much to do, too many lives at stake to wait for very much longer, she decided. She would try to patch things up later. Before she left, though, she picked up the book Clara had been reading. It was a thick hardcover with the title on the cover in big block letters: FUNDAMENTALS OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, SEVENTH EDITION.
She laid it gently back on the table and returned to her car.
Her next stop was Mechanicsburg, and the local jail there. The cops and corrections officers that ran the place were surprised to see her, but when she flashed her silver star they fell into line. One grabbed up a heavy key ring and led her down into the basement, to the secure cells.
“He screamed every time we tried to put him in a cell with a window,” the CO explained, sorting through his keys. “These are our solitary confinement units, which we save for the worst kind. Padded walls, no furniture but a suicide-proof toilet. Electric lights we keep on twenty-four/seven so we can see what they’re up to.”
“What has he been doing?” Caxton asked.
The CO shrugged. “At night he sits staring into space, or sometimes he’ll pace back and forth. The cell’s only three paces wide, but he’ll do that for hours. During the day—from dawn until sundown, every time—he just sleeps. It’s funny.”
“What is?” Caxton asked.
“Down here,” the CO said, “there’s really no way for him to see whether the sun is up or down. But somehow, he knows. He’ll be sleeping now, of course, but I can wake him up if you want.”
“I do,” Caxton said.
The CO unlocked a heavy reinforced door and opened it wide. Inside Dylan Carboy lay stretched out on the floor, his head turned to one side, looking like nothing so much as a lifeless corpse. His hands were secured behind his back with nylon restraints and his feet were bare.
“Come on, kid. Come on. You got a visitor.”
The boy didn’t move.
“This might take a while,” the CO said, then grabbed Carboy under the arms and grunted and strained to get him sitting upright. “You’re a U.S. Marshal, huh? You come to transfer him?”
She understood why he would think that—prisoner transport across state lines was one of the primary functions of the USMS. “No,” she said. “I just want to talk to him. It’s pertinent to an open investigation.”
The CO shrugged. “Hell, I was hoping we were going to get rid of him. Little bastard creeps me out.
You want to talk, feel free. I don’t know if he’ll answer.”
Caxton squatted down next to Carboy and studied his face. He was just a kid, even younger-looking than she remembered from when she’d hauled him in. At the time, of course, he’d been made up like a vampire. He was still pale, but not deathly pale, and his ears were round and normal. A thin fuzz of stubble coated the top of his head where his hair had started to grow back in. His eyes were open, but they didn’t track, just stared vacantly forward.
“I can get him on his feet, if you want,” the CO said. “We can drag him down to an interrogation room.”
“No need,” Caxton said. “Tell me—has he asked for a lawyer?”
The CO shook his head. “We offered, a bunch of times. After dark, when he was talking, even. He wants vengeance, he says. He wants blood. He says that a lot. But lawyers he can do without.”
“Okay, then. I’ll speak with him awhile and then get out of your hair,” she said. The CO nodded and moved to stand by the door, hands held behind him, waiting for her to do what she needed to do. Caxton knew better than to ask to be left alone with the prisoner. That would never be allowed, not with someone as violent and unstable as Carboy.
“Do you remember me?” she asked. The boy’s face didn’t change. He was supposed to be a vampire, and of course vampires didn’t talk during daylight hours. It seemed he was going to prolong the ruse even when no one else believed in it. “I’m Laura Caxton. You wanted to kill me. Remember?” Caxton frowned. “It was all over your notebooks.”
The corner of Carboy’s upper lip twitched. Just a tic, but enough that Caxton caught it. Maybe that was what she needed: an in. The secret to police interrogations wasn’t knowing when someone was lying to you. You had to assume everything a subject said was a lie. No, the secret was finding the button you could push, the one thing that bothered the subject so much it threw him off his game enough to get his carefully prepared facts tangled up. In this case it was finding something that would get Carboy to talk at all.
“We found your notebooks in your house. You remember, the house where you strangled your sister.”
The tic came again when she mentioned finding the notebooks but didn’t recur when she mentioned his sister. Yeah, she had him. Those notebooks were important to him. “I didn’t bother reading them all,”
she said. “They were kind of repetitive, and not very well written. So I gave them to one of my officers.
He had to pull one of them apart because blood had stuck all the pages together. Completely ruined them.”
The boy’s lip had curled up so far that she could see his teeth.
“What I did read was kind of funny. ‘Laura Caxton will die by Halloween.’ But look, it’s almost Christmas, and here we are. I’m running around perfectly healthy, and you’re stuck in here, where you can’t even write bad poetry to entertain yourself.”
His mouth opened and she thought words might spill out. Instead he carefully brought his teeth together and closed his lips. They were white with the strain.
“I think,” she said, “that I’m going to make photocopies of some of the funnier pages, and share them with all my cop friends.”
“I’d like to see those,” the CO behind her said, playing along.
Caxton nodded eagerly. “Sure. I’ll get your address before I leave so I can send them along. There’s one part that’s just hilarious. He talks about Jameson Arkeley—you know, the
The boy lunged forward, his teeth clacking together on the lapel of her coat. The CO rushed forward, but Caxton waved him back. Carboy growled and his feet kicked at the floor, but she easily held him down, pinning him by pressing his shoulders against the floor. The boy was as weak as a starved dog, and she wondered if he’d been eating in the jail—if he wanted everyone to think he was a vampire, he couldn’t very well eat solid food.
Down on the floor Carboy writhed and moaned. “He came to me. He came to
“And Malvern?” Caxton asked. “Did she come to you, too?”
“Only in dreams,” the boy said.
“Where are they, Rexroth?” Caxton asked. She thought appealing to his adopted vampire persona might get a better result. “Tell me where they are.”
Carboy shook himself violently, trying to get free. The CO coughed, his way of telling her she was on the verge of being abusive. She didn’t ease up.
“Tell me. If you know so much. If they really came to you, then tell me. Or I’ll never believe you. Where is their lair?”
“I am still worthy! He’ll come for me again! He will free me!” the boy shrieked.
“You’re lying. You’re a worthless lying sack of shit,” Caxton barked. “He never came for you. Why would he? You’re nothing. You’re nobody.”
“I will never betray him! He warned me you would come. He told me to say nothing. Nothing! I am still worthy, Jameson! I am still worthy!”
The CO coughed again, much louder this time. Caxton forced herself to let the boy go. She jumped up and back so he couldn’t bite her again, considered kicking him in the ribs, but finally she just walked out the door of the cell and into the corridor. The CO came out a few moments later and asked her if there was anything else she needed, but she didn’t even look at him. She was already heading for her car—and for Syracuse.
Chapter 36.
