“Now. How about you tell me why you’re actually here?”
“Alright,” he said, sitting down on the toilet. “I’m here to offer you a star.”
Chapter 13.
“A star,” Caxton said, scowling. “You want to give me a star. What, like a teacher gives a good student a gold star?”
“This one’s silver, actually.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and brought out a lapel pin in the shape of a star inside a circle. She recognized it instantly, of course. Fetlock was wearing one himself. Jameson Arkeley used to wear one, too. Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley of the U.S. Marshals Service. “I’m authorized to temporarily deputize any law enforcement officer I choose into the Service, for as long as I see fit.”
“What, like a sheriff rounding up a posse of cowboys?”
“That’s about exactly right,” he said. “The Service is the oldest branch of the Justice Department. We were originally organized to clean up the frontier. A lot of cowboys were Marshals—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Bill Hickock.”
She shook her head. “I’m not a big fan of Westerns,” she told him.
“Frederick Douglass was one of us, too. Later on President Kennedy had us on the front lines of the civil rights movement and desegregation. We’re the white hats,” he said, his eyes twinkling.
She stared at the pin in his hand but said nothing. What the hell was this about? she wondered.
When she didn’t take the pin immediately, he closed his hand around it but didn’t put it away. “You’ve asked why I came down here. You probably wondered what I was doing at your SSU briefing. I was sent by the director of the Service. He’s very concerned about your investigation and he wants us to help you any way we can. Maybe I should start by giving you some background information, tell you our side of this. Where I come in. At our headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, on 21 November, I was asked to gather all of Jameson Arkeley’s old files from our archives. I was supposed to make photocopies of everything we had and send the originals on to you. The online catalog showed there wasn’t much—a few notebooks, a couple of case jackets and his personal dossier. None of it was digital, which meant I had to go down to the stacks in person and find the paper documents by hand. When I attempted to do so I made an unnerving discovery. Every single folder I was looking for was missing.”
He studied her face, but she refused to give anything away. She wouldn’t even shrug, not until she’d heard more.
“My next step, of course, was to find the Service’s librarian and check the circulation records. The files I wanted had all been checked out at the same time and then never returned. They’d been signed for. I bet you can guess whose signature was on the sheet. Jameson Arkeley’s.”
Caxton let herself blink, maybe too rapidly.
“Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? This was all well after he became a vampire. More than a year after he retired from the Service. He would have needed a photo ID to check out those materials. He would have needed ID just to get into the building. I checked with the unit that issues those ID cards and they told me that they’re supposed to destroy the cards once a deputy leaves the Service, but that sometimes people don’t turn in the cards when they clean out their desks. Sometimes they want to keep them as souvenirs of their old jobs, and sometimes they just forget. The ID unit never bothers to check if a given card has been turned in and destroyed or not. Well, they will now, I am told. Somebody down there is probably going to get fired over this.”
“Videotapes,” Caxton said.
Fetlock watched her as if waiting for her to say more, but she figured he knew exactly what she meant.
“You mean, is the entrance to the archive under electronic surveillance? Of course. I watched the footage myself—it’s not actually on videotape, you understand. It’s all in compressed files on our servers. I watched the six hours before and after Arkeley supposedly signed out those files. If you’re wondering if I saw a tall albino with pointed ears and no facial hair, no. Nothing of the sort. He might have sent a half-dead in his place, of course, but the librarian would probably have noticed someone coming in with no skin on his face.”
“A human associate, then.”
Fetlock nodded. “Has to be. That person’s identity remains unknown at this time. When I presented the director with the story I just told you, he made a decision very quickly. We couldn’t take that kind of security failure lightly. Maybe you’re thinking that the theft of a few library materials is no big deal, but it demonstrates something much more frightening. It shows that he knows all our tricks—and how to get around them. Jameson Arkeley conspired to trespass on Service property, in addition to any other crimes he might have committed. He is now considered a rogue deputy of the U.S. Marshals Service.
That means he goes to the top of our Major Cases list—our version of the FBI’s most wanted, I suppose you could say.”
She wondered why the Service really wanted Jameson so badly. Maybe Fetlock was just gunning for promotion and wanted to take credit for closing up some unfinished business. Maybe it was just bad PR.
After all, an ex-deputy turned mass murderer would look very bad for the Service. Or maybe the director was just truly concerned about public safety. Based on her experience with federal cops she kind of doubted that.
Fetlock raised his closed fist and rattled the pin around the way a gambler rattles his dice before he throws them. “While he still hadn’t hurt anybody we kept his name off the website and out of the media, but after what happened here last night I doubt that remains an option. We’re committed to catching him.
We’re going to put every resource we have behind that. We want you to be one of those resources.”
She shook her head. “I already have a job.”
“And you would keep it,” he said. “This is strictly a temporary deputization. It’ll last just until you catch him. Then you’ll go right back to what you were doing before you started fighting vampires.”
She wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore, if she was honest. She’d been putting her life at stake for so long she’d never really considered what she would do if the vampires were driven to extinction.
Maybe she would retire and work as a dog trainer. That would be nice.
Not yet, though. For now, she was a cop.
“What’s in it for me?” she asked. She couldn’t see it. Did he expect her to just jump at the chance?
He leaned back and seemed to think about it before answering. “It would open a lot of doors for you. It would allow you to track a fugitive across state lines, for one thing. Right now if Jameson runs to West Virginia you can’t legally follow him.”
She would anyway, of course, legally or otherwise. But it could be useful to have police powers anywhere in the country. She had often considered what might happen if the vampire moved outside the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If she were him, she would have done it months ago.
“You’d also have access to the resources of our Major Case Fugitive Program.” He sighed and stood up. “Let me show you something you’ve probably already seen.” He took a pen from his pocket and pointed at the warped frame of the bathroom window. “Here.” He indicated a tiny scrap of black cloth stuck in a corner. “Fiber evidence. Maybe something useful, maybe something that could take you to Jameson Arkeley.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I went through there, too. It could have come from my pants. Anyway, I already have our Forensic Services on the way. They do hair and fiber and DNA matches all the time. I’ve yet to see anything useful out of that kind of evidence.”
“And why would you? Your unit operates in a strictly prosecutorial role. They make the case after the subject is in custody. How long does it take them to do a thorough search? Six weeks?”
“About that,” she admitted.
“A lot of bodies could pile up in six weeks. My guys can take those fibers and run them against every national database and have something for you in twenty-four hours. All it takes is a phone call and I can have them here by lunchtime.”
“Vampires don’t have any hair and they don’t wear a lot of clothes. If they even have DNA, nobody’s ever found it.”
Fetlock sighed. “Alright, then what about manpower? You have two full-time people in your SSU, including yourself. You can’t afford to hire anyone else, so you rely on part-time volunteers. With federal money you could hire anyone you want for as long as your investigation lasts.”
She had to admit it was tempting. “What’s the catch?”
