“I’ve been monitoring your phone,” he told her. “You made it sound as if you expected Jameson to attack tonight, so I’ve been up waiting to hear what happened. I hope you don’t mind me listening in to your phone calls.”
“No…of course not,” Caxton said.
“It’s crucial we stay together on this case. You should have called me earlier, when you were setting up your ambush. I could have had a SWAT team mobilized or something. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I figured I could handle it myself,” Caxton replied. To be honest, she hadn’t thought of Fetlock at all.
“Alright, next time. Now tell me what you need right now. I can be there in less than an hour.”
Caxton thought about it for a moment. She thought about Margot—and the girls. Violet’s murder would upset them more than she wanted to accept. She should try to be more sensitive, she decided. That was what Glauer would have told her. “There are no men allowed down here. Maybe you should stay clear—though I do need some officers to guard the scene, and the body. Female officers. Also,” she said, looking around the snowy lawn, “I have some material evidence here. Jameson left his clothes behind.”
“His clothes?”
So she had to explain how he’d gotten away after all. Fetlock said he would see what he could do about getting some female officers down to the convent and Caxton hung up. Then she went to send home the cops who had made up her ambush. She thanked them profusely and was glad to see them leave unscathed—but then one turned back. He was an earnest-looking young cop from the local borough’s PD. His uniform was spotless and his eyes were bright, even though the hour was growing late. He waited patiently for her to wave at the departing cars, then stepped closer, coughed discreetly into his hand, and then stood at attention until she met his eye.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said.
“At ease,” she replied. “You have something to say?”
He nodded and relaxed a little. “I hit him,” he said.
Caxton shrugged. “So did I. Several times.”
The cop frowned. “Ma’am, begging your pardon—you didn’t so much as slow him down. We were all talking before, wondering if maybe he was bulletproof. Maybe through some magical means. But I’ve been hunting since I was a boy, and I know when I’ve hit an animal or a paper target. I saw his blood. I just wanted you to know that. He isn’t impervious to bullets, at least not totally.”
She stared at him with wide eyes. “You saw his blood?”
“I saw him turn to his left, and his arm went up, like so,” he demonstrated. “Then blood came out of the wound. Not much. But I know when I hit somebody.”
“Thank you very much, Officer. That’s actually good to hear.” And it was. She sent him home. He’d given her a lot to think about. So far she’d been unable to scratch his skin with her best shots. If the young officer had actually drawn blood—then maybe there was hope.
She secured the scene in the foyer as best she could, then went to sit in her own car and wait for Fetlock’s fiber unit to arrive. The sun was just starting to color the tops of the trees when the unit showed up—or rather, when the forensics expert arrived, since it was just one woman. She was about fifty, with frosted blond hair and bags under her eyes. She was not happy about being dragged out of bed to look at some cast-off clothes. “There’s a body inside?” she asked, pulling on some latex gloves. “Can I have that as well?”
“No word yet from the local coroner, so we can’t remove her yet. I’m waiting on word from her family so I can cremate her.”
The forensics expert grunted. “Tough to get anything useful from ashes. Though cremation’s not as complete as some people think. Your typical flame job leaves small material, some of it recognizable. You can get teeth out of ashes, and sometimes the fillings don’t melt, so you can match dental records. Titanium surgical pins, Teflon knee replacements, those survive.”
“We already have a positive ID on the body.”
The older woman shrugged.
“You want to take a look?” Caxton asked. She led the woman inside the foyer to where Violet still lay as she’d fallen.
“Vampire attack,” the expert said, after studying the body for a while. “More violent than the previous ones we’ve seen. This wasn’t premeditated.”
“No,” Caxton said. “Listen, I was here. I know all this already. Do you think you could tell me something I could use?”
The expert grunted again. “Maybe. This is not an exact science, Trooper.”
“Special Deputy. Let’s go look at the clothes.” She led the expert back out to the lawn and the shirt and pair of pants Arkeley had left behind. “Nobody has touched them. I made sure of it.”
