Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(62)

“That’s great,” Caxton said. “That’s a lot of information we didn’t have before. That really helps flesh out the narrative. Blood bags—it sounds like Jameson used this lair before he went rogue, before he killed anybody. He would have been hungry, though. Desperate for blood. He must have had Carboy steal blood from a local hospital or blood bank—but that wouldn’t work. Vampires can’t drink cold blood. It has to be fresh or warm for them to get any benefit from it.”

“Okay,” Fetlock said. “Not my area. I’ve got the site under constant surveillance—from a distance. If anyone tries to go in or out during the night, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” Caxton said, and ended the call. She was almost certain the old lair was abandoned, that Jameson had moved on to somewhere else, but it was good that Fetlock didn’t take chances. For a while she was buzzing with excitement, putting together jigsaw pieces in her head, adding the new stuff to what she already knew. Eventually, though, as the night wore on, that excitement faded. The new information was useful. But it didn’t change anything. Jameson was still at large. The evidence might help her catch him, eventually, but for now she still needed to focus on Simon. On keeping Simon alive.

The adrenaline rush she’d gotten from the phone call turned to nervous tension all too quickly. She tried to relax, tried to listen to the conversation of the three Feds in the van. They were talking about the Orangemen, Syracuse’s basketball team. Apparently one of the star players had been caught smoking crack cocaine in the locker room. There was some discussion as to whether he would be allowed to finish out the season before he was prosecuted. “It’s not like he was dealing,” Miller asserted.

“Just holding.”

“With or without intent to distribute?” Young asked. He opened a fresh bag of corn chips and pushed a bunch of them into his mouth.

Caxton looked out the side windows at the street, at the cross streets on either side. Something felt wrong. Maybe she was just too keyed up, too paranoid. That was probably it. Still. She hadn’t survived as long as she had by assuming things were okay. “You guys know this neighborhood?” she asked.

“What’s behind this house?”

Miller grunted. “Bunch of backyards, divided up by fences.”

“Could someone have gone out a back door of the house and slipped away without you noticing?

Hopped over the fence and got away by a side street?”

Young sat up very straight in his chair. “Sure. If there was anybody unaccounted for. We thought of that, too, and we made damned sure to keep track of where Simon and the building manager were at all times. If your POI had left that window, one of us would have gone to cover the back of the house. But he hasn’t moved, not since lunchtime.”

“Not even to go to the bathroom?” she asked.

Miller shrugged. “Maybe once a couple hours ago, but he was back in a couple of seconds. Not long enough to do anything.”

Caxton lifted the glasses to look at Simon again. The figure there was hard to make out, just a rough silhouette of a young man reading a book. A young man—

“Shit!” she said, and slapped the armrest of her chair hard enough to make the men around her jump.

“He made you. Goddamn it, he must have made you hours ago. Lu, you’re with me. Miller, Young, you stay here and cover us.”

“What the hell?” Young asked. “What are you talking about? He hasn’t moved—”

Caxton snarled her reply at him. “Look at his fingers. His fingers. Simon Arkeley doesn’t wear nail polish.”

Lu already had the van’s back door open. He jumped down into the snow and she followed close on his heels. They slogged through the drifts that covered the sidewalk and up to the porch of the house, Caxton surging forward to pound on the door.

“Open up,” she shouted. “Open up! Federal agents!”

It seemed to take forever for the building manager to come thumping through the house to answer the door. When he cracked it open Caxton lifted her lapel to show him her star.

“Jeez, what do you want?” the man asked. He was in his late fifties, about average height. Grizzly stubble coated the bottom half of his face, and his eyes were wet and red. Maybe he’d been sleeping. His breath was yeasty with beer. He looked from Caxton to Lu and back again.

“Federal agents,” Caxton repeated. “We need to come inside. Can you step back, sir?”


He was in his rights to demand to see a search warrant. Caxton wasn’t sure what she would do if he asked. After a moment, though, he lifted his shoulders and moved back so she and Lu could push inside the house. It was warm inside, almost stiflingly hot. The front hall was full of very old furniture—a sideboard, a cheval mirror, a sofa that might have been an antique if the upholstery wasn’t split and oozing stuffing.

“It’s that kid upstairs, right? Arkeley? He do something bad? I always kind of figured he would get in trouble,” the building manager whispered. “He’s the only one here, anyway. Comes in all hours of the night, never seems to sleep, and I seen some of the books he brings in here, scandalous stuff—”

“Which room is his?” Caxton asked, cutting him off.

“Top of the stairs, on the left.” The building manager raised his shoulders again, a kind of lazy shrug. “I’ll be down here, you need me.” He shambled back toward his own room, where the television was blaring something about lingerie models competing to see who could eat the most bloodworms. Caxton was already hurrying up the stairwell. The banister was slick under her hand but marred by countless deep scratches and places where the varnish had been scuffed down to bare wood, probably from countless generations of students moving in and out. At the top of the stairs she turned left and found the door she wanted. She rapped twice on it with her knuckles, then drew her weapon. Behind her Lu’s eyes were wide, but he took out his own handgun.