8.
Malvern struck again and the body count was even higher this time. She’d hit a roadhouse outside of Allentown, just after midnight. One patron had managed to escape to call the local police, but by the time they arrived Malvern had slaughtered two cocktail waitresses, a bartender, a bouncer, and six good old boys who’d just wanted to have a few beers after work. By dawn Clara and Glauer were there, checking for clues. Fetlock was busy in Harrisburg, catching up with his paperwork, so for once the two of them had the scene to themselves.
“She must have had help,” Glauer said, pacing back and forth from the rear exit and the front door. “Look at the arrangement of the bodies. She got the bouncer here, and one of the waitresses—but the rest of them tried to flee out the back. They got—this far,” he said, stopping next to a bad stain on the carpet by the restrooms. The bodies had already been removed by the local coroner—which Clara appreciated, because it meant she didn’t have to see them, even if it also meant some evidence might have been destroyed. “The exit was blocked, so they couldn’t get out.”
“We know she has to have some kind of accomplice,” Clara agreed. “Someone has to drive her from victim to victim. She’s too weak to walk from scene to scene.” A vampire at full strength could outrun a speeding car, but Malvern hadn’t been that strong in centuries. “It could be a human sympathizer. Or a half-dead.” Vampires had the ability to raise their victims from the dead—for a short while. The resulting servants were called half-deads. They rotted away almost fast enough to watch, but as long as they could still stand under their own power they were forced to do the vampire’s bidding.
“There’s another possibility,” Glauer said, meeting Clara’s gaze. He held her eye for a second and then said, “The accomplice could be another vampire.”
Vampires could make more of their kind. In fact, Malvern was an expert at it. Every vampire Laura Caxton had ever destroyed had been one of Malvern’s creations.
Clara shook her head. “That’s not in our profile for her. It saps her strength to create new vampires, and she’s running on fumes as it is. It would put her back in her coffin for good if she tried that now.” Deputy Marshal Fetlock had built his whole strategy around the idea that Malvern was indulging herself in one long orgy of blood and that she had no grand scheme in mind, no master plan. That she would start making mistakes any night now.
“You know what Caxton would have said about that profile,” Glauer muttered.
“She would have said that he was underestimating Malvern. And that underestimating a vampire is the surest way to get killed by one.” She stepped behind the bar and ran a hand behind the bins of lime and lemon wedges. Her fingers touched something metallic and she drew it out. A sawed-off shotgun. She knew she’d find something there—every bar had a gun, in case things got so far out of hand that the bouncer couldn’t handle it. She cracked open the shotgun and found a pair of shells inside. She sniffed the barrel and decided it hadn’t been fired in a long while.
“Something—something occurred to me, after that last scene,” she said. “After the Tupperware party. Malvern has changed her MO.”