“Good. Honestly, fiber’s my specialty,” the expert said.
Caxton sighed in relief. Fetlock had sent the right person for the job, then. There would be no fingerprints on the scene, or any DNA evidence. Vampires didn’t leave those behind, ever. Fibers were another matter. Anybody who wore clothes left fibers behind, somewhere.
The expert took one quick look at the clothes, then examined a few loose threads with a jeweler’s loupe. “I think I can confirm this is a match with what we saw at the hotel. Three kinds of fibers. We left a report for your liaison.”
“I got it,” Caxton agreed.
“Yeah. She wasn’t there at your HQ when we arrived. We had to leave the report with a desk sergeant. She never even followed up to let me know she got it. That’s just not professional. You want some free advice? Fire this twit. You’ve got real forensic pathologists in Harrisburg. Any of them would do a better job.”
The woman was talking about Clara. Caxton held her tongue.
“Anyway, I’ll do an actual comparison, but for now, I’ll provisionally say we’re looking at the same three fibers. Cotton, nylon, Twaron.”
“What the hell is Twaron?” Caxton asked. She’d been wondering all day.
The expert picked at the shirt and unbuttoned it. Beneath was another layer of cloth, some kind of vest. She picked up the vest and threw it at Caxton, who caught it—but it was much heavier than she’d expected and she nearly dropped it. Squishing it in her hand, she knew what it was instantly.
“Twaron,” the expert explained, “is a competing product with Kevlar. It’s used in the construction of police body armor, mostly. Your vampire was wearing a ballistic vest.”
33.
Caxton slapped the vest down on one of the desks in the briefing room a few hours later. Glauer stared at it as if there was some hidden message written on it, something he could read if he just looked hard enough.
“It’s a type IIIA ballistic vest,” Caxton said. “Standard police issue. Twaron fibers woven just right to reduce the impact of a bullet.” She rapped her knuckles on a spot just above where the wearer’s heart would be. “Then there’s a steel trauma plate here, just in case something gets through the fibers. It’ll stop pretty much any handgun bullet—.38 special, .44 Magnum, and just about any 9-millimeter round you can name, including the Parabellum rounds I load.”
Glauer tilted his head to one side. “So when you shot him, even at point-blank range—”
“He probably felt it, but it probably didn’t hurt.” She shook her head. “If you add this to how tough a vampire is anyway—I’m not exactly sure what would kill him.”
“Jesus,” Glauer swore. The man rarely ever swore. “But I’m confused. In the middle of a firefight he just threw it away. Why?”
“We weren’t shooting at him with handgun bullets anymore. This time we were using rifles. A rifle bullet would go through this like tissue paper,” she said, poking her index finger through a hole low on the left side, about where the wearer’s kidney might be. The cop who had spoken with her after the ambush had been right—he had hit Jameson, just not in his one vital spot.
“Jameson’s smart. We knew that already. He’s smart enough to understand his limitations. Most vampires don’t. They’re tougher than us, a hell of
a lot faster, but they’re arrogant. They think they’re invincible, and that makes them cocky. Jameson is the least vain vampire I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe, but then again he did leave this behind, right? So now he’s unprotected. You can’t just buy these off the Internet. You need to be in law enforcement to get one, and nobody is going to sell a vest to a vampire.”
Caxton punched the vest, and not lightly. “That would be great, wouldn’t it? Fetlock’s forensics expert said pretty much the same thing. For about an hour I was happy. Then I got a call. A peace officer out of Lenhartsville had radioed in saying he had a subject that matched the description on my APB. Tall, vampire, naked, running along the side of I-78. He said he was going to investigate. Then he never radioed back.”
“Oh, no.”
Caxton nodded. “A second unit was dispatched to the scene. The peace officer was found drained of blood. The engine of his cruiser was still running, but the trunk had been torn open, as if with a pry bar. You want to guess what was missing from the trunk?”
