Caxton rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. She sat up straighter in the chair, complaining muscles notwithstanding. “Yes, sir.” Putting her feet down on the floor, she started to think about standing up.
“I’ve had some very disturbing reports out of the field office in Syracuse. I wanted to discuss your conduct. Special Deputy Benicio tells me you illegally entered and searched Simon Arkeley’s apartment. Is that true?”
“There were exigent circumstances,” she said. It wasn’t strictly a lie. Simon’s life had been at risk and she’d only forced the door in order to protect him.
“Benicio doesn’t corroborate that,” Fetlock told her.
She got her feet down, then stood up all in one go. It was easy then to stagger to the door and push it open. The holding cells were just down the hall—she needed to check. “Sir, Simon is now in my custody.” She considered telling him that the boy had confessed to stealing the files from the USMS archives, but she worried he might insist she drag him down to Virginia and relinquish him to the authorities there. That was the last thing she wanted. She needed to keep him close, where she could watch him. “I do not believe he will be interested in pressing charges.”
“For your sake I hope so. We can’t have this kind of behavior, Caxton.”
There were eight cells, little bigger than closets, lining either side of a short corridor. Only a few of them were occupied. She counted down the cells. She’d put Simon in the third cell on the left side herself. She came up to the bars and looked in. There he was. Sleeping. She watched his chest rise and fall. He was still alive.
“Sir,” she said, “can I ask you what time it is?”
“It’s eight-oh-two, by my clock,” Fetlock told her. “Don’t try to evade the issue.”
She tried to remember, but couldn’t, what time sunrise was. “Please. Just tell me something. Is the sun up yet?” she asked.
“Yes, Special Deputy. It is. But—”
“Oh, thank God,” Caxton said. That meant she’d made it through the night. It meant she’d gone twenty-four hours without discharging her weapon. More important, it meant it had been more than twenty-four hours since anyone died. “Thank God,” she said again. “Thank God.”
Fetlock kept talking, but she barely heard him. She made apologetic noises where appropriate, but she didn’t bother explaining her actions—why should she? Raleigh and Simon were alive. Jameson’s plot to recruit new vampires had failed. She could keep his children safe while she hunted for him, for his lair. And where she found him she would find Malvern as well. She wasn’t done yet. It would take more time, more work, more risk, to finish off the vampires, but she’d taken an important step.
Of course, the vampires wouldn’t let her have her moment of triumph without ruining it somehow.
When she finally got Fetlock off the phone, it chimed at her to tell her she had a voice mail message waiting. The call had come in during the early hours of the morning, shortly after she’d fallen asleep. She recognized the number it came from right away: it was from the phone Jameson had stolen from a dead cop in Bellefonte.
Steeling herself, she dialed her voice mail and waited to hear his growling voice again. Except when the message played it wasn’t a male voice.
It was a very short message. “Keep the boy from harm, Laura. I have plans for him.”
It was recognizably a woman’s voice, though so creaky and rough she could barely make out the words. At first she didn’t understand, couldn’t think of who it might be. Then she remembered she had heard that voice before, just once, more than a year previously. It was the voice of Justinia Malvern.
She was talking again. Jameson had fed her enough blood to give her her voice back. That meant it was only a matter of time before she would start walking under her own power.
It didn’t matter. Caxton told herself that, over and over. The kids were both in protective custody. She was making progress. She signed the necessary papers and had Simon released into her recognizance. The boy looked almost pathetically grateful as she led him out of the police station and into the parking lot. It had stopped snowing during the night, and all of Syracuse was buried under a thick layer of white that hurt her eyes to look at. She slipped on her sunglasses and eventually found her car. It was under six inches of snow, but the red paint showed through here and there. Together she and Simon dug it out and then climbed inside, their breath pluming across the windows and leaving them fogged.
Before they got on the highway she stopped at a fast-food restaurant for breakfast. Simon, it turned out, was a vegetarian. They had trouble finding him a salad, but eventually he settled for one with a few withered vegetables and some strips of fried chicken he could pick out. He laid them carefully on a napkin, which he then folded up and stuck inside the bag. This he crumpled up in his hands and put in his pocket for later disposal.
Caxton looked into the Mazda’s backseat and saw all the wrappers and bags she’d thrown back there. Neither of them said anything.
The snowplows had cleared the highways and laid down a thick scurf of rock salt. The road surface was wet and shiny, but the chains on her tires held it just fine.
It was only a little after noon when she arrived back at Harrisburg and the state police headquarters. She brought Simon inside and went looking for Glauer. He was down in the SSU briefing room, pinning up a picture of Raleigh’s friend Violet under VAMPIRE PATTERN #1. In the picture the girl wore a black hooded sweatshirt, unzipped to show some generous cleavage, and piercings in her nose and ears. She looked unhappy. Nothing like the smiling girl in a baggy sweater Caxton had seen die at the convent.
“Where’d you get that?” Caxton asked.
“The girl’s parents. They agreed to the cremation, by the way. They did it last night, as a rush job.”
“Good,” Caxton said, “though it was probably unnecessary. Jameson would know I had a guard on her body. If he raised her I could have interrogated her.”
