We managed to get my urgent news out, eventually, though two o’clock had come and gone. I was climbing out of the wagon, glad to be shut of that cramped and eerie conveyance, when the telegrapher called me back. “Another message, sir.”
“What now, more news from the other side?”
“No, sir, this one’s got your name on it. ‘Received in full,’ it says, and then, ‘New orders. Gum Spring forthwith.’ Where’s that, then?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said. It was the first I’d heard of the place.
—THE PAPERS OFWILLIAMPITTENGER
25.
Afaint misty rain was falling by the time Caxton got back to Gettysburg. The afternoon was already half over, and it would be dark before she knew it. She wheeled into the parking lot of the town’s sole police station, on High Street just south of Lincoln Square. She finished the takeout food that littered the Mazda’s passenger seat; she needed to keep her strength up, especially as lousy as she felt after the previous night’s exertions. Then she stepped out of the car and through the glass doors at the front of the cop shop. The sergeant at the front desk stood up when he saw her and pointed her through a pair of swinging doors. Beyond she found the bullpen, a dimly lit room full of cubicles, each with a PC and a couple of office chairs. Policemen in gray and black uniforms stood up all around the room as she walked in. She stopped short as every man in the room turned to face her.
They were patrolmen, not detectives. They were cops who spent every day walking the streets, keeping order. They were tall men, mostly, and most of them were a few pounds over-weight. They wore bristly mustaches and their hair was short and neat. In other words, they looked a lot like her father had in his prime. She knew enough cops to recognize the look they were giving her. Their eyes were empty, the same way they’d look while they were interviewing suspects, willing to give nothing away for free.
One of them she actually recognized. A huge guy with broad shoulders and a hunched head, as if he was afraid of banging it on the ceiling. He was one of the cops who had responded to the mortuary burglary, the one who had survived. The one who stayed with his dead partner while she raced off in his borrowed cruiser. His name tag readGLAUER, and he stepped forward to stand in front of her, his immense bulk blocking her path. She wasn’t sure what he wanted, but she was ready to defend herself if he wanted to call her out.
“Officer,” she said, by way of greeting.
“Trooper,” he said. His lips barely moved as he spoke. “Every man here was a friend of Brad Garrity.
He was the one who—”
“Who died in service last night. I remember,” Caxton said. She tried to keep her eyes as blank as his.
Was he going to puff himself up next, and tell her how much he resented her walking into this office like she could just take over? Maybe he would accuse her of being an accomplice in Garrity’s death. The vampire was to blame; everyone knew that, but she was a much more convenient target for his rage and grief. If he wanted to blow some steam at her, she supposed she could take it.
“You didn’t know him,” Glauer said. “We did. He had a wife and two kids, just little kids. He wasn’t a smart guy, but people liked him. He was honest and hardworking, and he loved the job. He loved this town. He grew up here.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, permitting herself a frown of compassion.
Glauer shook his head, though. He didn’t want her apologies. “When he died I followed procedure. I stuck with him until the ambulance arrived, even though I knew he was gone. I called it in. Afterward I came back here and filled out the paperwork. You, on the other hand, went tearing off after the perp who killed him.”
She nodded. There were rules to this game and she would follow them.
“We heard what happened to you. I saw what happened to my cruiser, when they towed it out of the Musselman Stadium parking lot. We all,” he said, glancing backward at the men standing behind him,
“just wanted to say something.”
Here it comes, Caxton thought. She would take it, whatever it was.
“We wanted to say thanks. You didn’t know Brad, but you put your life on the line to catch his killer.
That kind of courage is something we respect.”
One of the men at the side of the room started to clap. The others followed suit immediately. The applause was hardly deafening, but it was real.
“Whatever you need to get this thing, whatever it takes, we’re with you,” Glauer said over the noise. He held out a hand and grasped hers hard, pumping it repeatedly. “Just next time, try to wreck Finster’s car instead. It’s a real shitbox.”
Another man—it had to be Finster—said, “Hey,” and everyone laughed, Caxton included. She took her hand back from Glauer and let him point the way to a glassed-in office at the back of the room.
Inside the local police chief waited for her, dozens of manila folders lined up neatly on his desk. He stood up promptly as she entered and shook her hand, then sat back down. “Trooper Caxton. I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you here. How glad the borough of Gettysburg is that you could help us out.” The nameplate on his desk readCHIEF VICENTE and there was no dust on it. The walls behind him held framed photos of policemen from years gone by, some of the photos looking sixty or eighty years old. They showed cops who looked almost identical to the men out in the bullpen, just with different uniforms.
Vicente himself stood out, by contrast. He was young, maybe ten years older than Caxton, and though he wore a mustache it was thin and neatly trimmed. He was relatively short and his eyes were bright and clear and full of optimism. He had a faint Puerto Rican accent when he talked. He didn’t look anything like the cops in his bullpen. He looked a little like a politician.
She sized him up in one professional once-over. He must have worked damned hard to get where he was, to be chief of the men outside his office. He must have put up with a lot of crap along the way.
Caxton knew that story because it was a lot like her own. This was a man she could work with, she thought. Somebody she could understand. “I want to thank you for inviting me down here,” she said, by way of opening.
“Are you kidding? I think the luckiest thing that ever happened to the ’Burg was you being here last night.” He opened one of his manila folders and took out a map of the town. Portions of the map had been highlighted in yellow ink and a number of handwritten notes crowded the margins. “This town has a population of about seventy-five hundred, and most days this time of year we have twice that many tourists in town. I have twenty sworn patrolmen to take care of those people, and a couple dozen auxiliary officers I can call in for homecoming or the bigger reenactments. Normally that’s enough.
Normally our biggest problem is frat parties getting out of control up at the college, or tourists who don’t know how to drive and make our traffic patterns a real mess.” He looked up from the map and smiled at her. “We had forty-three violent crimes reported last year. None of them resulted in a death.”
“None?” Caxton repeated, a little stunned. “You had no murders at all last year?” Even in the sleepiest of backwater towns you normally got a couple of abused women killing their husbands or kids playing with guns blowing each other away. Then there were vehicular fatalities to consider. In the era of road rage, more and more people were realizing that a three-ton SUV made a great murder weapon.