“A type IIIA ballistic vest?” Glauer asked.
Caxton touched the tip of her nose. “He doesn’t mind running around without any pants on, but Jameson feels naked without a trauma plate over his heart. He didn’t waste any time getting another one.”
Glauer stood back and rubbed at his mouth with his hands. “Another cop.”
“Another funeral,” Caxton agreed.
For a while they were both silent. The Glauer said, in a very soft voice: “At least it wasn’t magic.”
Caxton sat down at one of the other desks. “Yeah. I was beginning to think he had some kind of spell to protect him against bullets. Now I know better. Fat lot of good it does me. I can’t carry a rifle around with me every time I go out. Against what I’m carrying, he’s fucking bulletproof!”
“Hey,” Glauer said, stepping toward her. For a second she flinched backward, thinking he was going to give her a supportive hug. “Let’s not lose focus here. You did accomplish something last night.”
Caxton frowned. “What? I managed to not get myself killed? I scared a bunch of girls who seriously did not need more trauma?”
“You saved her life.”
They both turned and looked then at Raleigh, who sat in a far corner of the room, on the floor, with her arms around her knees. She had been offered a chair but refused it. She hadn’t said a word since Caxton led her out of the convent, except “yes” and “no” when she’d been asked if she was willing to come to Harrisburg, and then when she was asked if she was okay, respectively.
She was scared. Terrified. Caxton could understand that. She should be scared, frankly. It was only a matter of time before her father came after her again.
Caxton turned back to Glauer. “Yeah,” she said. “I saved her. She isn’t going to be safe, though, until I take Jameson down.”
“Okay. How do you want to proceed?”
Caxton scratched her chin. “Well, as I see it, there are two things I need to do. I need to go up to Syracuse and stop Jameson from killing Simon. Then I have to find Jameson’s lair. Shooting him doesn’t seem to work. So I have to catch him when he’s defenseless. If I can get to him during the daytime, if I can find his coffin, I can pluck his heart right out of his chest.”
“How’s the search for the lair coming?” Glauer asked.
She nodded appreciatively. She might be uncomfortable working with Fetlock, but he got results. “We had a list of sixty-odd places to check yesterday. The Feds were able to eliminate twenty of them yesterday, by actually going there and checking them in person. No sign of a vampire in any of them. They’ll probably finish off the list today. I’d love to be able to go and check them out myself, but this’ll have to do—I’m going up to Syracuse as soon as I can, to secure Simon personally. We know Jameson is headed there next. It’s his last stop. If we don’t get him there—I have no idea where he’ll strike next, and everything gets a lot harder.”
“How far away is Syracuse?” Glauer asked.
“A little over four hours, if you’re driving. I don’t know how he travels.”
Glauer nodded. “That’s a long drive. Are you sure you’re up to it? You look like you need sleep.”
Caxton shrugged. “I used to work highway patrol. I would do twelve-hour shifts in a car back then. This I can handle. I have a couple of errands to run before I go, but I should be on the road before noon—which means I can arrive before nightfall. I might even have time to talk to Simon before his father tries to kill him.”
“Okay. I assume, from the way you’re talking, that I’m not going with you up there. I’ll keep working on the Carboy notebooks.”
“You haven’t turned up anything more from them, have you?” she asked.
Glauer’s face lit up, just a little. He gestured at the whiteboards and she saw, under Jameson’s portrait, a new picture. A picture of a slightly pudgy teenaged girl with spiky black hair (bright blue at the temples) and soft, very kindly-looking brown eyes.
“Who’s that? I’ve never seen her before.”
“Yes, you have,” Glauer told her. “Fetlock’s people came through with a partial facial reconstruction while you were gone. She was the half-dead that approached Angus.”
“Seriously?” Caxton looked closer at the picture. “I thought that one was male. She didn’t look anything like that.” Of course, if she’d been dead for a week, and she’d scratched off her own face—maybe.
