Pandemonium Cozy Mystery #2

Chapter 16

"Do you think we were too hard on Tony?" Mahogany asked. They sat on Evelina's floor, eating leftover pizza from the night before.

Bazgul crawled into Mahognay's lap and morphed into a black and orange kitten, purring and kneading her stomach. "Ouch, Bazgul. That hurts."

"Heck no," Evelina said. "You feel bad because you still like him romantically, and after seeing him half-naked outside Urban Alchemy, you'd be stupid not to want to bed him."

"Jeez, Evelina," Mahogany said, blushing so hard that her temples throbbed.

Bazgul shifted again. This time into a fluffy red-furred hamster. The lesser demon scampered up Mahogany's arm and sniffed her ear.

"Bazgul!" Mahogany shrieked, and the demon spider shifted into a red-brown haze and slipped out the open window. "What's his problem?"

Evelina sighed and rolled her eyes. "All I'm saying is that, yes, Tony is a hottie. He's a great cook, has amazing taste in music, has a job, and knows about magic and Folk. All pluses. But he's kind of spineless. He has trouble saying what he means; trust me, that's not a good trait." Evelina held her hand up, and her eyes went wide. "The boy, and I mean boy, traveled to a different state to avoid a woman he couldn't break up with properly."

Mahogany threw her hands over her face and groaned. "Oh, you're right. He's a putz."

"I don't know what that means, but it sounds like penis, so I agree," Evelina pulled another piece of cold pizza from the greasy box. She nodded to the meager murder wall. "Now what? RW and Saree are in police custody with no alibi. At least not one anyone but them and a ghost can corroborate. The Remus brothers will soon kill Ace for his debt. Lilac's too dumb to pull something like this off. We still don't know how the murderer got into the building. It was locked inside with the deadbolt and the chain that couldn't have been magicked."

Mahogany's phone buzzed, and she groaned again. "It's the detective. She wants to meet at the museum tonight to do more digging for the anelace."

"I don't get it. Why does she have a bug in her chonies about the anelace? We solved that murder." Evelina leaned against the wall and picked at her pizza.

"When I made the replica, I left my fingerprint on it," Mahogany said, dropping her half-eaten piece of pizza back into the box, her appetite vanishing.

"Don't you know you're supposed to wear gloves when using replica clay?" Evelina said with a laugh.

"I did, but it started to fall after I removed the gloves, and I caught it."

"Rookie mistake." Evelina shrugged. "Well, a seven-hundred-year-old fingerprint is hardly something to get bothered about. It's not like she can trace it. Unless you touched something else, and she entered your prints into that CODIS thingy." Evelina stopped picking at her pizza. "You didn't leave your fingerprints somewhere, did you?"

Mahogany bit her lip.

"Gurl!" Evelina tossed her picked-over slice back into the box like a pro horseshoer throwing a ringer. "The same fingerprint can't exist on something from the 14th century and the twenty-first. That kind of information will make a human's head implode."

"Well, it's happened. I left my fingerprint on the fake anelace and in the library when I found the librarian dead this summer." Mahogany threw her hands in the air. A migraine budded behind her eyes, threatening to bloom with its full force.

"It's only a matter of time before Detective Sawyer figures out that your fingers produced those prints."

"I know. How am I going to explain it?" Mahogany dark brown eyes found Evelina's violet gaze.