13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1) Page 13

Part III: Reyes

Chapter 13

It is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.

-Le Fanu, Carmilla

In the morning, with sunlight coming in through the windows, Caxton got up without disturbing Deanna and pulled on some clothes, anything, really. It was freezing in the little house and there was frost on the garden. She turned on the coffee maker and left it belching and hissing then went out and fed the dogs out in the barn. Their breath plumed out of the kennels. They were happy enough to see her. She let them out to run around for a while on the wet grass, none of them willing to test the limits of the invisible fence, content, for the moment, to stay in their safe little patch of lawn bordered by winter-quiet trees. She watched them play, snapping at one another, knocking each other over, the same game dogs had been playing for a hundred thousand years and still nobody ever won. It made her smile. She felt surprisingly good, maybe a little stiff where she'd fallen on her arms and her ribs the night before, a few bruises here and there from when the vampire had yanked her out of the car. But mostly she felt good, and healthy, and like she'd achieved something. So she was quite confused when she started crying. Not big noisy sobs, just a little leakage from the eyes, but it didn't seem to want to stop. She wiped it away, blew her nose, and felt her heart jump in her chest.

"Pumpkin?" Deanna asked, standing mostly naked in the back door, just a sleeveless t-shirt on that covered everything the law required. Deanna's red hair stood up in a bed head shock of spikes and she shivered visibly. She'd never looked more beautiful. "Pumpkin, what's wrong?" she asked.

Caxton wanted to go to her, to grab her around the waist, to ravage her. But she couldn't. She couldn't stop crying. "It's nothing. I mean, really, I have no idea why I'm crying. I'm not sad or... or anything, really." She wiped at her eyes with her fingers. It had to be a delayed stress reaction. They'd taught her about those in the academy, and told her she was no tougher than any civilian. Like everyone else in her class she had thought, yeah, right, and fallen asleep during the seminar. She was plenty tough. She was a soldier of the law. But she couldn't stop crying. Deanna rushed out on the grass, the dew squishing up between her toes, and grabbed Caxton up in a stiff kind of back-patting embrace. "There's some guy at the door who wants to see you. Do you want me to send him away?"

"Let me guess. Old guy, lots of wrinkles, with a silver star on his lapel." Caxton pushed Deanna away, not ungently. She grabbed the flesh of her own upper arm near her armpit through her shirt and gave it a good twist. The pain was sudden and real it stopped the crying instantly.

At the front door Arkeley stood waiting patiently, his mouth a meaningless slot again. When he saw Deanna, though, his face started to glow. She opened the door to let him into the kitchen and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. Caxton stayed a little away from him, not wanting him to see her irritated eyes. He smiled even more broadly but shook his head. "I can't drink the stuff. It gives me ulcers. Good morning, trooper."

Caxton nodded at him. "I didn't expect to see you here," she said. "I thought we were done after last night."

He shrugged. "While we were busy having so much fun yesterday some people were out there doing real police work. Fingerprints, dental records from the half-deads, what have you have turned up no identification on the vampire yet, not even a name. But we do have this." He handed her a computer printout. She recognized it immediately as an entry from the nation car license plate registry. It listed the license plate number from the Cadillac CTS that had started the vampire investigation, the car full of bodies that the one-armed half-dead had abandoned. The sheet listed the name and all known addresses of the car's owner.

"This is our vampire?" Caxton asked.

Arkeley shook his head. "Our best guess is that it's the victim. The one in the trunk. His fingerprints turned up nothing but his son's did and blood typing suggests everyone who was in that car was related."

"What kid has been fingerprinted?" Deanna asked, her nose wrinkling up. "I thought you only got printed if you got arrested." She poured some cereal in a bowl but didn't bother with milk. Breakfast tended to be an informal affair at their house.

"We've been printing kids as fast as we can for a couple years now," Caxton told her. "It helps identify them if they get kidnapped. At least that's what we tell their parents. It also means the next generation of criminals will almost all have their fingerprints on file when they start committing crimes."

Arkeley sat down unbidden in one of the cheap Ikea chairs around the kitchen table. He had that same uncomfortable posture she'd seen before whenever he sat in a chair. He must have seen the question in her face. "The Lares case nearly killed me," he explained. "I had to have three vertebrae fused together. This one last night was easy."

Caxton frowned and studied the printout. It indicated that the car's owner had been named Farrel Morton and that he owned a hunting camp near Caernarvon. Not too far from where she'd been working a standard Intoxilyzer sweep just two nights earlier. She put the pieces together. "Jesus. He took his kids hunting and the whole family got eaten alive. Then the living dead stole his car."

"There are human remains at his hunting camp. A lot of them," Arkeley told her. Deanna stamped her bare foot on the floor. "No fucking shop talk in the kitchen!"

she shouted. It was a habitual war cry and Caxton winced.

