“His own brother. Why?”
“Because he said no. You asked me what Jameson offered Angus and I told you I don’t know for sure, but I think I can guess. A vampire only has one thing he can give you, which is his curse. I think Jameson Arkeley offered to make his brother a vampire. He gave him twenty-four hours to think it over, and maybe Angus was even tempted—eternal life must sound pretty good to an old man, even if he knows what price he’s going to have to pay. When Angus said no, Jameson killed him before he could say one more word to me.”
For the first time Fetlock showed a little surprise. His face paled a shade and his eyes opened a little wider. “He wanted to make his brother like he was. If he couldn’t do that he wanted to keep him from talking to you. And he intentionally used a moldering servant so he couldn’t tell you anything.”
“Yeah, that theory looks good,” Caxton said.
“Then he’s afraid of you.”
She actually laughed at that. “Yeah. I’m his biggest threat.” She led Fetlock over to the toilet and showed him the window that both she and Jameson had crawled through. “Out there,” she said, “I put two nine-millimeter rounds in his heart at point-blank range. Then he stood up again, incapacitated me, and fled the scene completely unscathed. Sure, I’m a real threat.” Fear surged through her again and she couldn’t help but shiver. Fetlock must be able to see how terrified she was, she thought. She couldn’t hide it anymore.
Fetlock shrugged. “Of all the people in the world, you’re the one he has the most to fear from. You’re the one who knows him best. You know his strengths, that’s something. And you know more about killing vampires than anyone else alive.”
But not necessarily, she thought, anyone undead. Jameson had taught her everything she knew. Now he was proving he had some secrets he hadn’t shared. “Thanks,” she sneered. “It’s nice to hear that.”
And yet she realized she sort of meant what she’d said. It did help to know someone believed in her.
“Now. How about you tell me why you’re actually here?”
“Alright,” he said, sitting down on the toilet. “I’m here to offer you a star.”
Chapter 13.
“A star,” Caxton said, scowling. “You want to give me a star. What, like a teacher gives a good student a gold star?”
“This one’s silver, actually.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and brought out a lapel pin in the shape of a star inside a circle. She recognized it instantly, of course. Fetlock was wearing one himself. Jameson Arkeley used to wear one, too. Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley of the U.S. Marshals Service. “I’m authorized to temporarily deputize any law enforcement officer I choose into the Service, for as long as I see fit.”
“What, like a sheriff rounding up a posse of cowboys?”
“That’s about exactly right,” he said. “The Service is the oldest branch of the Justice Department. We were originally organized to clean up the frontier. A lot of cowboys were Marshals—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Bill Hickock.”
She shook her head. “I’m not a big fan of Westerns,” she told him.
“Frederick Douglass was one of us, too. Later on President Kennedy had us on the front lines of the civil rights movement and desegregation. We’re the white hats,” he said, his eyes twinkling.
She stared at the pin in his hand but said nothing. What the hell was this about? she wondered.
When she didn’t take the pin immediately, he closed his hand around it but didn’t put it away. “You’ve asked why I came down here. You probably wondered what I was doing at your SSU briefing. I was sent by the director of the Service. He’s very concerned about your investigation and he wants us to help you any way we can. Maybe I should start by giving you some background information, tell you our side of this. Where I come in. At our headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, on 21 November, I was asked to gather all of Jameson Arkeley’s old files from our archives. I was supposed to make photocopies of everything we had and send the originals on to you. The online catalog showed there wasn’t much—a few notebooks, a couple of case jackets and his personal dossier. None of it was digital, which meant I had to go down to the stacks in person and find the paper documents by hand. When I attempted to do so I made an unnerving discovery. Every single folder I was looking for was missing.”
He studied her face, but she refused to give anything away. She wouldn’t even shrug, not until she’d heard more.
“My next step, of course, was to find the Service’s librarian and check the circulation records. The files I wanted had all been checked out at the same time and then never returned. They’d been signed for. I bet you can guess whose signature was on the sheet. Jameson Arkeley’s.”
Caxton let herself blink, maybe too rapidly.
“Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? This was all well after he became a vampire. More than a year after he retired from the Service. He would have needed a photo ID to check out those materials. He would have needed ID just to get into the building. I checked with the unit that issues those ID cards and they told me that they’re supposed to destroy the cards once a deputy leaves the Service, but that sometimes people don’t turn in the cards when they clean out their desks. Sometimes they want to keep them as souvenirs of their old jobs, and sometimes they just forget. The ID unit never bothers to check if a given card has been turned in and destroyed or not. Well, they will now, I am told. Somebody down there is probably going to get fired over this.”
“Videotapes,” Caxton said.
Fetlock watched her as if waiting for her to say more, but she figured he knew exactly what she meant.
“You mean, is the entrance to the archive under electronic surveillance? Of course. I watched the footage myself—it’s not actually on videotape, you understand. It’s all in compressed files on our servers. I watched the six hours before and after Arkeley supposedly signed out those files. If you’re wondering if I saw a tall albino with pointed ears and no facial hair, no. Nothing of the sort. He might have sent a half-dead in his place, of course, but the librarian would probably have noticed someone coming in with no skin on his face.”
“A human associate, then.”
Fetlock nodded. “Has to be. That person’s identity remains unknown at this time. When I presented the director with the story I just told you, he made a decision very quickly. We couldn’t take that kind of security failure lightly. Maybe you’re thinking that the theft of a few library materials is no big deal, but it demonstrates something much more frightening. It shows that he knows all our tricks—and how to get around them. Jameson Arkeley conspired to trespass on Service property, in addition to any other crimes he might have committed. He is now considered a rogue deputy of the U.S. Marshals Service.
That means he goes to the top of our Major Cases list—our version of the FBI’s most wanted, I suppose you could say.”
She wondered why the Service really wanted Jameson so badly. Maybe Fetlock was just gunning for promotion and wanted to take credit for closing up some unfinished business. Maybe it was just bad PR.
After all, an ex-deputy turned mass murderer would look very bad for the Service. Or maybe the director was just truly concerned about public safety. Based on her experience with federal cops she kind of doubted that.
Fetlock raised his closed fist and rattled the pin around the way a gambler rattles his dice before he throws them. “While he still hadn’t hurt anybody we kept his name off the website and out of the media, but after what happened here last night I doubt that remains an option. We’re committed to catching him.
We’re going to put every resource we have behind that. We want you to be one of those resources.”