Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(24)
“I’m a special deputy now,” she said. “I’m working for the Marshals Service. Apparently that makes me an honorary cowgirl.”
“A special deputy. Just like he was.”
Laura shook her head. “It’s just a formality, really. It gives me federal jurisdiction and apparently I can spend taxpayer money on the investigation. It’s a tool. Something to help me do this job.”
“First he put you in danger. He made you his vampire bait. Then he made you a badass, a real vampire killer. Now you’re turning into him for real. Maybe you’ll end up just like he did. Willing to do anything to keep fighting. Willing to do horrible things.”
“No, no, no,” Laura said, pulling Clara into a tight hug, burying her face in her girlfriend’s neck. “It’s not like that.” But it was, of course. She had to become more like Jameson every day. She had to—the alternative was getting killed in some stupid way or, worse, far worse, letting the vampires get away.
“Let’s just go to lunch. It’s already two o’clock.” Clara pulled away and stood up. She leaned against the door of the office, not even looking at Laura. “Is there someplace you want to go to? What about that Greek place?”
Laura bit her lower lip. She got the message that Clara was sending—the conversation was over. They would talk about nothing but gossip and trivia at lunch and not address any of their real problems. She could play that game, too. “That place is so expensive, though.”
“Considering how often you take me to lunch, we can afford it.”
Laura stood up and started putting her more lethal gear away in a cupboard by her desk—her handgun, her pepper spray, her collapsible ASP baton. All she needed for lunch was her wallet and her cell phone.
“Actually,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about that. About a way we could have lunch together almost every day.”
She followed Clara out into the hallway. Clara turned to look at her with mistrusting eyes but half a smile.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Laura began, but just then Glauer came running up the hall. “You need to see these,” he insisted, and shoved a heavy plastic bag into her arms, so forcefully that he nearly shoved her backwards. She looked down at the bag and saw it contained three spiral-?bound notebooks, the top one stained with a bloom of dried blood.
Vampire Zero
Chapter 16.
“Jesus, Glauer. I thought I told you to drop this.” Caxton had humored him enough to take the bag into the briefing room and spread its contents over some of the desks. One of the notebooks literally came apart in her hands and turned into a pile of random sheets of paper. The bloodstained one proved hard to open—the blood had soaked right through the pages, and each time she turned to a new leaf the notebook would creak and rip and spill shiny maroon powder down her pantleg. She quickly put that notebook down and took up the one that was in the best shape. Rexroth—or Carboy, that was his real name—had decorated its cover with a crude picture showing a jack-?o’-lantern with vicious fangs, much like a vampire’s. “I guess this was the Halloween issue,” Caxton said, flipping open the cover. The next page contained only six words, but they were inscribed in giant jagged letters, outlined and embellished liberally. They’d been written in ballpoint pen, and Carboy had pressed down so hard that he’d torn the paper in places. The message was simple enough:
Caxton grunted. She didn’t know how to react to that. So she turned to the next page. This proved to be some kind of journal entry, written in a cramped, sloping hand she could barely make out. The corners of the page were decorated with crude line drawings of vampires. One of them had baby-?sized legs sticking out of its mouth. She studied the text and quickly found her name, repeated several times, usually in the middle of an elaborate threat. “Laura Caxton is going to, to,” she read. “What’s this? Oh, I’m going to pay. I’m also, apparently, going to bleed—it’s repeated three times—and then he’s going to dance in my blood wearing his favorite pair of boots. He’s going to chop me into tiny bits, and when the kids come by on Halloween he’s going to give pieces of me away as treats. Apparently I deserve this because of what I did to Kevin Scapegrace. Interesting.”
“You remember that name?” Glauer asked. “Scapegrace?”
“Yeah. Of course I do. Teenaged vampire.” She shrugged. “He went down as quick as the rest of them.”
Her bravado couldn’t quite keep her from drawing her shoulders in closer to her body and wrapping her arms around her chest. Scapegrace had captured her and tortured her before he died. She didn’t like to think about it.
“I think you should read the rest,” Glauer insisted. “I haven’t had a chance to go through it all myself, but—”
“No,” she said.
“What do you mean? This doesn’t worry you?” he asked, turning the page to show her a picture of a state trooper hanging from a noose, her Smokey Bear hat still perched on her head even though her face had turned blue and her tongue hung out of her mouth. “This doesn’t bother you?”
“It would bother me a lot more if Carboy wasn’t already in custody,” she admitted. “But he is. So—so what? According to this I was supposed to die by Halloween, and that was over a month ago. He was late even by his own schedule.” She grabbed the cop’s arm. “Listen. I appreciate your concern. But Dylan Carboy was just a lonely kid with nothing better to do than scribble threats in a journal and fantasize about being a vampire. He probably got my name out of the newspaper and just fixated on it. It’s truly sad that nobody stopped him before he got as far as he did, but now he’s going to jail, probably for the rest of his life, and I’m safe.” She dropped the notebook on one of the desks. “Now put this all back together and take it back to Mechanicsburg.”