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

makeshift knights didn’t go in for the museum-piece plate armor suits. They went for body-length chain mail, or vests and a kind of metal skirt. Mail was cheaper, easier to move in, breathed, and since it was just clothing made up of little metal rings, it was lighter as well.
    I was willing to bet a year’s salary that at the time of his death, John Doe had been wearing chain mail.
    Okay, but did that get me anywhere? Again, it looked like I just replaced one mystery with another. I paced the length of the kitchen and stuck my hands in my pockets. Something cold tingled against my index finger.
    To my horror, I pulled John Doe’s damned gold medallion out of my pocket.
    My mind whirled back through yesterday’s events.
    Okay, I sent samples of Doe’s clothing to the fiber experts, dumped the sweaty jumpsuit, sterilized the medallion, stuck it in my pocket…
    Oh my God! What the hell was I doing? I’d just tampered with—I’d just stolen evidence from a murder case! I’d robbed a corpse!
    Breathing hard, I pulled open a kitchen drawer with one hand. With the other, I moved to put the medallion in the drawer.
    The hand holding the medallion put the damned thing back in my pocket.
    I blinked. I took the medallion out, tried to put the thing away, and a second time, into my pocket it went. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention as if someone had just run their nails over a chalkboard.
    Okay, now this was getting just plain spooky.
    I took the medallion out and examined it again. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’d have blinked if I’d seen the phrase One Ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them stenciled on one side.
    Instead, clear imprint of a horse’s hoof dominated one face of the medallion. The strange lettering on the other looked like a cross between Latin letters and Nordic runes. My arms goose-pimpled as I considered what was going on here.
    One, I could be losing it.
    Two, something effing strange was going on.
    I didn’t believe in voodoo or witchcraft or Wicca or any dopey new-age version of an Earth-Mother. Hell, I didn’t even go to church on Sunday to partake in any of the local religious denominations on order.
    I went out the front door in a rush. Of course, I’d completely forgotten that Deputy Chief McClatchy had put me under surveillance for my own safety. I badly startled the half-asleep pair of cops that had taken over for the Bears’ linebackers. I gave them an apologetic wave as I hopped into my car and thanked whoever was pulling the strings upstairs that no one had yet tried to take a potshot at me for my absent-minded spate of stupidity.
    I drove to the M.E.’s office at the sizzling Southern California highway speed of twenty miles per hour in bumper to bumper traffic. I didn’t mind this time. It let me think more on the medallion. I could feel the cold lump of metal in my pocket. Tugging at me like it had its own gravity field.
    “Okay,” I said to myself, “John Doe didn’t get shot with this little golden marker. So how did it get into his chest wound?” The answer was obvious, and it almost made me miss the highway off-ramp to the Medical Examiner’s headquarters.
    It got into his chest wound because someone planted it there.
    Fair enough. Why would someone do that? Knowing even the basics of forensic examinations meant that whoever put the thing in the most obvious wound expected it to be found. In other words, someone planted it there for a single reason.
    Whoever it is wanted me to find it.
    With that happy thought dancing in my head, I pulled in and parked in my assigned garage slot. My police escort parked nearby, in a spot where they could watch the entrance.
    The Office of the Medical Examiner was a long, low-slung trapezoid of smoky black glass and long corridors lined with gray carpet. Compared to the ‘well-tended junkyard’ look of a lot of labs I’d worked for, the high-tech look of the place was a welcome change.
    I