Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(41)
“Oh,” Caxton said. She turned in her seat to look at the girl behind her. “What’s Violet in for?”
The mute girl grabbed her throat and simulated strangulation.
Sister Margot explained. “She attempted to commit suicide by drinking drain cleaner. It was only through an act of great blessing that she survived, though as a result she’ll never speak again or eat solid food.”
Violet shrugged, her smile returning as bright as before.
“I take it some people stay here longer than others,” Caxton suggested.
“As long as they need to. Some of our patients never leave.”
What on earth, Caxton wondered, had Raleigh done to get herself sent to a place like this? “It’s important I see Raleigh as soon as possible. Before dark, at the very least. How much longer is her session going to last?”
“Another fifteen minutes or so. She’ll be brought to you the second she’s done. I want you to know, Trooper, that you are perfectly welcome here, for as long as you must join us. I’d be less than honest, however, if I said that your prolonged presence here was desirable. I worry that you’ll make some of the girls uneasy. A number of them have histories with law enforcement that were less than…convivial.”
“I promise, I’ll be as quick as I can. Where can I talk with Raleigh?” she asked. Sister Margot looked to Violet. “Please find a room where they may talk and prepare it with candles and fire.” The mute girl bowed her head and ran off without looking back. “In the meantime, can I offer you a quiet place to wait?”
Caxton checked her cell phone. She got lousy reception in the office, and she hadn’t checked in with Glauer in a long time. “Maybe some place with a phone?”
Sister Margot’s smile dropped for a moment. “There’s only one telephone in the building, and that’s here, in my office. If you’d like to use it, I’ll just go wait out in the hall.”
Caxton started to protest, but the nun didn’t give her a chance. She headed out the door and left Caxton all alone. Whatever, Caxton thought, and reached for the woman’s phone. She called in to HQ and got Glauer, who had some information for her.
“You asked the members of the SSU to start looking for potential lairs,” he said, and she got excited for a second. “They’ve turned up sixty-?one possibles, from Erie all the way to Reading.”
“That’s good,” she said, though the number was surprisingly large. The cops who worked part time for the SSU must have tagged every abandoned farmhouse and disused factory in the state. There was no way she could investigate all those leads on her own, though. “Get Fetlock in on this. Tell him—scratch that, ask him politely, he’s a little sensitive—to get his people to run all these down. Get as many of them as possible checked out before nightfall. You know what we’re looking for. Places that haven’t been used for years, but have signs of recent activity. They can rule out the places the local teens go to drink, and anywhere clearly visible from a main road. That should narrow the search.”
How awesome would it be, she thought, if they turned up the lair in the next hour? Knowing Jameson, his lair would be well guarded and probably booby-?trapped. There were ways to deal with that sort of thing, however. If she could get to the lair by daylight, if she could find Jameson and Malvern inside, still in their coffins—it would be the work of a few minutes to remove their hearts from their bodies. To destroy the hearts. To end this.
Then she could go home. Go to bed for a week.
Then she could be alone with Clara, for a long time. She could fix everything. Everything that was wrong with her life.
She knew with a depressing certainty it wasn’t going to happen that way.
“Jameson’s smart,” she said. She said it so often it had become a mantra. “He’s not going to be anyplace I think to look for him, is he?”
“We might get lucky,” Glauer said.
She snorted a response and ended the call.
In the silence that followed—she could hear nothing but the crackling of the fireplace—she sat back in her chair and sipped at her apple juice. She thought about what could have made Raleigh come to such a place, to cut herself off from the world altogether like this. It was not, she had to admit, without a certain attraction. Tell everyone to go to hell. Run and hide from all her problems. She’d love to. But no.
The only reason a place like this repurposed convent could exist was that there were people out there in the real world, people who fought and bled to protect Sister Margot’s right to be safe and immune from danger and harm. Caxton knew a lot of old cops—her father had been one, and so had all his friends—and she remembered back in the seventies they’d had a certain way of thinking, a metaphor for what they did. The modern world with all its crime and drugs and violence and crazies was a trash can, a big, bulging trash can too small to hold everything inside of it, always threatening to burst, to run over and spill out onto the streets. As cops, they were paid to do nothing more than sit on the lid. Now that was her job.
There was a knock on the door. It was Sister Margot. “Raleigh’s ready for you now,” she said.
Vampire Zero
Chapter 26.
Sister Margot led Caxton to a windowless square room on the second floor with a table and a few less-?than-?comfortable chairs. It was freezing cold inside, but a brazier had been set up in one corner to warm the place and tall candelabras flanked the table, giving some light. Raleigh already waited inside, sitting at the far side of the table. She greeted Caxton warmly, then sat back down and smiled. Caxton pulled a digital audio recorder out of her pocket. “Is it alright if I use this? I noticed you don’t have electricity here.”