They were evidence boxes. Clyde kept a lot of things he shouldn't have. He'd said enough, when we were standing around in that field every year, for me to know that. Eventually we’d reached the age where it didn’t take long to tell me how his life was going, and he’d stopped asking about mine; that was when he started telling stories. He kept evidence: mementos, little trinkets that served as memorabilia from a life spent tracking down people who'd done terrible and desperate and twisted things. He’d spent years putting them away for those things, and along the way he’d gathered up all the little bits of whatever they'd left in their wake and tucked them away in boxes at home.
There was one of those things, in particular, that I wanted to see for myself.
Many years after that first murder investigation, he'd told me he'd found and kept a little bracelet from the wrist of one of the victims. It had been on the wrist of the kid, the rich orphan who'd apparently played genital patty-cake with the wrong “song chaser” stranger. The bracelet was a rough leather band with little teeth - human baby teeth and the fangs from animals - alternating one after the other, in a ring down the center of the strip of leather. At either end of the string of teeth and once in the very middle there had been the head – just the head – of an old-fashioned, rough-hewn nail made of iron. It had a metal clasp to close it around the kid's wrist. It had been so weird, so out of place in that age of Detroit steel and scientific parenting and better living through electric appliances, that Clyde couldn't help taking a special interest in it. No fingerprints on it except for the kid's and the old woman's, the other victim. It was the “other thing” Clyde had said he’d found that, to his mind, pointed up the mountains to some hillbilly instead of to anything as modern as a complicated con job gone wrong. He had meant it when he said his theory wasn’t popular in those parts back then. He’d kept it for himself when he couldn’t get anyone to accept that maybe it had been a local instead of an outsider. He hadn't told me right after; he'd waited a few years until he'd been able to convince himself it would never matter one way or the other. It was the kind of thing they’d build the whole plot around in an episode of Dr. Lawyer Cop these days, I’m sure, but to him, back then, it was something to be tucked away rather than exposed.
When he held it out, I'd started to reach for it and dropped my hand at the last second. I didn't know what it was, but I didn't want to touch it. It was wrong somehow.
It seemed completely random to me at the time, but I had decided to just trust my instincts rather than try to over-think it. Something made me want to see if that bracelet was still there so here I was. I started to despair at the odds of ever finding it amongst the half-dozen or so crates of junk from his other investigations, especially since they’d already been rifled through. Then I started to worry that if I messed everything up I'd give away that someone else had been there, too. Then I said, well, screw it. I'm here, they're messed up, how much worse can I make it? So I dug in with both gloved hands and started panning for stones. Over the next hour or so – disturbed only by my own shuffling of papers and the sound of Smiles' claws on the hardwoods as he patrolled the inside of the house – I ended up sorting everything more or less back into chronological order. I didn't put it all away neatly in the boxes or anything, but I did organize it enough to be able to tell where in the mess his earliest cases should be.
There was no bracelet.
I couldn't know if anything else was missing, of course, as I'd never seen any of it before, but I knew for certain that the bracelet was gone. Clyde had not been wearing it the night he died, or at least not when I found his corpse; and yet, in the papers, I had found the note he'd shown me at the same time he showed me the bracelet. It had been taped up and pasted to the underside of the bracelet, he told me. He'd removed it to read it and never put it back. It was written on old notepaper, bright pink, as unnatural as anything in the world. The handwriting had been old-fashioned and scribbled, no punctuation, the capitals kind of skewed or just archaic.
When Sun is low and Moon is high
Cold on you and danger nigh
Drench in blood of what you fear
Wear on wrist or keep it near
It stops the danger keeps you whole
It helps dear Jesus save your soul
You don't get folk magic like that these days. That's some seriously old-fashioned shit right there.
So, the note was still here. Whoever took the bracelet hadn't known enough to know it was important, or they knew enough not to need the note to tell them the deal. I didn't really know anything other than the obvious, that this was some sort of charm bracelet against a specific danger. Clyde had pointed out to me what my eyes and nose had already told me: not a drop of blood on it. The kid had known he was in danger, or been convinced enough to wear it, but either hadn't had time or hadn't been sufficiently convinced to actually dip it in the blood of whatever he was afraid of.
Or what he feared was well enough specialized that he hadn't had any of its blood close to hand.
I clucked my tongue again and clicked my cheeks quietly. Smiles came into the room making less noise than his own shadow under a full moon and I held out the note. He sniffed it idly and then licked my hand. Nothing special or telltale that I'd failed to notice, I guessed. Nobody had disturbed us in the hour or so we'd been there and I'd managed to confirm that the bracelet was gone. All in all, I’d had a successful night so far. I got up off my hands and knees and we crept around to the back door, let ourselves out and disappeared into the woods without anyone the wiser.
Part II
1
Roderick had spent a few productive minutes with a phone book and three different online maps, a satellite imagery site, and Withrow's backlog of newspapers and studied them all until he was confident he could find Clyde Wilfred's house with his eyes closed. As soon as the sun was down, he'd gone and found it and parked his car in the driveway of a house where a cheerful “Gone to Florida, back in six months!” had been taped to the side of the newspaper box by some idiotic, trusting retiree. Roderick had hidden his car there and found a perch twenty feet up an ancient oak fifty yards away and across the road from Clyde Wilfred's home within an hour of sunset.
