Free Dark Magic (Harbinger P.I. Book 3) by Adam J Wright Page B

Alec Harbinger,” I said.
    “So you want to know about the stone,” he said. “Do you know what it is?”
    “Yeah, I want to know how and where you got it. I’m assuming you saw Sherry Westlake leave it somewhere and then you went and picked it up.”
    “Not right away,” he said. “I didn’t go get it until after she disappeared. I figured she wouldn’t be coming back for it, with the feds searching for her and all. So I kept it with the other stuff. I’ve poked and prodded it and tried to look it up on the internet but I don’t know what it is or what it does.”
    “When and where did you see her put it?” I asked him. “And when did you go get it?”
    “Let’s see,” he said, “I saw her hide it in some bushes maybe a week before Christmas. I collected it on New Year’s Day, a week after Westlake disappeared. So what the hell is it? Is it important?”
    “I don’t know. You haven’t told me where Sherry hid it.”
    “Oh, right. It was on the island. Whitefish Island in the middle of the lake.”

Chapter 8
    “ S herry had made a connection between the church and the lake,” I told Felicity after ending the call with Wesley. “While she was investigating the church, she put the Apollo Stone on the island in the middle of the lake. Whitefish Island. Wesley watched her from the docks while she took a boat out there.”
    She looked up from the scattered papers and photos. “So how do we play back what the stone recorded?”
    “That’s going to be difficult,” I said. “The stone records onto the crystal, like a hard drive, but to read the recording requires a witch or a psychic who can pick up impressions from the crystal.”
    Felicity sighed. “She should have used a camera.”
    “Hey, it’s magic, not science. I don’t really want to go to the Blackwell sisters with the crystal. We don’t know what’s on it and I’m not ready to share it with anyone else.” I thought for a moment. “There is a way we can see the recording but it means getting hold of a particular artifact. They might have one at the Society headquarters in Bangor.”
    “So let’s get our hands on it,” Felicity said. She seemed more gung-ho than usual and I wasn’t sure if that was because she was so eager to work the case or because she was in a “go get ‘em” mood.
    “Make a call to the Bangor HQ tomorrow,” I said. “Tell someone there that I need them to send over a Crystal Reader. In the meantime, let’s go through all this stuff and see if we can piece together what Sherry was up to before the church massacre.”
    Felicity held up a photo of a slender black woman in a leather jacket approaching a door that bore the words WESTLAKE P.I. in black lettering on frosted glass. I recognized the door. It was the one that now said HARBINGER P.I. and led to my office. “I assume this is Sherry,” Felicity said. “She’s in most of the photos and they look like they’ve been taken from a distance, probably with a zoom lens.”
    I sat next to her on the floor and examined the other photos. Nearly all of them showed the same woman. In some, she was standing next to a blue Jeep. In others, she was simply walking along Main Street and I assumed Wesley had taken those pictures through his store window. There was one photo of Sherry standing at the edge of Dearmont Lake, looking out over the water toward Whitefish Island.
    Felicity was poring over the handwritten and typed papers. “These are records of when and where Wesley saw Sherry.”
    “Try to find any mention of the church or Clara,” I said. “And don’t forget the pizza.”
    We each took a slice and began to eat while we went over Wesley’s notes. From what I read, it seemed like he’d decided to follow Sherry around every now and then to see if she would unknowingly lead him to material he could print in the Observer .
    He wasn’t successful. Most of the time he followed Sherry, she managed to lose him. I wondered if she had known he was