them, the new vampire was like a loaded gun in the hands of a killer. It would take weeks for them to be self-aware enough to be anything more than blood-seeking killers. New vamps were the most likely to tear out people’s throats by accident, because they could sense the blood in the body, and they wanted it, but there is a practice curve to learning to use fangs. Hell, once a person had been captured by vampire gaze, they could turn into an enemy. I’d had more than one fellow cop try to shoot his own men after a vamp mind-fucked them. So I agreed it was just standard because the evil master vampire would control them until he or she was killed, and if the master was new enough, killing him or her would turn the newbie vamps into damn near revenants that attacked and killed anything. Some vampires’ minds could survive the deaths of their masters, and some couldn’t, and those had to be put down like a rabid animal, because that was probably all they’d ever be. But as I read through the reports about families with children, engagements announced just before they disappeared, parents asking after their grown children on a weekly basis, I began to wonder if given enough time even the most insane new vamp could become more like who they had been?
There was no way to test the theory, because they were animals with superhuman strength and super-speed that lived off the blood of the living. They weren’t much more alive than a flesh-eating zombie. You couldn’t cage something like that and hope it improved over time, but looking at pictures of the vampires before they became vampires made me wonder how many people we’d killed who might have recovered to be law-abiding citizen vamps. It was like wondering if a serial killer could be reformed. The answer was no, but it was still something you wondered about when you heard of one who could go twenty years without a kill while he raised his kids to be teenagers. Apparently being the parent of teens was enough to send him back to killing. I’ve heard having teenagers was stressful, but geez.
‘You’ve thought of something,’ Edward said.
I looked up from the files, blinking because I had to drag myself back from the files, and the smiling faces, and the bloody faces, and my own thinking.
‘Not really, or not in the way you mean.’
‘Share,’ he said.
I glanced at Hatfield, who was looking at me now, too. If had just been Edward then I would have shared, but … ‘Just a weird thought I had about how new these vampires are. I’ve never been called in where this many people were listed as missing and then changed to killer vamps; one or two, yeah, but not dozens.’
‘It’s not dozens,’ Hatfield said.
‘I requested they send me all the missing-person reports for this area in the last three months, even ones they didn’t think were linked. A lot of people vanished in the same area, but over about a three-month time period. They found three bodies so decomposed that they thought they’d all fallen to their deaths and then animals got to them. That may be what happened; animals do that in wilderness areas and it’s routine to just accept it as accidental death.’
‘But you don’t think it was,’ Hatfield said.
‘If a vampire is powerful enough, it can go inactive for years and sustain itself, but when it wakes, or gets out of where it was trapped, whatever, it usually is a little crazy. It feeds in a more animalistic fashion, like a newbie vampire again, until it’s had enough blood to sort of get its head back to a point where it’s not crazy anymore. Some vampires never come back after being trapped without food for too long.’
‘Trapped how?’ Hatfield asked.
‘Cross-wrapped coffins, usually,’ I said.
‘Who traps them in cross-wrapped coffins? We’d just kill them,’ she asked.
I debated on what to say, and finally Edward said, ‘Vampires have what amounts to jail when one of their kind goes crazy and they don’t want to kill them.’
‘I thought they just killed each other like any other predator.’
‘Even animal predators don’t like killing one of their own friends, but vampires are just like regular people. They find it hard to kill someone they’ve known a long time, so they try to imprison them and hope they can cure them.’
‘You mean rehabilitate them?’ she asked.
‘Something like that,’ I said. In