Claire didn’t know what all this had to do with vampire forensics, but DeWitt was on the move now, like a bloodhound. Sure enough, about twenty seconds later, he stopped in front of an aboveground tomb the size of a potting shed. Klieg lights blazed around it, and guards formed a living wall around it. With a bit of a flourish, DeWitt turned and faced the expectant group.
“We’ll be going down into the crypt in groups of four. Count off, please.”
“Crypt,” Jackson said, raising his eyebrows. “I don’t know about you, Claire, but this sure beats mashed potatoes and stuffing.”
Jackson was observer number one, and he snickered when Claire announced that she was number two. Numbers three and four were two agents from Maine. After donning gas masks—DeWitt slapped one on, too—the five entered the illuminated interior of the tomb. The floor had been swept clean. Klieg lights and what appeared to be battery-operated air filters were whirring away. There were four old stone sarcophagi, sitting about waist-high, which had been opened, and Claire glanced inside the nearest one. Stove-in wooden planks, bones, fibers, from a long time ago.
“We tested the contents of these coffins,” DeWitt said through his transmitter. “Bodies are fully human, and appear to be seventeenth- and eighteenth-century. The sarcophagus you’re examining, Agent Anderson, was the one concealing this trapdoor.”
She followed his pointing finger, spotting the trapdoor in question. It was open, and on the exposed underside of the access hatch, a cross had been inlaid with iron, now very rusty. The cross would have been flush with the ceiling of whatever lay beneath it.
DeWitt climbed through the hatch and clanged down a contemporary set of portable metal stairs. Claire and Jackson followed after, Claire in her skirt and heels, and then the two guys from Maine. The walls of the tiny chamber were pitted and limey. More super-bright lights illuminated a wormy, weather-beaten wooden coffin perched on top of a stainless steel sheet, on top of another sarcophagus. Its lid sat across the tiny room on several pieces of what appeared to be linen, on a metal cart.
“We’re unclear about pathogens, so make sure your masks are secure,” DeWitt said through his mic.
“Before securing the masks of any children traveling with you,” Jackson murmured, as he, Claire, and the Mainers walked to the side of the coffin and peered inside.
A man who appeared to be about forty years old lay as if sleeping. His cheeks were ruddy and his face was full. He was covered up to his neck in the same linen as the coffin lid rested on, but something protruding from his chest tented the fabric. DeWitt lifted the linen, and Claire saw old-timey clothes in tatters and a wooden stake plunged through the chest, exactly where the heart should be.
“Vic number four?” said the taller of the Maine agents.
DeWitt shook his head. He reached into his pocket and pulled on blue latex gloves. Then he approached the body and gently pulled back the left side of the upper lip. The canine was long, and very sharp, as if it had been filed.
“We believe that this is a vampire,” he said.
For a few seconds, Claire’s mind went blank, as if it simply couldn’t process what he had just said. Then errant thoughts filtered in about naked Ms. Hannover and her pointy teeth. Leaping over a balcony railing, flashing—literally—down the street.
“I smell money,” Jackson said. “Fifty bucks.”
“How did you find him?” Claire asked, ignoring Jackson.
“It was an accident. A lucky one,” DeWitt said. “About five years ago, there was an incident in the graveyard—kidnapping across state lines, murder—so we had jurisdiction. We were collecting evidence. In addition to the blood of the human kidnapping vic, we got a faint purple glow in the cemetery dirt. We didn’t know what it was, and we sprayed the cemetery down. The glow was strongest on the ground around the sarcophagus on top of the trapdoor. We kept following the trail. And habeas corpus.”
“Damn,” Jackson said.
“We took fingerprints, too,” DeWitt said. “There were two distinct sets on the trapdoor, and on this coffin, with the purple glow. We’ve documented them with long-exposure photographs, same as the punctures.”
“So these were the prints you were talking about in class?” Claire asked.
“Yes,” DeWitt said.
