“He made you. Goddamn it, he must have made you hours ago. Lu, you’re with me. Miller, Young, you stay here and cover us.”
“What the hell?” Young asked. “What are you talking about? He hasn’t moved—”
Caxton snarled her reply at him. “Look at his fingers.
Lu already had the van’s back door open. He jumped down into the snow and she followed close on his heels. They slogged through the drifts that covered the sidewalk and up to the porch of the house, Caxton surging forward to pound on the door.
“Open up,” she shouted. “Open up! Federal agents!”
It seemed to take forever for the building manager to come thumping through the house to answer the door. When he cracked it open Caxton lifted her lapel to show him her star.
“Jeez, what do you want?” the man asked. He was in his late fifties, about average height. Grizzly stubble coated the bottom half of his face, and his eyes were wet and red. Maybe he’d been sleeping. His breath was yeasty with beer. He looked from Caxton to Lu and back again.
“Federal agents,” Caxton repeated. “We need to come inside. Can you step back, sir?”
He was in his rights to demand to see a search warrant. Caxton wasn’t sure what she would do if he asked. After a moment, though, he lifted his shoulders and moved back so she and Lu could push inside the house. It was warm inside, almost stiflingly hot. The front hall was full of very old furniture—a sideboard, a cheval mirror, a sofa that might have been an antique if the upholstery wasn’t split and oozing stuffing.
“It’s that kid upstairs, right? Arkeley? He do something bad? I always kind of figured he would get in trouble,” the building manager whispered. “He’s the only one here, anyway. Comes in all hours of the night, never seems to sleep, and I seen some of the books he brings in here, scandalous stuff—”
“Which room is his?” Caxton asked, cutting him off.
“Top of the stairs, on the left.” The building manager raised his shoulders again, a kind of lazy shrug. “I’ll be down here, you need me.” He shambled back toward his own room, where the television was blaring something about lingerie models competing to see who could eat the most bloodworms.
Caxton was already hurrying up the stairwell. The banister was slick under her hand but marred by countless deep scratches and places where the varnish had been scuffed down to bare wood, probably from countless generations of students moving in and out. At the top of the stairs she turned left and found the door she wanted. She rapped twice on it with her knuckles, then drew her weapon.
Behind her Lu’s eyes were wide, but he took out his own handgun.
Caxton rapped again. It sounded like a hollow-core door, the kind you could just kick your way through.
When no answer came, she started to do just that.
“Whoa, whoa,” Lu said, grabbing her arm. She stared wildly into his face. “You can’t do that. It’s not kosher.”
She knew perfectly well what he meant. Unless she had a search warrant or evidence of a crime being committed inside, she couldn’t just bust the door down, not legally.
She didn’t have time to be legal. “The vampire is coming. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but soon.
You want this kid to get killed by his own father? Have his throat torn out and his blood splattered everywhere?”
“No,” Lu confessed.
She lifted her foot again, but once more he grabbed her arm.
“I also don’t want to get put up against administrative review,” he told her. “Listen, I’ve only been on this job about a month. I was walking a beat in Tipp Hill before that, and I don’t want to go back. Young can be a real hard case when it comes to protocol.”
“Then maybe he doesn’t need to know,” Caxton said. “Maybe the door was open when we got here and we have no idea how the lock got broken. Or maybe we thought we heard someone shouting for help from inside, but in the end it turned out just to be the old man’s TV.”
Lu stared at her, goggle-eyed.
“There’s nobody here to say whether it happened like that or not,” she said, “except you and me.” Then she kicked open the door. It flew open effortlessly, the lock’s bolt clacking in its receptacle.
“Aw, hell,” Lu breathed. “You’re nuts, lady!”
“I’m desperate,” Caxton said, and stepped inside the room.
Chapter 38.
The room beyond seemed filled with books. They were heaped on the floor in enormous tottering stacks, they covered one of the room’s two tables, and more than a few had been laid out, evidently with some care, on the bed. There were hardcovers and leather-bound tomes and dog-eared paperbacks, quite a lot of pamphlets, some photocopied facsimiles of books, spiral bound and with clear acetate covers. There were textbooks so new they were still inside their shrink-wrap, and some books so old their spines were curling off and spilling red dust across the covers of other books. Caxton picked up a few at random. She found a paperback called
Caxton swung her weapon around, covering all the corners. She saw no kitchen at all, just a hot plate, which of course was covered in two neat stacks of books. She saw the bed was little more than a cot, the sheets made and unslept-in, and ducked to see dusty books shoved beneath the bed frame. The closet was full of books, but also clothes—though there was no winter jacket inside. By the window she saw a chair, unoccupied, with a book resting open-faced on its seat.
At the far end of the room stood another door, open, which revealed a bathroom also filled with books—they stood like makeshift walls on either side of the toilet and on top of its tank, and some even had been piled under the sink, where a dripping pipe had left them spotted with mold.
A very frightened-looking girl with short dark hair wearing a tattered sweater sat on the edge of the tub, her hands up to protect her face. Her fingernails were painted black, just like the nails Caxton had seen through her binoculars.
“Who the hell are you?” Caxton said, raising her pistol to point at the ceiling.
“Linda,” the girl squeaked. “I’m a friend of Simon’s. He asked me to come up here and sit in the window.”
“Why?”
Linda shrugged. “He said the cops were watching him. He said he wasn’t in any trouble, though. He said he didn’t do anything. Is he okay?”
Lu started to ask the girl a lot of questions, but Caxton didn’t bother to listen to them. Rushing back into the hall, she found what she expected to see—a broad window, propped open with a short piece of dowel. Beyond in the flurry of snow she saw a wooden scaffolding with steps leading down to the backyard of the house. A fire escape, a way for the inhabitants of the second floor to get out in case they couldn’t use the front stairs.
On the steps of the fire escape she could just make out the round shapes of footprints sunk through the deep snow, mostly filled in again by the storm. She grabbed for the windowsill, intending to yank it upward and climb out, to follow Simon’s trail, but then realized that would be pointless. The boy would have made as quickly as he could for the street and out there his tracks would be lost altogether, churned over by passing cars or lost to the blizzard by the time she arrived.
This was bad, very bad. Very, very bad. If she had lost him, if he’d gotten away from her, then she had no way of knowing whether he’d made contact with Jameson or not. She had to find him—more lives than just his own were at stake—but how?
She had to think. If he had run out in the middle of the storm, Young and his crew would never have seen him. He had noticed their van and known he was under surveillance, then had gone to the trouble of calling in his friend to fool them into thinking he was still in his room, reading quietly. Either he just didn’t like being watched or
