“Oh,
Jackson was quiet a moment. Then he slid a glance at her. “Maybe a couple of weeks apart will help. Have you given any more thought to the therapy idea?”
She pulled another wet wipe from the pack—they bought them by the case at Costco—and scrubbed at her ick-encrusted elbow. Then she wadded the towelette and slipped it into their little black trash holder.
“Peter and I don’t need couples counseling. And we don’t need ‘help.’ Things are fine.”
“It really helped Santos and his third wife. Or was it his fourth?” Jackson deadpanned.
“We’re
“Claire, I’m your partner,” Jackson said gently, and his voice slid perilously close to the edge where they should not go. She was married to Peter, and even if she hadn’t been, fraternization was not cool. There was no way she wanted to jeopardize her career because Jackson was handsome and funny and observant. And tall with lanky legs and blond hair shot with silver. And had periwinkle blue eyes, periwinkle being her favorite color. They were both superstars on the fugitive task force—which was why they were the “lucky” ones being dumped with Advanced Forensics Techniques over Thanksgiving—and for kids like them who got all A’s in The Job, the straight and narrow was the only way to fly.
“I’m all packed,” Claire said. “I’m ready to go.”
“I’ll miss you,” Peter said, kissing Claire good-bye the next evening. Her assignment was all very cloak-and- dagger: Night before Thanksgiving, car at eight, not to take her to the Boston field office but to an undisclosed location.
“I’ll miss you, too,” Claire said, but she was still focused on his forced tone of voice. His fakey-fake smile. She was an FBI agent. She knew lying when she saw it, heard it. He was actually happy that she was leaving. Not simply relieved, the way people are when things are not great at home and a business trip gives you both a break. He had something planned. He had dark brown curly hair and big coffee-colored eyes, and he worked out. Maybe some hottie grad student at MIT, where he taught physics, was coming over to cook a goddamn Thanksgiving turkey for poor Dr. Anderson, whose careerist wife was abandoning him at such a special time of year.
Peter didn’t even like turkey.
Their kiss left much to be desired, and then the car slid up to the curb like a shark. Jackson was in the back, in a really great black suit, white collar, and tie. Blond hair, tanned, he took the FBI look to a whole new
“You okay?” Jackson said by way of greeting. She didn’t bother answering. One lie today was enough.
“This is all very drama-drama,” she said. “We could drive ourselves. We both have take-homes.” As in, Bureau cars they could drive home when they went off-duty.
“Which makes it even more mysterious and, therefore, cool,” he replied. Then he nodded knowingly as they glided away. “Aliens.”
Not aliens.
“Holy shit, are they kidding?” Jackson murmured, as the next PowerPoint slide popped up on the screen. In the image, the vic, who in life had been very beautiful, was lying on her side in a room with ugly beige wallpaper. She was wearing a pink turtleneck sweater and blue jeans, and clutching a copy of Thoreau’s
Until the car had arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, Claire hadn’t known that the Bureau had a Special Forensics Unit located there. Jackson hadn’t, either. The nondescript brick building was situated near a Walgreens. According to some last-ditch, furtive net searching on her non-Bureau smartphone, the Walgreens was not too far from the correct location of Gallows Hill (as opposed to the recreational area that was still listed as the actual site). Nineteen people had been hung for witchcraft on Gallows Hill in 1692. Her first thought had been that maybe their secretive little group was going to do some kind of forensics on the bodies of the victims. Learn historical forensics techniques or something like that.
She sure hadn’t thought they were going to learn how to detect vampire activity.
After being welcomed to the SFU by Mark Nash, the Special Agent in Charge, they’d been sent to a classroom with individual, college-style desks in two rows of six. Claire wondered at all the rush, as if there was some pressing need to learn vampire evidence collection as fast as possible—as if the information would spoil if left out too long, like Ms. Hannover’s goddamn turkey.
Told not to eat or drink anything, Claire and Jackson made sure to sit in the first row, dead center. First impressions were everything.
Dr. DeWitt didn’t spend a lot of time on preamble. All he had said was that the Bureau had conclusive evidence that vampires walked among the living; that there had been three attacks from Boston to Portland, Maine; and that it seemed to be the work of an individual vampire, classified, therefore, as a serial killer. And that they were there to get trained in evidence collection so they could figure out his pattern, apprehend him, and process any additional vampire-related crime scenes that presented themselves. Such evidence collection being referred to as VSI. Vampire Scene Investigations.
“You owe me fifty bucks,” Claire said to Jackson.
“I think vampires count as aliens,” Jackson retorted.
The PowerPoint kept going. They saw another vic with telltale puncture marks. Another pretty girl. Third vic, cute girl again. Same type of holes, luminous with Luminol. They watched a computer simulation of how the fangs must be shaped, how they would enter the body. The closest analogy was a rattlesnake. Which, bleh.
They discussed the process of exsanguination—having all your blood sucked out of you. Dripping. If you lifted vampire prints, they would glow, too. However, there were no prints found at any of the crime scenes, so Claire raised her hand and asked how they knew that prints glowed. DeWitt told her to hold that excellent question. There were theories as to why so much glowing, but that would also wait for when they got into blood chemistry. As well as profiling the perp, who clearly had a thing for beautiful girls.
They were going to stay on-site, the male agents doubling up. Claire, as the only female, would have a room to herself.
“Now we have a body to examine,” DeWitt announced, as he turned off his projector.
He didn’t say which body. There seemed to be an assortment of them—at least three victims. Claire was eager to see any and all of them.
“Before we do, I want each of you to provide a buccal swab,” he went on.
Claire and Jackson traded frowns. Buccal swabs provided personal DNA. Of course they’d both had extensive physicals, bloodwork, and even drug tests for the FBI, but here, now, requesting a swab rang an alarm bell. She also realized why they hadn’t been allowed to eat or drink anything, and why class had begun that night—so their first swabs would be valid control samples. Still, Claire raised her hand.
“The purpose for this, sir?” she asked.
“Health precaution,” he replied. “Since we’re not certain how vampirism is transmitted, we want to monitor the well-being of everyone on the team.”
Transmitted? Her mind ran ahead to the possibility that vampirism might be a communicable virus, and so their vics might contain said virus, that being why the blood glowed purple.
While she pondered that, DeWitt handed a box of swab kits to the agent at the end of Claire’s row. The agent hesitated. There were a few cases before the courts of police officers refusing to comply with requests for DNA samples by their departments. Civil liberties, violation of privacy. Not everyone wanted everything in an accessible database.
