“Where you failed to find any sign of a barrel. Come on, I need to see for myself.” She led the way.
Junco shrugged and kept up with her as she hurried inside. A woman in blue coveralls, presumably the same Floria Alvade, was buffing the lobby floor with a big metal waxer. Its furry wheel spat dust across Caxton’s shoes. When she saw them coming she switched the machine off.
“Miss Alvade?” Caxton asked. The woman nodded, her face a cautious mask. Lots of people looked like that when cops approached them. It didn’t mean anything. “I need to know, did anyone enter this building last night?”
The woman nodded at Trooper Junco.
“Anyone else? Anyone at all? Maybe a tall man, very pale skin, bald?”
“Like that vampire I seen on the TV?” Alvade crossed herself. “Oh, Mary preserve me, no! Just him, I swear. I been here all night, too.”
Caxton nodded and turned to go up the stairs. “How about you, Trooper? Did you see anybody leave as you were coming in?”
“I think I would have mentioned if I saw an undead bloodsucker,” he told her.
She whirled on him, fixed him with her hardest glare. Arkeley wouldn’t have put up with that kind of insubordination. She had to get tougher, had to rise above her bad reputation. Had to make people understand just how serious things had become.
“If you have any more glib comments to make, Trooper,” she told him, “I suggest you save them for your official report. Clear?”
His mouth hardened. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said.
She turned without waiting for anything further and raced up the stairs two at a time. She was winded when she got to the top, but she pressed on, past the classroom where she’d met Geistdoerfer, back to the specimen room where she’d seen the barrel. It was gone. She’d already known that. Seeing it for herself made a difference, though. It made her blood run colder, made her skin prickle.
The hearts were gone.
When she could think again, when her own heart wasn’t bursting inside her chest, she headed back down to the parking lot. Three local police cars were just pulling in, lights on but no sirens. Officer Glauer stepped out of one. Dots of toilet paper flecked his throat where he must have just finished shaving.
“You got my message,” Caxton said, by way of greeting.
“Yeah. All four of them,” Glauer replied. He fingered his mustache, an obvious tell. He was worried.
Good. She needed him worried. She needed him scared.
“I just called exigent circumstances so I could search a room up there,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder at the classroom building. “Turned up nothing. There are ninety-nine missing vampire hearts.
Whoever has them can wake up ninety-nine vampires when the sun goes down tonight. I’d like to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I’d like to help you with that,” the big cop said. He reached into his car and picked up his hat. “The chief, on the other hand—”
Caxton nodded. She knew Vicente was going to be a problem. “I’ll talk to him, when he actually comes in to work.” She looked up at the sky. The clouds were thickening and turning dark, but the sun was up there somewhere. “What time did the sun go down last night?” she asked.
Glauer placed his hat carefully on his head. He squinted for a second as he tried to remember. “Just before seven. Yeah, I’d say ten till—that’s when I took my dinner break and I remember being very glad I was off the street. We kept our guard up last night, believe me, even if the chief thought we were safe.
So we have until seven to find those hearts?”
Caxton shook her head. “There might be another way.” She looked at Geistdoerfer’s Buick and decided it wasn’t the ideal vehicle for what came next. Her own Mazda was nearby, but it wasn’t marked as a police car. “You’re driving,” she said. “Maybe we can finish this in the next hour.”
He gave her a weak smile. “Christmas is still two months away,” he told her, but he didn’t waste any more time. He took her south through town, down the tourist lanes into the battlefield. Up Seminary Ridge and then down an unpaved road through a clump of trees. She remembered exactly where it was—in highway patrol she’d learned to make mental notes whenever she was called to a scene, to pick out the local landmarks so she could find her way back if she needed to, so she could give accurate directions to paramedics and firefighting units. The little dig site was still fresh in her memory from the last time she’d seen it, only two days before.
There were no cars at the end of the road. She got out and led Glauer and the four other cops down the path, about two hundred yards into the trees, back to where the dig site had been set up by Geistdoerfer and his students. The tents were still there and the campfire, but the ashes were cold and wet with dew.
Exhaustion and guilt formed ice crystals in her brain as she saw the place again. She should have known—somehow she should have known. She should have cordoned the place off, declared it an official crime scene. Of course she hadn’t been on active duty when she’d first seen it, but there had been plenty of time afterward. It had just not occurred to her. Jeff Montrose, the grad student who showed her around, had thought the place was dead, a simple crypt.
It helped her conscience a little that Arkeley hadn’t bothered to lock the site down, either. It helped a very little.
Okay, she thought to herself. My guilty feelings about the past help nobody. For the present: No more mistakes. Do this just like Arkeley would.
She drew her weapon from its holster. Checked the safety. “There won’t be any vampires down there, not now, but there could be others. Half-deads, or maybe deluded people who work for my vampire.
They may have gotten the hearts but didn’t have time to put them with their respective bodies. In that case they might be guarding the coffins right now.” She stood silent for a moment, listening for any sign of activity inside the tent. The nylon walls stirred a little in a breeze, but she didn’t hear anyone moving around. She stepped through the tall wet grass that left little dark ovals on her pant legs, and twitched back the door of the tent.
There was nobody inside. Not up top, anyway. She looked back at two of the cops who’d come with Glauer. Gestured for them to go around either side of the tent. There could be any number of monsters hiding in the trees around them—she did not want to go down into the cavern and have somebody pull the ladder up, trapping her inside.
She moved into the tent with just Glauer at her shoulder, half a pace behind her. He was so tall that the roof of the tent bowed outward around his head. She stopped and looked back at him, then down at his belt. He looked confused until she pointed directly at his gun. He frowned guiltily, then drew it.
His instincts, his cop training, had told him you didn’t enter a place looking for a fight. You didn’t draw until you were ready to shoot. In any other circumstance that would have been a good thing, proper firearms discipline. In the tent it was just dumb.
He drew his weapon, lifted it to shoulder height. The muzzle pointed up, through the roof of the tent. If he tripped or panicked his shot would go clear and not hit Caxton in the back. That made her feel slightly better.
She walked past the tables full of old rusty metal artifacts and whited lead bullets. The excavation at the far end of the tent was as she’d last seen it, with the ladder leading down into the cavern. One thing was different, but it took her a moment to place it. Somebody had turned off the lights down there.
She spun around looking for a generator, or a switch, or any way to get them back on. She couldn’t see anything. Instead of wasting more time looking for a way to get the power back on, she took her flashlight off her belt and swished its beam around the bottom of the hole. Nothing jumped out at her.