Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(58)
“What are you talking about? Guilt?”
“Jesus! Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Our relationship is falling apart. I should have dumped you a long time ago. But how could I? I keep asking for more time together, for more intimacy. But no, you’re too busy saving the world. I can’t exactly compete with that, and I feel guilty about wanting to. So I hang in there, I keep being patient and loving and making your f*cking breakfast every morning. Then you come along with this job offer and I think hey, maybe you actually do care. Maybe you understand. So I jump into something I have no training for, something I’d never even considered. Now you’re laying some girl’s death on me, too? Jesus!”
“It’s not like that,” Caxton said, but Clara was already storming out of the room. She hurried to the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
For a time Caxton just sat at the table, hoping her girlfriend would come back. She didn’t. There was too much to do, too many lives at stake to wait for very much longer, she decided. She would try to patch things up later. Before she left, though, she picked up the book Clara had been reading. It was a thick hardcover with the title on the cover in big block letters: FUNDAMENTALS OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, SEVENTH EDITION.
She laid it gently back on the table and returned to her car.
Her next stop was Mechanicsburg, and the local jail there. The cops and corrections officers that ran the place were surprised to see her, but when she flashed her silver star they fell into line. One grabbed up a heavy key ring and led her down into the basement, to the secure cells.
“He screamed every time we tried to put him in a cell with a window,” the CO explained, sorting through his keys. “These are our solitary confinement units, which we save for the worst kind. Padded walls, no furniture but a suicide-?proof toilet. Electric lights we keep on twenty-?four/seven so we can see what they’re up to.”
“What has he been doing?” Caxton asked.
The CO shrugged. “At night he sits staring into space, or sometimes he’ll pace back and forth. The cell’s only three paces wide, but he’ll do that for hours. During the day—from dawn until sundown, every time—he just sleeps. It’s funny.”
“What is?” Caxton asked.
“Down here,” the CO said, “there’s really no way for him to see whether the sun is up or down. But somehow, he knows. He’ll be sleeping now, of course, but I can wake him up if you want.”
“I do,” Caxton said.
The CO unlocked a heavy reinforced door and opened it wide. Inside Dylan Carboy lay stretched out on the floor, his head turned to one side, looking like nothing so much as a lifeless corpse. His hands were secured behind his back with nylon restraints and his feet were bare.
“Come on, kid. Come on. You got a visitor.”
The boy didn’t move.
“This might take a while,” the CO said, then grabbed Carboy under the arms and grunted and strained to get him sitting upright. “You’re a U.S. Marshal, huh? You come to transfer him?”
She understood why he would think that—prisoner transport across state lines was one of the primary functions of the USMS. “No,” she said. “I just want to talk to him. It’s pertinent to an open investigation.”
The CO shrugged. “Hell, I was hoping we were going to get rid of him. Little bastard creeps me out. You want to talk, feel free. I don’t know if he’ll answer.”
Caxton squatted down next to Carboy and studied his face. He was just a kid, even younger-?looking than she remembered from when she’d hauled him in. At the time, of course, he’d been made up like a vampire. He was still pale, but not deathly pale, and his ears were round and normal. A thin fuzz of stubble coated the top of his head where his hair had started to grow back in. His eyes were open, but they didn’t track, just stared vacantly forward.
“I can get him on his feet, if you want,” the CO said. “We can drag him down to an interrogation room.”
“No need,” Caxton said. “Tell me—has he asked for a lawyer?”
The CO shook his head. “We offered, a bunch of times. After dark, when he was talking, even. He wants vengeance, he says. He wants blood. He says that a lot. But lawyers he can do without.”
“Okay, then. I’ll speak with him awhile and then get out of your hair,” she said. The CO nodded and moved to stand by the door, hands held behind him, waiting for her to do what she needed to do. Caxton knew better than to ask to be left alone with the prisoner. That would never be allowed, not with someone as violent and unstable as Carboy.
“Do you remember me?” she asked. The boy’s face didn’t change. He was supposed to be a vampire, and of course vampires didn’t talk during daylight hours. It seemed he was going to prolong the ruse even when no one else believed in it. “I’m Laura Caxton. You wanted to kill me. Remember?” Caxton frowned. “It was all over your notebooks.”
The corner of Carboy’s upper lip twitched. Just a tic, but enough that Caxton caught it. Maybe that was what she needed: an in. The secret to police interrogations wasn’t knowing when someone was lying to you. You had to assume everything a subject said was a lie. No, the secret was finding the button you could push, the one thing that bothered the subject so much it threw him off his game enough to get his carefully prepared facts tangled up. In this case it was finding something that would get Carboy to talk at all.