“But there were no fingerprints at the crime scenes,” Jackson said.
“Yes. Our serial killer vampire is very careful. He cleans up after himself. Except he doesn’t know about the Luminol.”
Claire stared down at the vampire. “So back to this body. You conjecture that Vampire One came down here with Vampire Two and, what, staked him?”
“I thought when you staked vampires they turned into dust,” said the shorter agent from Maine.
“There’s no evidence to support that,” DeWitt said with a straight face. “We’ve drawn some blood and taken tissue samples. We don’t have the proper language to describe the results. You’ll be going over those samples tomorrow.”
“Is he alive?” Claire asked, grimacing down at the vampire. The tent of linen was neither rising nor falling, so it didn’t appear that he was breathing.
“Again, that’s open to interpretation,” DeWitt said.
“What happens if you remove the stake?” Jackson asked.
“We don’t know. We haven’t done it. We debated for a long time about if we should remove the body from the crypt. We ultimately decided against it.” He stared down at the vampire with a little smile on his face and shook his head as if to say, You rascal. “We don’t know why he’s here.”
“Why are we here?” Claire asked. “Why were we selected for this case?”
“’Cause FBI fugitive task forces are a dying breed,” Jackson said. Which was true. Marshals had the corner on the fugitive biz these days.
“KSAs. Knowledge, skills, abilities. Each of you has been selected to be here because of your stellar performance records,” DeWitt said. “We’re hoping that once we show you everything we’ve learned so far, you’ll come up with some theories about the perp. The vampire at large,” he elaborated. “We’re wondering if our perp is the same vampire who accompanied our friend here. Maybe he staked this vampire to put him in some kind of stasis. To immobilize him. Maybe this is a vampiric coma, or imprisonment. We conjecture that the stake acts as a kind of restraint.”
“So maybe this vamp is a vic,” Jackson said.
DeWitt cracked a small smile. “That’s a theory. There’s so much to learn, wouldn’t you agree? Two weeks isn’t nearly enough time.”
—
Claire and Jackson went back up tombside and talked to the Maine agents while the other two groups took their turns discovering that the Truth wasn’t out there; it was about ten feet below. By then it was nearly midnight, and they were dismissed and sent off to their quarters. Jackson asked to come to Claire’s room after they both got settled in to talk for a while, and she figured they weren’t in high school and they did have a lot to talk about, so she said yes.
“Damn,” he said, as he shut the door. Her room had a bed, a small dresser, a desk and a chair, and an overstuffed chair. He sat on the desk chair and she took the more comfortable one. “Vampires.”
They shared a look. And Clare got nervous, because not only was she really glad he’d asked to come in, but she’d been hoping that he would.
“Vampires,” she concluded. “Can you believe it?”
“Just watch. We’re going to end up as a task force,” he said. “We twelve. We’re going to have T-shirts that say VSI. They’re going to transfer us to the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in D.C. like those guys in The X-Files. People will laugh at us.”
“That should pose no problem for you. You’re already big on laughter,” she pointed out.
“She had a baster,” Jackson said.
“I might have shot her.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry, Claire. It’s been a weird time in my life.”
Her ears pricked up at that and felt an
unsettling little blip in her chest. “Girlfriend?”
Steadily gazing at her, he replied, “You know I don’t have a girlfriend.”
It was stupid to be relieved. Stupid, and wrong.
“Is your grandma sick?” she probed, trying to get him to share.
“It’s just family stuff,” he said. “My sisters and I inherited a house in California from our aunt and we’re trying to decide what to do about it.”
He’s thinking about moving, she translated. She hadn’t known about all these feelings for him—okay, she’d known she had feelings, just not that they ran this deep.
“Hey, so how’d you meet Peter?” he asked, naming the elephant in the living room, and she blessed him for it.
“A party. Engagement party, actually.” She looked off in the distance, remembering. “He knew the groom. I went to college with the bride. I almost didn’t go.”
