Once the tape was down, she opened the unlocked door and led us into the living room. I stepped to the side to make room for Karl's bulk and almost knocked over a knick-knack shelf full of little ceramic leprechauns. There'd be hell to pay if I broke any of them.
The furniture and drapes were old, but well caredfor. The floral wallpaper wasn't peeling anywhere, although nails stuck out from it in several parts of the room. The rug we stood on was threadbare in a few places, but it was as clean as you could expect with cops tramping all over it.
The Dwyers didn't have a lot, but they seemed to take pride in what they had. I was betting that Mrs. Dwyer vacuumed every week – probably on Saturday morning, just like my mom had done. On one wall, occupying a place of honor, was a framed faded portrait of JFK that looked like it had been clipped from a magazine. The one in our house had been from Life, I remembered.
A short hallway branched from the living room, with a door on each side and a bathroom at the end. One room had its door open, lights burning inside. Lacey led us there saying, "Mom, Dad, and two boys. Dennis is at Penn State, the other one, James, dropped out of high school a little over a year ago. Junior year."
"That must've been when he was turned," I said. "Which came first, I wonder?"
"Was he out to the parents?" Karl asked.
"Dunno," Lacey said, "but, Christ, he'd have to be."
Pretty hard to explain to Mom and Dad that you weren't going outside in daylight any more, and that midnight mass at Christmas was off your schedule for good. Sunday dinner would never be the same, either. They must've known their kid was a vamp. I felt sorry for them.
The bedroom looked like it would make a good set for a remake of I Was a Teenage Vampire. The walls were covered with posters of rock stars, although I didn't recognize most of them. Discarded clothes covered the furniture, and the floor was littered with CDs, DVDs, and magazines. The room's two windows had close-fitting boards nailed over both of them, which were covered with black plastic from garbage bags. The edges of the bags were heavily taped around the edges, to make sure no speck of sunlight would sneak in. That was the only unusual thing about the room – unless you counted the bloody corpse on the bed.
The wooden stake must have been very sharp – it looked like it had gone right through the kid's body, pinning him to the mattress like some kind of bug in a museum exhibit. James Dwyer had been wearing white briefs and a gray T-shirt with "Question Authority" printed on the front. Probably what he wore to bed when he'd been sleeping at night, not all that long ago.
The heart contains a lot of blood, so I wasn't surprised at the gore that half-covered the body and bed, and spattered the nearby wall. I'd seen staked vampires before.
"Here's the reason my buddy called me, and why I got in touch with you guys," Lacey said, walking over to the body. She pushed bloody blond hair away from James Dwyer's forehead, and there they were: three of the same kind of symbols that we'd been encountering on corpses lately. In fact, these looked kind of familiar.
I reached into my jacket pocket for my notebook. Even though the case files contained plenty of photos from each of the dead vamp crime scenes, I had still made cies by hand of the symbols that had been carved into each of the victims.
First vic – three symbols. Check. Second vic – three symbols, but different from the first set. Check. Third one – three symbols found on the guy in Wilkes-Barre. Check. Same weird alphabet, but different from the other two. Then James Dwyer, right in front of me. Three symbols. Check. Except...
"Lacey, lift the kid's hair again, will you? Karl, take a close look at these."
Karl stepped closed and leaned in close. Then he straightened up. "They look similar to the ones we been seeing," he said. "Not surprising."
"No," I said, "but here's something that is." I showed him my notebook. "See?" Each of the first three vics had a different set of these fucking arcane symbols carved on him. But James, here–"
"–has got the same markings as the first vic." Karl's forehead wrinkled. "So, maybe this fucking ritual, whatever it is, requires some kind of repetition, only… Fuck, I dunno."
Lacey was looking at me. "There's something else that doesn't fit," she said. "Now that you mention it. The M.O."
"All the M.O.s have been different," Karl said. "I mean, that's part of the pattern, haina?"
"I think maybe I see what she's getting at," I said to him. "It's not weird enough."
She nodded slowly. "Yeah, exactly. My guy had been done by a silver garrote, and in your two, the perp used–"
"Charcoal bullets and a silver-coated blade," I said. "Wooden stake through the heart, it's, I dunno, too conventional."
"Okay, I'm with you now," Karl said, "but it still doesn't tell us shit. We don't know why the perp would all of a sudden start using the tried-and-true method of killing a vamp, but we don't know why the fucker's doing anything he does."
"Yeah, but I wonder..." I let my voice trail off. "Look, we should get out of here so the coroner can take the body away. They're probably waiting for us."
As we shuffled back out the door, I said, "Besides, there's something I wanna look at in the car."
"What's that?" Karl asked.
"My laptop."
Karl was just slipping into the passenger side as I reached under my seat for the slim laptop computer. I heard the rear door open and close as Lacey scrambled into the back seat.
I opened up my computer, logged on, then passed it to Karl. "Here," I said. "You're better at this stuff than I am."
"What stuff?" Karl asked.
"Searching the Internet."
"Ah, hell. It's not all that hard to find porn." He glanced over his shoulder at Lacey. "Not that I would know."
"If not, you're the only guy in the world who doesn't," Lacey murmured.
"So what am I looking for, Stan?" Karl said.
"Images of the symbols that were carved into the first victim."
He looked at me. "Scranton PD never released that information. Neither did Wilkes-Barre."
"No, they didn't," I said. "But it's funny how much confidential stuff gets on the Internet without being officially released. I want to know if somebody outside law enforcement could've known what those symbols looked like."