“Maybe they’re only taking people who won’t be missed.”
“Oh, thanks,” she snapped.
Jackson was quiet a moment. Then he slid a glance at her. “Maybe a couple of weeks apart will help. Have you given any more thought to the therapy idea?”
She pulled another wet wipe from the pack—they bought them by the case at Costco—and scrubbed at her ick-encrusted elbow. Then she wadded the towelette and slipped it into their little black trash holder.
“Peter and I don’t need couples counseling. And we don’t need ‘help.’ Things are fine.”
“It really helped Santos and his third wife. Or was it his fourth?” Jackson deadpanned.
“We’re fine,” Claire said through gritted teeth.
“Claire, I’m your partner,” Jackson said gently, and his voice slid perilously close to the edge where they should not go. She was married to Peter, and even if she hadn’t been, fraternization was not cool. There was no way she wanted to jeopardize her career because Jackson was handsome and funny and observant. And tall with lanky legs and blond hair shot with silver. And had periwinkle blue eyes, periwinkle being her favorite color. They were both superstars on the fugitive task force—which was why they were the “lucky” ones being dumped with Advanced Forensics Techniques over Thanksgiving—and for kids like them who got all A’s in The Job, the straight and narrow was the only way to fly.
“I’m all packed,” Claire said. “I’m ready to go.”
—
“I’ll miss you,” Peter said, kissing Claire good-bye the next evening. Her assignment was all very cloak-and-dagger: Night before Thanksgiving, car at eight, not to take her to the Boston field office but to an undisclosed location.
“I’ll miss you, too,” Claire said, but she was still focused on his forced tone of voice. His fakey-fake smile. She was an FBI agent. She knew lying when she saw it, heard it. He was actually happy that she was leaving. Not simply relieved, the way people are when things are not great at home and a business trip gives you both a break. He had something planned. He had dark brown curly hair and big coffee-colored eyes, and he worked out. Maybe some hottie grad student at MIT, where he taught physics, was coming over to cook a goddamn Thanksgiving turkey for poor Dr. Anderson, whose careerist wife was abandoning him at such a special time of year.
Peter didn’t even like turkey.
Their kiss left much to be desired, and then the car slid up to the curb like a shark. Jackson was in the back, in a really great black suit, white collar, and tie. Blond hair, tanned, he took the FBI look to a whole new GQ level. Claire had on a killer black jacket, white silk blouse, black wool pencil skirt, black heels—not too high for the job, very flattering.
“You okay?” Jackson said by way of greeting. She didn’t bother answering. One lie today was enough.
“This is all very drama-drama,” she said. “We could drive ourselves. We both have take-homes.” As in, Bureau cars they could drive home when they went off-duty.
“Which makes it even more mysterious and, therefore, cool,” he replied. Then he nodded knowingly as they glided away. “Aliens.”
—
Not aliens.
“Holy shit, are they kidding?” Jackson murmured, as the next PowerPoint slide popped up on the screen. In the image, the vic, who in life had been very beautiful, was lying on her side in a room with ugly beige wallpaper. She was wearing a pink turtleneck sweater and blue jeans, and clutching a copy of Thoreau’s Walden. Fingertips in blue latex had moved the sweater neck away from the vic’s skin, revealing two deep punctures. Next slide: Luminol had been applied to the punctures, and the long-exposure shot revealed the telltale glow of blood, also showing a few droplets on the floor beside her. Only instead of glowing blue, as it should have, the blood was a brilliant purple. “We surmise that when the vampire attacks, it deposits something into the victim’s bloodstream that causes this reaction to the Luminol,” Dr. Alan DeWitt, their forensics instructor, explained in a flat monotone that boggled Claire’s mind. How could anyone sound that detached when they were discussing an attack by an actual bloodsucking vampire?
Until the car had arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, Claire hadn’t known that the Bureau had a Special Forensics Unit located there. Jackson hadn’t, either. The nondescript brick building was situated near a Walgreens. According to some last-ditch, furtive net searching on her non-Bureau smartphone, the Walgreens was not too far from the correct location of Gallows Hill (as opposed to the recreational area that was still listed as the actual site). Nineteen people had been hung for witchcraft on Gallows Hill in 1692. Her first thought had been that maybe their secretive little group was going to do some kind of forensics on the bodies of the victims. Learn historical forensics techniques or something like that.
