A Heart of Crystal

Clues

She woke the next morning to loud banging on Drake’s front door. Zeada rubbed the sleep from her eyes as she fumbled for her glasses. She then stumbled her way downstairs.

“Where’s Zeada?” She heard Ray question Drake.

“She’s sleeping,” he replied, “I’m sure you’re well aware of the evening she had last night.”

“I don’t care what kind of night she had last night, me and my men need to get into that lighthouse to investigate this crime,” their esteemed chief of police, Cody Sanders, growled before Zeada walked into the room.

“I have one condition.” All three men turned to her. “No one goes in until I’ve investigated for myself.”

“Who are you to impede the law?” Chief Sanders questioned her crossly. She just crossed her arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow.

“Who are you to stop me? Either you let me go in first or you don’t go in at all. It’s that simple.” The situation was painfully clear to everyone in the room, even Ray. He had been up at the lighthouse with Chief Sanders earlier and no matter what they did, not one of his officers could break through the building’s metal barrier.

“I could arrest you for this,” Sanders threatened.

“And what would that accomplish?” Zeada scoffed. The chief of police started to respond but then thought better of it. “Don’t worry, I won’t take more than an hour of your time and I promise I won’t disturb any of the evidence,” she told him.

“Fine,” he relented sourly. Zeada softened at the look on his face. “But I don’t see what you could possibly gain from going in alone before us.”

“I have my reasons. And it’s not because I’m in league with my brother because I know he didn’t do this,” she paused a moment before adding, “I’d also like to get a couple changes of clothes. I have the sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be here for a while.”

“How do you know Silas didn’t do it?” Ray asked her curiously.

“Intuition. Now I’m going to go get my shoes on, then we can go.” The trip up to the lighthouse was silent. When they arrived, Zeada made everyone back away and went to where she had gone the night previously before lifting the lockdown on the lower portion of the building. True to his word, none of the police officers had entered the building. She walked back around to the front.

“One hour,” Chief Sanders told her. Zeada nodded her head in agreement before walking through the front door with Raul. She locked it behind her to ensure that no one would come in and disturb her. She then pulled out her phone and flipped on the camera and flashlight. Her shaded vision exploded into color as she connected with the electronic device in her hand. She scoured the first and second floors but came up with nothing of importance. Then she went up to her room. She replaced the condition of the door to its previously battered state. Nothing in her room was really missing and the only thing that had been damaged had been the door. She finally went up to the top where the Heart had been. In the artificial light of her phone, she saw the crystal shards from the orb splayed all over the confined room. There was something very off about them though. Zeada reached down and felt the edges of one of the shards. The edges had been smoothed out. If Silas had somehow been able to force her door open from the inside, he still couldn’t have created this smooth of an edge if he had tried to force his way to the center of the orb. Which meant that whoever did steal the Heart also had heat powers or something similar. She went back down the stairs to her room, digesting the information that she had discovered as she threw some cloths into a duffle bag. She then grabbed Raul’s bed and descended the stairs. Only then did she let in the police force.