Glauer there. She planned to apologize to him. It had been a bad night for everybody, but he hadn’t deserved the crap she’d given him. She found him just where she’d expected, and he’d been busy.
He had taken the liberty of updating the whiteboards. For VAMPIRE PATTERN #1 he had pasted up pictures of the Carboy family underneath the pictures of Rexroth/Carboy’s other victims. For VAMPIRE
PATTERN #1 he had found pictures of the state troopers and Bellefonte police they’d fought at Astarte’s house, as well as the anonymous half-dead from the motel where Angus died. Jameson’s brother and his widow both had their own memorials there, circled in red marker. The boards were getting crowded; there wasn’t much room left for future victims.
It was fine that he’d done all that—but when she saw what else he’d done she nearly lost it. He had taken one of Dylan Carboy’s notebooks—the one that had been gummed together with dried blood—and separated all the pages. They lay spread out on the desks like an enormous tarot card reading.
She had given him specific instructions to stop reading the notebooks. Clearly he’d decided he didn’t have to obey her orders. Before she could blow up at him, though, he held up his hands. “I can explain,”
he said. “I know you think this is all garbage. And the vast majority of it definitely is. There are whole sections where he just copied down the lyrics of his favorite songs, and there are pages where he pasted in printouts of websites, some of them pretty random. It looks like he was obsessed with the Columbine school shooting for a while. I think maybe he was planning something similar at his college—that might have been when he bought the shotgun.”
He tapped one of the desks. “But starting here things change. None of his journal entries are dated, but he talks about a TV show he watched and I looked it up. The episode he mentions ran the first week in October.”
“Right after Jameson accepted the curse,” Caxton suggested.
“Yeah.” Glauer picked up one of the sheets. “The show’s not important except that it gives us a time frame for the transition. Before that date most of his entries are long, rambling passages about how he feels like no one understands him and how he feels alienated even from his family. Then we have this one.
It stuck out at first only because it was so short: ‘I saw him outside my window tonight. He’s close now, and coming closer.’”
Caxton raised an eyebrow.
Glauer pushed his way between the desks, knocking them sideways in his excitement so their feet squeaked across the linoleum. “There’s more! Here, maybe a couple days later: ‘He told me the strong will always prey on the weak. That’s the laws of nature. He said if you were weak you had a duty to make yourself stronger, or to get out of the way. Nobody is as strong as him.’”
“Does he ever mention Jameson by name?” Caxton asked.
Glauer dropped his head. “No. At least not in the journal entries. There are newspaper articles about vampires all over this notebook. A lot of them about what happened at Gettysburg.”
Caxton leaned against the bookcase. “But you think this ‘he’ is Jameson. You think he was in contact with Carboy somehow. Presumably not through their MySpace pages.”
“We know they can communicate telepathically,” Glauer tried.
Caxton couldn’t deny it—she’d had her mind invaded by more vampires than she liked to remember.
“And after the second week in October he starts talking about a ‘she’ as well. Here: ‘She was beautiful once, and can be again. It would be an honor to feed her, to make her whole. It would be an act of love.’”
“So he was talking to Malvern, too. Okay. And this kid sounds about the right type to get a vampire’s interest. He was fucked up already, spiraling toward violence, ready to obliterate himself as long as he could take some other people with him. That would make him a perfect candidate to accept the curse.”
“Yeah,” Glauer said.
“But in the end they didn’t give it to him. He had to pretend he was a vampire. We know Jameson is recruiting. We know Malvern has recruited in the past, and I have no doubt she wants more vampires to come worship her. Neither of them gave Carboy what he wanted. That suggests to me he never met either of them face- to-face. Maybe he just imagined these conversations. Maybe he was just crazy.”
“Maybe, but there’s something here. Something…I need to read more.”
Caxton threw up her arms. “Alright. I don’t need you right now, actually. I’m going out to Allentown, to Raleigh’s place, but they don’t let men in there, you said. So spend the day on this if you need to. One day.”
He nodded gravely. “Thanks. This one is haunting me. If I can figure out what made him do it…I don’t know. I don’t know what that will achieve, in concrete terms, but it means something to me.”
“One day,” she repeated. “Wish me luck.” She left the basement and headed up to her car, finally ready to go to Allentown. She had her key in the ignition before she realized she hadn’t actually apologized to Glauer. Well, maybe, she thought, letting him dig through Carboy’s diseased brain was apology enough.
She hoped so.
It was a long ride to Allentown, and she needed her sunglasses the whole way. Snow lay deep and thick on the fields she passed through, but the sun was out. In the towns, as she drove through the quiet residential streets, the eaves and gutters glittered with ice melt and the streets were filled with dark slush.
The radio told her it was going up to fifty degrees by afternoon but that more snow was on the way. If there were blizzards coming, she thought, she would have to get Fetlock to give her a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The little Mazda wasn’t made for slippery conditions.
Eventually she started to recognize landmarks, old family restaurants that had been in business for decades, the main squares of little towns she’d visited a million times. Caxton had grown up in small towns all around the area, the old coal mining part of Pennsylvania, sometimes in the cities and sometimes in places that were nothing more than rows of cheap company housing built for coal miners in the previous century—places that didn’t even deserve the title of “town,” so instead they were called patches. She got to see one or two of them as she drove past, though very few of them lay near the main road. Almost all the old patches had been forgotten by time once the coal dried up or the mines were just shut down.
The directions she’d downloaded from MapQuest took her south of Allentown proper, through the borough of Emmaus. Emmaus was famous as the original home of the Moravian Church in Pennsylvania—an offshoot of Protestantism with its own unique customs, though not as severe as the Amish or the Mennonites. The one thing she remembered about the Moravians was that they had a special kind of cemetery called a God’s Acre. Instead of burying their dead in family groups, the Moravians filed them by age, gender, and marital status. She couldn’t remember why—maybe they wanted them filed appropriately for God when he came to get them again on Judgment Day.
There were a lot of religious groups living their own way in the area. There were monasteries and retreats tucked away in the hills she drove through, and plenty of churches. When she finally found the side road she wanted, she headed down through a long copse of dead trees that ended in a stone wall surrounding what she took for either a museum or a rest home. The building stood four stories high and as wide as a city block. It was made of redbrick dressed with carved stone and studded everywhere with windows, some of them with Gothic arches. Ivy covered most of the face of the building, brown and dead now, but she could imagine it bright green in summertime. The building sat on a broad lawn of yellow grass that peeked up sporadically from under the snow. A number of stone monuments, a fountain, and a rustic gazebo stuck out of the snow here and there. Behind and to one side a stripe of water cut through the lawn, a creek full of pale stones.
There was no parking lot. A few very old and very nondescript cars sat on the lawn near the main gate in the wall, and she pulled in beside them. She got out and went to the gate, a huge wrought-iron contraption surmounted by a simple cross. She started looking for a bell to ring, but before she found one someone came to let her in: a teenaged girl wearing a baggy dress and a parka two sizes too big for her.
“Hi, I’m Special Deputy Caxton,” she said to the girl.
The girl smiled broadly and nodded her head.
“I have an appointment. I mean, I’m supposed to speak with Raleigh Arkeley. She lives here, right?”
The girl smiled and nodded again. Apparently she didn’t speak much. Caxton looked up at the cross over the gate and wondered if she’d come to a convent or a nunnery and if everyone inside had taken a vow of silence. It would make it damned hard to interview Raleigh about her father.
“Can you take me to her?” Caxton asked.
The girl nodded again and then turned around and started trudging across the lawn. The hem of her dress
