he’d decided he had something he had to do and didn’t want the cops to see him doing it. He’d taken his winter coat—she had noticed its absence up in the room—but surely he couldn’t walk very far, not with the snow up to his knees in some places. She already knew from Fetlock that Simon didn’t own a vehicle; that was one of the first things you checked when you staked out a POI. He could have caught a bus, but she doubted it. Who would want to wait for a bus in this weather? She decided he must have arranged to have someone pick him up in a car. Which meant that someone would know where he had gone.
The walkie-talkie in her hand kept chirping for attention. She ignored it. She headed down the stairs and burst in on the building manager just as he was cracking open a new beer can. His apartment had all of the house’s best furniture in it—a massive oak breakfront, a kitchen table with four matching chairs—but dust dulled all the colors and there were bags of trash stacked in the kitchen. No books anywhere.
“Hell’s bells, what now?” the old man asked when he saw her.
“I need some information, and I don’t have a lot of time, so forgive me if I sound impolite,” she said.
“How long has Simon lived here?”
“That Arkeley kid? Just this semester. Signed a one-year lease.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?” she asked.
The building manager laughed. “You mean that Linda? She comes sniffing around a lot, but you ask me, the guy’s gay. Never gives her a second look.”
“Does he ever have any other visitors?”
The old man scowled. “Hah! Yes, yes he does. The kind that stay all night and you have to listen to them talking and laughing while you’re trying to sleep. They put a towel under the door, too, but don’t think I’m so old I don’t recognize the smell of what they smoke up there, I was alive in the sixties and—”
Caxton shook her head. “Just answer my questions, alright? As simply and as clearly as you can. Do you remember the names of any of his visitors? Did he ever introduce them to you?”
“We’re not exactly on friendly terms, him and me,” the manager replied. He scratched at his stubble for a second, though, and said, “I guess there was one guy. Simon called him ‘Murph.’ Ugly little pothead with freckles and red hair. Comes around a lot, actually. Don’t know his last name.”
“Do you know where he lives? Please, think hard.”
The building manager shrugged. “South Campus, somewhere.” She must have looked confused. “There’s a secondary campus, called South Campus, about two miles from here down Comstock Avenue. It’s almost all residential buildings. Crappy little cinder-block shacks they rent out for next to nothing.”
“That’s all you can tell me?” Caxton asked, desperate.
“Maybe it’s enough,” Lu said from behind her. He took the walkie-talkie out of her hand. “Deputy Marshal Young, do you read me?”
“Yeah, go ahead, Lu.”
“Special Deputy Caxton would like you to call up the registrar’s office. We need to track down a student, partial name Murph, maybe Murphy. Not sure if that’s a last or first name. Last known address is South Campus and he may have a record for drug offenses. You think that might turn something up?”
“We’ll get on it, maybe we’ll get lucky. Over.”
Caxton nodded with excitement. “Good thinking,” she said to Lu. “Sir,” she said, turning to face the building manager, “thanks for your assistance.”
“Simon’s not going to jail, is he?” the man asked.
“I don’t have a warrant for his arrest,” she told him.
“Good, ’cause he’s still got six months on that lease.”
Caxton led Lu back down to the street and climbed into her Mazda, indicating he should take shotgun. “I need you to navigate,” she said. “We’ll head down to South Campus now and hope we have an address by the time we arrive.”
“You got it,” Lu replied. “But what makes you so sure he went to hang out with this friend of his?”
“Because I don’t have any other ideas,” she told him.
Chapter 39.
Caxton left Young and Miller to watch the house, in case she was wrong. If Simon came back while she was gone they were under orders to sit on him—to watch his every move, and to follow him if he left the house. There was no point in being discreet anymore. If the kid was going to sneak out from under their noses and run around in the dark, she would do everything she could to keep him away from his father.
If she didn’t, she was beginning to think she would have a second vampire on her hands, just as dangerous as the first.
Simon’s reticence to talk to her, his obvious distrust of law enforcement: those she could have chalked up to youthful rebellion or just general stupidity. The trick with getting his friend to sit in his window for him suggested something more. Maybe he had something to hide.
“When we get to this place,” she told Lu, “just back my play. I’ll do the talking.”
“Right,” he said, sounding unconvinced. She’d pushed him to his limit when she broke down Simon’s door, and she wasn’t sure how much more he would let her get away with. Well, she would just have to find out.
She kept her speed down on the way to South Campus. It wasn’t all that far away and the snow on the road made any kind of driving hazardous. Big trucks full of rock salt were carving out channels through the snowdrifts, but she didn’t want to take any chances. If she went off the road and disabled the Mazda, she would lose crucial time and mobility.
“You’re from here, right? From Syracuse? If we knock on the door of a drug scene, should we expect to be met with guns?”
Lu’s eyes went wide. “Hell, no. The drug users here are just students—teenagers. They smoke pot, maybe drop acid sometimes. This is a college town, you have to expect that, a little. They rarely get violent. It’s too cold up here for that kind of stupidity.”
“Good,” she said, and shifted in her seat, trying to relax.
It wasn’t easy. This place they were going to—this apartment. Jameson could be there waiting for her. It could be a trap. He could have already passed the curse to Simon. The place could be crawling with half- deads.
She could find anything there, anything at all.
She turned off on a road called Skytop and got her first look at South Campus. The building manager’s description hadn’t been far off. The residential units were simple two-story dwellings built of cheap materials. They had few windows and they all looked exactly alike. They lay like scattered Monopoly pieces in a vast sea of salted gravel parking lots. Caxton could imagine few places more depressing to live—but she supposed, if they were cheap enough, students could put up with them.
They pulled into a parking lot big enough for a shopping mall and then they sat. And waited. And waited some more. Caxton got impatient and punched the steering wheel a few times, but that didn’t help anybody, so eventually she stopped. Finally Young called her with an address. He’d turned up over a hundred students with the last name Murphy, and had gone through them all and ruled them out—either they were female, or they didn’t live in South Campus, or they didn’t have red hair—before trying it as a first name. There was only one student in the entire university with the first name of Murphy, and he both was male and lived in South Campus. If this wasn’t the guy they were looking for, he said, if Murph was just a nickname, then they were plain out of luck. He gave her the exact address and she got the car moving before she’d even thanked him.
She pulled into a spot directly in front of the unit she wanted. It was rented, according to Young, to a junior named Murphy Frissell. Frissell was an environmental science and forestry major—what Lu said was locally known as a Stumpy. Frissell was believed to have one roommate, named Scott Cohen, who was studying music. Both of them had been arrested the previous year for possession of marijuana, but their sentences had been suspended. Frissell sounded exactly like the boy the building manager had described—Young had even downloaded a picture from the registrar’s office and confirmed that Frisssell had red hair.
Caxton and Lu got out of the car and approached the housing unit. She could hear thumping music coming through the drawn curtains and thought she could even smell pot smoke. She waved at Lu to cover her, then