“Sure,” Glauer said. He wrote Violet’s name on the board with a dry erase marker. VIOLET HARMON. Caxton hadn’t even known her last name before.
“I brought Simon back in one piece,” Caxton said, and introduced the boy to the big cop.
“I’m so sorry, for everything that’s happened,” Glauer said, his big hand folding around one of Simon’s. “I promise, we did everything we could to help your mother.”
“I’m sure you did,” Simon said.
“Listen, your sister is here. Do you want to see her?”
The boy frowned. “Why?” he asked. Then he shook his head as if to clear it.
“You should talk about what’s happened.” Glauer patted Simon on the shoulder. “Your family needs to be together at a time like this. Love and support mean everything in the face of grief.”
Simon shrugged. “I’ve never really done the big brother thing before.”
“Just wait in the lounge, then,” Glauer said, and gestured toward the door. When Simon went out of the room the big cop turned to Caxton and rolled his eyes. “He’s about as bad as you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Caxton asked, but with a smile. Nothing could ruin her good mood. When Glauer didn’t answer she followed him out into the hallway. “I take it,” she said, “from the fact that everybody here is still alive, that Jameson didn’t attack last night.”
“No, he didn’t,” Glauer told her. “And I’ll admit I was kind of relieved. You made it sound like one night alone with Raleigh was going to be the death of me. Instead it was kind of fun.”
“Really?” Caxton’s smile broadened. “She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?”
Glauer blushed but assured her nothing like what she was insinuating had happened. “She got bored pretty early, which didn’t surprise me. I mean, what’s a nineteen-year-old girl going to do spending the night in an office building? We played a game of Scrabble—”
“Who won?” Caxton asked.
“She did. With chasma on a triple word
score. I challenged, because I’d never heard of it before, but it turns out it’s a medical term for excessive yawning. After that I gave her the grand tour of the place—the PCO room, the computer crimes unit, the evidence room, the garage…”
“Did you let her wear your Smokey Bear hat?”
Glauer blushed again, but didn’t comment on whether he had or not. They went up the stairs to the barracks wing of the headquarters, where off-duty troopers often slept between shifts. There were several semiprivate bedrooms there. “I kept her up kind of late—I didn’t sleep at all myself, of course, because I was on watch. She’s still sleeping, I think, or at least she hasn’t come out of there yet.” He indicated a particular door and raised his knuckles as if to knock on it. “I don’t know, maybe we should just let her sleep.”
“It’s almost one o’clock,” Caxton said. “If she sleeps any later she’ll never sleep tonight. Go on.”
Glauer knocked once, tentatively, and waited a second. When there was no answer he knocked again with more determination. By the time Caxton started frowning he had knocked three times and gotten no response at all.
“Open it,” she said.
He turned the knob and pushed the door open. The shades were drawn over the windows of the room beyond, so it was lit by the glow of a television with the sound turned off. It gave a bluish cast to everything, but instantly Caxton realized that it couldn’t explain why Raleigh’s lips were so purple, or why her face was so pale. She rushed inside and cupped her hand over the girl’s mouth and nose.
“She’s not breathing,” she said, looking up at the big cop in the doorway, who could only stare back with nothing on his face but surprise.
44.
Caxton pulled the sheet off Raleigh’s body. She was naked underneath, but there was no time for modesty. She grabbed the girl’s wrists and rubbed them violently. Her skin was ice cold.
“No,” she moaned, then looked up at Glauer again. “Get in here and help me. Call 911, tell them we have an emergency.” She put her hands together over Raleigh’s sternum and pushed down rapidly. Glauer put his mouth over Raleigh’s and blew air down into her lungs. They’d both had CPR training—in fact, the state police required them to get checked out on emergency first aid every year. They both also knew it was pointless. The girl was dead. She probably had been for hours.
Still they kept up chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth. Caxton kept at it until her arms grew sore and her own breath grew ragged. Eventually the paramedics came. One of them grabbed the girl’s wrist and asked how long she’d been unresponsive. Caxton didn’t know, and told him as much, while still pushing down on Raleigh’s chest. The paramedics tried giving her a shot of adrenaline, but it was just for form’s sake. Eventually they told Caxton to stop.
She stepped back, her own pulse thundering in her ears. She sagged into a chair and stared at the corpse. “How?” she asked. “How did this happen?”
Glauer only shook his head. He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t looking at anything, just staring into space. It was one of the paramedics who answered.
“It would take an autopsy and a tox screen to say for sure. But this is what I’m guessing.” He picked up the girl’s arm and turned it outward to show Caxton. She saw a puckered little wound on the inside of Raleigh’s elbow. There were other marks there, long snaky furrows under her skin. Much older, mostly healed.
Caxton looked around the room, then dropped to her knees and looked under the bed. An empty syringe had fallen down there, and she thought she saw grains of brown powder. Caxton had been trained to recognize heroin when she saw it.
“Most likely she took a massive dose last night before going to bed,” the paramedic said. “She probably passed out and stopped breathing shortly thereafter. If it’s any consolation, she didn’t feel any pain. In fact, she probably felt pretty good before she lost consciousness.”
