“You remember that name?” Glauer asked. “Scapegrace?”
“Yeah. Of course I do. Teenaged vampire.” She shrugged. “He went down as quick as the rest of them.”
Her bravado couldn’t quite keep her from drawing her shoulders in closer to her body and wrapping her arms around her chest. Scapegrace had captured her and tortured her before he died. She didn’t like to think about it.
“I think you should read the rest,” Glauer insisted. “I haven’t had a chance to go through it all myself, but —”
“No,” she said.
“What do you mean? This doesn’t worry you?” he asked, turning the page to show her a picture of a state trooper hanging from a noose, her Smokey Bear hat still perched on her head even though her face had turned blue and her tongue hung out of her mouth. “This doesn’t bother you?”
“It would bother me a lot more if Carboy wasn’t already in custody,” she admitted. “But he is. So—so what? According to this I was supposed to die by Halloween, and that was over a month ago. He was late even by his own schedule.” She grabbed the cop’s arm. “Listen. I appreciate your concern. But Dylan Carboy was just a lonely kid with nothing better to do than scribble threats in a journal and fantasize about being a vampire. He probably got my name out of the newspaper and just fixated on it.
It’s truly sad that nobody stopped him before he got as far as he did, but now he’s going to jail, probably for the rest of his life, and I’m safe.” She dropped the notebook on one of the desks. “Now put this all back together and take it back to Mechanicsburg.”
Glauer shook his head. “I think that would be a mistake. There’s something here. I can feel it. Just let me take one more look,” he pleaded.
Caxton rolled her eyes. “Fine. But you don’t have a lot of time to waste here. After last night things are going to get very busy, very fast. In fact, you’d better come to lunch with us—we have a lot to talk about.”
Clara had been waiting outside the briefing room the whole time. She looked slightly confused when she heard that Glauer was going to join them, but she said she didn’t mind at all. She and the giant cop had always gotten along, though they rarely saw each other.
Caxton and Glauer took her Mazda—Clara had come in her own car—and drove out to the Greek place, which was only a few minutes away. Over dolmades and feta she told the two of them about Fetlock and her battlefield promotion.
“They can just do that? Wave a wand and, poof, you’re a Fed?” Glauer asked. “I thought you had to take all kinds of tests and then go through their academy and everything.” Back when Caxton had formed the SSU she had tried to get Glauer made into an instant state trooper and been told the process was much more complicated. Technically he was still on the payroll of the Gettysburg Borough Police Department, though the PSP reimbursed Gettysburg for his salary and he hadn’t checked in with his chief in weeks.
“Apparently the Marshals do it differently. It’s just like a sheriff riding into town and deputizing the local gunslingers to take down the black hats. It’s just as temporary, too. For now, though, it makes me the national go- to person for all vampire cases, and it gives me some police powers I never thought I’d have.”
“Okay,” Glauer said, “but what does it mean for us?”
“Well, first things first. We’re both getting a big raise.” The three of them smiled at that. “It also means I can finally, officially hire you on.” She reached across the table and shook his hand. “Welcome aboard.
Fetlock tells me I can hire anyone I want, including somebody to do all our paperwork.”
“That’ll be a relief,” Glauer laughed. He picked up his large Diet Coke and sipped thirstily at it. “You’re probably going to want to bring in some other people, too, right? I can recommend some guys we should have with us. Johnson, from Erie—he used to be a linebacker in high school, he’s one tough son of a gun.” Glauer shifted his own massive bulk around on the chair—he barely fit in it. “Then there’s Eddie Davis, from Troop K. I’ve never seen anybody who could drive like that guy, he could be your automobile specialist, and—”
“Actually,” Caxton said, “I kind of like having most of our people just be on call. I want to build a core team of just a few people. I was thinking three of us. You, me, and her,” she said, grabbing Clara’s wrist.
Clara had been tearing her paper napkin into a pile of tiny pieces. “Bullshit,” she said.
Caxton frowned. “What do you mean?”
Clara looked to Glauer for support. “You’re spouting bullshit. What do you mean, me? I’m not part of your team.”
“I’d like you to be, though,” Caxton said.
“To do what? Every time I see a vampire I can scream, so you know it’s nearby? Or maybe I can startle them with the flashbulb of my camera. That’s what I do, Laura. I take pictures of crime scenes and dead bodies and gross stuff. I’m very good at it, but I don’t think you need a photographer in your core team.”
“You could be my forensics guy. Like on
Clara just laughed. “Huh? You do realize those guys go to school for that. They’re scientists. They train for years and years and read scientific journals and go to conferences to talk to other eggheads about just how many legs a certain species of cockroach has. I went to Slippery Rock for art photography, and I don’t even use anything I learned.”
Caxton shook her head. “I don’t expect you to just pick it all up by reading a couple of websites about forensics. But you can coordinate with the people the Marshals Service uses. You can manage them—you know a lot more about vampires than they do, by now, so you can tell them what to look for, or how to interpret what they find.”
“There are so many people better qualified than me,” Clara protested. “Why on earth would you pick me for this?”
“You said we weren’t spending enough time together,” Caxton admitted. “You said I spent all my time at work and never got to see you at home. Well, this way we’d both be at work all the time. We could see each other a lot.”
Clara shook her head in disbelief.
“Well?” Caxton asked. “Are you going to give me an answer?”
“No!” Clara said. “At least—not right away.”
Chapter 17.
They polished off a good-sized moussaka without saying much more. Clara excused herself before the baklava arrived, saying she had to get back to work. “That goes for us, too,” Caxton told Glauer. “Come on. We can take dessert to go.”
The two of them headed back to HQ together, Caxton enumerating the things they had to get done as she drove. “We have to try to make some kind of ID on the half-dead from the motel. There’s not a lot to work with, but maybe we can get some idea of what he looked like and run it against the missing persons list. Who knows, maybe we’ll turn up a match. Then there’s the field out behind the motel—I had it searched once, but maybe we missed something in the dark. Get some people over there to have a look around. When you get a chance we need to contact the Feds and see if they have a file on Angus Arkeley—he said he had some trouble with the law a while back. He wasn’t clear on whether he’d actually been processed or convicted, but there might be something there. Oh, and I put a guard on his body, but they need to be relieved, so find somebody who can go over to the morgue and take care of that. I’m going to try to get in touch with his family and get permission to have him cremated as soon as he’s been autopsied.” It was standard practice to cremate the remains of vampire victims. Otherwise the vampire could call them up as half-deads whenever he chose.
By the time they got back to the HQ building it was already four o’clock. The sun was starting to set and pink clouds streaked the sky. Stepping out of her car, Caxton studied the horizon as if there were some clue there. Night was falling, which meant Jameson Arkeley would be active again. He had killed at least twice so far. Would he kill again tonight? she wondered.
All vampires started as people with individual personalities, with moral codes all their own. Eventually they ended up all the same. How long had Jameson lasted before he killed his first victim? Probably longer than most. He
