Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (45 page)

But he wasn’t down for the count. Not yet anyway.

After all, they had five dead kids down here in DeWitt County, and if that wasn’t a story tailor-made for the bestseller lists, he didn’t know what was.

“I’m just calling it like I see it,” Kohler said. “You get yourself on TV, like Marsh, and you could write your own ticket.”

Ed glanced over at him, surprised that he’d let himself wander. It was the heat, he thought. It made him miserable. “Thanks for the tip,” he said sullenly.

“No problem.” Kohler handed him the case file. “Listen, I’ll do you one better.”

“Yeah?” Ed said. “How’s that?” He steeled himself for the insult that was surely about to come.

“You know we got a lot of wetbacks down in the southern part of the county, right?”

Ed hadn’t expected that. Insults to his professionalism were old hat these days. When you worked with cryptids, one learned to live with the occasional sneer from one’s colleagues. But Ed’s mother was Hispanic, Indio actually, and even though he’d inherited many of her features, like her short stature and her dark skin and her round, plump cheeks, racism wasn’t something he’d had to deal with since he was a teenager. “Excuse me?” he said.

“Just what I said. Nobody ever talks to the wetbacks. You guys didn’t talk to them the last time you was here, and I know Marsh ain’t talked to them yet this time around neither. It’s
their
kids getting murdered, is all I’m saying. Seems to me, if you really wanted to know what was going on, that’d be the place to start.”

Despite his indignation, Ed was suddenly interested. “Are you sure Marsh hasn’t talked to any of them yet?”

“Positive. Something to think about, if you ask me.”

“Yeah,” Ed said. “Yeah, I guess so.”

E
d knelt down next to the bed in his motel room and pulled out the contents of the accordion file Deputy Kohler had sold him. Research had always been Ed’s thing, what he did best, and combing through old books and autopsy reports and microfiche facsimiles of long-dead newspapers was like putting on a comfortable pair of shoes.

But twenty-five years of fieldwork had taught him that the best evidence came from the encounter itself, and in cases like this, that meant going to the crime scene photos.

So he pulled those out, thinking he’d make his own judgments first, before reading the opinions of detectives and pathologists, and immediately realized he’d been screwed.

There were only about sixty photographs in the file.

Any decent police investigation into the murder of a child, not to mention
five
children, should have included thousands of photographs.

Marsh
, he thought.
Goddamn Charles Marsh.

With that man, no amount of trickery was off the table. He’d probably paid the deputy to keep the really important pictures out of the file.

Except that that wouldn’t be Marsh’s style, would it?

Maybe Marsh had paid to make sure Ed saw only this specific information. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d taken advantage of Ed’s knowledge for his own ends. In fact, that had pretty much defined their relationship these past fifteen years, dating all the way back to the publication of Ed’s first
New York Times
bestseller,
American Nightmares
, back in July 1996.

Marsh came out with his own debut bestseller two months later,
Vampires of America
, and as they were both publishing with Simon & Schuster, Ed thought nothing of it when Marsh came to
him for help on a new book he was writing. The idea, Marsh explained, was to show how real-life professionals would handle a confirmed sighting of a cryptid—in the case of Marsh’s next book, a lake monster.

Intrigued, Ed had answered all of Marsh’s questions, the result totaling some eighty pages, almost twenty thousand words. Marsh had gushed with thanks and promised Ed would be properly and prominently recognized for his contribution.

And then the book came out.

Operation American Nessie
got starred reviews from all the trade journals. It was an instant
New York Times
bestseller. Several actors and other celebrities, many of whom contributed little more than a two-sentence comment or a modest sidebar about their involvement in some ridiculous horror movie, were billed as featured contributors. Bestselling author Ed Drinker, meanwhile, whose total contribution came to about one-fourth of the book, was barely given credit. There were several ads that named a bunch of celebrities and then somewhere down near the bottom a single line that read, “and many other noted experts.” That, and a mention in the acknowledgments section at the front of the book, was all the recognition Ed received for his trouble.

