She stepped closer to the coffin. He threw the lid back and she looked down.
Malvern"s bones lay askew on the upholstery. Her enormous lower jaw had fallen away from the upper part of the skull. Her heart, which looked like a rotten plum, lay inside her ribcage, unattached to anything else. All the rest of her flesh had been reduced to a mucilaginous soup that stained the silk lining of the coffin, a gloppy ma.s.s that covered her pelvis and part of her spine. Pools of its lingered in the corners of the coffin and filled one of her eye sockets. Flecks of what looked like charred skin hung submerged in the fluid while tiny curved things like fingernail clippings cl.u.s.tered at the center of the mess. The smell was very, very strong, almost overpowering. Caxton leaned forward a little and studied the fingernail clippings. She could just make out little hooks protruding from one end, and the rings that segmented their tiny bodies.
"Maggots," she gasped. Her face was inches from a maggot ma.s.s. Rearing up she nearly screamed. Now she could see them for what they were it was impossible to pretend they were something else. Her skin crawled, writhed away from the coffin. Her lips retracted in a grimace of horror.
"One of evolution"s greatest wonders," he told her. He looked completely serious. "If you can see past your own prejudices, anyway. They eat the dead and pa.s.s the living by. Their mouths are designed so that they can only survive on food of a certain viscosity. They are so adept at working together to break down necrotic tissue that they literally share a common digestive system. Isn"t that astounding?"
"Jesus Christ, Arkeley," she said, bile touching the back of her tongue. "You"ve made your point. Cover her up, please." "But there"s so much you haven"t seen yet. Don"t you want to watch her come back to life when the sun goes down? Don"t you want to see her tissues recompose, her eyeball inflate, her heart reattach?"
"Just close it," she breathed. She hugged her stomach but that just made it worse. She tried very hard to breathe calmly. "That smell."
"It"s wrong, isn"t it? That"s not how natural things smell." She heard the coffin lid sc.r.a.pe closed behind her back. It helped, a little. "The maggots don"t seem to mind but dogs will howl if they smell her and cows will stop giving milk if she pa.s.ses them by. People notice eventually, if they"re near her long enough. Something feels wrong about her, something"s just not right. Of course by then she"ll already have ripped one of the big veins out of your arm so she can gulp down all the blood in your body."
"You"re enjoying this, aren"t you?" she demanded. "It makes you feel good to put the little girl in her place." Caxton stalked to the far corner of the room, as far as she could get from the coffin. "It must make you feel so tough in comparison."
He sighed, a long, elaborate sigh. It made her turn around. There was no joy in his face. No desire to hurt her, she could tell. Just weariness. "You were grooming me to be your replacement. Someone to keep fighting vampires after you"re gone."
He shook his head. "No, trooper, no. I never even considered you a candidate. I won"t bulls.h.i.t you. I owe you at least that much since you"ve been honest with me."
She nodded heavily. There was no way she could win the argument. It was like when she used to fight with her father. He was a good man, too, but the rule was that in his house he was always right. It had been harder to remember that when she was a teenager.
Jesus, she thought, why was she thinking about her dad so much lately? Ever since the vampire, the now dead vampire, had hypnotized her she"d been thinking about him a lot. And she"d told Vesta Polder about her mom. It had taken her months to talk to Deanna about her dead parents. Arkeley had dredged all that up to the surface in record time.
Enough. It was over. When she"d seen the first vampire die she had thought that but now it was actually true. "I"ve got something you should see, too," she said, and he looked at her expectantly. The argument hadn"t bothered him at all, because he knew that it was his investigation and that made him right. Fine, whatever, okay, she thought, knowing she would blow up later when he wasn"t around. She took out her PDA and scrolled to Clara"s email. She opened up two of the picture attachments and displayed them side by side. "A survivor in Bitumen Hollow gave us these," she said. "There are a couple of interesting things."