There was a pause. She looked back over at him, to find him staring at her with undisguised longing. His cheeks reddened and he got up.
“I’d better go to bed.” He pulled a face. “Two weeks is a long time to sleep with some guy you don’t know.”
“You have my sympathies,” she said lightly.
“Which I’ll keep in a jar on my desk,” he said. He walked to the door and put his hand around the knob. Then he paused. “Ms. Hannover today. Do you think she was a vampire?”
“Daylight. They can’t walk around in it,” she reminded him.
“The Cullens can walk around in it,” he said. “It makes them sparkle. And Dracula went out in daylight in the original novel, too.”
She blinked. “You know a lot about vampires.”
“We all have our fetishes. Isn’t yours Orlando Bloom?”
She reached over to the bed and made as if to throw a pillow at him. He laughed and opened the door. “Actually, I was just speed-reading the material on vampires they left on our pillows. Me and my snuggle buddy.” He looked at her bed. “Didn’t you get yours yet?”
“No,” she said. “Maybe they forgot me because I’m in here by myself.”
“Agent Anderson?” a voice said in the hall. He came into the doorway. Young, agent-y or clerk-y looking. “I have a file for you.”
He held out an interoffice memo jacket, and Claire took it. Signed for it.
“Thanks,” she said, as the guy hovered.
“Yes, ma’am.” He gave Jackson a look, turned, and disappeared around a corner.
“That’ll be your vampire dossier,” Jackson said. “Don’t forget to hang up your garlic and crosses,” he added as he headed out, too. “Perhaps ze count vill walk tonight.”
That creeped her out, but she didn’t show it. Then she shut the door and stared at it, and wondered what Peter was up to tonight. For someone so diligent about her career, she’d been very sloppy about Peter. They’d just kind of ended up together. She was pretty sure the reason they’d gotten married was to make her conservative Catholic father happy. Which was a pretty weak reason.
We were in love, she insisted. We are in love.
Then she got ready for bed, climbed in, and started reading about Nosferatu, Sookie Stackhouse, and Vlad the Impaler. And despite how wound-up she was, she fell asleep.
She dreamed about waking up because someone was in her room, but she couldn’t make herself open her eyes. So she drifted in a sea of apprehension for most of the night, and woke in the morning to nothing new but the reflection through the window sheers of steady rain. But as she lowered her gaze and studied the ground, she couldn’t shake the sensation that the rain had just washed fresh footprints away.
Footprints pointed straight at her window.
—
“Blood type AB. I guess that makes sense. ABs can get blood transfusions from all four blood types. Lower than average levels of serotonin,” Claire read to Jackson, as they studied their blood sample readouts. It was their fourth day of training, and they were sitting in a lab off the autopsy room. The agents had been paired off, and everyone was discussing results. It was still raining, and gloomy.
The three vics were in cold storage in that room, but today the VSI students were analyzing vampire blood that they themselves had drawn. The vampire in the coffin had not appeared to feel anything when the needle went in, and no one had any reasonable theories about why his blood hadn’t coagulated inside him long ago. Also, about whose blood it actually was that they were studying. If the vampire drank the blood of his victims, what happened to it?
“Lower levels of serotonin have also been found in the brains of murderers on death row, accounting for increased aggression,” Jackson said, reciting from their class lecture.
“There are caps on short tandem repeats of DNA strands,” Claire continued.
“Which suggests increased life span,” Jackson said. “Caps allow for little to no unraveling of the strands.”
“Time for swabs,” DeWitt announced, holding the box out to them. They’d had one swab a day since arriving. Claire was becoming increasingly apprehensive. Was there concern that something was happening to them?
“I don’t like this,” she murmured to Jackson as she unwrapped the swab. “Do you think they’re withholding information from us? Even experimenting on us? I mean, we didn’t even volunteer for this. This could be construed as a form of coercion.”
“It could,” Jackson said. “You want to see Nash?”
