23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

8.

Malvern struck again and the body count was even higher this time. She’d hit a roadhouse outside of Allentown, just after midnight. One patron had managed to escape to call the local police, but by the time they arrived Malvern had slaughtered two cocktail waitresses, a bartender, a bouncer, and six good old boys who’d just wanted to have a few beers after work. By dawn Clara and Glauer were there, checking for clues. Fetlock was busy in Harrisburg, catching up with his paperwork, so for once the two of them had the scene to themselves.

“She must have had help,” Glauer said, pacing back and forth from the rear exit and the front door. “Look at the arrangement of the bodies. She got the bouncer here, and one of the waitresses—but the rest of them tried to flee out the back. They got—this far,” he said, stopping next to a bad stain on the carpet by the restrooms. The bodies had already been removed by the local coroner—which Clara appreciated, because it meant she didn’t have to see them, even if it also meant some evidence might have been destroyed. “The exit was blocked, so they couldn’t get out.”

“We know she has to have some kind of accomplice,” Clara agreed. “Someone has to drive her from victim to victim. She’s too weak to walk from scene to scene.” A vampire at full strength could outrun a speeding car, but Malvern hadn’t been that strong in centuries. “It could be a human sympathizer. Or a half-dead.” Vampires had the ability to raise their victims from the dead—for a short while. The resulting servants were called half-deads. They rotted away almost fast enough to watch, but as long as they could still stand under their own power they were forced to do the vampire’s bidding.

“There’s another possibility,” Glauer said, meeting Clara’s gaze. He held her eye for a second and then said, “The accomplice could be another vampire.”

Vampires could make more of their kind. In fact, Malvern was an expert at it. Every vampire Laura Caxton had ever destroyed had been one of Malvern’s creations.

Clara shook her head. “That’s not in our profile for her. It saps her strength to create new vampires, and she’s running on fumes as it is. It would put her back in her coffin for good if she tried that now.” Deputy Marshal Fetlock had built his whole strategy around the idea that Malvern was indulging herself in one long orgy of blood and that she had no grand scheme in mind, no master plan. That she would start making mistakes any night now.

“You know what Caxton would have said about that profile,” Glauer muttered.

“She would have said that he was underestimating Malvern. And that underestimating a vampire is the surest way to get killed by one.” She stepped behind the bar and ran a hand behind the bins of lime and lemon wedges. Her fingers touched something metallic and she drew it out. A sawed-off shotgun. She knew she’d find something there—every bar had a gun, in case things got so far out of hand that the bouncer couldn’t handle it. She cracked open the shotgun and found a pair of shells inside. She sniffed the barrel and decided it hadn’t been fired in a long while.

“Something—something occurred to me, after that last scene,” she said. “After the Tupperware party. Malvern has changed her MO.”

“Sure. She’s stopped hiding her kills so carefully.” Clara nodded. “Yeah. Fetlock thought it was because she was getting scared, and that made her sloppy. You and I had a different idea, if you recall—that it was just the opposite, that she’s stopped thinking of us, of law enforcement, as a threat.”

“Yes,” Glauer said. “I remember.” He stopped pacing and looked at her. “You think you have a better explanation?” “Maybe. I think she might be building up to something.” Glauer sighed. “I don’t like the sound of that.” “We know she’s a smart one. Every time Laura had Malvern in her sights, Malvern managed to get away almost on a technicality, or at the last minute. And even when she was stuck in her coffin, too weak to move, she always found a way to cause trouble. I can’t imagine she doesn’t have a plan right now.”

“But what could it possibly be?” Glauer asked. “She needs blood, lots of blood. More blood every night. That’s a zero-sum game. It means we’ll never stop looking for her. And no matter how inept we may be, eventually we’re going to find her. No matter how clever or how careful she is, she can’t keep doing this forever, but she can’t stop, either. What kind of plan would get her out of this mess?”

“I don’t know. I’m not as smart as she is,” Clara admitted. “I just have a feeling, that’s all. She hasn’t finished surprising us yet. Shit. Is that really the time?”

Glauer looked up at the clock over the bar. “Almost. Places like this set the clock ahead about fifteen minutes, because they know when last call comes, it’ll still take the patrons that long to finish their drinks and get out. They call it bar time.”

Clara smiled at the big cop. She probably knew a lot more about closing down bars than he did. “Listen, I know Fetlock doesn’t want to bring Laura into this investigation. But I’m going to run her through it anyway and see what she says. I’m going up to Tioga County today to visit her.”

“Really? He’s not going to like that,” Glauer said. “For one thing, he’s definitely going to want you on call, and if he can’t reach you—”

“It’s only a four-hour drive,” Clara told him. It was almost noon and she really needed to get on the road. “You… heard, right? About where she is now?”

“That they segregated her?” He shrugged. “Yeah.” Every cop knew a few corrections officers—they ran in the same social circles. And any time an ex-cop ended up inside it made for excellent gossip. Probably every state trooper and sheriff’s deputy in Pennsylvania had heard about Caxton’s descent to the hole. “Probably the safest place for her is in an SHU. She can’t have a lot of friends in the general population.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not all good. Prisoners in the SHU only get one hour of non-contact visitation a month. If I don’t get up there by five o’clock today it’ll be the end of April before I can get another appointment. It’s four hours up there, an hour visit, and four hours back. I’ll be back here by ten at the latest. So if Fetlock comes calling, stall him for me, will you? Just pretend you can’t reach me, that I’m out of cell phone range or something. Please. It’s really important that I talk to her now.”

Glauer smiled at her. “You know I will. It’s got to mean a lot to her, to have someone come see her as regularly as you do.”

“Yeah,” Clara said. “It must.”

“You’re a good person,” he told her. “A lot of people wouldn’t have wanted to wait for her to get out. Maybe they would hold out for a while, you know, but eventually they wouldn’t be able to handle it. They would have to break things off.”

“Um. Yeah,” Clara said.

His eyes went wide. “Oh,” he said. “You’re going to—”

“I’m going to be late,” Clara said, “if I don’t get going right now.”

Glauer turned his face away from her. “Tell her I said hi.”