Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(59)

“We found your notebooks in your house. You remember, the house where you strangled your sister.”

The tic came again when she mentioned finding the notebooks but didn’t recur when she mentioned his sister. Yeah, she had him. Those notebooks were important to him. “I didn’t bother reading them all,”

she said. “They were kind of repetitive, and not very well written. So I gave them to one of my officers. He had to pull one of them apart because blood had stuck all the pages together. Completely ruined them.”

The boy’s lip had curled up so far that she could see his teeth.

“What I did read was kind of funny. ‘Laura Caxton will die by Halloween.’ But look, it’s almost Christmas, and here we are. I’m running around perfectly healthy, and you’re stuck in here, where you can’t even write bad poetry to entertain yourself.”

His mouth opened and she thought words might spill out. Instead he carefully brought his teeth together and closed his lips. They were white with the strain.

“I think,” she said, “that I’m going to make photocopies of some of the funnier pages, and share them with all my cop friends.”

“I’d like to see those,” the CO behind her said, playing along. Good man, she thought. “I think all of us here would enjoy that.”

Caxton nodded eagerly. “Sure. I’ll get your address before I leave so I can send them along. There’s one part that’s just hilarious. He talks about Jameson Arkeley—you know, the real vampire? Dylan here claims he actually spoke with him. Please!”

The boy lunged forward, his teeth clacking together on the lapel of her coat. The CO rushed forward, but Caxton waved him back. Carboy growled and his feet kicked at the floor, but she easily held him down, pinning him by pressing his shoulders against the floor. The boy was as weak as a starved dog, and she wondered if he’d been eating in the jail—if he wanted everyone to think he was a vampire, he couldn’t very well eat solid food.

Down on the floor Carboy writhed and moaned. “He came to me. He came to me! He knew I was worthy. He knew I could do whatever he asked, that I wouldn’t fail! I proved it to him. I proved I could kill anyone, anyone I loved. Just like him.”

“And Malvern?” Caxton asked. “Did she come to you, too?”

“Only in dreams,” the boy said.

“Where are they, Rexroth?” Caxton asked. She thought appealing to his adopted vampire persona might get a better result. “Tell me where they are.”

Carboy shook himself violently, trying to get free. The CO coughed, his way of telling her she was on the verge of being abusive. She didn’t ease up.

“Tell me. If you know so much. If they really came to you, then tell me. Or I’ll never believe you. Where is their lair?”

“I am still worthy! He’ll come for me again! He will free me!” the boy shrieked.

“You’re lying. You’re a worthless lying sack of shit,” Caxton barked. “He never came for you. Why would he? You’re nothing. You’re nobody.”

“I will never betray him! He warned me you would come. He told me to say nothing. Nothing! I am still worthy, Jameson! I am still worthy!”


The CO coughed again, much louder this time. Caxton forced herself to let the boy go. She jumped up and back so he couldn’t bite her again, considered kicking him in the ribs, but finally she just walked out the door of the cell and into the corridor. The CO came out a few moments later and asked her if there was anything else she needed, but she didn’t even look at him. She was already heading for her car—and for Syracuse.





Vampire Zero





Chapter 36.


Caxton was well onto the highway—I-81, which would take her all the way to Syracuse—when she realized her face was wet with sweat. She wiped at it with one hand and steered with the other. That could have gone better, she thought.

She had wanted to hurt the boy. She had wanted to grind him into the floor of his cell until he told her what she wanted to know. Only the presence of the CO had stopped her. And yet she doubted that he even knew anything useful—Jameson was too careful, too good at covering his tracks, to let some crazy kid in on his biggest secret, the location of his lair. For all she knew, despite any evidence suggesting the contrary, Carboy had never even met Jameson. Glauer had her half convinced otherwise, but there was still part of her that thought Carboy had made it all up, that his stories of talking to vampires had been some deluded fantasy. The boy was, without a doubt, mentally ill. Sane people didn’t murder their families, then dress up like vampires and go gunning for state troopers. But was he lying, or not?

She had gone to see him because she couldn’t afford to leave any stone unturned. Because she was running out of ideas. That made her scared—and her fear had made her violent. She had to get control of her fear.

She tried to focus on her driving. She let the lines on the road occupy her full attention so she didn’t have to think about anything else. Two hours into her drive it started to work—mostly because the driving became a lot harder the farther north she went. The road turned white with snow, first as broad fan-?shaped sweeps of powder that rolled across the asphalt, then as a thin sheet of slush embossed with the chevron-?shaped tire marks of a snow plow that had gone before her. North of Binghamton, just across the state line into New York, the snow turned into a thick carpet of pure white and she started losing traction. She had to stop and put chains on her tires at a rest stop. She worked quickly, both because she didn’t want to lose any more time and because it was cold out, colder than she’d expected, and her hands stung every time she touched the metal chains. She cursed herself, wishing she’d bothered to check the weather report. Her Mazda wasn’t suited to extreme-?weather driving—if she’d thought this through better she could have requisitioned a patrol cruiser or even something with four-?wheel drive. She had to keep her speed down when she got back on the highway. The chains gave her a better grip on the road, but it was still slick enough to be dangerous. Up past Cortland she caught up with the storm and suddenly the sky was as white as the road, full of big puffy flakes that splattered on her windshield. Headlights speared through the falling snow, dazzling her, while the brake lights of the cars ahead made pink roses bloom across her windshield. A flashing warning light like a strobe made her blink and nearly go off the side of the road. Up ahead a snow plow was thundering north, a fountain of wet snow blasting out from either side of its blade. It couldn’t be going more than thirty miles per hour, but she had to fight her instinct to pass. As bad as the snow was behind the plow, it would be impassable in front. She kept both hands on the wheel and tried to stay in the plow’s tracks, two dark gullies full of slush. The tracks were the only way she had of knowing where the road curved—in the torrent of snow she couldn’t even see the guardrails.