“I can’t right now. Fetlock’s coming down here any second and if he hears me talking to you we’re both in serious trouble. But first you need to know something. We’ve already started going over Vesta Polder’s body. Fetlock has me supervising his forensics team and taking pictures. They trust me now.
Treat me like one of them. They didn’t find much yet, except some black powder on her clothes. I’m pretty sure it’s coal dust.”
“Okay,” Caxton said, clutching at her forehead. “I don’t know why that’s—”
“Coal dust. Vesta didn’t live anywhere near a coal mine. I suggested we go back and look at some of the old fibers. The Twaron and nylon from the motel, and the clothes he left at the convent. There were traces of coal dust on all of them. We think Jameson had coal dust on his hands when he killed Vesta Polder.”
Caxton tried to speak, but her throat was too thick with emotion. She choked down her tears, then said,
“I’m going to make things right between us. Right now I have to—you know what I have to do. But when I get back,” she said, thinking,
“I have to go now,” Clara said. “I’ll give you a call when I can talk.” She paused for a moment, then said,
“Same here,” and hung up.
Caxton put her phone down, then laid her forehead gently against the steering wheel. Her body convulsed with sobs that she fought back, sobs of grief for what she’d thrown away and the people she’d lost. Sobs of fear, too. True fear. Fear of what was still to come.
Because as soon as Clara told her about the coal dust, she’d already put two and two together.
She knew where the lair was.
Chapter 53.
A coal mine. That made sense. Vampires liked their lairs dark and quiet, and far away from human interference. A coal mine, an abandoned coal mine, would make the perfect spot. There were thousands of coal mines in Pennsylvania, however, and hundreds of them were abandoned. Caxton could never have checked them all even if she’d had unlimited time.
When she added what Carboy had told her, however, she could only think of one abandoned coal mine where flowers grew in the middle of winter.
She wanted to go right there, but it wouldn’t be that easy. She needed special equipment. Jameson had said humans couldn’t survive inside his lair, and he hadn’t been kidding. Getting that equipment was going to be a problem. What she needed was in ready supply at the HQ building, but she wouldn’t be welcome there—and Fetlock would watch her every move if she showed up, even if he didn’t already know what she’d done with Carboy. She thought about approaching a firehouse and trying to bluff her way into getting what she needed, but she knew there would be too many questions, and probably too many phone calls made.
In the end she was reduced to going shopping. There was a place in Harrisburg she knew, an army surplus store that stayed open late. She arrived just as they were closing, but she flashed her state police ID and the night manager nodded and let her in, locking the door behind her.
She stared at the racks of camouflage clothing, let her gaze run across glass display cases full of butterfly knives and night-vision goggles. She could use a pair of the latter, but she knew she couldn’t afford them.
She was willing to go into debt—she’d lost so much already her credit rating didn’t feel terribly important— but there was a pretty tight limit on her Visa card.
The manager was a young guy in a plaid shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. He sighed with impatience and asked her what he could help her with.
Caxton cleared her mind by rubbing at her face with both hands. Was she really going to do this? The lair was underground, probably full of carbon monoxide gas, and the temperatures down there could reach a thousand degrees. Nothing in the store could keep her alive through that.
If she could just get close, though—close enough—
“I need a Nomex flash-resistant suit,” she said. “Gloves, booties, the whole package. I need a face mask, too, and a hard hat. And a portable air supply, the longest-lasting one you’ve got.”
The manager stared at her openmouthed. “You fighting a brush fire, ma’am?” he asked.
“Worse. I’m going into a coal mine fire.”
“Like the one in Centralia?”
Caxton gave him a weak smile. “Exactly like the one in Centralia. You have what I need?”
He shrugged and walked down an aisle, calling over his shoulder, “Is this going to be cash or credit?”
Fifteen minutes later she was back in the car, headed northeast. Toward the closest thing to hell you could find in Pennsylvania.
Centralia. Every kid in the Commonwealth knew about Centralia, about the fire under the town that had been burning since the sixties and still had enough fuel to continue to burn long after they, and their grandchildren, were dead. It was a place where the ground opened up and swallowed people and houses whole. It was a place where the earth was so hot underneath that flowers bloomed on the surface, even in the middle of winter.
Caxton drove through the night, staying off the highways. Taking the back roads took longer but lowered the probability that she would be spotted by a highway patrol cruiser and pulled over. She had little doubt that by now her license plate number had been memorized by every state trooper on the road.
Just as Jameson had learned all the tricks of being a vampire long before he even considered becoming one himself, Caxton knew how to move around the state without being spotted. She had, after all, spent years in the highway patrol. She knew the location of every radar trap and sobriety checkpoint in Pennsylvania, and she knew what roads were never watched. She drove carefully, as tired as she was, taking pains not to weave across lanes, to drive at just the right speed. If you drove too slow, you drew attention to yourself. If you kept exactly to the speed limit, you drew attention. She stayed just over the limit, but no more than five miles an hour over, in case she wandered past a local cop looking to make his quota of speeding tickets for the month. She signaled every turn and every lane change well in advance.
Centralia. Once it had been a thriving town. Caxton herself had grown up in a series of mining patches, little company towns too small to have their own police. Her father had been the only law some of those places had ever seen. Centralia had a population in the thousands once, but by the time Caxton was born it was a ghost town, too small to even be called a patch. The fire had started as an accident. The local mining company had taken to burning its garbage in a played-out pit mine just southeast of the town. It must have seemed more economical than hauling the trash to a landfill. It turned out the pit hadn’t been as empty as they thought. There must have been some coal still down there, because in 1962, it ignited, and started a fire that couldn’t be stopped. Coal is a fossil fuel and it combusts well, even in low-oxygen conditions. The burning coal in the pit had in turn ignited a coal seam connected to the underground mines near the town. Once that seam caught, the fire just grew and grew. The mines had to be abandoned, but for twenty years nobody had considered it a serious problem. There were mine fires all over the world, and most of the time it was more cost-efficient to just let them burn themselves out. They’d figured Centralia would do just that in a couple of years.
They were wrong.
She pulled over to get her bearings. Centralia wasn’t on her road map. Nobody was supposed to go there anymore. She knew where it was, though, and when she put her finger on Route 61 she saw that it was less than two miles from Mount Carmel, Dylan Carboy’s hometown. Less than a mile from the location of the abandoned grain elevator lair. “Son of a bitch,” she murmured. Jameson had been right under her nose the whole time.
She knew she was getting close when she saw reefs of pale smoke winding between the trees on either side of the road. The coal company had drilled holes down into the inferno to release the buildup of smoke and toxic gases. It hadn’t been enough. In the eighties the surface of Route 61 had started to crack and buckle. A whole new highway had been constructed that went around the affected area. Then sinkholes started collapsing all around town. One had nearly swallowed up a small boy. About that time the government bought up as much of the town as it could and relocated all the citizens to nearby boroughs. A very few stubborn holdouts had stayed, and survived the best they could, even knowing the risks. As of the last census, the population of Centralia had sunk as low as twelve.