“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”
Then the lab door opened and Nash himself poked his head in. He looked straight at DeWitt and then the class and said, “It’s time.”
“Let’s roll,” said DeWitt. “I’ll brief you all while you’re suiting up.”
In near-unison, the ten other agents in the room rose from their chairs and made for the exit. DeWitt went with them. Claire looked around in confusion, then began to get up, too.
“Claire,” Jackson said in an odd tone of voice, “you and I are staying behind.”
“What? What’s going on?” she demanded.
“Jackson, Anderson, in five,” Nash said, closing the door.
“Do you trust me, Claire?” Jackson asked, locking gazes with her. “Please, trust me.”
“Tell me what’s going on,” she insisted. “Why are we staying behind?”
“You’ll find out everything in a few minutes,” he said.
“You bastard. I don’t trust you. You’ve been holding out on me.” She glared at him. “You’re my partner.”
He looked upset. “I know, Claire. I know and I’m sorry, but it’s going to be okay now.”
“Okay now?” she asked, her voice rising. “What hasn’t been okay?”
Jackson stood up. He said, “Let’s go see Nash.”
They went down a hallway and faced Nash’s door. Jackson rapped on it sharply. Nash opened it, and Claire did a quick sweep of the interior. American flag, portrait of the POTUS, commendations.
“Take a seat, please,” Nash said to Claire and Jackson as he sat down behind his desk. Nash picked up the folder. “Agent Anderson, I need you to stay calm.”
She sat down. A million scenarios ran through her mind: She had done something to cause a civilian’s death. She had a fatal illness. She was becoming a vampire. The vampire had risen and was terrorizing Salem.
And: By his demeanor, Jackson knew a hell of a lot more about what was going on than she did.
“The perp,” she said. “The vampire. He’s struck again?”
Nash nodded, his expression somber. “Yes. He has.”
Then why are we in this room? she thought. Why aren’t we with the rest of the team? “Let’s roll” obviously meant lights and sirens. As in, get your tail to the crime scene. “Suit up” meant vests and helmets. A violent confrontation.
Jackson gave her a look and she kept her mouth shut.
Nash flipped open the folder. The topmost picture was the first vic they’d seen onscreen, the one in the pink turtleneck sweater. Second vic. Third vic. Purple glow at the punctu
re sites. And then a form she recognized as DNA test results.
Like any decent bureaucrat, she was a champ at reading upside down. In one box, MATCH was typed and in the “subject’s name” box, ANDERSON, CLAIRE.
“Match? What’s this?” she demanded, reaching for the document. Nash kept his hand splayed over it, preventing her from taking it. Her blood pressure spiked. Bad news. Frame-up, she thought. Setup. But how or what, she had no idea.
“Listen to him,” Jackson said, his voice that gentle voice he used, connecting with her, helping her focus.
“I’m going to be blunt,” Nash said. “We’ve had a prime suspect in this case for some time.”
“Not me,” she said, reaching again for the piece of paper. Nash kept a firm hold of it.
“The suspect had access to your DNA and planted it at each of the three crime scenes your class has discussed,” Nash told her. “Hair follicles. To make you look like the guilty party.”
Stunned, she looked at Jackson. “The swabs—”
“We’ve been taking swabs so we could ensure that you are not a vampire, and we arranged this school so we could keep you under observation if and when he killed again,” Nash said plainly. “If he hadn’t struck within the two weeks, we would have extended the duration of your training.
“You’re not a vampire,” he added.
Dumbfounded, she could only sit and listen. A terrible feeling was spreading throughout her body—Claire was smart and she could piece things together, which was why she was so good at what she did. But she couldn’t fathom that she was drawing the correct conclusions.
“The perp was careful. He wore gloves and booties, and he wiped down the scenes. But he obviously did not consider that when he bites his victim, he leaves behind a vampiric marker we can catch with Luminol. And he didn’t do a perfect cleanup job. He’s not a professional criminal, just a killer. But we had to be sure of you.”
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