"Quite right. There'll be time enough for the gory details later." He and Deanna traded a look of complete understanding that made Caxton wince again. He would never have looked at her like that. Maybe she shouldn't have cared, but she did.

"You've got quite the partner here, trooper," Arkeley said, rising painfully to his feet. "Have you two been together for very long?"

"Almost five years," Caxton said. "Should we get going? The crime scene is getting old by now." Not that it was likely to matter much with the perpetrator dead but there were rules in police work.

"How did you meet?" he asked.

Caxton froze. She had to decide, at that moment, whether she was going to let him inside of her real life or not. The cop stuff, the vampire fighting, that was important, sure, but this was her home, her dogs, her Deanna. The side she didn't let anybody see, not even her fellow troopers. Of course she'd never had a partner before. He was her partner at least for the duration of the investigation and you were supposed to have your partner over for dinner and stuff like that. He would be going away soon, now that the vampire was dead. She decided the danger of letting him inside was minimal. "I rescue greyhounds," she said. "From the dog tracks. When one of the animals gets injured or just too old they put them down. I give them a more humane option-I save the dogs and raise them to be pets. It's an expensive hobby-most of the dogs you save are injured or sick and they need a lot of medical help. Deanna used to work as a veterinary technician. She used to sneak out heartworm pills and rabies sticks for me. She got fired for it, actually."

Deanna leaned across the kitchen cupboards, stretching, one leg up in the air. "It was a shit job anyway. We were putting down animals all the time because people didn't want to pay to fix them up."

"I can imagine that would get disheartening," Arkeley soothed. Deanna's face grew radiant under the warmth of his sympathy.

Jealousy spiked upwards through Caxton's guts. "Now she just does her art."

"Aha, I knew it," Arkeley said. "You've got an artist's hands."

Deanna waggled them for him and laughed. "Do you want to see the piece I'm working on?" she asked.

"Oh, honey, I don't know," Caxton tried. She looked at Arkeley. "It's contemporary. It's not for everybody. Listen, you can see my dogs instead. Everybody likes dogs, right?"

"When they're safely behind a fence, sure," Arkeley told her. "I can't stand the way they lick. But really, trooper, I'd love to see your partner's work."

There was nothing for it but to head out to Deanna's shed. Deanna put on shoes and a padded winter coat and headed across the lawn to work the combination lock. Caxton and Arkeley followed along a little more slowly.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Caxton asked, once Deanna was out of earshot. Arkeley didn't play coy. "You always make nice with your partner's wife. It gets you invited to dinner more often," he told her.

They entered the shed with roses on their cheeks-it was going to be a truly cold day, it seemed. Caxton moved to stand up against one wall of the shed, extremely embarrassed. Her cheeks burned but not just because of the cold. Deanna was as unabashed as ever. She'd shown her work to every person she could find who was even slightly willing to look at it. Most of the time she got polite silence in response. Some people would deem her work "interesting" or "engaging"

and go on for a while about theories of body politics or post-feminism until they ran out of steam. The people who actually appreciated her work scared Caxton. They didn't seem all there-and worse, they made her wonder if maybe Deanna wasn't altogether normal herself.

Arkeley moved around the shed carefully, taking it all in. Three white sheets-queen-sized-hung from the shed's rafters with a few feet of empty air between them. They moved softly in the cold empty air of the shed, lit only by the early morning sun coming through the door. Each sheet was spotted with hundreds of nearly identical marks, roughly rectangular, all of them the same reddish brown. There was no smell on such a cold day but even in the height of summer the marks gave off only the faintest tang of iron.

"Blood," Arkeley announced when he'd walked around all three sheets.

"Menstrual blood," Deanna corrected him.

Here it comes, Caxton thought, the moment when Arkeley got skeeved out and called Deanna a freak. It had happened before. A lot. But it didn't come. He nodded and kept studying the sheets, his head tilted back to take it all in. When he didn't say anything more for a full minute Caxton started to feel nervous. Deanna looked confused.

"It's about taking something hidden," Caxton blurted out and they both looked at her. "Something that is normally hidden away, disposed of in secrecy, and putting it up on display."

The pride in Deanna's face made Caxton want to melt on the spot. But she had to juggle her two partners. She couldn't let Arkeley see any sign of weakness, especially not here in this deepest sanctum.

Arkeley breathed deeply. "This is powerful," he said. He didn't bother trying to interpret it, which was good. He didn't try to explain it away. Deanna bowed for him. "It's taken me years to get it this far and it's not nearly done. There's a guy in Arizona who is doing something similar-I saw him at Burning Man a while ago-but he's using any kind of blood and he lets anybody contribute. This is all me. Well, Laura has helped a few times."

Caxton's hands started shaking. "Okay, too much information," she let out. It just came out of her. They both looked at her but she just shook her head.

"Perhaps we should get to the crime scene," Arkeley suggested. She had never been so glad to receive an order.