Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(60)
It took another three hours before she reached Syracuse, and even longer to weave her way through the maze of the city’s surface streets. Some of them had been plowed, leaving one narrow lane open and mounds of snow on either side six feet high, with here and there a car buried so deeply in the drifts that she wondered how they would ever be dug out. The Victorian houses she passed were half snowed-?in, their roofs weighted down with thick layers of snow like frosting on a cake. Even the street signs were often obscured by clumps of snow that clung to them, and more than once she had to stop in the middle of a street and study her map. It was four forty-?five when she reached the university campus, already after dark, though it was hard to tell. The sky had taken on an uncanny blue-?gray color, a haze of light from the city’s buildings trapped under the heavily laden clouds. The streetlights looked like showerheads gushing down diamond-?bright snowflakes, and trails of mist wandered the streets like freezing ghosts looking for some warm place to haunt.
The main campus of the university loomed up out of the storm as she rumbled past. She saw brick dormitories with fogged-?up windows, libraries and classroom buildings made of big flat slabs of concrete stained dark by melting snow. She saw a massive gray building with a black mansard roof, just dripping with gables and dormer windows. It reminded her of the Addams family house from TV. Following the directions Fetlock had given her, she took a left turn and drove past a massive park, the rolling hills of which looked like an ocean of heaving white waves, then another left on Westscott Street, where little shops and businesses spilled yellow light across the submerged road. She passed a big New Age bookstore and finally arrived at her destination, the corner of Westscott and Hawthorne. On every side of her, two-?story houses from the turn of the century hunkered down in the snow. They were painted in bright colors turned pastel by the snow, and all of them, for some reason, had balconies on their second level. She wondered what this place would look like in summer, but couldn’t really paint the picture in her mind. It was so encrusted with snow that she couldn’t imagine winter ever ending. She pulled up behind an unmarked white van, a Ford E-150 with tinted windows. It was buried in snow up to its wheel wells, but the windshield had been scraped clear, and recently. It was so obviously a police surveillance van that she winced when she saw it. Apparently the local Feds had never heard of discretion. Maybe, she thought, Simon would have been so busy with his studies that he wouldn’t have noticed it was parked outside his house for two days in a row. Of course, she’d never been that lucky before.
Fetlock had tasked his own men, U.S. Marshals, with this stakeout, thinking they might do better than local cops. It wasn’t Caxton’s job to second-?guess that decision.
When she killed her engine and switched off her lights the van’s rear doors popped open and a gloved hand waved her over. Popping her own door, she jumped out and hurried up into the back of the van, yanking the door closed behind her as a wraith of snow whirled and howled in through the gap. Inside, three men with silver stars on their lapels just like her own sat in swiveling captain’s chairs, passing around a thermos of coffee. They all wore parkas, gloves, and hats, and massive boots. One of them half rose from his place to shake her hand. “Deputy Marshal Fetlock told us you’d be coming. Caxton, right?
I’m Young, this is Miller, and that fellow over there is Benicio.”
“Call me Lu,” Benicio said, waving at her. “Short for Luis, but nobody can pronounce that right. Even though it’s a common name where I come from.”
“Where’s that?” she asked.
He smiled. “Utica.”
Her feet squelched on the carpeted floor, which was flooded by half an inch of murky water. Plastic water bottles floated in the muck, each filled with a yellow liquid she did not care to identify. They competed for space with the soggy wrappers of microwave burritos and fast-?food cartons. It was cold enough inside the van to see her breath, though not so bad as it had been outside. She plopped down in a fourth chair and nodded at the introductions. “You guys have been here awhile, huh? You picked a great day for it.”
Young laughed. “What, you mean the weather? This is nothing. We’re all from the local Syracuse office of the USMS, so we’re used to it. Syracuse is the snowiest city in the contiguous forty-?eight. We get what, a hundred and fifteen inches a year?” Miller nodded animatedly. “Lake effect snow, mostly. It hits pretty hard, then melts after a couple of days. Wait till January, if you want to see some snow. When it gets so deep you can’t open your front door, that’s when we start to worry.”
Caxton shook her head. Pennsylvania was like the Tropics compared to that. “How’s our person of interest?” she asked, leaning forward to look through the windshield. The van had a good view of the house across the street that was Simon Arkeley’s last known address. It was a two-?level Victorian just like all the rest, painted white, so it blended in with the sky and its yellow-?lit windows seemed to hang in the air. She could see into its porch, which was crammed with patio furniture and unrecognizable junk, and also into its balcony, which was mostly clear.
Lu came to squat next to her and hand her a pair of field glasses. Only two of the windows were lit.
“He’s got the one up there on the second floor. He’s been in there reading a book all afternoon.”
She looked where he pointed and saw someone sitting in the window, though she could only make out a rough silhouette in the bad light. It had to be Simon Arkeley. As advertised, he had a book in his hands and his head was bent over it. She watched him turn a couple of pages, then sank back in her chair.