He had buried the dog himself, not telling his parents, not telling Rich, preferring to let them think that Roger had simply run away. He'd placed branches and dead leaves over the dog's twisted lifeless form in the ditch that morning and had returned at night alone, picking up the hard bony body, the gluey blood sticking to his hands, and carrying the dog out to a spot in the surrounding desert near a particularly large saguaro where he'd already !idug a hole.
He had never told anyone the truth, and forever afterward Rich and his parents had believed that Roger had run away and had not come back because he had found another friendly family to live with. They had never given up the hope of getting Roger back, had always thought they would run into him someday in town or hear his bark from someone else's backyard, for years had even made weekly pilgrimages to the small corral behind the vet's that passed for a pound in Rio Verde, but of course they had never found the dog. He had successfully spared them the horrible truth of Roger's death.
But he could not spare Rich this.
Robert opened his eyes, glanced back toward his men. Ted, especially, looked stricken, and Robert remembered that the young patrolman had lost his own mother a few years back.
She was doubtlessly one of the disinterred corpses now littering the landscape.
"Ted?" he asked. "You want to take a breather?"
The patrolman shook his head. "I'm fine." He ran a hind through his short brown hair. "Who you figure'd do something like this?
I ::" "I don't know," Robert admitted.
Stu looked toward them, the flashlight pointing down at his feet.
"Where do we start? I mean, do we dust the tombstones for fingerprints?"
"We look for tire tracks in the road. We take soil samples.
Footprints should be our best bet. Whoever did this had to walk out of here. He had to step on this dirt somewhere."
"Unless he flew." Stu's voice was quiet.
"Knock that crap off." Robert looked from Stu to Ted.
Both were pale, frightened. They were just kids, he realized Hell, out of all his men, only he and Ben had any life experience to speak of. The rest of them were just... babes in the woods.
He was just being overprotective. Equally young cops in inner cities dealt with worse things than this all the time. But he didn't know those young cops in inner cities. To him, they were faceless men in blue uniforms, like the police on TV crime shows, somehow better trained, more mature, and more competent than his own men. He did know Stu and Ted. They were good men, good cops-good small-town cops--but they had never had to face something like this.
On the other, hand, neither had he.
"What are we going to do about the bodies?" Hillman asked from behind him.
' Robert turned to face the caretaker. He felt tired all of a sudden and realized that it must be getting close to midnight. "After we're through with our investigation, we'll hire some men to re dig the graves and return the bodies to their proper plots."
"How'll we tell who's who?"
"We'll have family members come out and identify the.." remains. If that doesn't work, and if we can't tell by the placement, we'll have to go by dental records." He nodded toward the corner. "My parents are over there." No one spoke.
Robert bent down to examine the body closest to him, an ancient skeleton wearing the rotted remnants of a dress. He found himself focusing his attention on the ex posed left femur. The bone had been snapped in half. Frowning, he motioned Hillman over. "Is this usual?
Do bones usually break like this?"
The caretaker dropped to his knees and squinted at the skeleton's leg.
"I can't really say. My job is just to take care of the cemetery grounds. I don't know nothing about the bodies."
"Maybe it broke that way when she fell out," Ted offered Robert shook his head. "I don't think so. Look at how the body's positioned. It's been taken out of its coffin and deliberately placed here. That leg hasn't even been bent How could the bone have broken?" Stu climbed a small dirt mound nearby. "Come here," he said.
They followed him. His flashlight shone on the femur of another skeleton. This one, too, had been broken. ""Looks like we have a pattern here." His flashlight beam moved on to another corpse lying next to an open new coffin on the other side of the mound, ii
Hillman gasped. '3esus."
Robert moved quickly forward, sliding down the pile of dirt, the others following. The body at his feet, though fully clothed and obviously interred only recently, had been shriveled and shrunk and bore an uncanny and uncomfortable resemblance to Manuel Torres's exsanguinated corpse. The same wrinkled parchment skin clung moisturelessly to the skull, the same deflated lips surrounded the overly toothy mouth. It was Caleb Peterson, Robert realized. He'd forgotten that old Caleb had been buried last week. He'd read about it in the paper, but he hadn't known the miner that well and hadn't gone to the funeral.
Only Caleb looked as though he'd died decades--not days---ago.
Robert put forth a tentative finger. The skin he touched was dry and brittle. -J The vampire had smelled fresh meat.
He pushed the thought from his mind. "Ted," he said. "Get on the radio to the station. I wantJud out here with a camera. Get Woods here too. I want a medical opinion on this."
"Yes, sir."
"And see if we can use Globe's K-9."
[ , "You're not going to want to hear this," Stu said quietly.
"But I think it was a vampire."
Hillman nodded fearfully. "I think so too."
"Don't be stupid."
"Stupid? This whole place was uprooted. In an hour.
Mr. Peterson's body has been sucked dryB"
"The vampire got a mouthful of embalming fluid then."
"Those bones were broken open because he was looking for the marrow."
Robert kept his face as impassive as possible. "We're here for ten minutes, we haven't even started our investigation, and already you're jumping to conclusions. Idiotic conclusions, I might add." You don't think all this is weird? Mr. Torres--"
"Yes, it's weird. But we don't know what's doing this, and until we do know, I want you to keep your mouth shut. There are going to be enough rumors as it is. I don't want any of them to originate with the police department.
You got that? If you have theories, you keep them to your self."
"Are you going to tell your brother?"
Robert glared at him. "Yes, I am. I think he has a right to know since his parents are lying over there with their graves dug up."
Stu looked down at the ground. "Sorry. I just meant that, since he's on the paper and all---"
"I know exactly what you meant. Now if you don't think you can handle this investigation without blaming every thing on monsters, I'll get Steve out here and assign you to the desk."
"I can handle it."
"I hope so." Robert looked at the young officer, then sighed. "While we're waiting, why don't you take Mr. Hillman's statement."
"Why? Am I a suspect? I swear to God, I didn't do itw" "You're not a suspect. But you're the closest thing we have to a witness. We just have to record what you saw and when you saw it."
He blinked. "Oh. Okay."
Robert stood alone next to Caleb's dehydrated body and empty coffin as Stand and the old man headed back through the cemetery toward the caretaker's house.
Looking for bone marrow.
The idea made sense.
Shivering, he looked again at the tight, grinning face of the corpse.
There was the sound, far off, of a coyote howling. A cliched noise at a cliched time, but it did its work, and the peach fuzz on the back of his neck bristled, turning into goose bumps on his arms.