Centaur of the Crime: Book One of 'Fantasy and Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 1) Read Online Free

attorney focused all of his powers on wrecking her carefully built case?
    But I’d held it together today. Even had to remind myself to thank the guy who’d put himself in harm’s way to keep me safe.
    It made me feel good.
    So good, it almost made me forget that someone had tried to kill me.
    Almost.

    I didn’t make it to bed. I stayed curled up on the couch like a lanky, black-haired, green-eyed cat. A cat that someone had stuffed with ice cream and then wrapped in an oversize bathrobe, to be precise. I watched the evening turn into night. The city had lit up the road to the observatory tonight, so that if you squinted, you could imagine James Dean, clad head to toe in shiny black biker leather, gunning his motorcycle up the steep asphalt slope and up to the tinted spotlights that gave the observatory dome the gentle amber shade of a Malibu sunset.
    My weary, drowsy brain settled on the round spotlights. Then the lights changed, became darker and more ragged at the edges as I felt my eyelids grow as heavy as marble slabs. I thought of the crime scene today. The drops of red at the scene near the body.
    Splashes of blood on concrete.
    That’s when my mind spiraled back to something I call ‘The Dream’. It’s a recurring vision-memory thing that comes back to me at the oddest times. To be honest, it took place so long ago, that I wasn’t sure if it was real, or if it had been some awful fever dream brought on by eating too many slices of holiday fruitcake.
    Yeah, someone was definitely being a fruitcake here.
    My eyes closed and the vision of the dusty gray concrete softened and turned white. It was a frigid December in the woods of Pike County, Illinois.
    I’d just turned seven.
    The blood trail stood out in a pattern of scarlet splashes against the snow. Cold wind bit at me with wolves’ teeth and made a low-pitched howl through icicle-coated branches. It raised goosebumps on my arms, even through the fleece of my ballet-slipper pink jacket and mittens. The bare trunks of the birch and hickory trees around me jutted out of the ankle-deep snow like picked-over bones.
    I wasn’t scared. Not much, anyway. If I squinted through the withered remains of the underbrush, I could still make out the red-green glow of the Christmas lights that rambled along our front porch as if it were some strange, wintery vine. The scent of a wood fire billowed out of our house’s skinny brick chimney and skimmed past my nose like a passing phantom.
    Curious, I decided to follow the blood trail.
    The line of droplets meandered drunkenly between the trees. Dark, heavy shade of red, like fistfuls of ripe chokeberries. My little wigwam boots sank into the snow’s icy surface with the crunch of someone biting into stale crusts of bread. Once, the droplets became a splatter, and off to the left, at the level of my head, was a bright gash against the papery-thin bark of a sugar maple tree. Then the trail of blood drops changed direction.
    Now it headed towards the house.
    I walked faster, let my breath fog up against my eyelashes. I brushed the wetness aside with one pink sleeve and saw the blood trail run up along the side of our driveway, past where Daddy’s beat-up station wagon sat like a wood-paneled display of dents ringed with rust. I followed the trail up to the garage’s side door. It was wide, built to swallow furniture and auto parts and maybe little girls.
    Lime-green flecks of paint clung to the door’s wooden surface by faith as much as anything else. The blood pointed the way. Inside. One circular drop lay smeared halfway under the door’s bottom edge as if it had tried and failed to squeeze under the worn gray weather stripping.
    My breath echoed hollow and empty in the recesses of my hood. The noises from inside the garage were soft but unmistakably clear. The scrape of flesh on concrete, a grunt, as if someone was lifting a heavy object, something falling with a thud against metal. Then the blubbery, snot-choked