She sure hadn’t thought they were going to learn how to detect vampire activity.
After being welcomed to the SFU by Mark Nash, the Special Agent in Charge, they’d been sent to a classroom with individual, college-style desks in two rows of six. Claire wondered at all the rush, as if there was some pressing need to learn vampire evidence collection as fast as possible—as if the information would spoil if left out too long, like Ms. Hannover’s goddamn turkey.
Told not to eat or drink anything, Claire and Jackson made sure to sit in the first row, dead center. First impressions were everything.
Dr. DeWitt didn’t spend a lot of time on preamble. All he had said was that the Bureau had conclusive evidence that vampires walked among the living; that there had been three attacks from Boston to Portland, Maine; and that it seemed to be the work of an individual vampire, classified, therefore, as a serial killer. And that they were there to get trained in evidence collection so they could figure out his pattern, apprehend him, and process any additional vampire-related crime scenes that presented themselves. Such evidence collection being referred to as VSI. Vampire Scene Investigations.
A vampire. A goddamn vampire. That was pretty much the consensus of the entire class.
“You owe me fifty bucks,” Claire said to Jackson.
“I think vampires count as aliens,” Jackson retorted.
The PowerPoint kept going. They saw another vic with telltale puncture marks. Another pretty girl. Third vic, cute girl again. Same type of holes, luminous with Luminol. They watched a computer simulation of how the fangs must be shaped, how they would enter the body. The closest analogy was a rattlesnake. Which, bleh.
They discussed the process of exsanguination—having all your blood sucked out of you. Dripping. If you lifted vampire prints, they would glow, too. However, there were no prints found at any of the crime scenes, so Claire raised her hand and asked how they knew that prints glowed. DeWitt told her to hold that excellent question. There were theories as to why so much glowing, but that would also wait for when they got into blood chemistry. As well as profiling the perp, who clearly had a thing for beautiful girls.
They were going to stay on-site, the male agents doubling up. Claire, as the only female, would have a room to herself.
“Now we have a body to examine,” DeWitt announced, as he turned off his projector.
He didn’t say which body. There seemed to be an assortment of them—at least three victims. Claire was eager to see any and all of them.
“Before we do, I want each of you to provide a buccal swab,” he went on.
Claire and Jackson traded frowns. Buccal swabs provided personal DNA. Of course they’d both had extensive physicals, bloodwork, and even drug tests for the FBI, but here, now, requesting a swab rang an alarm bell. She also realized why they hadn’t been allowed to eat or drink anything, and why class had begun that night—so their first swabs would be valid control samples. Still, Claire raised her hand.
“The purpose for this, sir?” she asked.
“Health precaution,” he replied. “Since we’re not certain how vampirism is transmitted, we want to monitor the well-being of everyone on the team.”
Transmitted? Her mind ran ahead to the possibility that vampirism might be a communicable virus, and so their vics might contain said virus, that being why the blood glowed purple.
While she pondered that, DeWitt handed a box of swab kits to the agent at the end of Claire’s row. The agent hesitated. There were a few cases before the courts of police officers refusing to comply with requests for DNA samples by their departments. Civil liberties, violation of privacy. Not everyone wanted everything in an accessible database.
But the hesitation was two seconds at best. He took one and passed it on. The next guy did, too.
And then it was her turn. DeWitt was watching her. She grabbed one and handed the box to Jackson, who did the same. All the agents opened them and performed the six swipes inside their cheeks, repeated on the other cheek. They put the swabs in the sterile vials and closed them.
“Last name, first name, please,” DeWitt instructed them. Claire wrote ANDERSON, CLAIRE and Jackson wrote JACKSON, BRIAN and she and he passed them in.
“Now we’ll examine the body,” DeWitt announced.
Everyone rose from their spotless government-issue desks. Note-taking had not been permitted. Nor were cell phones, which had been locked up in a safe until their owners were driven back to their homes. Apparently, everything the agents would be learning would be kept in one place and one place only—their heads. That posed no problem. FBI agents were used to memorizing lots of information and keeping secrets. They knew things that might break civilians, cause widespread panic. Biochemical warfare, terrorist plots, close calls with nuclear power plants. Maybe it was just as well that Peter seemed disinterested in what she did when she wasn’t with him.
Almost as disinterested in what she did when she was with him.
In a little rush of anger, she was glad she wouldn’t be able to tell him about vampires. She hadn’t realized just how angry she was with him. How not fine they actually were.