Cousin Withrow hadn't wanted his help with this Last Gasp business, he could tell. That simply made giving it all the more fun. Last Gasp is not an easy time for a vampire. Roderick knew vampires who had gone mad when it finally happened. There were vampires who had tended their human kindred or friends or servants or slaves like a shepherd only to see them all taken in one disaster or another. He also knew vampires who had carefully tended the garden of their mortal relations so that they could bring the moment of their Last Gasp to fruition in their own time, in some personal way. He had known vampires who didn’t even know they still had a human out there who remembered them as a person, someone who wondered idly in some rank and rumpled secondhand hospital bed whatever became of that handsome young professor who’d taught their astronomy lab all those decades of nights ago. Then they woke up one day with powers they had never imagined, never asked for, some useful and some utterly humiliating. A vampire who could fly all of a sudden was in for some very fun games of catch and no small amount of negative attention from their local power structure. A vampire who could make dandelions dance was a lot less fearsome but – for that very reason – ever so much safer from her own kind.
Roderick had watched with mild interest and then amusement as a small, black Cavalier with permanent plates, a government car of some sort, had pulled up the long gravel road, gone past the house, turned around in a driveway, killed its lights and then crept painfully slowly back to park a little ways up from Clyde Wilfred's home. The driver – an Asian woman, stocky build, hair slightly longer than shoulder length, dark pants and a dark coat and a dark cap and dark gloves and, most of all, a dark expression – had pulled out a pair of binoculars and begun getting comfortable. All the trim, the bits of plastic and cheap metal making a mockery of chrome
, had been covered over in black electrician’s tape to minimize the car’s ability to be seen in the shadows.
Fascinating. Roderick had watched with the keen eyes of a predator and admired her ingenuity. It was that kind of creativity he so often found lacking in humanity. Its absence was one of the things that made them such boringly easy prey so much of the time.
The driver pulled out a dark blue blanket that looked grey in the starlight and put it over herself to stay warm. Roderick had worn a light jacket to blend in if he ran into anyone but he loved being cold. Cold was refreshing. The human world was one of light and warmth and he was a creature of frigid darkness. He had stayed extra still, up in the tree, so that all the unnecessary, cloying warmth could flow out and into the air and away, shed like a snake's skin. He hated that warmth when he was out at night on his own, watching, hunting. Warmth was for luring them, putting them at ease. Cold was much more comfortable and poetically appropriate to a vampire’s work.
The woman had special binoculars – night vision, so interesting, more creativity! - and used them to watch the house for a while. Steam from her coffee made the windows want to fog up so she had to crack the windows every now and then and let it cool off again. It must be torturing her, he thought, a part of her so warm and a part of her so cold.
He settled against the tree trunk and watched her. He'd planned to watch the house in case anyone came sneaking around – in case Withrow came sneaking around is what he meant, of course – but she was here and so much more interesting than some empty old house in some empty old neighborhood on an empty old mountain between empty old towns. She was here with a purpose, which was more than he could say about anything else these mortals had done. That always got his interest. She would yawn, nod off for an average of two minutes at a time, wake with a start, jerk the binoculars up to her face, look intently at the house, then drink more coffee, then repeat. It was soothing to lose himself in her cycle of sleep and rushed, self-conscious activity. It was like watching a human day on fast forward.
His phone buzzed silently in his pocket so he turned around and had a quiet conversation with Withrow. He didn’t even watch her to make sure she didn’t hear him. She wouldn’t, and if she did, he would just kill her.
She didn’t. When they were done speaking, Roderick turned back around and went back to watching her. This human woman was like a television stuck on a really boring show and that, in itself, was interesting.
Eventually, he realized, he wouldn't be able to resist. He would have to go speak to her. He wished he had brought Doggie – his dog – to this place with him, but he hated making him fly. He was so very old now. He wasn't frail, but it didn't seem fair to make him fly. The dog would have been a great excuse to be out, though. Oh well, it's not against the law to take a walk after dark. He would just be out for a walk. Yes, humans did that. They walked all the time. They loved to take little walks. It's good for their heart, Roderick thought, and he smiled. If he thought about it hard enough, he could make his heart beat. He'd gotten very good at that kind of thing. He could even remember to breathe for ten minutes straight if he focused.
Slipping around to the far side of the tree from the fascinating police person in the fascinating car, he climbed down in darkness and made his way through the trees to way back up the road, far from the car, far behind it. He zipped up his jacket and rubbed his hands together to make them warm again. He reached up and ran his fingers through his long, blond hair, stringy and greasy no matter how he washed it or how much product he used. He rubbed his sunken eyes and slapped his own jutting cheekbones, his hollow cheeks, to try to make them look a little more lived in. Then, whistling a happy tune, he set off at a leisurely pace down the middle of the road towards the so very interesting little car with the irresistible little woman in it.
