“Melody, I feel it coming on. I feel the vibration in my chest from when I get . . .” Owen was pulled back to himself.

The next day, instead of walking, Owen drove the car to work for the first time in recent memory. Once he got there, he hid out in his office and showed himself only when he had to check books out for the patrons, which, thankfully, were few. Even the dozen or so he helped, he eyed suspiciously, although he’d known most of them since they were born. He was put off by the younger Kelsey boy’s incisors and Mrs. Morton’s selection of Interview with the Vampire. Throughout the day, he was undecided about visiting Kiara. He had to tell her about Feit and desperately wanted to know what she knew. His other consideration was whether to buy a gun or see if he could borrow Mrs. Hultz’s husband’s.

In the afternoon, he researched news stories of missing persons last seen in or who lived in Westwend. As best as he could ascertain, there had been zero going back at least two decades. But then he was sorry he looked, because in searching for “missing persons” in the county, the hits started accruing from nearby towns. The phenomenon was fairly frequent, but consciously, carefully dispersed in a sixty-mile radius, going back to the 1960s. People did sometimes leave town, though. Because no one knew where they went didn’t necessarily mean they’d been abducted, killed, and drained by a vampire.

Owen counted twenty-five, and those were the ones local police knew about. Granted, they were spread out over eight towns and four times as many years. The police departments in those towns by the barrens were understaffed, and the crime rate for drug-related offenses had risen in the 1990s, taking a good portion of those departments’ resources and time. Old Crenshaw was a crafty individual. He killed like a rabid dog but had the acumen of a tactician. If he killed a person every so often, he could drain them into his tub and save the blood somehow—if he could prevent it from clotting—to ingest over time.