Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(38)

“I believe so, yes,” Fetlock confirmed. “We only caught him for a split second, but my digital analysis people cleaned up the image quite a bit. I thought you should see this.”

The picture on the screen showed a man in a light blue suit walking through a metal detector. The shot was blurry at best, and the face couldn’t be seen at all—just the back of the man’s head. His hair could have been brown or black—the image was too poorly lit to be sure. “He was using Jameson’s ID, right?

It’s not him, though.”


“You don’t think it could have been the vampire in disguise?” Fetlock asked. Caxton frowned. “I suppose it’s possible. Vampires do alter their appearance sometimes. They put on wigs, throw on some makeup. I knew one, once, who tore off the tips of his own ears so they’d look more human.” She tapped at the screen of her computer. “This is different, though. Those vampires wouldn’t fool anybody except from at an extreme distance. It would take Hollywood-?level makeup artists to make one look this human. No, I still think this is a human being pretending to be Jameson. He found someone human and sent him in his place. Besides. He’s got all his fingers. Jameson is missing all the fingers from one hand.”

“He could be wearing a prosthesis,” Fetlock suggested.

Caxton frowned at her screen. “A guy walks into your offices, wearing powder on his face, an obvious wig, and a fake hand. Even if the makeup job was good, don’t you think somebody would notice something?”

“So it definitely wasn’t Jameson. Which only begs more questions,” Fetlock said.

“Yeah. Now, if it’s alright, I have to get going—time’s wasting,” Caxton said. She didn’t particularly care about the archives theft. She was far more worried about losing another one of Jameson’s family members.

She wasn’t quite done, though. Before she left she stuck her head into the briefing room. She hoped to find Glauer there. She planned to apologize to him. It had been a bad night for everybody, but he hadn’t deserved the crap she’d given him. She found him just where she’d expected, and he’d been busy. He had taken the liberty of updating the whiteboards. For VAMPIRE PATTERN #1 he had pasted up pictures of the Carboy family underneath the pictures of Rexroth/Carboy’s other victims. For VAMPIRE

PATTERN #1 he had found pictures of the state troopers and Bellefonte police they’d fought at Astarte’s house, as well as the anonymous half-?dead from the motel where Angus died. Jameson’s brother and his widow both had their own memorials there, circled in red marker. The boards were getting crowded; there wasn’t much room left for future victims.

It was fine that he’d done all that—but when she saw what else he’d done she nearly lost it. He had taken one of Dylan Carboy’s notebooks—the one that had been gummed together with dried blood—and separated all the pages. They lay spread out on the desks like an enormous tarot card reading.

She had given him specific instructions to stop reading the notebooks. Clearly he’d decided he didn’t have to obey her orders. Before she could blow up at him, though, he held up his hands. “I can explain,”

he said. “I know you think this is all garbage. And the vast majority of it definitely is. There are whole sections where he just copied down the lyrics of his favorite songs, and there are pages where he pasted in printouts of websites, some of them pretty random. It looks like he was obsessed with the Columbine school shooting for a while. I think maybe he was planning something similar at his college—that might have been when he bought the shotgun.”

He tapped one of the desks. “But starting here things change. None of his journal entries are dated, but he talks about a TV show he watched and I looked it up. The episode he mentions ran the first week in October.”

“Right after Jameson accepted the curse,” Caxton suggested.

“Yeah.” Glauer picked up one of the sheets. “The show’s not important except that it gives us a time frame for the transition. Before that date most of his entries are long, rambling passages about how he feels like no one understands him and how he feels alienated even from his family. Then we have this one. It stuck out at first only because it was so short: ‘I saw him outside my window tonight. He’s close now, and coming closer.’”

Caxton raised an eyebrow.

Glauer pushed his way between the desks, knocking them sideways in his excitement so their feet squeaked across the linoleum. “There’s more! Here, maybe a couple days later: ‘He told me the strong will always prey on the weak. That’s the laws of nature. He said if you were weak you had a duty to make yourself stronger, or to get out of the way. Nobody is as strong as him.’”

“Does he ever mention Jameson by name?” Caxton asked.

Glauer dropped his head. “No. At least not in the journal entries. There are newspaper articles about vampires all over this notebook. A lot of them about what happened at Gettysburg.”

Caxton leaned against the bookcase. “But you think this ‘he’ is Jameson. You think he was in contact with Carboy somehow. Presumably not through their MySpace pages.”

“We know they can communicate telepathically,” Glauer tried.

Caxton couldn’t deny it—she’d had her mind invaded by more vampires than she liked to remember.