By tacit agreement, Claire and Jackson scooted directly behind DeWitt as he left the classroom, as close to Source Vampire Data as possible. Other, slower, perhaps less enthusiastic agents queued behind them. Then the thirteen of them walked down a chilly hall, and passed a door with a sign that read HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE. That was the traditional Latin phrase often seen on plaques in autopsy rooms: “This is the place where death rejoices to help those who live.” So one would assume that was where the body was, but they weren’t going in there.
“We’ll get to that later,” DeWitt announced.
He turned a corner and Claire saw two federal marshals standing on either side of a fire door. DeWitt showed them his badge and used a card swipe. Although everyone had been checked in at the main desk when they’d arrived, the marshals studied each ID card as each agent in turn waited at the door.
There was a concrete staircase on the other side of the threshold. After DeWitt, Claire and Jackson started down, Jackson making no effort to conceal how excited he was, like they were going on an amusement park ride. Claire found that she was kind of tense. That was how it often was between them on cases—Jackson all yippi-kai-yai-oh and Claire pondering, speculating, absorbing. She wondered if Peter thought she was a drag because of her reserve. But really, all he liked to do was go to wine tastings and read. He wasn’t exactly Mr. Excitement. That had always been okay with her. Her job was excitement enough.
She didn’t want to be thinking about Peter right then. A real vampire was a game-changer. This was history in the making.
Cement stairs gave way to uneven cobblestones, and the walls changed from modern brick to very old, pitted blocks of stone that smelled of mold and dust. They moved into a tunnel, and Claire saw a metal door painted black at the other end. Also, two more marshals and another card reader. The marshals were impassive, and all the VSI students had fallen silent. Claire could feel the tension building in the air.
As DeWitt took off his ID badge and swiped the lock, Claire glanced over at Jackson. Her partner bared his teeth and mimed biting her. Everything was a joke to him, except her happiness. He became unhappy when he sensed that things were going even less well than usual at home. She knew that deep down in her heart, where she kept her secrets. And she also knew, right then and there, that she was very close to telling him that she loved him for it. In the icy hall at their very bizarre forensics school. Or maybe this impulse was just an extra little splash of adrenaline kicking into her system. Because all this was pretty goddamn incredible.
The door fwommed open and DeWitt stepped outside. Claire went next, into another world of ivy, tombs, weeping angels, and headstones. A cemetery. And more marshals, planted like statues around the graveyard, dressed for trouble in raid jackets. An owl hooted. She saw her breath.
There were some murmurs throughout the ranks, but Claire kept quiet. DeWitt walked purposefully along a gravel path. On the nearest headstone, the name written there was illegible but the date was 1692. If she remembered her hasty phone search facts, that was the year of the Salem witchcraft trials. Maybe the occupant had been hung by the neck until dead because her next-door neighbor’s cow stopped giving milk.
Claire didn’t know what all this had to do with vampire forensics, but DeWitt was on the move now, like a bloodhound. Sure enough, about twenty seconds later, he stopped in front of an aboveground tomb the size of a potting shed. Klieg lights blazed around it, and guards formed a living wall around it. With a bit of a flourish, DeWitt turned and faced the expectant group.
“We’ll be going down into the crypt in groups of four. Count off, please.”
“Crypt,” Jackson said, raising his eyebrows. “I don’t know about you, Claire, but this sure beats mashed potatoes and stuffing.”
Jackson was observer number one, and he snickered when Claire announced that she was number two. Numbers three and four were two agents from Maine. After donning gas masks—DeWitt slapped one on, too—the five entered the illuminated interior of the tomb. The floor had been swept clean. Klieg lights and what appeared to be battery-operated air filters were whirring away. There were four old stone sarcophagi, sitting about waist-high, which had been opened, and Claire glanced inside the nearest one. Stove-in wooden planks, bones, fibers, from a long time ago.
“We tested the contents of these coffins,” DeWitt said through his transmitter. “Bodies are fully human, and appear to be seventeenth-and eighteenth-century. The sarcophagus you’re examining, Agent Anderson, was the one concealing this trapdoor.”
She followed his pointing finger, spotting the trapdoor in question. It was open, and on the exposed underside of the access hatch, a cross had been inlaid with iron, now very rusty. The cross would have been flush with the ceiling of whatever lay beneath it.