“Next new message.”
“Trooper, it’s Glauer again. Things have gone from weird to worse. I arrived in Mechanicsburg about an hour ago. I met with the cops there and asked to talk to Rexroth. They said he was sleeping—he sleeps all day, because he’s supposed to be a vampire. They asked me if I wanted them to wake him up, but I decided I’d get more information out of him if I waited. I thought maybe I’d made the trip for nothing, but the locals had some information for me themselves. It turns out that Kenneth Rexroth is an alias, that the kid’s name is actually Dylan Carboy. He’s nineteen years old and lives with his parents up in Northumberland County, in Mount Carmel. Lives—lived, I guess. The Mount Carmel cops sent a car out there to try to contact the Carboy family and got no response at the door. They popped the lock and went inside and found three dead bodies, all in states of advanced decomposition. The victims were, let’s see, Mark Carboy, father, forty-?three years old, Ellen Carboy, mother, thirty-?nine, and Jenny Carboy, sister, seventeen. The two parents were killed with shotgun blasts, the same gauge as the shotgun you took off Dylan at the storage facility. The sister was strangled in her bed, and had…Jesus. She had bite marks on her neck. Made by human teeth, not vampire. I don’t think he woke her up first. I really don’t think he did. I don’t want to think he did. They recovered a bunch of stuff from Dylan’s room. Notebooks full of handwritten journal entries and newspaper clippings. They sent them on to Mechanicsburg, where I got to take a look at them. I asked if I could borrow the notebooks to show you and the locals said that would be fine, as long as I left a receipt in case they need them for the trial. The kid had plenty to live for, Trooper. He had one prior, for possession of marijuana, but the judge threw it out as long as he promised to go back to school. He was in community college studying to be a chef. You need to see these notebooks, Trooper. I think you should see them. They have your name all over them. I’m going back to Harrisburg now. I have my cell phone if you need me.”
“Next new message.”
“Laura, it’s Clara. I heard about—I heard—the guys here are talking about it, they’re talking about you, just call me. I’m scared. I’m scared for you, so just call me, alright? Call me, damn it.”
“End of new messages. You have forty-?five saved messages.”
Caxton flipped the phone shut. Thought about whom to call first. Glauer shouldn’t be working the Rexroth angle. It wasn’t even an angle! Finding and killing Jameson Arkeley was the only thing that mattered. She called his number, but it went straight to voice mail. Typical. For two months while they’d had nothing real to do he was always at her heels, always waiting for his next order. Now that she actually had an order to give him he was out of cell phone range.
“Officer Glauer, this is Caxton. I want you to stop playing around. You’ve heard what happened last night. Well, you’re right, this is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is what we’ve been studying for and working toward, and it’s happening now. I have no doubt that Arkeley will want to kill again, and we need to get him before that happens. So when you get this, start putting together an action item list we can send around to everyone in the SSU.” She glanced down at the star on her lapel. “There are going to be some changes to how we work, but I’ll tell you about them when I see you next. Stay focused, Glauer. Stay with me.”
She snapped the phone shut. Centered herself. The next call required her to be calm and collected. She scrolled down to Clara’s cell number, then pressed SEND.
She got Clara’s voice mail. The phone didn’t even ring once.
“Hi, baby. I got your messages,” she said. “Listen, I’m okay. I’m going to be okay.” He didn’t even want to hurt me, she started to say, then stopped herself. Clara was no idiot. She knew that if a vampire didn’t kill you one night it only meant he was saving you for the next time he got hungry. “Let’s do lunch, okay? Get to Harrisburg, to the HQ, whenever you can and we’ll eat and talk and I’ll tell you everything. I miss you too.”
She ended the call—and then immediately wanted to call back, to say that she loved Clara, that she wanted nothing more than to go home and be with her alone and quiet and not talk or think about anything, just be in each other’s arms for a while with nothing to do, nowhere she had to be. She should just call back, she told herself. She really should. She even started reaching for the phone again.
Then it rang on its own. Thinking it might be Glauer or Clara calling her back, she responded immediately. “Trooper Caxton,” she said.
“Good afternoon, Officer,” a woman’s voice said. She didn’t recognize the caller.