32.

As usual, Jameson had left her quite a mess to clean up.

Her first concern was for Raleigh. Sister Margot and several of the girls were waiting in the front hall and they demanded answers to their questions. She just pushed past them and into the hallway where she’d last seen Jameson’s daughter. The girl was there, curled up in a massive wooden chair. Her face was white with fear and her hands were clenched. She said she could not release them.

“Just breathe,” Caxton said, kneeling in front of her. “Breathe.”

The girl shook her head wildly. Caxton fought down the urge to slap her. She had work to do, but first she needed to make sure Raleigh was alright. She tried to imagine what Glauer would do in this situation. Glauer was much better at dealing with hysterical people. “Look,” she said. “It’s going to be alright. Yeah. Your father wants to turn you into a vampire, but—”

“He wants what?” Raleigh gasped. She started breathing heavily. She was at risk of hyperventilating.

“You’re safe right now. He won’t come back tonight. I promise. That’s his MO so far, one attack per night.”

“Then what about tomorrow night?” the girl asked.

“I’ll protect you then, too,” Caxton said.

It wasn’t working. Raleigh’s fear level was ramping up and nothing Caxton said seemed to help. She headed back into the foyer, intending to ask Sister Margot for help. “Did Raleigh have any friends here she was especially close with?” Caxton asked. “I mean,” she said, after glancing at the corpse on the floor, “anyone other than Violet. Someone needs to sit with her. I don’t think she’s going to sleep tonight. Also, I need some Styrofoam cups, or whatever you have.” There were shell casings all over the floor, bullet holes in the walls, and worse, probably dozens of bullets out on the lawn. She needed to start identifying their locations. Normally she could have left that to someone else, but with the girls milling about in the foyer it was going to be hard to secure the scene. She scanned the floor with her eyes, finding her brasses, until she realized Sister Margot wasn’t answering her. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“You,” Sister Margot said, “have brought death into this sacred place. You will leave at once!”

Caxton bit her lip.

Sister Margot stamped her foot on the flagstones. “At once!”

Caxton watched the young woman carefully. Sized her up. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” she said.

“This is a place of healing. Of peace! I’ve worked all my life to make it a quiet refuge and in one night you’ve ruined everything!”

Not shrugging was the best Caxton could do to mollify the girl. “I’m going to need to bring in some forensics people, get this crime scene cleared, that’s going to take most of the night, then I’ll need to bring in some people to question everyone who was out in the halls before, so we can establish when the vampire came in and what route he used. Lastly I’m going to—”

“Violet is lying there, dead!” Margot shrieked.

“Yeah. I need to contact her parents immediately.”

“I should hope you would. When they hear what happened I imagine—”

“I’ll need to convince them into an emergency cremation. Whenever he wants, the vampire can bring her back from the dead. Meanwhile, I’ll get an armed guard in here to watch her for signs of reanimation.” It would be much easier, of course, to just cut off the dead girl’s head. Decapitated corpses didn’t come back as half-deads. But she supposed the family had a right to make that kind of decision. “Meanwhile, why don’t you get everyone back to bed, alright? My people will come and go and hopefully be done by the time you get up in the morning. Thanks, Margot.”

The nun’s face was bright red. Caxton turned away to head back toward the gate, where she could make some phone calls.

First things first—she called in an APB on a naked vampire, to be considered extremely dangerous. She called the local police chief and reported Violet’s homicide so he could get a file going. Not that it was going to require much in the way of investigation, but you had to keep the paperwork straight. Finally she called Fetlock—or rather, she started dialing his number. Before she had half the digits into the phone he called her instead.

“Um, hello,” she said, answering his call.

“Is she dead?” Fetlock asked.

Caxton rubbed the bridge of her nose. “No. Raleigh—Raleigh’s alright. A little shaken up. How did you—?”

“But Jameson got away. I just saw your APB.”

Everybody knew about the mess she’d made. Malvern, Fetlock—when would Vesta Polder chime in? she wondered. “Yeah. Yeah, he got away. I’ll explain how later. Listen, Deputy Marshal, how do you know all this? It only just happened.”

“I’ve been monitoring your phone,” he told her. “You made it sound as if you expected Jameson to attack tonight, so I’ve been up waiting to hear what happened. I hope you don’t mind me listening in to your phone calls.”

“No…of course not,” Caxton said.

“It’s crucial we stay together on this case. You should have called me earlier, when you were setting up your ambush. I could have had a SWAT team mobilized or something. Why didn’t you call me?”

“I figured I could handle it myself,” Caxton replied. To be honest, she hadn’t thought of Fetlock at all.

“Alright, next time. Now tell me what you need right now. I can be there in less than an hour.”

