23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale(110)

There had been a package of sticky foam in the SHU, when Caxton needed it. Even though sticky foam was experimental and was banned from use in prisons until the kinks could be worked out.

Doors had been left open in the prison, doors that should have been locked. Oh, not the doors she had hoped would be open. But enough that she’d been able to move around relatively freely.

It hadn’t been easy, not at all. But then—if it had been easy, she would have seen through the game right away, wouldn’t she?

She bent down over Malvern’s corpse and studied its face, ran the fabric of the mauve nightdress through her fingers. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. But something felt wrong. Something was wrong.

Then she got it. All at once, the puzzle put itself together in her head.

“Smart,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Always so smart.”

She saw the whole game now, from beginning to end.

And she knew Malvern had won.





60.

By five o’clock in the morning the fires had all been put out.

The vast majority of the prisoners were back in their cells, grumbling but more or less happy once the Feds started handing out food and coffee. A few were unaccounted for. The white supremacists barricaded in the cafeteria were still making demands, but it sounded like they were arguing among themselves in there and there was no place for them to go. A SWAT team of hostage negotiators had assured Fetlock that they could resolve the situation peacefully.

Up on the wall, Clara looked down at a prison that was as close to being back to normal as she could hope for. A lot of people had died, and a lot of people had suffered. But it was over.

Kind of.

Five o’clock. Clara checked her watch again. This was it, the end of the twenty-three-hour deadline. An hour still to go before dawn. By now she was supposed to be dead. She shuddered at the thought.

Fetlock and Glauer came up the stairs huffing and puffing.

She had called them and said there was something they needed to see. She wasn’t sure how she should present it, though. As the team’s forensic analyst, it had been her job to look at all the bodies, including Malvern’s. Fetlock didn’t seem to know what he expected her to find, but it was part of any investigation that you checked the bodies afterward, and he was a man who did everything by the book.

“She was here,” Clara said, when they looked at her expectantly. “Laura. I mean, Caxton. This is where she left the prison.” A makeshift rope had been dangled over the outside of the wall, tied at the top to a window of a watchtower. The rope looked like it was made out of nylon restraints buckled together, and it was more than long enough to reach the ground. “Most of the police units were inside the wall at that point, and the ones outside were busy at the main gate rounding up attempted escapees. Caxton could scale the wall here and run into those woods without being seen. She’s had at least a couple hours to get away.”

“I’ll find her,” Fetlock said. “The U.S. Marshals Service is good at that sort of thing, at least.”

Glauer looked sharply at their boss, but he didn’t say anything. What could he say? Laura was a fugitive from justice now. If she had returned to her cell and just waited for the cops to arrive, maybe all could have been forgiven. She could have served out the rest of her sentence quietly and then been released. But now she was a problem, and she had to be hunted down and arrested again, prosecuted again. Given a whole new sentence. Fetlock was never going to just let her go. He wasn’t that kind of man.

“Why did she run?” Glauer asked, confused. “I don’t get it. She was done! The vampires are all dead. Why would she make more trouble for herself?”

Clara knew that Glauer had personally been responsible for killing Forbin. He had been leading a SWAT team when they found two persons tangled up in a coil of barbed wire, apparently trying to struggle their way out. He’d had the presence of mind to realize that one was dead and the other was a vampire, and he had dispatched the latter without much fuss. Sometimes you got lucky.

Clara cleared her throat. “This isn’t actually what I wanted you to see. The vampire’s corpse is in the tower over here.” She led them toward the tower, working out her next words precisely. “I’d like to have a pretty serious autopsy done on the warden.”

“Why?” Fetlock asked. “You made a positive identification based on her clothing and build. This looks like a closed case to me. Do you know how badly I want this to be a closed case, Special Deputy Hsu?”