“I took the partial face sketch they gave me and had some troopers run it by the missing persons database. She came up pretty fast. Cady Rourke, aged eighteen. Former resident of Mount Carmel.”
Caxton squinted. “That’s Carboy’s hometown.”
“Yes. And Cady Rourke was his first girlfriend. At least, that’s what he writes in the notebooks. I called her family and they said she and Dylan were just friends. Either way, what was Jameson doing with her? Besides drinking her blood?”
“It’s a connection,” Caxton had to admit. “Tenuous, but it’s something.”
“I’d like to keep working on this lead. Unless you have something better for me to do.”
“Actually, I do. I need you to watch her.” Caxton didn’t so much as glance at Raleigh, but they both knew whom she was talking about.
“Oh. Okay,” Glauer said, nodding.
“Don’t just accept it like that. This is a pretty serious assignment. Jameson isn’t done with her, not yet. He’ll try again to give her the curse. Normally when we work vampire sightings, I send you around to the back door. I put you on guard duty. This time you’ll be in the line of fire. You’re allowed to say no if you want to.”
“I can handle it,” the big cop said.
“You should keep her somewhere with lots of cops. Like right here. It’s possible that he’s tough enough to take on an entire barracks of troopers, but he’s too smart to try to find out. You should be okay as long as you don’t make any stupid mistakes.”
“I said I could handle it,” he grunted. “There’s nothing magic about you, either.”
Caxton watched his face. Had she hurt his feelings? “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“It means you aren’t the only person in the world who can fight vampires. I know we’ve watched a lot of cops get killed trying. But that was because they weren’t trained for this kind of work. I’ve been learning from you for two months now.”
She tried to stare him down, with her best cop look. He didn’t break eye contact with her. After a minute or so, she blinked.
She had learned how to fight vampires by watching Jameson. He’d never thought she was ready to do it on her own. She’d been about to say the same thing about Glauer—but then, Jameson had been wrong about her. Maybe she was wrong about Glauer. “Fair enough.” Then she turned to look at Raleigh. “Officer Glauer’s going to see to your needs,” she said. The girl looked up with wide eyes. “He’ll protect you. Just do everything he says and you’ll be alright.”
> Raleigh’s mouth fell open. “What about you? Aren’t you going to stay with me? You said you would keep me safe. You said that!”
“I have to go collect your brother,” Caxton said, going over to kneel next to the frightened girl. “I’ll bring him back here and you’ll both be safe.”
“You’re worried my father will attack Simon?”
What I’m worried most about, Caxton thought, is that Jameson will make his offer to Simon, and that Simon will accept it. “Nobody else is going to die,” she said. “Not if I can help it.”
34.
The state police armorer broke into a very wide grin when she told him what she needed. He disappeared into a Quonset hut at the side of the target range and when he came back his arms were full of cardboard boxes. Some contained ammunition—bullets fatter and heavier than any Caxton had seen before. Others held a variety of pistols.
“So you don’t want to carry around a high-powered rifle,” he said, twirling the ends of his mustache. “That’s the best way to defeat body armor.”
She shook her head. “I do a lot of close-quarters fighting inside of buildings. I’ll keep a rifle in the trunk of my car, but for most situations I need a handgun.”
“Now, if this were some normal bad guy,” he told her, “I’d say don’t bother with toys. I’d tell you to put more time in on the range until you could reliably take him down with a head shot.”
Caxton shook her head. “A vampire’s only vulnerable point is his heart. He’s got a IIIA ballistic vest and over that a steel trauma plate.”
The armorer rubbed his chin. “Vests aren’t perfect. They don’t do anything against knives or, say, wooden stakes.” Before she could even react the man waved one hand in the air. “Just a little joke. And anyway, you don’t want to go into this with a knife. By the time you got close enough to stab him you’d already be dead. Okay. Next thought. The ballistic fabric loses its effectiveness when it gets wet.”
Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale Page 17