“You’re safe right now. He won’t come back tonight. I promise. That’s his MO so far, one attack per night.”
“Then what about tomorrow night?” the girl asked.
“I’ll protect you then, too,” Caxton said.
It wasn’t working. Raleigh’s fear level was ramping up and nothing Caxton said seemed to help. She headed back into the foyer, intending to ask Sister Margot for help. “Did Raleigh have any friends here she was especially close with?” Caxton asked. “I mean,” she said, after glancing at the corpse on the floor, “anyone other than Violet. Someone needs to sit with her. I don’t think she’s going to sleep tonight. Also, I need some Styrofoam cups, or whatever you have.” There were shell casings all over the floor, bullet holes in the walls, and worse, probably dozens of bullets out on the lawn. She needed to start identifying their locations. Normally she could have left that to someone else, but with the girls milling about in the foyer it was going to be hard to secure the scene. She scanned the floor with her eyes, finding her brasses, until she realized Sister Margot wasn’t answering her. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
“You,” Sister Margot said, “have brought death into this sacred place. You will leave at once!”
Caxton bit her lip.
Sister Margot stamped her foot on the flagstones. “At once!”
Caxton watched the young woman carefully. Sized her up. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” she said.
“This is a place of healing. Of peace! I’ve worked all my life to make it a quiet refuge and in one night you’ve ruined everything!”
Not shrugging was the best Caxton could do to mollify the girl. “I’m going to need to bring in some forensics people, get this crime scene cleared, that’s going to take most of the night, then I’ll need to bring in some people to question everyone who was out in the halls before, so we can establish when the vampire came in and what route he used. Lastly I’m going to—”
“Violet is lying there, dead!” Margot shrieked.
“Yeah. I need to contact her parents immediately.”
“I should hope you would. When they hear what happened I imagine—”
“I’ll need to convince them into an emergency cremation. Whenever he wants, the vampire can bring her back from the dead. Meanwhile, I’ll get an armed guard in here to watch her for signs of reanimation.” It would be much easier, of course, to just cut off the dead girl’s head. Decapitated corpses didn’t come back as half-?deads. But she supposed the family had a right to make that kind of decision. “Meanwhile, why don’t you get everyone back to bed, alright? My people will come and go and hopefully be done by the time you get up in the morning. Thanks, Margot.”
The nun’s face was bright red. Caxton turned away to head back toward the gate, where she could make some phone calls.
First things first—she called in an APB on a naked vampire, to be considered extremely dangerous. She called the local police chief and reported Violet’s homicide so he could get a file going. Not that it was going to require much in the way of investigation, but you had to keep the paperwork straight. Finally she called Fetlock—or rather, she started dialing his number. Before she had half the digits into the phone he called her instead.
“Um, hello,” she said, answering his call.
“Is she dead?” Fetlock asked.
Caxton rubbed the bridge of her nose. “No. Raleigh—Raleigh’s alright. A little shaken up. How did you—?”
“But Jameson got away. I just saw your APB.”
Everybody knew about the mess she’d made. Malvern, Fetlock—when would Vesta Polder chime in?
she wondered. “Yeah. Yeah, he got away. I’ll explain how later. Listen, Deputy Marshal, how do you know all this? It only just happened.”
“I’ve been monitoring your phone,” he told her. “You made it sound as if you expected Jameson to attack tonight, so I’ve been up waiting to hear what happened. I hope you don’t mind me listening in to your phone calls.”
“No…of course not,” Caxton said.
“It’s crucial we stay together on this case. You should have called me earlier, when you were setting up your ambush. I could have had a SWAT team mobilized or something. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I figured I could handle it myself,” Caxton replied. To be honest, she hadn’t thought of Fetlock at all.
“Alright, next time. Now tell me what you need right now. I can be there in less than an hour.”
Caxton thought about it for a moment. She thought about Margot—and the girls. Violet’s murder would upset them more than she wanted to accept. She should try to be more sensitive, she decided. That was what Glauer would have told her. “There are no men allowed down here. Maybe you should stay clear—though I do need some officers to guard the scene, and the body. Female officers. Also,” she said, looking around the snowy lawn, “I have some material evidence here. Jameson left his clothes behind.”