He was furious, and over the next year, at several conventions, Ed voiced his contempt for Charles Marsh. Never in public, of course, because that wasn’t his style; just up in the con suite, where most of the attendees were drunk and supposedly off-duty. A friendly word of warning to colleagues here and there.

Still, word got back to Marsh.

A bitter and (if Ed was absolutely and ruthlessly honest with himself) one-sided feud developed between the men. Ed’s books got more scholarly and less popular, while Charles Marsh, who could talk the shine off a new penny, got one lucrative publishing deal after another. Soon the man even made the jump to TV, and his show,
American Monsters
,
became one of the most popular reality adventures on cable.

The thing was, and this was what really galled Ed, Charles Marsh wasn’t a two-bit hack. If he’d really been nothing more than a talking head, Ed might have been able to dismiss him, and maybe even gotten over the
Operation American Nessie
incident. But Charles Marsh could actually do some really solid work when he put his mind to it, and that royally pissed Ed off, because the man rarely did his own thinking anymore. He made his living off the research of others.

Still, Ed had these sixty photographs, and he’d paid dearly for them. They were a foot in the door, if nothing else, and that was all he’d ever needed. Charles Marsh be damned. He could make his own way from here.

He opened a beer and started flipping through the images.

T
he first series was of a young girl named Amanda Valdez, age eight, who was found in the weeds next to Farm-to-Market Road 474 with her skirt bunched up around her waist. She was on her back, her head obscured by some tall weeds. Looking at her skirt, Ed’s first thought was that the girl had been sexually assaulted, and a sickening knot formed in his gut. But thankfully there was no mention of that in the autopsy report, and if he needed any more reassurance, the little girl’s underwear was still on. That made looking at her autopsy photos a little easier, but not much. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and went back to studying the scaly white skin on the girl’s hips and thighs. A few of the close-ups made her skin look like the surface of a head of cauliflower.

There was identical patterning around the front of her neck.

The pictures of Amanda’s six-year-old brother, Hector, who was found eighty feet away, facedown in two inches of ditch water, showed the same scaly patterning on the back of his neck and on his right wrist.

Ed had become something of an expert on sarcoptic mange the last time he was in Cuero, and the patterning on the kids looked an awful lot like the skin he’d seen on the alleged
chupacabra
specimen they’d shown him.

But this was not the same thing.

The mite that caused sarcoptic mange did so by burrowing under the skin and laying its eggs to hatch. They could be seen with the naked eye, so the fact that there was no mention of them in the autopsy report made it highly unlikely they were the culprits here.

Plus, it usually took weeks for that scaling to show up, and neither child had a history of scabies, the human version of mange.

The pathologist who had performed the autopsy wasn’t able to explain the skin condition. She couldn’t link it to cause of death, which was listed as cardiac arrest due to extreme dehydration, even though she indicated that such a connection was “extremely likely,” as much of the fluid loss appeared to have traveled through the affected areas.

Ed put the photos down and drained the rest of his beer as he thought about the implications of that last part. Conspiracy theorists would have a field day with that. Proof, they’d say, of vampirism. The
chupacabra
was real!

Ed scoffed aloud at that and then forced himself to change gears. Suppose Marsh was responsible for limiting the contents of the police report. Suppose Marsh was allowing him to see only the parts of which he couldn’t make sense. Ed could certainly see why his rival was stumped. Something usually popped out during these investigations, something obvious. The last time around, it had been the animal itself. Witnesses claimed it was a classic
chupacabra
, with short forelegs and long, lanky hind legs. What Ed had seen on the video, though, was a marginally misshapen animal that ran very much like every other dog he’d ever seen. And when he actually sat down to examine the half-rotted remains of the
specimen a local rancher had shot three days before his arrival, he saw the obvious features of a coydog, the offspring of a male coyote and a female domestic dog. Such hybrids were rare, but they did happen, and when the scourge of sarcoptic mange was thrown into the mix, one got a creature very much like the legendary
chupacabra
.

