Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(19)
“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.”
She shook her head. “I already have a job.”
“And you would keep it,” he said. “This is strictly a temporary deputization. It’ll last just until you catch him. Then you’ll go right back to what you were doing before you started fighting vampires.”
She wasn’t even sure what that meant anymore, if she was honest. She’d been putting her life at stake for so long she’d never really considered what she would do if the vampires were driven to extinction. Maybe she would retire and work as a dog trainer. That would be nice. Not yet, though. For now, she was a cop.
“What’s in it for me?” she asked. She couldn’t see it. Did he expect her to just jump at the chance?
He leaned back and seemed to think about it before answering. “It would open a lot of doors for you. It would allow you to track a fugitive across state lines, for one thing. Right now if Jameson runs to West Virginia you can’t legally follow him.”