He bent close to look at the pictures on the small screen. She"d studied them already and she knew what he would see. The pictures had been a.s.sembled from a Virtual Identikit, mix-and-match software that let the sheriff"s department create full-color composite sketches of Actor #1 and #2. Like all such images they weren"t exact and they looked blocky and weird, more like pictures of Frankenstein"s monster than vampires. The skin tone was all wrong because the Identikit didn"t have an option for deathly pale, nor did it have red eyes (a kind of rich, warm brown was the best it could do) and it certainly had nothing like a vampire"s jaw line and teeth.
Yet the images struck a chord with Arkeley right away. "Yes. This is them," he said, looking up at her. "This is good. It"s useful."
Caxton nodded. "I thought so too. And look, we even have an identifying mark for one of them." The Identikit artist had sketched in the long triangular ears of Actor #2. The survivor had insisted, however, that Actor #1 had normal human ears but they were discolored on top, almost black. "His ears are different."
"Because he tears them off daily," Arkeley agreed.
"He what?" The Fed picked up the PDA and brought it very close to his face. "The ears are a dead giveaway. Some vampires, young vampires, will try to hide them, to make themselves look more human. Lares did it for camouflage. I"ve read of others who did it out of self-loathing. They wanted to look human again. They"ll wear wigs and blue contact lenses and even put rouge on their cheeks and noses to look more like us."
"But every day... this guy tears his own ears off every day?" Arkeley shrugged. "Every night. At dusk, when he wakes, he"ll find they"ve grown back."
That just made Caxton think about the maggot ma.s.s in the coffin. "Some of them must hate themselves. They must hate themselves and what they have to do."
"No one knows. The movies suggest they have deep and brooding inner lives, but I don"t buy it. I think they sit around all night thinking about blood. About how good it tastes and how bad they feel when they don"t get it. About how to get more without being found and executed. And about how long it will be before they stop caring about being found."
Caxton felt as if she were standing in a cold spot. She held herself close. "Like junkies," she said. Before she"d dropped out she"d known some girls in college who did heroin. They were individual people with thoughts and feelings before they started using the drug. Afterwards they were interchangeable, their personalities completely submerged under their need. "Like junkies who can"t quit their habit."
"There"s a difference," he told her. "Junkies eventually die."
"Something happened here last night, didn"t it? Something that could have been bad," sergeant Tucker said, staring across his desk at them. The last time Caxton had seen him he"d had his feet up on the desk and he"d been watching television. Now he was leaning forward, his eyes scanning the hallways that lead off in four directions from his station. "We had twenty-three COs on duty last night but I can"t get a straight answer out of everyone. One guy sees shadows moving around like his room was full of candles and they were flickering and s.h.i.t. Another guy definitely saw a vampire walking across the lawn, pale skin, lots of teeth, bald as an egg, but he had orders not to even tell the a.s.shole to halt."
"That was my order," Arkeley confirmed. Tucker nodded. "And then at two-fourteen in the AM, the temperature in the hospital wing dropped by seven degrees. I got a recording right here on my computer. It was sixty-two, then it was fifty-five. By half past two it was back up to sixty. I"ve got video footage of something pale and blurry running across the pool room so fast I can"t even get image enhancement to work." Tucker"s eyes narrowed. "If you hadn"t been here, if it had just been my men-"
"I was here. The situation was under control the whole time." Tucker studied Arkeley"s face for a long time, then looked away and scratched at his close-cropped hair. "Yeah, alright. What can I do for you now?"
Caxton handed over her PDA and Tucker stared at the pictures on the small screen. "These are the vampires who were here last night," Arkeley explained. "I need to know if they resemble any of the people on my list."
Tucker tapped at his keyboard. "Right, the list of all the people who worked here in the last two years. I can"t say I recognize either of them but let"s look." He swiveled his monitor around so they could see. The names from the list came up on the screen and he clicked each one to show them a picture.
"This is a pretty sophisticated database," Caxton marveled.
Tucker pursed his lips and clicked through the names, one by one. "It has to be. I don"t know what this place looks like to you, but to me, it"s a corrections facility. I run it like I would any prison-which means I keep very close tabs on who goes in and out."
