“That’s good,” she said, though the number was surprisingly large. The cops who worked part time for the SSU must have tagged every abandoned farmhouse and disused factory in the state. There was no way she could investigate all those leads on her own, though. “Get Fetlock in on this. Tell him—scratch that, ask him politely, he’s a little sensitive—to get his people to run all these down. Get as many of them as possible checked out before nightfall. You know what we’re looking for. Places that haven’t been used for years, but have signs of recent activity. They can rule out the places the local teens go to drink, and anywhere clearly visible from a main road. That should narrow the search.”
How awesome would it be, she thought, if they turned up the lair in the next hour? Knowing Jameson, his lair would be well guarded and probably booby-?trapped. There were ways to deal with that sort of thing, however. If she could get to the lair by daylight, if she could find Jameson and Malvern inside, still in their coffins—it would be the work of a few minutes to remove their hearts from their bodies. To destroy the hearts. To end this.
Then she could go home. Go to bed for a week.
Then she could be alone with Clara, for a long time. She could fix everything. Everything that was wrong with her life.
She knew with a depressing certainty it wasn’t going to happen that way.
“Jameson’s smart,” she said. She said it so often it had become a mantra. “He’s not going to be anyplace I think to look for him, is he?”
“We might get lucky,” Glauer said.
She snorted a response and ended the call.
In the silence that followed—she could hear nothing but the crackling of the fireplace—she sat back in her chair and sipped at her apple juice. She thought about what could have made Raleigh come to such a place, to cut herself off from the world altogether like this. It was not, she had to admit, without a certain attraction. Tell everyone to go to hell. Run and hide from all her problems. She’d love to. But no.
The only reason a place like this repurposed convent could exist was that there were people out there in the real world, people who fought and bled to protect Sister Margot’s right to be safe and immune from danger and harm. Caxton knew a lot of old cops—her father had been one, and so had all his friends—and she remembered back in the seventies they’d had a certain way of thinking, a metaphor for what they did. The modern world with all its crime and drugs and violence and crazies was a trash can, a big, bulging trash can too small to hold everything inside of it, always threatening to burst, to run over and spill out onto the streets. As cops, they were paid to do nothing more than sit on the lid. Now that was her job.
There was a knock on the door. It was Sister Margot. “Raleigh’s ready for you now,” she said.
Vampire Zero
Chapter 26.
Sister Margot led Caxton to a windowless square room on the second floor with a table and a few less-?than-?comfortable chairs. It was freezing cold inside, but a brazier had been set up in one corner to warm the place and tall candelabras flanked the table, giving some light. Raleigh already waited inside, sitting at the far side of the table. She greeted Caxton warmly, then sat back down and smiled. Caxton pulled a digital audio recorder out of her pocket. “Is it alright if I use this? I noticed you don’t have electricity here.”
“Sister Margot says we don’t need it. That if we had it we’d be tempted to get radios, or even a television set, which would be a mistake. Sometimes I think she must have been Amish before she became a nun. I don’t think that little thing will be a problem, though.”
Caxton nodded her thanks and set up the recorder, putting a small microphone on the table where it could catch both their voices. She decided to get right to business. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about your father. Have you been in touch with him recently? I mean before he changed.”
The girl shook her head. “Not for about six months. The whole family is sort of estranged. Until two days ago I hadn’t seen Uncle Angus since I was a child. Mom I saw just a few weeks ago, but we didn’t speak for very long, we were—”
Caxton stopped her, not wanting to talk about Astarte. That would probably bring up a lot of emotional stuff she didn’t need. She needed to keep this interview on track. “When was the last time you spoke with your father?”
“I was in…Belgium,” Raleigh said. Her face clouded as if the memory was painful.
“You were in college at the time. Your father told me that. You were doing a semester abroad.”
Raleigh shrugged. “That was how it started. I wanted to study great art. They have a lot of amazing museums in Belgium. Have you ever been?”
Caxton smiled. “No.” She’d never been out of the country, except one quick visit to Canada when she was a kid. She’d rarely left her home state. “So you saw the museums,” she prompted.
“Yes. And they were wonderful. But you can’t just look at paintings all day, and write papers about them all night. I went with a friend of mine, Jane. She—”
Caxton took a notepad out of her pocket. “Last name?”
The girl frowned. “That’s not important to the story I’m telling.”
Caxton smiled through gritted teeth. “You never know what’s important. It’s often the little details that matter.”
“I suddenly feel like I’m being interrogated,” Raleigh said.