Chapter 14
Lukas
“Are you sure this is everything?” I asked frantically, pushing the books around the large table in the conference room.
“Yes, this is everything they brought in,” Ed responded, hands on his hips as he watched me in confusion.
“Where is it?” I growled under my breath. Surely they couldn’t have missed the one thing that I needed. The one thing that could completely alter this case and expose whoever was helping Aster.
“What are you looking for? They brought all of this in for cross-examination.”
“Another lab book. One with matching handwriting to the notes in Aster’s lab books.”
“Why are you so convinced the second handwriting is important?”
I looked up at Ed, bewildered. He couldn’t be serious. “She was working with someone else.”
“That’s a pretty big jump to make. It could have just been an innocent colleague of hers helping her with Mastery work.
” Ed gave me a flat look that made me want to throw all the books off the table.
He hadn’t seemed to listen to me in any of this.
He was the one who had asked me to scrutinize the lab books, and I’d found something that no one else had paid any attention to.
Something that could change the entire case and prove Forrestbriar is still in danger.
Yet he didn’t care to entertain the theory.
“All the notes made in the second handwriting are unrelated to the pages they are on.” I tried to keep my tone calm and collected and not show how utterly annoyed I was with him.
“And notes individually have little meaning, but I am telling you, they all pertain to the love potion. And to the spell-casting.”
I didn’t—couldn’t—exactly explain that I’d found the exact paper that seemed to be a key of sorts to all the random notes. Each of them was no longer than one sentence, one ingredient, one instruction. And to anyone just glancing over them, it wouldn’t seem important.
I’d convinced Ed to get a search warrant for the professors’ library by rewriting all the notes on sticky notes, and then posting them to my office wall in what seemed the correct order to make a potent love potion.
And the extra notes that I couldn’t understand, I just added to the bottom of the wall.
After showing him they seemed almost entirely to write out instructions, he agreed to get a warrant to see if they matched any of the professors’ handwritings.
Of course, I knew they did, and that I needed that notebook and the paper inside it to tie all of this together.
But it wasn’t here. They didn’t get it.
I fought hard against my raging desire to flip the conference table.
Ed sighed loud enough for me to hear. “I’ll talk to Miss Vane about it.
Have her add that into the questioning.” Alicia Vane was the lead prosecutor for our team, and she was as mesmerizing as she was terrifying.
I’d only met her when we were in court, since Ed didn’t deem it necessary to take me to any other meetings he had with her and the rest of our team.
I nodded, knowing that we needed that last piece of the puzzle to seal this. I needed that notebook.
“For now, see what you have here that could be useful. Tomorrow, you’ll help me start on the truth serum.”
My eyes snapped up to his. “Actually?”
“That something you’re interested in?” He had a slight tilt to his lips as he waited for my answer.
“Of course!”
He just nodded and left me with all the notebooks to go through. I had my work cut out for me, and I hoped something in these records would help me identify who the second handwriting belonged to. And I needed to get as far along as possible so that I could focus on making truth serum with Ed.
I had to force myself to focus instead of getting too excited over the truth serum.
Like the love potion, truth serums were very restricted.
Legally, they couldn’t be used against unknowing or unwilling participants unless sanctioned for legal purposes.
Even then, the rules were stringent. Truth serum could only be used on suspects in a case if the crime met specific criteria.
Since Aster’s criminal case included counts of forced sexual assault through the use of a love potion, it met those requirements.
Since it was such a restricted potion, making it wasn’t something most potion masters ever learned how to do. It was notoriously complicated to make and took a lot of time and patience. The recipe for the potion was not publicly published.
Meaning that this was most likely something I would never get to do again. Knowing that it could be the very potion that puts Aster away for life made me anticipate making it even more.
Later that night, I broke into the staff library again. The lab book was gone.