Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(61)

“Who’s on the ground floor?” she asked. She couldn’t see anybody through that window, just the occasional blue flicker of a television set.

“Building manager,” Lu said. “Old guy, drunk most of the time. He hasn’t been out all day, except once to get beer down at the liquor store.”

Caxton sighed and looked out the van windows. She doubted Simon would be going out that night, not with the heavy snowfall. It looked like she was going to be sitting in the cold van for a long time.

“What’s your plan?” Lu asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t come all the way up here to make a fourth for bridge.”

She smiled, remembering the casual camaraderie of stakeouts. She’d done her share of them on the highway patrol. “Well,” she said, trying to think of her next move by talking it out, “I’m going to—”

She didn’t get any further, though. Her phone rang. It was Fetlock.

“We found a lair,” he told her.





Vampire Zero





Chapter 37.


“Is he there? Is Malvern there?” Caxton demanded.

“No, neither of them,” Fetlock said, sounding almost apologetic. “And it looks like they haven’t been for a while. Let me just give you the details, alright?”

Caxton closed her eyes and sank back into her chair. “Alright,” she said, holding the phone against her shoulder. She reached into her pocket and took out a small notebook, then snapped her fingers at the three Feds in the van and mimed writing something down. Lu handed her a pen.

“We eliminated all the other possible lairs from your list,” Fetlock told her, “by about two o’clock this afternoon. Some of my men out of Reading were about to eliminate the last one, but they knew it was getting late and they didn’t want to be there after sundown.”

“Good,” Caxton said, “smart.”

“Well, you did warn us. They approached the site and made a quick reconnaissance. The site was an abandoned grain elevator just outside Mount Carmel. They saw definite signs of recent occupation—someone had forced their way into an outbuilding, tearing the chains off the door and not bothering to replace them. They assumed it was probably some petty criminal looking for anything they could steal. After making sure there were no half-?deads lying in wait, a three-?man team entered the building and found some empty plastic bags. IV bags, like from a hospital. The kind of bags that whole blood is stored in.”

“What about human remains? Furniture made out of bones, bodies wired into lifelike postures, that sort of thing?” That was what you expected to find in a vampire lair. It was the kind of thing she’d seen in vampire lairs before.

“Nothing of the sort, but if the blood bags were enough to pique their interest, there was also a coffin in there. A very old, very cheap coffin that had fallen to pieces. They did what they’d been told to do and called in reinforcements. Lots of them. When no vampires showed up they sent in heavily armed units to secure the site and retrieve all the evidence. They did so, then immediately departed the scene, at approximately four-?thirty, just as the sun was going down.”

Caxton sighed almost happily. Fetlock seemed to get how this worked, if nobody else did. You didn’t stick around a vampire’s lair at twilight, no matter how abandoned it might look. That was asking for trouble.

“The evidence was taken back to your HQ building in Harrisburg. I brought in my forensics people and also your team lead—Clara Hsu—to supervise.”

“Clara was part of this investigation?” Caxton asked, a little surprised. “How was she at—I mean, did she prove useful?”

“Yes,” Fetlock said, and Caxton’s eyes opened wide as he added, “She’s clearly not trained for forensics work, but she asked a lot of interesting questions and she even cleared up one mystery for us. There were some skin samples in the coffin. Just a few flakes, like dandruff, but when we tried to run a DNA test nothing whatsoever came up.”

“There was no match in the database?”

“No,” Fetlock said, “I mean there was no DNA. Which confused the hell out of my forensics team. Then Clara pointed out that vampires don’t have human DNA.”

Wow, Caxton thought. Clara had been paying attention. She’d made the connection. Caxton would have felt gushingly proud of her girlfriend if she didn’t feel so guilty for not believing in Clara before.

“They were able to carbon-?date the skin samples,” Fetlock went on. “They look to be a couple hundred years old, at least.”

“So they came from Malvern,” Caxton said. “Malvern was in this lair. She can’t go anywhere without Jameson’s help, so they must both have been there.”

“Not just them. We also found some fingerprints on the blood bags. When we ran those through the database a match came up right away. The prints belong to Dylan Carboy, aka Kenneth Rexroth.”


“Seriously?” Caxton asked. She wanted to slap herself on the forehead. So Glauer had been right. Carboy did have some tangible connection with Jameson. It seemed she was going to have to make some apologies.

“That’s all we have so far, all the hard evidence,” Fetlock went on. “My people were willing to make one more conjecture, though. Judging by the amount of dust on the coffin and the blood bags, they say nobody had been in that lair for weeks. They won’t testify to that in court, but they sounded pretty sure.”