“just wanted to say something.”
Here it comes, Caxton thought. She would take it, whatever it was.
“We wanted to say thanks. You didn’t know Brad, but you put your life on the line to catch his killer.
That kind of courage is something we respect.”
One of the men at the side of the room started to clap. The others followed suit immediately. The applause was hardly deafening, but it was real.
“Whatever you need to get this thing, whatever it takes, we’re with you,” Glauer said over the noise. He held out a hand and grasped hers hard, pumping it repeatedly. “Just next time, try to wreck Finster’s car instead. It’s a real shitbox.”
Another man—it had to be Finster—said, “Hey,” and everyone laughed, Caxton included. She took her hand back from Glauer and let him point the way to a glassed-in office at the back of the room.
Inside the local police chief waited for her, dozens of manila folders lined up neatly on his desk. He stood up promptly as she entered and shook her hand, then sat back down. “Trooper Caxton. I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you here. How glad the borough of Gettysburg is that you could help us out.” The nameplate on his desk readCHIEF VICENTE and there was no dust on it. The walls behind him held framed photos of policemen from years gone by, some of the photos looking sixty or eighty years old. They showed cops who looked almost identical to the men out in the bullpen, just with different uniforms.
Vicente himself stood out, by contrast. He was young, maybe ten years older than Caxton, and though he wore a mustache it was thin and neatly trimmed. He was relatively short and his eyes were bright and clear and full of optimism. He had a faint Puerto Rican accent when he talked. He didn’t look anything like the cops in his bullpen. He looked a little like a politician.
She sized him up in one professional once-over. He must have worked damned hard to get where he was, to be chief of the men outside his office. He must have put up with a lot of crap along the way.
Caxton knew that story because it was a lot like her own. This was a man she could work with, she thought. Somebody she could understand. “I want to thank you for inviting me down here,” she said, by way of opening.
“Are you kidding? I think the luckiest thing that ever happened to the ’Burg was you being here last night.” He opened one of his manila folders and took out a map of the town. Portions of the map had been highlighted in yellow ink and a number of handwritten notes crowded the margins. “This town has a population of about seventy- five hundred, and most days this time of year we have twice that many tourists in town. I have twenty sworn patrolmen to take care of those people, and a couple dozen auxiliary officers I can call in for homecoming or the bigger reenactments. Normally that’s enough.
Normally our biggest problem is frat parties getting out of control up at the college, or tourists who don’t know how to drive and make our traffic patterns a real mess.” He looked up from the map and smiled at her. “We had forty-three violent crimes reported last year. None of them resulted in a death.”
“None?” Caxton repeated, a little stunned. “You had no murders at all last year?” Even in the sleepiest of backwater towns you normally got a couple of abused women killing their husbands or kids playing with guns blowing each other away. Then there were vehicular fatalities to consider. In the era of road rage, more and more people were realizing that a three-ton SUV made a great murder weapon.
Vicente shook his head, though. “This is one of the safest towns in Pennsylvania. We’re very proud of that, and we’d like to keep it that way. My men aren’t trained to respond to what happened last night.
We had to download the correct forms to report a death in service because we didn’t have any on hand.
Trooper Caxton, you tell us what to do, okay? You tell us how to keep our people safe and we will listen.”
Caxton sat back in her chair and inhaled deeply. “I haven’t had time to prepare a formal action plan,”
she said.
Vicente raised his hands an inch or two off the desk and then lowered them again. “I’ll take your best off- the-cuff suggestions, too.”
She nodded and thought about it. She was trained for this. She had been training in criminal investigations for a year. “Yeah. Well, we start by looking for where he’s sleeping. Vampires don’t just dislike sunlight. They literally cannot get out of their coffins until the sun goes down. This one doesn’t even have a coffin—he tried stealing one last night, but I screwed up his plan. He can sleep in a barrel or even a Dumpster if he has to, but he needs someplace dark and enclosed. If we can find where he is now, we can pull his heart out and be done without any further violence.”
“Do you think that’s a likely scenario?” Vicente asked, his eyes brightening.
“Unfortunately, no. There are too many places he could be hiding and we don’t have enough manpower to search the entire town today. It’s going to be dark in a couple of hours. The vampire will need blood tonight—he looked emaciated, and they’re worse than junkies, they need blood the way we need oxygen. If—when—he attacks somebody, we need to know about it so we can respond instantly. So we should put out an APB. I can work up an Identi-Kit profile so your people will know what he looks like, but he’s conspicuous enough that people will probably recognize him right away. I need to get the call when that happens.”
“I don’t want to just wait for someone to die before we take action,” Vicente said. “People around here won’t like that.”
“No, of course not.” Caxton licked her lips. Her mouth was getting dry. She’d never done this before, but she was the only one who knew how to fight the monsters. She kept having to remind herself of that.
“Every car we can get on the streets should have two cops in it, and enough firepower to take down the vampire. There’s a state police barracks a few miles from here, and another one in Arendtsville. You can request they send every available unit. We’ll search every shadow, every street corner. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Also, I’d like to open an official investigation, see what we can learn about this guy.” That should have come first, she realized. It should have been her first suggestion. Vicente caught her self-doubt; she could see it in his eyes. She was making mistakes already.
What would Arkeley do? It had been so much easier when he’d been in charge and she’d just followed his orders. She had to remind herself she’d been trained for this.
“There’s somebody I need to talk to, a professor at the college.” She pulled out her notepad and flicked back to the first page. “Professor Geistdoerfer, in the, uh, Civil War Era Studies department.”
“The Running Wolf?” Vicente exclaimed.
“You know him?”
The police chief laughed and then covered his mouth. “I’m an alum of the college. Class of ninety-one.
Everybody there knows him. How is he possibly mixed up in all this?”
“He was the first person to enter the tomb,” Caxton said. When Vicente’s face clouded in confusion, she felt like her heart had stopped for a second. The chief didn’t even know how this had all begun. Briefly she filled him in on Arkeley’s discovery and the investigation she’d made of the cavern and the hundred coffins.
“We’re—we’re not going to see more of these things, are we?” he asked, when she’d finished. His eyes were very wide and his mouth was open. He was scared shitless.
Well, maybe he should be, she decided. Maybe it would keep him on his toes. As long as he didn’t get so scared he stopped functioning. She needed him.
“The hearts were all missing. That means they’re dead. So hopefully we won’t see more than just the one. But that’s more than enough. Can you have someone make an appointment for me with the professor?”
“Yes,” he said, “of course.” He took a pack of gum out of his desk and peeled off a stick. He offered her one, as well, and she took it gladly. “I’ll make sure he sees you right after the press conference.”
Caxton stopped with her stick of gum halfway to her mouth. “Press conference?” she asked.
26.