And that was fine, within the original context.

Prior to his first visit to Cuero, local ranchers had reported several instances of slaughtered goats, all of which showed signs of a canid attack. That was the
chupacabra
MO. Attack goats, suck them dry. That was how they got their name, after all.

But not this time around. None of the five murdered children appeared to have been killed by anything like a dog. They had no open, tattered wounds, no bite marks, no obvious injuries like you’d expect from a dog attack.

Instead, they had cauliflower skin and massive fluid loss. The latter certainly offered a suggestion of vampirism, and the skin condition was scaly enough to call to mind the reptilian flesh of the
chupacabra
. Plus, all five children had been killed in the same general area where the poor mangy creature was spotted last time around.

Which, to Ed’s mind, was more than enough to suggest an affirmative link between the dead children and the mythical
chupacabra
.

That’s what Ed wanted to believe, anyway.

He was still thinking of the
chupacabra
when one of Amanda Valdez’s autopsy pictures slid from the bed to the floor.

Ed reached down to retrieve it, and froze.

It showed the little girl’s face, her eyes open and vacant and dead, and yet haunted with more pain than any eight-year-old should know. Her cheeks were sunken, her lips puckered and wrinkled and dark, like dried fruit. Ed swallowed hard and sat up, the picture staring at him from the floor. Something Deputy Kohler said came back to him.

Nobody ever talks to the wetbacks . . . It’s
their
kids getting murdered.

Maybe, he thought, it was time he changed that.

E
d got in his Suburban early the next morning and headed down to the southern part of DeWitt County.

The last time he’d been down this way was in 2010. The people of Cuero had decorated every shop and pickup truck with cartoon drawings of something that looked like it had escaped from the set of a fifties-era creature feature. They had visions of the
chupacabra
doing for their town what the little green men and their spaceships had done for Roswell, New Mexico, and the whole county, it seemed, had turned out to hunt the thing down. Pickup trucks had lined the shoulders of the little dirt road for miles. Parking was impossible. Squads of men with shotguns and orange hunting vests turned out for the hunt, some from as far away as Tulsa, chewing tobacco and hurling curses like marine drill instructors; yet there was an air of fun to the gathering, everybody laughing and joking about what they were going to do when they finally caught the goatsucker. They even had news crews to cover the spectacle. It had been like a day at the fair.

But there was none of that spectacle now. There were no pickups, no cartoons, no news crews. Just a lot of flat, open ranch land and sweet potato crops stretching as far as the eye could see, the view broken only by a series of crosses next to the road.

Five of them, strung out over about a quarter of a mile.

He pulled over.

The first cross he came to was made of fence planks that had been painted white and fastened together with a great deal of care. A bouquet of black-eyed Susans and Indian paintbrushes rested at its base with a jumble of sweet potatoes and corn and a cooked rabbit carcass, perhaps three hours old. The ants hadn’t even gotten to it yet. Colored plastic beads were strung over the bar. Nailed to the
center of the cross was a picture of a little girl in a blue dress, maybe four years old. He hadn’t seen her picture in the case file.

He glanced down the road, toward the old abandoned church that stood at the intersection of Farm-to-Market Roads 474 and 3008. In between, there were four more of the little crosses, each similarly decorated.

Five little lives cut savagely short.

When he’d headed out that morning he’d been so excited, so ready to make scientific history. But now, he felt uncomfortably sober. This wasn’t a joyride he was on. This was bigger than his career. Bigger than his feud with Marsh. Bigger even than the quest for the truth that had propelled him for so many years. It was all about this little white cross, this one little life that had no voice. Maybe he could change that.

He got back in his Suburban, drove down to the intersection, and parked behind the old abandoned church. The tarpaper shacks where the five dead children had lived were across the road. He saw smoke rising from cooking fires and a few figures moving in between the houses, but more goats than people.