37.

         

“Is he there? Is Malvern there?” Caxton demanded.

“No, neither of them,” Fetlock said, sounding almost apologetic. “And it looks like they haven’t been for a while. Let me just give you the details, alright?”

Caxton closed her eyes and sank back into her chair. “Alright,” she said, holding the phone against her shoulder. She reached into her pocket and took out a small notebook, then snapped her fingers at the three Feds in the van and mimed writing something down. Lu handed her a pen.

“We eliminated all the other possible lairs from your list,” Fetlock told her, “by about two o’clock this afternoon. Some of my men out of Reading were about to eliminate the last one, but they knew it was getting late and they didn’t want to be there after sundown.”

“Good,” Caxton said, “smart.”

“Well, you did warn us. They approached the site and made a quick reconnaissance. The site was an abandoned grain elevator just outside Mount Carmel. They saw definite signs of recent occupation—someone had forced their way into an outbuilding, tearing the chains off the door and not bothering to replace them. They assumed it was probably some petty criminal looking for anything they could steal. After making sure there were no half-deads lying in wait, a three-man team entered the building and found some empty plastic bags. IV bags, like from a hospital. The kind of bags that whole blood is stored in.”

“What about human remains? Furniture made out of bones, bodies wired into lifelike postures, that sort of thing?” That was what you expected to find in a vampire lair. It was the kind of thing she’d seen in vampire lairs before.

“Nothing of the sort, but if the blood bags were enough to pique their interest, there was also a coffin in there. A very old, very cheap coffin that had fallen to pieces. They did what they’d been told to do and called in reinforcements. Lots of them. When no vampires showed up they sent in heavily armed units to secure the site and retrieve all the evidence. They did so, then immediately departed the scene, at approximately four-thirty, just as the sun was going down.”

Caxton sighed almost happily. Fetlock seemed to get how this worked, if nobody else did. You didn’t stick around a vampire’s lair at twilight, no matter how abandoned it might look. That was asking for trouble.

“The evidence was taken back to your HQ building in Harrisburg. I brought in my forensics people and also your team lead—Clara Hsu—to supervise.”

“Clara was part of this investigation?” Caxton asked, a little surprised. “How was she at—I mean, did she prove useful?”

“Yes,” Fetlock said, and Caxton’s eyes opened wide as he added, “She’s clearly not trained for forensics work, but she asked a lot of interesting questions and she even cleared up one mystery for us. There were some skin samples in the coffin. Just a few flakes, like dandruff, but when we tried to run a DNA test nothing whatsoever came up.”

“There was no match in the database?”

“No,” Fetlock said, “I mean there was no DNA. Which confused the hell out of my forensics team. Then Clara pointed out that vampires don’t have human DNA.”

Wow, Caxton thought. Clara had been paying attention. She’d made the connection. Caxton would have felt gushingly proud of her girlfriend if she didn’t feel so guilty for not believing in Clara before.

“They were able to carbon-date the skin samples,” Fetlock went on. “They look to be a couple hundred years old, at least.”

“So they came from Malvern,” Caxton said. “Malvern was in this lair. She can’t go anywhere without Jameson’s help, so they must both have been there.”

“Not just them. We also found some fingerprints on the blood bags. When we ran those through the database a match came up right away. The prints belong to Dylan Carboy, aka Kenneth Rexroth.”

“Seriously?” Caxton asked. She wanted to slap herself on the forehead.

So Glauer had been right. Carboy did have some tangible connection with Jameson. It seemed she was going to have to make some apologies.

“That’s all we have so far, all the hard evidence,” Fetlock went on. “My people were willing to make one more conjecture, though. Judging by the amount of dust on the coffin and the blood bags, they say nobody had been in that lair for weeks. They won’t testify to that in court, but they sounded pretty sure.”

“That’s great,” Caxton said. “That’s a lot of information we didn’t have before. That really helps flesh out the narrative. Blood bags—it sounds like Jameson used this lair before he went rogue, before he killed anybody. He would have been hungry, though. Desperate for blood. He must have had Carboy steal blood from a local hospital or blood bank—but that wouldn’t work. Vampires can’t drink cold blood. It has to be fresh or warm for them to get any benefit from it.”

“Okay,” Fetlock said. “Not my area. I’ve got the site under constant surveillance—from a distance. If anyone tries to go in or out during the night, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” Caxton said, and ended the call. She was almost certain the old lair was abandoned, that Jameson had moved on to somewhere else, but it was good that Fetlock didn’t take chances.

For a while she was buzzing with excitement, putting together jigsaw pieces in her head, adding the new stuff to what she already knew. Eventually, though, as the night wore on, that excitement faded.

The new information was useful. But it didn’t change anything. Jameson was still at large. The evidence might help her catch him, eventually, but for now she still needed to focus on Simon. On keeping Simon alive.

The adrenaline rush she’d gotten from the phone call turned to nervous tension all too quickly.

She tried to relax, tried to listen to the conversation of the three Feds in the van. They were talking about the Orangemen, Syracuse’s basketball team. Apparently one of the star players had been caught smoking crack cocaine in the locker room. There was some discussion as to whether he would be allowed to finish out the season before he was prosecuted. “It’s not like he was dealing,” Miller asserted. “Just holding.”

