“Don’t you remember?” Raleigh asked. “Vesta Polder looked for that once, and she couldn’t find it. It’s already gone.”
She picked up Caxton effortlessly and threw her down on the couch. “Don’t try to follow me. I have instructions not to kill you. Daddy wants you to live for now. But if you come after me, I can hurt you. A lot.”
She swept out into the hall then, Simon tucked under her arm like a bag full of dirty laundry.
Caxton lay where she was for a second. Just a second to catch her breath. And to let Raleigh get enough of a head start. Then she jumped to her feet and raced down the hallway. It was her belief that Raleigh was taking Simon straight to their father—straight back to the lair.
She pushed through the front doors and hurried toward the Mazda, only stopping when she heard the doors burst open again behind her. She whirled around, ready to kill the first evil bastard she saw. Vesta Polder was there, shrieking wildly, her veil hanging by one pin like a broken wing on the side of her head.
She must have been pushed through the doors, because she was rolling on the ground, one arm underneath her, the other up as if fending off a blow. Fetlock came after her, Caxton’s old Beretta 92 in his hand. There was a cut on his face and his hair was in disarray. He was breathing hard and sweating profusely. He looked up at Caxton, his mouth open to try to catch his breath. Then he pointed the Beretta at Vesta’s skinless left temple and blew her brains all over the asphalt.
For a second Caxton held his gaze. Then she slipped into the driver’s seat of her car and started up the ignition. All the car tracks leading out of the parking lot headed in the same direction—east, toward the highway. That was the way Raleigh and the half-deads had gone.
Simon had twenty-four hours to live. When the deadline came, if Jameson offered him the curse, knowing what the alternative was—Caxton did not believe the son would say no.
Caxton threw the car into gear, intending to chase after Raleigh and the half-deads whether they liked it or not. The car surged under her—then died. The engine stalled out and she felt every muscle in her body tense up. She switched the car off, then back on. Put it in drive. The car shuddered and lurched forward, then stopped as the engine sputtered to a halt.
It took her too long to figure it out. It took her ten long minutes to get the hood open and see that the half- deads had monkeyed with her engine, and even longer to fix what they’d done. By the time she got back on the road heading east they were long gone, and there were no tracks to follow.
She didn’t waste any more time by getting frustrated. Instead she pulled a U-turn and headed west.
There was one more lead she could follow, she knew. One last chance to find out where the lair was.
She knew she would take that chance—even if it meant throwing away her entire career.
Chapter 51.
She had to drive through the downtown section of Harrisburg to get where she was going. She passed through streets full of little stores, boutiques selling pricey clothes. In one window she saw a pair of young women laughing together as they dressed a mannequin in a bright red minidress with white fur trimming.
At another store the proprietor was stringing up red and green lights. They were getting ready for Christmas.
Christmas. Caxton hadn’t celebrated the holiday much since her parents died. But the year before, when it had just been her and Clara, they’d exchanged presents, and drank eggnog, and even strung up mistletoe. She’d gotten Clara a special lens for her camera, one she’d been looking at online for months.
Clara’s present to her had been a box of bath salts, scented candles, and a wooden massage roller.
Things to help her relax. Most of them were still in the box, which sat underneath the bathroom sink in the back of the cabinet, where she saw it every time she reached for a new disposable razor.
She could use that box now, she thought. She needed to relax, to get frosty, if she was going to pull this off.
She pulled into the parking lot of the jail in Mechanicsburg and switched off the car. She wanted to just sit there for a while and collect her thoughts, but she knew if she did she would never get up and out of the car, so she reached over and pushed the door open and let the cold winter air belly inside, the icy breeze pressing her coat against her body and stinging her cheek. She popped open her seat belt and then climbed out of the car and shut the door behind her.
Inside the jail only a few corrections officers were still at work. The cells were quiet, the prisoners inside either sleeping or contemplating their fates. As one corrections officer—one, thankfully, she had not met before—led her down a flight of stairs to the basement, she started to hear someone yelling, not saying anything, just making inarticulate noises. She was not surprised to learn it was Dylan Carboy making that racket.
“He’s not quite all there, you know that, right?” the CO asked. “He does this all night. It’s weird. It’s like he’s praying, but not to any God I ever heard of. You’ll have to keep an eye on him.”
Caxton nodded. She handed the CO a clipboard on which she’d filled out the appropriate forms. She had lied many times while checking the various boxes and writing in the numbers and authorizations required. She had put down Fetlock’s name as authorizing the transfer, then put her own phone number below it. If anyone called to confirm her authority her phone would ring and she would at least know they were onto her.
She doubted they would, however. Transfers like this happened all the time and cops tended to trust each other. She was counting on that.
“You’re with the Marshals Service,” the CO said, leafing through her paperwork. “This guy commit some kind of federal crime? We have him down for a couple local homicides.”
“He broke into the USMS archives and stole some files,” she lied. “I’m taking him to the field office up in Harrisburg, where we can ask him what was in those documents that he wanted.”
“Huh. Do you guys do a lot of interrogations at night?”
“When the subject sleeps all day, we do. We figure he’ll be more talkative now than tomorrow morning.”
The CO smiled. “You know about him, then.”
“I’m the one who originally brought him in. Listen, I’ll make it as quick as I can. I’ll probably have him back to you before breakfast.”
“You can have him as long as you want,” the CO said.
The door of the padded cell opened up and she stared inside. The gibbering and wailing stopped instantly. Carboy was up against the far wall, his hands lifted high above his head, the fingers splayed as if he were reaching for something on the ceiling. There was nothing there. Caxton didn’t know what that was about. She told herself she didn’t care.
“Come on, Carboy,” the CO said. “Don’t make this difficult, alright? This lady’s from the U.S. Marshals and she wants to talk to you.”
Carboy’s eyes focused on her slowly. “Caxton,” he muttered. “I knew you’d come back.”
The CO said, “You want me to get a straitjacket? He can be violent.”
“I know what he’s capable of. Come on, Dylan. We’re going for a ride.”
Carboy shuffled out of the cell as quickly as he could. The CO bound his hands behind his back. His ankles were shackled together with a length of soft plastic. His feet were bare. The CO had some slippers for him to wear and a blanket to wrap around his shoulders to protect him from the cold. He let Caxton go first up the stairs, then Carboy, and finally he came up from behind with a Taser in his hand, just in case.
The prisoner didn’t attack Caxton, though, or even say anything as she led him out to the jail’s lobby.
She had to sign a couple more release forms, and then she was done—except that the CO reached out and tapped her shoulder.
“Your badge,” he said, nodding at her lapel.
She’d completely forgotten about the star. State troopers didn’t wear badges, and she’d never really gotten used to the star while she had it. She touched her lapel, then looked up at him with her heart thundering in her ears. She forced a smile. “It fell off in the car. It’s always doing that—you want me to go out and get it?”
He gave her an appraising stare, then glanced at Carboy.
“Nah,” he said. “Just get this guy out of here. At least we’ll have one night’s peace, right?”
Caxton thanked him and led her prisoner out into the cold. Carboy climbed into the Mazda without making a