Caxton thought about it for a moment. She thought about Margot—and the girls. Violet’s murder would upset them more than she wanted to accept. She should try to be more sensitive, she decided. That was what Glauer would have told her. “There are no men allowed down here. Maybe you should stay clear—though I do need some officers to guard the scene, and the body. Female officers. Also,” she said, looking around the snowy lawn, “I have some material evidence here. Jameson left his clothes behind.”

“His clothes?”

So she had to explain how he’d gotten away after all. Fetlock said he would see what he could do about getting some female officers down to the convent and Caxton hung up. Then she went to send home the cops who had made up her ambush. She thanked them profusely and was glad to see them leave unscathed—but then one turned back. He was an earnest-looking young cop from the local borough’s PD. His uniform was spotless and his eyes were bright, even though the hour was growing late. He waited patiently for her to wave at the departing cars, then stepped closer, coughed discreetly into his hand, and then stood at attention until she met his eye.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said.

“At ease,” she replied. “You have something to say?”

He nodded and relaxed a little. “I hit him,” he said.

Caxton shrugged. “So did I. Several times.”

The cop frowned. “Ma’am, begging your pardon—you didn’t so much as slow him down. We were all talking before, wondering if maybe he was bulletproof. Maybe through some magical means. But I’ve been hunting since I was a boy, and I know when I’ve hit an animal or a paper target. I saw his blood. I just wanted you to know that. He isn’t impervious to bullets, at least not totally.”

She stared at him with wide eyes. “You saw his blood?”

“I saw him turn to his left, and his arm went up, like so,” he demonstrated. “Then blood came out of the wound. Not much. But I know when I hit somebody.”

“Thank you very much, Officer. That’s actually good to hear.” And it was. She sent him home. He’d given her a lot to think about. So far she’d been unable to scratch his skin with her best shots. If the young officer had actually drawn blood—then maybe there was hope.

She secured the scene in the foyer as best she could, then went to sit in her own car and wait for Fetlock’s fiber unit to arrive. The sun was just starting to color the tops of the trees when the unit showed up—or rather, when the forensics expert arrived, since it was just one woman. She was about fifty, with frosted blond hair and bags under her eyes. She was not happy about being dragged out of bed to look at some cast-off clothes. “There’s a body inside?” she asked, pulling on some latex gloves. “Can I have that as well?”

“No word yet from the local coroner, so we can’t remove her yet. I’m waiting on word from her family so I can cremate her.”

The forensics expert grunted. “Tough to get anything useful from ashes. Though cremation’s not as complete as some people think. Your typical flame job leaves small material, some of it recognizable. You can get teeth out of ashes, and sometimes the fillings don’t melt, so you can match dental records. Titanium surgical pins, Teflon knee replacements, those survive.”

“We already have a positive ID on the body.”

The older woman shrugged.

“You want to take a look?” Caxton asked. She led the woman inside the foyer to where Violet still lay as she’d fallen.

“Vampire attack,” the expert said, after studying the body for a while. “More violent than the previous ones we’ve seen. This wasn’t premeditated.”

“No,” Caxton said. “Listen, I was here. I know all this already. Do you think you could tell me something I could use?”

The expert grunted again. “Maybe. This is not an exact science, Trooper.”

“Special Deputy. Let’s go look at the clothes.” She led the expert back out to the lawn and the shirt and pair of pants Arkeley had left behind. “Nobody has touched them. I made sure of it.”

“Good. Honestly, fiber’s my specialty,” the expert said.

Caxton sighed in relief. Fetlock had sent the right person for the job, then. There would be no fingerprints on the scene, or any DNA evidence. Vampires didn’t leave those behind, ever. Fibers were another matter. Anybody who wore clothes left fibers behind, somewhere.

The expert took one quick look at the clothes, then examined a few loose threads with a jeweler’s loupe. “I think I can confirm this is a match with what we saw at the hotel. Three kinds of fibers. We left a report for your liaison.”

“I got it,” Caxton agreed.

“Yeah. She wasn’t there at your HQ when we arrived. We had to leave the report with a desk sergeant. She never even followed up to let me know she got it. That’s just not professional. You want some free advice? Fire this twit. You’ve got real forensic pathologists in Harrisburg. Any of them would do a better job.”

The woman was talking about Clara. Caxton held her tongue.

“Anyway, I’ll do an actual comparison, but for now, I’ll provisionally say we’re looking at the same three fibers. Cotton, nylon, Twaron.”

“What the hell is Twaron?” Caxton asked. She’d been wondering all day.

The expert picked at the shirt and unbuttoned it. Beneath was another layer of cloth, some kind of vest. She picked up the vest and threw it at Caxton, who caught it—but it was much heavier than she’d expected and she nearly dropped it. Squishing it in her hand, she knew what it was instantly.

“Twaron,” the expert explained, “is a competing product with Kevlar. It’s used in the construction of police body armor, mostly. Your vampire was wearing a ballistic vest.”