Fetlock shrugged. “Of all the people in the world, you’re the one he has the most to fear from. You’re the one who knows him best. You know his strengths, that’s something. And you know more about killing vampires than anyone else alive.”
But not necessarily, she thought, anyone undead. Jameson had taught her everything she knew. Now he was proving he had some secrets he hadn’t shared. “Thanks,” she sneered. “It’s nice to hear that.”
And yet she realized she sort of meant what she’d said. It did help to know someone believed in her.
“Now. How about you tell me why you’re actually here?”
“Alright,” he said, sitting down on the toilet. “I’m here to offer you a star.”
Vampire Zero
Chapter 13.
“A star,” Caxton said, scowling. “You want to give me a star. What, like a teacher gives a good student a gold star?”
“This one’s silver, actually.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and brought out a lapel pin in the shape of a star inside a circle. She recognized it instantly, of course. Fetlock was wearing one himself. Jameson Arkeley used to wear one, too. Special Deputy Jameson Arkeley of the U.S. Marshals Service. “I’m authorized to temporarily deputize any law enforcement officer I choose into the Service, for as long as I see fit.”
“What, like a sheriff rounding up a posse of cowboys?”
“That’s about exactly right,” he said. “The Service is the oldest branch of the Justice Department. We were originally organized to clean up the frontier. A lot of cowboys were Marshals—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Bill Hickock.”
She shook her head. “I’m not a big fan of Westerns,” she told him.
“Frederick Douglass was one of us, too. Later on President Kennedy had us on the front lines of the civil rights movement and desegregation. We’re the white hats,” he said, his eyes twinkling. She stared at the pin in his hand but said nothing. What the hell was this about? she wondered. When she didn’t take the pin immediately, he closed his hand around it but didn’t put it away. “You’ve asked why I came down here. You probably wondered what I was doing at your SSU briefing. I was sent by the director of the Service. He’s very concerned about your investigation and he wants us to help you any way we can. Maybe I should start by giving you some background information, tell you our side of this. Where I come in. At our headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, on 21 November, I was asked to gather all of Jameson Arkeley’s old files from our archives. I was supposed to make photocopies of everything we had and send the originals on to you. The online catalog showed there wasn’t much—a few notebooks, a couple of case jackets and his personal dossier. None of it was digital, which meant I had to go down to the stacks in person and find the paper documents by hand. When I attempted to do so I made an unnerving discovery. Every single folder I was looking for was missing.”
He studied her face, but she refused to give anything away. She wouldn’t even shrug, not until she’d heard more.
“My next step, of course, was to find the Service’s librarian and check the circulation records. The files I wanted had all been checked out at the same time and then never returned. They’d been signed for. I bet you can guess whose signature was on the sheet. Jameson Arkeley’s.”
Caxton let herself blink, maybe too rapidly.
“Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? This was all well after he became a vampire. More than a year after he retired from the Service. He would have needed a photo ID to check out those materials. He would have needed ID just to get into the building. I checked with the unit that issues those ID cards and they told me that they’re supposed to destroy the cards once a deputy leaves the Service, but that sometimes people don’t turn in the cards when they clean out their desks. Sometimes they want to keep them as souvenirs of their old jobs, and sometimes they just forget. The ID unit never bothers to check if a given card has been turned in and destroyed or not. Well, they will now, I am told. Somebody down there is probably going to get fired over this.”
“Videotapes,” Caxton said.
Fetlock watched her as if waiting for her to say more, but she figured he knew exactly what she meant.
“You mean, is the entrance to the archive under electronic surveillance? Of course. I watched the footage myself—it’s not actually on videotape, you understand. It’s all in compressed files on our servers. I watched the six hours before and after Arkeley supposedly signed out those files. If you’re wondering if I saw a tall albino with pointed ears and no facial hair, no. Nothing of the sort. He might have sent a half-?dead in his place, of course, but the librarian would probably have noticed someone coming in with no skin on his face.”