“Apparently the Marshals do it differently. It’s just like a sheriff riding into town and deputizing the local gunslingers to take down the black hats. It’s just as temporary, too. For now, though, it makes me the national go-to person for all vampire cases, and it gives me some police powers I never thought I’d have.”
“Okay,” Glauer said, “but what does it mean for us?”
“Well, first things first. We’re both getting a big raise.” The three of them smiled at that. “It also means I can finally, officially hire you on.” She reached across the table and shook his hand. “Welcome aboard.
Fetlock tells me I can hire anyone I want, including somebody to do all our paperwork.”
“That’ll be a relief,” Glauer laughed. He picked up his large Diet Coke and sipped thirstily at it. “You’re probably going to want to bring in some other people, too, right? I can recommend some guys we should have with us. Johnson, from Erie—he used to be a linebacker in high school, he’s one tough son of a gun.” Glauer shifted his own massive bulk around on the chair—he barely fit in it. “Then there’s Eddie Davis, from Troop K. I’ve never seen anybody who could drive like that guy, he could be your automobile specialist, and—”
“Actually,” Caxton said, “I kind of like having most of our people just be on call. I want to build a core team of just a few people. I was thinking three of us. You, me, and her,” she said, grabbing Clara’s wrist.
Clara had been tearing her paper napkin into a pile of tiny pieces. “Bullshit,” she said.
Caxton frowned. “What do you mean?”
Clara looked to Glauer for support. “You’re spouting bullshit. What do you mean, me? I’m not part of your team.”
“I’d like you to be, though,” Caxton said.
“To do what? Every time I see a vampire I can scream, so you know it’s nearby? Or maybe I can startle them with the flashbulb of my camera. That’s what I do, Laura. I take pictures of crime scenes and dead bodies and gross stuff. I’m very good at it, but I don’t think you need a photographer in your core team.”
“You could be my forensics guy. Like on CSI: Miami, ” Caxton said. “You could do all my hair and fiber and DNA research.” The idea had come to her when Fetlock had mentioned his own forensics team.
Clara just laughed. “Huh? You do realize those guys go to school for that. They’re scientists. They train for years and years and read scientific journals and go to conferences to talk to other eggheads about just how many legs a certain species of cockroach has. I went to Slippery Rock for art photography, and I don’t even use anything I learned.”
Caxton shook her head. “I don’t expect you to just pick it all up by reading a couple of websites about forensics. But you can coordinate with the people the Marshals Service uses. You can manage them—you know a lot more about vampires than they do, by now, so you can tell them what to look for, or how to interpret what they find.”
“There are so many people better qualified than me,” Clara protested. “Why on earth would you pick me for this?”
“You said we weren’t spending enough time together,” Caxton admitted. “You said I spent all my time at work and never got to see you at home. Well, this way we’d both be at work all the time. We could see each other a lot.”
Clara shook her head in disbelief.
“Well?” Caxton asked. “Are you going to give me an answer?”
“No!” Clara said. “At least—not right away.”
Chapter 17.
They polished off a good-sized moussaka without saying much more. Clara excused herself before the baklava arrived, saying she had to get back to work. “That goes for us, too,” Caxton told Glauer. “Come on. We can take dessert to go.”
The two of them headed back to HQ together, Caxton enumerating the things they had to get done as she drove. “We have to try to make some kind of ID on the half-dead from the motel. There’s not a lot to work with, but maybe we can get some idea of what he looked like and run it against the missing persons list. Who knows, maybe we’ll turn up a match. Then there’s the field out behind the motel—I had it searched once, but maybe we missed something in the dark. Get some people over there to have a look around. When you get a chance we need to contact the Feds and see if they have a file on Angus Arkeley—he said he had some trouble with the law a while back. He wasn’t clear on whether he’d actually been processed or convicted, but there might be something there. Oh, and I put a guard on his body, but they need to be relieved, so find somebody who can go over to the morgue and take care of that. I’m going to try to get in touch with his family and get permission to have him cremated as soon as he’s been autopsied.” It was standard practice to cremate the remains of vampire victims. Otherwise the vampire could call them up as half-deads whenever he chose.
By the time they got back to the HQ building it was already four o’clock. The sun was starting to set and pink clouds streaked the sky. Stepping out of her car, Caxton studied the horizon as if there were some clue there. Night was falling, which meant Jameson Arkeley would be active again. He had killed at least twice so far. Would he kill again tonight? she wondered.
All vampires started as people with individual personalities, with moral codes all their own. Eventually they ended up all the same. How long had Jameson lasted before he killed his first victim? Probably longer than most. He had fought it, she was sure, with every fiber of his being. He must have spent night after night curled around himself in his lair, desperate to go outside, to hunt, but knowing what it would make him.
Then again—maybe he had given in early. Maybe he had known it was inevitable, and decided it wasn’t worth torturing himself just so a few humans could live another day. Vampires saw death—human death—through a very different lens than she did. For vampires, human beings were simply prey. Game animals to be culled as needed. Angus had been given the option of becoming one of the predators.
When he refused that gift, Jameson must have seen death as the next best thing for his brother.
She shivered uncontrollably.
“You okay, Caxton?” Glauer asked.
She blinked her eyes and looked away from the sunset. Phosphor afterimages glared behind her eyelids.
“I’m fine. Let’s get inside.”
Down in the basement she booted up her computer and started composing her report of the previous night’s events. When she’d worked with Arkeley, when they took down Malvern’s brood, and later when she’d defended Gettysburg during the massacre, she had never worried so much about paperwork.
Maybe Jameson had filed reports every night, but she’d been mostly concerned with staying alive. Now that she was head of the SSU she wasn’t able to avoid it anymore. The Commissioner of State Police demanded constant updates on her investigation and forms filled out every time she discharged her weapon. Every time she discovered a body she had to fill out a Non-Traffic Death Investigation Report, a much more complicated form than the traffic fatality reports she’d filled out as a highway patrol officer.
It took her hours every day to type up all the necessary official files, and hours more to create files for the SSU database. She’d actually taken a touch-typing course at the academy in Hershey just to speed things up, but still much of her day was filled up with bureaucratic nonsense.