Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(68)

Vampire Zero





Chapter 41.


“What is this about?” Simon demanded, a few hours later. “What are you charging me with?”

He looked scared. She had hauled him down to the local police station and then handed him over to the officers there to be booked and processed. He’d been photographed, fingerprinted, strip-?searched, and shoved in a cell with a bunch of drug offenders and petty thieves, then left there to stew for a while. He looked very scared.

This was the first she’d seen of him since they’d arrived. She’d spent the intervening time discussing her investigation with the local police chief and checking her email. She had to be sure. When she was ready—or maybe, to be honest, a little while after she was fully ready—she had him brought up from cells and put in an interrogation room. As they went, it wasn’t the nicest interrogation room Caxton had ever seen. There was one table topped with Formica, brown and black with generations of cigarette burns and coffee stains. There were two chairs, which sat side by side—the room wasn’t big enough to allow the subject and the interviewer to sit across from each other. There was a reinforced staple in the wall, to which Simon had been attached by a pair of handcuffs. It was high up on the wall so that the video camera in the corner of the ceiling could see where Simon’s hands were at all times.

Caxton leaned back in her chair. She had a manila envelope containing a few pieces of paper. She drew one out and read:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you at interrogation time and at court. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”

She looked up at him expectantly.

“Fuck you,” he howled. “Tell me what’s going on. I don’t have to take this. I can walk out of here right now if you don’t charge me.”

Caxton shook her head no, with a sad little smile. “Charges? Alright. Let’s pick one. How about trespassing in a government building? Or maybe the theft of evidence in an ongoing criminal investigation. Then there’s impersonating a police officer. Shall I go on?”

“You don’t—you don’t have any evidence,” he said. His eyes were shiny with fear. Good. If she scared him enough he might agree to enter her protection. She sighed dramatically and said, “You have the right to remain silent. Any—”

“Fine,” he said, stopping her. “Yes, I understand. Just tell me what this is about, damn it.”

“Your suit. Your powder blue suit.”

He squinted at her. “I wore it to that stupid funeral. That’s the only time you’ve seen it.”


She shook her head again, then reached into her envelope and drew out a computer printout on glossy photo paper. It showed a man wearing a light blue suit, standing at the entrance of the USMS archives. Simon’s eyes flicked down to the photo but didn’t linger there long enough for him to have taken a real look. “That’s not me. You can’t even see the face.”

“You think that’s all I have, this one picture?”

“I—I won’t talk until my lawyer arrives.”

“That’s fine,” Caxton said. “That’ll give me time to check your fingerprints against the ones we found on the crime scene.” It was a bluff, but an easy one. The man in the photograph wasn’t wearing gloves. He would almost certainly have touched some surface, maybe a doorknob or a countertop, while he was inside the archives.

“Hold on,” Simon said.

“Once we get a match, I really don’t think I’ll need to ask you any more questions. We can just drop you in a holding cell and wait for trial. You’ll be safe enough there while I go find and kill your father. Of course, there are a couple of things I’d really like to know, but fine, you want your lawyer, you get your lawyer. Lu finally got hold of him a little while ago, and he said he would be here in the morning.” She put her papers back in the envelope and started to get up. “You can spend the night back in the holding cell until he arrives.”

“Wait,” Simon said.

She looked at him expectantly.

“Wait. Am I—okay, I’m in trouble. I understand that. Now, I’m not confessing to anything. But if I answer your questions—”

She shook her head. “I can’t coerce you to talk to me. That means I can’t offer you any deals to get you to speak, either.”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “There has to be something we can do, though. If I agree, of my own free will, to answer your questions, maybe you won’t just dump me in a cell and let me rot.”

She shrugged. “It’s not my decision whether to press charges or not.” That was the truth. Fetlock would make that decision, when the time came, based on Caxton’s advice. “However, as a U.S. Marshal one of my duties is to transport prisoners from place to place. I can transport you to a different detention facility. Say, one in Pennsylvania, where you can be with your sister.”

He stared at her with wide eyes for quite a while. Then his chin bobbed up and down. It took her a second to decide that was a yes, and not just a muscular tremor.