Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(65)
“Good,” she said, and shifted in her seat, trying to relax.
It wasn’t easy. This place they were going to—this apartment. Jameson could be there waiting for her. It could be a trap. He could have already passed the curse to Simon. The place could be crawling with half-?deads.
She could find anything there, anything at all.
She turned off on a road called Skytop and got her first look at South Campus. The building manager’s description hadn’t been far off. The residential units were simple two-?story dwellings built of cheap materials. They had few windows and they all looked exactly alike. They lay like scattered Monopoly pieces in a vast sea of salted gravel parking lots. Caxton could imagine few places more depressing to live—but she supposed, if they were cheap enough, students could put up with them. They pulled into a parking lot big enough for a shopping mall and then they sat. And waited. And waited some more. Caxton got impatient and punched the steering wheel a few times, but that didn’t help anybody, so eventually she stopped. Finally Young called her with an address. He’d turned up over a hundred students with the last name Murphy, and had gone through them all and ruled them out—either they were female, or they didn’t live in South Campus, or they didn’t have red hair—before trying it as a first name. There was only one student in the entire university with the first name of Murphy, and he both was male and lived in South Campus. If this wasn’t the guy they were looking for, he said, if Murph was just a nickname, then they were plain out of luck. He gave her the exact address and she got the car moving before she’d even thanked him.
She pulled into a spot directly in front of the unit she wanted. It was rented, according to Young, to a junior named Murphy Frissell. Frissell was an environmental science and forestry major—what Lu said was locally known as a Stumpy. Frissell was believed to have one roommate, named Scott Cohen, who was studying music. Both of them had been arrested the previous year for possession of marijuana, but their sentences had been suspended. Frissell sounded exactly like the boy the building manager had described—Young had even downloaded a picture from the registrar’s office and confirmed that Frisssell had red hair.
Caxton and Lu got out of the car and approached the housing unit. She could hear thumping music coming through the drawn curtains and thought she could even smell pot smoke. She waved at Lu to cover her, then stepped up to the door and pounded on it. “Open up,” she shouted. “Federal agents.”
There was no answer. She hadn’t really expected one—the music inside must be playing at an ear-?shattering volume, if she could hear it so clearly through the building’s insulated walls. She hammered again and again at the door, and stabbed at the bell over and over. Finally she heard someone moving around inside. She stepped over to the nearest window and tapped on the glass with her collapsible baton.
“Shit!” someone said inside. “Did you hear that?”
“Come on,” Caxton shouted. “Open this door!”
The music stopped abruptly. Caxton pounded on the door again. Finally someone came to the door and peaked out. It was a young man, just about Simon’s age, with a mop of black curls falling to his shoulders. His eyes were deeply bloodshot and they had trouble finding Caxton’s face. “What?” the boy asked.
Caxton sighed. “Scott Cohen? I’m Special Deputy Caxton, and this is Special Deputy Benicio. We’re here to talk to Simon Arkeley. Can we come in, please?”
The boy licked his lips. He appeared deep in thought. Caxton tried to remain patient and calm, but she knew if Cohen didn’t step aside in a second she would physically remove him from the doorway.
“Um, okay,” the boy finally said. “Wait. Are you cops?”
Caxton shoved past him through the door. “Federal agents,” she said, gesturing for Lu to follow her.
“I’m not sure if I should let you in,” Cohen said, but it was already too late. Caxton was inside. The room beyond the door was a kitchen, with a dented and scorched countertop and badly painted cabinets. The refrigerator was decorated with a poster for an organization called NORML, which showed an oversized hemp leaf. She came around the side of the counter and saw a framed M. C. Escher print on the wall. The rest of the lower floor was taken up by a spacious living room with a tan shag carpet. Numerous spots on the carpet had been burned down to round, black-?edged holes, perhaps by dropped cigarettes. There was a gigantic sofa, on which a boy who had to be Murphy Frissell lay passed out or sleeping. There was a forty-?inch flat-?screen television, switched off. On a coffee table sat a collection of glass and plastic bongs, as well as numerous butane lighters and mini blowtorches of the kind used to make crème br?lée—or to keep a crack pipe lit.
Caxton scanned the corners of the room looking for shotguns or pistols or, for that matter, swords—she’d seen enough residences exactly like this one to expect the bizarre. There was no sign of any weapons, however.
Cohen had followed after her like a puppy, his hands up in front of him as if he were surrendering before she’d even charged him with anything. “Where is he?” she demanded. Before Cohen could ask who she meant, she said, “Arkeley. Simon Arkeley.”
The boy looked around the room, his face scrunched up. “He’s not here,” he said, and Caxton’s heart fell. Then his eyes opened wider. “He must be upstairs, then. Is he upstairs?”