Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t, instead making an abrupt U-turn. “I saw the books in your car. Which one were you reading? Maybe I could get it in here to you…something to read between interviews.”
    I really didn’t want to talk about my choice of literature. The only thing more suspicious than a vagabond was a vagabond obsessed with the occult. “Yiddish fairy tales from Germany.” I forced myself to blush, as if I were an English professor caught red-handed with a Harry Potter novel.
    “Yiddish? Are you Jewish, Colin?” She chuckled. “I’m sorry that came out wrong. I mean…it’s an unusual language outside of certain subpopulations.”
    “No offense taken. Religiously, I’m Catholic. Race-wise, I don’t know…Fisher is British, but my branch of the family is American Heinz 57. I just have a gift for languages.”
    “I’d say. What about this one? What languages are in it?” She slid a large folio-sized book on to the table, wrapped in a plastic evidence collection bag. It was as bad as I’d feared, I realized as I looked at the black leather cover shining under the fluorescent lights. I’d rather talk about my family dynamic than that damned book.
    “Quite a few, I think. English, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Latin…might be a couple others.”
    “Careful, Colin.”
    “Damn it, you think I don’t know that? This isn’t going the way we want it to.”
    She asked another question, oblivious to the internal dialogue I had to drown out to hear her. “You don’t know all the languages in the book?”
    I shook my head. “A lot of side comments have been added helter-skelter by previous owners. It’s a very old book.”
    “So you can’t read it all?”
    I bit my lips, not wanting to answer that question directly. Omitting the truth was one thing, but lying to the FBI didn’t seem prudent if I could avoid it. Agent Devereaux of the straight brown hair, Irish white skin, and wrong-colored eyes waited for a moment before asking something else. “So what is it? I’ve never seen anything like it. Our analysts have a betting pool as to how much it’s worth.”
    I tried to put a humble face on it. “I picked it up at an estate sale for fifty bucks.”
    “What do you think Antiques Roadshow would say it was worth?”
    I shook my head. “I wouldn’t be qualified to say,” I allowed. “More than I paid for it.”
    She looked at it quizzically, as if afraid it might bite her hand if it came too close to its cover. “But what is it?”
    “It’s a hand-written copy of the Necronomicon. Supposedly it was made from Lovecraft’s own notes rather than a printed edition.”
    “You don’t want to talk about it, do you? You’ve gone pale.” She patted my wrist gently. “It’s okay. It’s just a book, right?”
    “Wrong.”
    “Yeah, it’s just a book…but I’m not an idiot. In the heart of the Bible Belt, it’s enough to get convicted for any number of things I didn’t do.”
    “Okay.” She pulled it off the table and tucked it away. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. What do you want to talk about?”
    “I didn’t do it. I’d like to talk about that. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why on Earth would I call the cops and stick around if I had anything to do with it?”
    “Had you ever met the clerk before?”
    “No. I drove by the place on my way to the lake.”
    She pulled out a notebook, flipped a few pages, then read four names off. “Do any of those names sound familiar?”
    I shook my head. “No, but I’ve met a lot of people in my travels.”
    “Colin, I have to ask this, but have you done any drugs recently?”
    Drugs? This was a new tack. “No, I mean, I’ve smoked weed before…used peyote, too, once. But that was years ago.”
    “She keeps jumping tracks. Maybe it’s an interview trick, but it’s almost schizophrenic. Like she’s two people at once,” my inner voice offered.
    “If we took a urine sample right now, would it say any