Free Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting by David Reed

business.”
    “Bullshit.”
    Not to say I didn’t feel for the woman, but there’s a certain art to prodding people into confessions. I could tell that Mrs. Greyson wanted to tell me more, but she was censoring herself. Thinking about her responses too much. I needed to get her agitated, make her talk faster, without the filter.
    She went through the usual motions, “Who do you think you are?” and “You’re a guest in my house” and “In my day . . . ,” but none of them convinced me that she wasn’t involved in Georgiana’s death.
    I asked more direct questions, like, “What was Prious doing in that house in the first place?” which she dodged for a while, until, finally—
    “She shouldn’t have been there. She should’ve known that what she was doing was wrong without us telling her.”
    Behind me, the front door creaked open. Balls. I’d convinced Alberta the night before to join me at Mrs. Greyson’s house, but not for another half hour—I wanted time to get to the bottom of things, get Greyson on my side and ready to talk sense into Alberta. I needed at least another five minutes, I was just getting to the good stuff. Except, it wasn’t Alberta. I heard the sound of a cane scuffing on the old hardwood floors. The uninvited house guest ambled in, didn’t notice me sitting in the dimly lit sitting room until he was right beside me.
    It was the widower from the nursing home, with the burned-toast skin. A man who claimed to only know the deceased women because they lived down the hall from him. Suspicious as hell that he’d show up out of the blue.
    “Oh,” he said. “I’ll come back when you don’t have company, Mrs. Greyson.”
    These were the options, as I saw them in that moment:
    A. His visit was random, if incredibly coincidental. Let him go and get back to grilling Greyson.
B. He was another piece of the puzzle I didn’t yet understand, but Alberta was still the killer. Hold him there, wait for Alberta to arrive, let the sparks fly. Kill whoever seemed appropriate once they got their stories straight.
C. The widower was the real culprit, here to finish the job. Get him outside, out of Greyson’s view, and kill him.
D. Kill ’em all, let the boys up and downstairs sort ’em out.
     
    Maybe you’re smarter than me. But me, facing those options . . . like hell I was gonna let him go. I beat him to the door, closed it. Bolted it. Made it clear that he wasn’t going anywhere, which he wasn’t psyched about. Whether he or Alberta was the culprit . . . that I didn’t know. I had to ask more questions.
    It became clear very quickly that Mrs. Greyson had no idea who the old widower was, or what he was doing there. One more strike against the guy. He claimed innocence, saying that Mrs. Greyson’s memory wasn’t what it used to be (happens to the best of us). That they were fast friends, and that he had no idea she had a connection to the burned women. Likely story, buddy.
    He claimed his name was Omar Adams, that if we called any of Mrs. Greyson’s friends, they’d back up his story. I decided to call his bluff, went to the next room to get the phone—remember, this was the eighties—with the real intention of getting a knife from the drawer. I had a gun in my jacket, just in case, but the situation felt like it was getting away from me and I wanted to cover my bases. When I reached for the knife block, Omar’s hand was already on the butcher knife. He hadn’t even been in the room a second earlier.
    “I thought you were going to make a phone call?” he asked. I noticed that he wasn’t holding his cane. He didn’t seem to need it.
    The doorbell rang. Cut the tension like the knife I now couldn’t grab. This time, it was Alberta at the door. She’d shown up early after all.
    I went to the door, unlatched the dead bolt, now realizing how pointless it had been to lock it in the first place. The widower had teleported himself into the kitchen, I was sure of it. My