That was pretty typical for Vesta Polder. She saw all, knew all—or so she wanted people to think.
Caxton was pretty sure it was mostly an act, a practiced technique to draw people out and make them give away what they knew. It still creeped her out.
“He made them both the same offer, I think. They could join him and become vampires or they could die on the spot. As to why, I don’t really get it yet.”
“He loved them,” Polder replied. “He loved them but they were human, and to a vampire human life is contemptible. He could not reconcile those two feelings. To resolve that tension he had to either make them like himself, to bring them up to his level, or extinguish them altogether.”
“I got that,” Caxton shrugged. “But vampires see us as prey. As livestock. He didn’t feed on either of them, just tore them up and let them bleed out.”
“Perhaps,” Vesta said, “to Jameson, now, that is affection. He put them to sleep, as one would a beloved pet, instead of making a meal of them like a cow or a pig.” She moved around the side of the bed and leaned over Astarte’s face, close enough that Caxton started to raise a hand in warning. Vesta passed one hand over Astarte’s mouth and then swept her ring-bedecked fingers together as if she were catching a fly. “She has moved on. Jameson will not be able to raise her as a half-dead. That’s what I came for.
May I close her eyes?”
Again, that was something you just didn’t do at a homicide scene, but Caxton just bit her lip and nodded.
Vesta lowered the dead woman’s eyelids gently, with two fingers of her left hand. Then she drew back.
She was clearly finished. Before she could go, however, Caxton had a few more questions for her.
“The night’s just begun. I’m worried he’ll strike again.”
“Not tonight,” Vesta said, shaking her head so her blond ringlets bounced on the shoulders of her severe black dress. “This moved him. It affected him, that portion of his heart that remains capable of love. He’ll return to his lair and sulk.”
Caxton couldn’t really imagine Jameson sulking, but she accepted what Polder said. She knew things, somehow, that other people didn’t. It was best not to question how she knew them. “You don’t happen to know where his lair is, do you?”
Polder shook her head again. “That is hidden from me, and from all human eyes. Good night, Astarte,”
she said.
She started to come around the side of the bed as if to leave the room, but Caxton stopped her. “You went out of your way to come here tonight.”
“Astarte was a friend. Someone needed to be here, to do what I have done.”
Caxton had thought otherwise. “Raleigh—back at the fake funeral—Raleigh told me about you and her.
She said you and Astarte had a falling-out or something. Care to tell me what that was about? She said you hadn’t spoken to each other in years.”
“You haven’t guessed already?” Polder asked. She looked away. “I had an affair with Jameson, of course.”
Caxton dropped her hand. If she couldn’t imagine Jameson sulking in his lair, she was completely incapable of seeing that in her mind’s eye.
Polder lifted her chin and stared at the ceiling. “It was in 1987. Jameson and Astarte had been married only a few years, but already they were drifting apart. It had been a sort of arranged marriage, of course.
Jameson was the dashing hero who had slain the great darkness—the man who had single-handedly driven vampires from the face of the earth. Or so we thought. He didn’t tell anyone that Justinia Malvern had survived, not at first. Astarte came from a very respectable, extremely old family. She could trace her lineage all the way back to the foundations of this country.”
“To Plymouth Rock, you mean?”
Vesta smiled. “To Salem. Still, it wasn’t a very good match. He was twenty years her senior, for one thing. They were never happy. He spent far too much time at his work and left her to keep house here, all but abandoned. He only seemed to drop by to impregnate her—that autumn, and then in the winter of the following year. She struggled with raising the children alone, virtually a single mother. I helped her as much as I could—back then I was less limited in my movements. She was my best friend, you see.
That’s how I met Jameson. I didn’t like him at all back then. He never beat her, of course, and every word from his mouth was loving, yet I thought he was a monster for the way he neglected her.”
“And yet,” Caxton said, “you somehow got involved with him.”
“There are those among us who find monsters quite attractive,” Vesta said. She had a knowing smirk on her face that made Caxton cringe. “Such a powerful man. Passionate, and driven. That kind of focus is very hard to resist when it is turned in your direction.”
Caxton scratched one of her eyebrows. “When I spoke with Astarte, um, recently, she—suggested that he and I might have been romantically connected.”
“That’s rather foolish. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that you’re a girl-lover.”
The conversation had taken a turn that wasn’t going to help her investigation, Caxton decided. She led Vesta out of the room and back down to the street. Fetlock waited there to talk to her. He looked impatient.
“You do know this woman, then,” he said, when Vesta Polder climbed back into the passenger seat of his car. “She came into the state police HQ a little after you left, demanding to be taken to you at once. I tried to get some ID out of her, but she said there was no time.”
“She probably doesn’t have any ID. She lives pretty far off the grid. But she’s one of the good guys.”
Fetlock nodded as if he was satisfied with her vouching for Polder. “We could use more of those.
Especially since we just lost seven of them.” He nodded his head in the direction of the house. “You know this doesn’t look good, right? You know this was kind of a disaster.”
Caxton admitted she could see how he might think that. “When people fight vampires, some of them die,”
she muttered. It was the kind of thing Jameson might have said.
“Tell me at least one good thing came out of this,” Fetlock insisted.
Caxton looked him right in the eye. “I know where he’s going to strike next.”
Chapter 23.
“Alright,” Fetlock said. “Tell me what you know. And how you know it.”
Caxton sat down on the hood of his car. Warmth from the engine seeped up through her clothes. “He approached Angus, his brother, with an offer—join him or die. Tonight he made the same offer to his wife. He’s going after his own family. He thinks he’s doing them a big favor, making them as immortal and as powerful as he is. They don’t see it that way, and the only other option as far as he’s concerned is to kill them painlessly. He can’t just let them lie in peace.”
“But why?” Fetlock asked. “What’s in it for him?”
“Reinforcements. He knows he isn’t invulnerable. He killed too many vampires himself to think that. No matter how tough he may be, there’s going to come a time when he just won’t be strong enough. When somebody is going to get him. I don’t think he’s all that worried about me. I’m just one person and he knows all my best tricks—because he taught them to me. Individually, nobody is tough enough to be a serious threat. But he’s smart, and he knows he’s outnumbered. If I can’t stop him, eventually he’ll be up against more than just me. If he wants to keep drinking blood—and he can’t stop now—he knows we’ll fight him over every drop. If he creates new vampires they can fight by his side.”