H’Diane had a warrant to search the house and had gone through and done so - very carefully - so she wasn’t sure why she was staking the place out. Oh, there were reasons enough. The victim’s son was nowhere to be found. There were cops with pictures of him up in their break rooms and all over their email, statewide. The newspaper had run a picture of him. There weren’t many places he could hide. If it was a slow weekend for news then MSNBC or somebody might turn up asking questions. H’Diane shook her head, shook herself more awake. There was a theory professed publicly that such attention was a good thing in an investigation. Spread the word as far as possible and you make it that much more likely someone who knows something will call it in to the people who need to hear. Truth was, cops hated it when reporters turned up and made the latest Missing White Woman story a media event. Spectators seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the real investigation. Lots and lots of volunteers would turn up to help search the woods for missing campers but they weren’t trained and they didn’t know what to look for. They’d just trample the undergrowth for a few square miles, call it a tragedy and that would be that.
Detective H’Diane Bing realized abruptly that she’d started to doze again. She hadn’t gotten any sleep worth a damn the night before. She was nodding off in the car and completely screwing up the surveillance. She might as well go home. She could park a deputy out here if she wanted. She had no good reason to do it herself. The son hadn’t turned up at work for two days, hadn’t been spotted anywhere else. She would get paged in a heartbeat if they found him somewhere.
That all made sense, except that she cared so very much about getting this right herself. It was her first case as a detective. She had all these entrenched deputies with their local culture; there was LaVonde, with all her years writing and now editing the political beat in Asheville; and H’Diane felt like everyone knew what to do but she herself didn’t. She had walked out of a career as a competent beat cop when she took down the chief in her last job. Oh well. She’d sworn to uphold the law, no matter who broke it. It wasn’t her fault he’d been a murderer. In lots of departments that would never have been held against her; in some towns the local media would have turned her into a temporarily untouchable hero. In some, it was a black mark that would never wash away. She could hear her father now: I didn’t bring you to this country so that you could throw away a good future, he’d said. What had kept her in police work at all was the next thing he said, But I didn’t bring you here so that you throw away your principles, either. That was all it took. She’d applied for detective training the next day and started night classes at UNC-Asheville in Criminal Justice.
Damn. Nodded off again. She poured more coffee out of the thermos and into the cup, drank some, set it haphazardly on the dashboard of the car, fished around in her lunchbox for a protein bar. She nearly dropped it when she heard gravel crunch behind the car. Glancing in the mirror she saw a stringy-haired white kid in a black leather coat, hands in the pockets, walking this way. Too young to be Cliff, she knew right away. He met her eyes in the mirror and then smiled a little and began to whistle a tune.
LaVonde stayed late at the office that night. She’d dug out those first few articles about the killing Clyde Wilfred had investigated, the one that happened where his own body had been found, but they had just scratched the surface. There were people who still talked about it online to this day, she’d learned. Most of them were conspiracy nuts, the usual assortment of John Birch Society types who think the commies killed a rich kid as an example to capitalists everywhere, the ones who were convinced it was Bigfoot and said the tears at their throats had proven it. Hell, she’d even read one very clinical and, well, “rational” wasn’t the right word for it, but it was certainly written in the moderate tones of someone merely discussing the evidence with an open mind; anyway, some guy named Marty had posted a theory in a local discussion board in which he proposed that it was a vampire. What she was looking for, though, she kept seeming to circle without exactly finding. There was no one around anymore, no one at all, who was related to the victims or had known them when they were alive. Every now and then she’d find a story - a blog post, a discussion board e
ntry, whatever - where someone explained that they were third cousins to the guy whose daughter babysat for the sister of one of them, sure, but never anything closer than that.
That was odd, she had to admit. People were usually eager to associate themselves with tragedy, no matter how tenuous the bond. She’d have expected someone to have something a little closer than that, surely? Someone who was a cousin of the victim? Something? Anything?
Nothing.
Roderick walked around the car staying no less than ten feet from the driver’s door. The woman inside, the policewoman, watched him with an expression of relief. He’d startled her. Tsk. He had not wanted to frighten her. He wanted to talk. This was not a good beginning. He smiled politely, she smiled back, he kept walking. Ten feet past the car, he stopped and turned in a precise circle on his heels, as though his feet were attached to a pole that had been driven into the ground and he could just turn in an even circle like that.
“Do you need anything?” He perked up his eyebrows, his eyes, kept the polite smile. He was addressing her in the helpful, alert, friendly manner of waiters in nice restaurants. He remembered restaurants. They smelled bad now.
The woman wrinkled her eyebrows. She hadn’t understood him. He’d spoken too quietly. Roderick drew a slow breath to refill his lungs and then said, more loudly, “I’m sorry, but do you need anything? Is your car broken down?”
H’Diane opened her mouth, held it that way for a moment and then laughed suddenly. “No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
Roderick positively beamed at her. She was a vision of joy. Look, she talked. To him. He hadn’t been so excited in at least five minutes. “Just enjoying the evening?”
The woman held her mouth open again then looked around and past him at the house before looking back to Roderick. “Yes. Out for a walk?”
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 8