“That’s no consolation at all,” Caxton said. “Now get out.”
“We can take her away for you, but we’ll need you both to move back so we can get a gurney in here. You’ll have to sign a receipt for the body and we’ll need to talk to the next of kin.”
“I told you to get out. You’re done here,” Caxton repeated.
“Hold on, I know this is a lot to take in right now, but there are rules about this sort of thing. There are laws—”
“You may not have noticed,” she said, “but I’m a cop. I’m the law here, and what I say goes. And what I say is you and your partner need to get the hell out of here.”
The paramedic frowned, but he did what he was told. That left her alone in the room with Glauer and the body.
“I don’t know how this happened,” Glauer said. Half of his mustache was in his mouth and he was sucking on it. “Special Deputy, I promise, I don’t—”
“You gave her the grand tour. You showed her the PCO room. And the computer crimes area. That’s what you said. You showed her the evidence room.”
“Oh, no,” Glauer moaned.
“You knew she was a heroin addict,” Caxton continued. “You should have looked out for drug-seeking behavior.”
“She was in recovery! You saw her, she didn’t look like a junkie at all!”
Caxton was ready to fire him on the spot. “We took her out of a stable environment. She was already under incredible stress—fear for her life, familial grief. Then we put her in a place where drugs were available. How many risk factors did she need before she broke down? She saw all the drugs in the evidence room. All the drugs we’ve confiscated over who knows how long. She must have done something to distract you, if only for a second.”
“Yeah,” Glauer admitted. “She kissed me.”
“Oh, fuck no,” Caxton said. She wanted to shoot something. Instead she picked up the remote control for the TV and stabbed the power button.
“It was—it was very sweet, I thought. I was showing her how we log in each piece of evidence. I was boring her, I thought. Then I turned around and she planted one right on me. Stood up on her tiptoes, threw her arms around my neck. The whole thing. I said—I don’t know what I said. I was so surprised I might have said anything. I probably said I was too old for her and she told me the kiss was just a thank-you. For taking care of her.”
Caxton knew Glauer well enough to understand how he must have reacted to that. The big cop lived for rescuing civilians from danger. It was why he’d become a cop in the first place. Had Raleigh seen through him that easily? Drug abusers could be devilishly cunning when it came to getting their next fix.
“I turned around and walked out of the room, unable to say anything at that point. I took my eyes off of her for maybe a couple seconds, that’s all.”
“Plenty of time.”
“Sure. She could have palmed her works and a bag of heroin and I wouldn’t have noticed.” Glauer stared down at his feet. “This is terrible.”
“Yep,” Caxton said. She was seeing stars, she was so angry. She thought about firing Glauer. When she wrote up her report on this incident, he would at the very least go before an administrative hearing. Even if she spoke up on his behalf—and she wasn’t sure she would—he would be suspended without pay for a long time. He might get fired without her lifting a finger. “I asked you to watch over her. I saved her from her father and all I wanted you to do was keep her alive.”
“Hey,” Glauer said. “There’s no need to get personal about this.”
“No?”
“No! This was a terrible accident, but—”
Caxton’s eyes went wide. “Are you so sure? Are you sure it was an accident? What if it was suicide?”
“No,” Glauer said, denying the possibility.
Caxton couldn’t afford to do the same. You had to commit suicide to become a vampire. It was one of the rules—true accidents didn’t count. “Her father could have given her his curse.”
“No,” Glauer said again.
“He could have. Tonight, in just a couple of hours, she could open he
r eyes, and they could be red. She could open her mouth, and it could be full of those teeth. Look at her. She’s already lost all her color.”
“That’s not—you’re making a mistake. This was just a dumb accident. She misjudged the dosage. That’s all!”
Caxton shook her head. “We have to cremate her body, before dark. I’ve made this mistake before. And it cost me everything.”
45.
Caxton had been worried about Simon. She had worried that Jameson would approach Simon, and make his offer, and that Simon would say yes. She had barely even considered the notion it would be Raleigh, poor timid little Raleigh, so fragile that Jameson had to rescue her and stick her somewhere quiet so very far from the real world.
She grabbed the yellow pages and started dialing. She needed an emergency cremation—before four-thirty. That was a little over two hours away. The first three places she tried didn’t even do cremation. It wasn’t listed as a category in the directory—she was just dialing funeral homes at random. The fourth number connected her to a very polite, very understanding man who assured her that it was quite impossible.
“I’d need the approval of the next of kin.”
“I’m a U.S. Marshal,” she said. “Can I order a cremation even without permission?”
“Not unless you’re also a health official. Otherwise, you need family approval.”
“Her brother’s the only one left. I’ll make him say yes.”
“Make him? There are regulations that apply to this industry,” he said. “Even if he says yes, we would also need a death certificate.”
“I promise you, this body is dead.”
The polite man coughed, a sound she could have interpreted as a laugh if she liked. Apparently in the mortuary industry you learned how to be diplomatic. But Caxton knew she was already beaten. Without a death certificate there was no chance, and to get one she would have to wait for a coroner to come and pronounce the body. If she waited for that, then took the time to drive to the funeral home—it could already be too late.
Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale Page 23