“With or without intent to distribute?” Young asked. He opened a fresh bag of corn chips and pushed a bunch of them into his mouth.

Caxton looked out the side windows at the street, at the cross streets on either side. Something felt wrong. Maybe she was just too keyed up, too paranoid. That was probably it. Still. She hadn’t survived as long as she had by assuming things were okay. “You guys know this neighborhood?” she asked. “What’s behind this house?”

Miller grunted. “Bunch of backyards, divided up by fences.”

“Could someone have gone out a back door of the house and slipped away without you noticing? Hopped over the fence and got away by a side street?”

Young sat up very straight in his chair. “Sure. If there was anybody unaccounted for. We thought of that, too, and we made damned sure to keep track of where Simon and the building manager were at all times. If your POI had left that window, one of us would have gone to cover the back of the house. But he hasn’t moved, not since lunchtime.”

“Not even to go to the bathroom?” she asked.

Miller shrugged. “Maybe once a couple hours ago, but he was back in a couple of seconds. Not long enough to do anything.”

Caxton lifted the glasses to look at Simon again. The figure there was hard to make out, just a rough silhouette of a young man reading a book. A young man—

“Shit!” she said, and slapped the armrest of her chair hard enough to make the men around her jump. “He made you. Goddamn it, he must have made you hours ago. Lu, you’re with me. Miller, Young, you stay here and cover us.”

“What the hell?” Young asked. “What are you talking about? He hasn’t moved—”

Caxton snarled her reply at him. “Look at his fingers. His fingers. Simon Arkeley doesn’t wear nail polish.”

Lu already had the van’s back door open. He jumped down into the snow and she followed close on his heels. They slogged through the drifts that covered the sidewalk and up to the porch of the house, Caxton surging forward to pound on the door.

“Open up,” she shouted. “Open up! Federal agents!”

It seemed to take forever for the building manager to come thumping through the house to answer the door. When he cracked it open Caxton lifted her lapel to show him her star.

“Jeez, what do you want?” the man asked. He was in his late fifties, about average height. Grizzly stubble coated the bottom half of his face, and his eyes were wet and red. Maybe he’d been sleeping. His breath was yeasty with beer. He looked from Caxton to Lu and back again.

“Federal agents,” Caxton repeated. “We need to come inside. Can you step back, sir?”

He was in his rights to demand to see a search warrant. Caxton wasn’t sure what she would do if he asked. After a moment, though, he lifted his shoulders and moved back so she and Lu could push inside the house. It was warm inside, almost stiflingly hot. The front hall was full of very old furniture—a sideboard, a cheval mirror, a sofa that might have been an antique if the upholstery wasn’t split and oozing stuffing.

“It’s that kid upstairs, right? Arkeley? He do something bad? I always kind of figured he would get in trouble,” the building manager whispered. “He’s the only one here, anyway. Comes in all hours of the night, never seems to sleep, and I seen some of the books he brings in here, scandalous stuff—”

“Which room is his?” Caxton asked, cutting him off.

“Top of the stairs, on the left.” The building manager raised his shoulders again, a kind of lazy shrug. “I’ll be down here, you need me.” He shambled back toward his own room, where the television was blaring something about lingerie models competing to see who could eat the most bloodworms.

Caxton was already hurrying up the stairwell. The banister was slick under her hand but marred by countless deep scratches and places where the varnish had been scuffed down to bare wood, probably from countless generations of students moving in and out. At the top of the stairs she turned left and found the door she wanted. She rapped twice on it with her knuckles, then drew her weapon.

Behind her Lu’s eyes were wide, but he took out his own handgun.

Caxton rapped again. It sounded like a hollow-core door, the kind you could just kick your way through. When no answer came, she started to do just that.

“Whoa, whoa,” Lu said, grabbing her arm. She stared wildly into his face. “You can’t do that. It’s not kosher.”

She knew perfectly well what he meant. Unless she had a search warrant or evidence of a crime being committed inside, she couldn’t just bust the door down, not legally.

She didn’t have time to be legal. “The vampire is coming. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but soon. You want this kid to get killed by his own father? Have his throat torn out and his blood splattered everywhere?”

“No,” Lu confessed.

She lifted her foot again, but once more he grabbed her arm.

“I also don’t want to get put up against administrative review,” he told her. “Listen, I’ve only been on this job about a month. I was walking a beat in Tipp Hill before that, and I don’t want to go back. Young can be a real hard case when it comes to protocol.”

“Then maybe he doesn’t need to know,” Caxton said. “Maybe the door was open when we got here and we have no idea how the lock got broken. Or maybe we thought we heard someone shouting for help from inside, but in the end it turned out just to be the old man’s TV.”

Lu stared at her, goggle-eyed.

“There’s nobody here to say whether it happened like that or not,” she said, “except you and me.” Then she kicked open the door. It flew open effortlessly, the lock’s bolt clacking in its receptacle.

“Aw, hell,” Lu breathed. “You’re nuts, lady!”

“I’m desperate,” Caxton said, and stepped inside the room.