"There," Arkeley said, pointing at the screen. "Stop and go back a few." Tucker did so and soon they were all staring at a picture of one Efrain Zacapa Reyes, an electrician with the Bureau of Prisons who had come through Arabella Furnace the previous year. "I remember this guy, a little. He came in to replace some fluorescents and to set up the blue lights Hazlitt wanted in the hospital wing."
A chill ran down Caxton"s spine.
Arkeley frowned. "So he would have been close enough to communicate with her. Close enough for her to pa.s.s on the curse." Caxton started to ask a question but then she remembered something. She wasn"t really on the case any more. She could help Arkeley out in whatever capacity he chose for her but her thoughts and opinions were no longer welcome. She felt a weird pang of loss, weird because it was very similar to how she felt when Clara had kissed her. Like she could see something, some whole new and exciting aspect of life, only to know she would never be allowed to explore the implications.
"I"ll admit there"s a similarity but this ain"t your guy," Tucker said, startling her back to attention.
"And why is that?" Arkeley asked. "Well, he was only on the hospital wing maybe like an hour. All he did was screw in some light bulbs, and I had three COs in there with him while he was doing it. If he tried anything they would have beaten him down on the spot-we do not f.u.c.k around at Arabella Furnace. n.o.body mentioned anybody swapping blood or spit or anything wet."
Arkeley nodded but he clearly hadn"t written off Reyes as a suspect. Caxton stared at the two pictures, the one on her PDA, the one on the screen. There was a distinct resemblance in the forehead and nose between one of the vampires and the electrician. There was one major difference, though.
"He"s Latin," Caxton said. The picture on the computer screen showed Reyes as having skin the color of ripe walnut sh.e.l.ls. The vampire, of course, was snowy white.
"Others," Arkeley intoned, "have made that mistake many times before. Others who are now dead. When the vampire rises from the grave his skin loses all of its pigment. It doesn"t matter if they were Black, j.a.panese or Eskimo beforehand, they end up white. You saw for yourself," he said to Caxton, "vampires aren"t just Caucasian. They"re albino. This," he said, tapping the computer screen, "is one of our men."
Tucker wasted no time printing off Reyes" vital statistics. Caxton ran to the printer to gather up the sheets of printout.
"Tell me his LKA," Arkeley said, referring to his Last Known Address. "We flushed them out of the hunting camp-they"ll need a new hiding place and most likely they"ll turn to a place where they feel comfortable.
She found the datum easily enough but shook her head. "It"s an apartment building in Villanova. They won"t want that, will they? Too much activity, too much chance of being noticed when they go in and out."
Arkeley nodded. "They prefer ruins and farms."
"Then there"s nothing here. Reyes lived in the same building for years, at least since 2001. Listen, let me try a cold call and see if I turn something up." Maybe-maybe if she could turn up some useful information then Arkeley
wouldn"t consider her such a failure. She cursed herself for using his opinion to define her self-esteem. What stupider thing could she possibly do? Still. She took her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed the emergency contact number, which was also the number of the building manager for the apartment building. When she"d established she was a police officer the manager was more than willing to talk to her. She got what details she could and hung up.
"So?" Arkeley asked. "Efrain Reyes was a nice guy, kept pretty much to himself, no wife or girlfriend, no family or at least no family that ever visited. The building manager thought maybe he was an illegal immigrant but had no proof of that."
"He would at least need a green card to get in here," Tucker clarified. Caxton nodded. "The man I spoke to liked Reyes a lot, because Reyes fixed a problem with the building"s circuit breakers a couple of years ago for no charge. He was informed by the local police that Efrain Reyes died seven months ago in an accident at his workplace. He says he wanted to attend the funeral but was told that because no one claimed the body it had been given a quick burial at the State"s expense in the potter"s field in Philadelphia. He"s holding Reyes" few personal effects in a box-he says there"s nothing unusual among them, just some clothes and toiletries. The apartment was furnished and Reyes doesn"t seem to have added anything to it."