Work filled up most of the rest of the day—paperwork, the kind she hated the most. She had to fill out a full report on what had happened the night before in Mechanicsburg. Then she had to sit through an interminable conference call with the district attorney and the Mechanicsburg police chief, going over evidence, presenting a clear case why Rexroth should be prosecuted. It should have been obvious, she thought. He had murdered and mutilated two people. The wheels of justice grind slowly, though, and by the time she signed out and got back on the road it was already four o’clock and the sun was setting. She needed to interview Angus and try to make contact with Arkeley’s wife again before she could call it a day.
The latter errand was easier said than done. She called the number Raleigh had given her and let the phone ring ten times before she hung up. She hadn’t actually expected an answer. She was going to have to meet the woman, and the sooner the better—most likely, Astarte was the last member of Arkeley’s family to see him before he accepted the curse. For the time being, however, she would have to settle for Angus, who had already told her he hadn’t seen his brother in twenty years. Angus was staying at a very seedy motel on the road to Hershey, a single-?story building with rooms that let out onto a shared porch, the whole construction stuck haphazardly in the middle of a black asphalt parking lot. The vacancy sign buzzed furiously out at Route 322—only two of the rooms had lights on. Across the street lay an undeveloped field of dry, dead weeds streaked with snow that glowed eerily in the last purple-?and-?orange light. Caxton pulled into a parking space near the motel’s office and stepped out into the chill. The temperature had fallen considerably since the morning’s memorial service and she reached into the backseat of her car for her jacket. As she leaned over, out of the corner of her eye she saw an orange light glow and sputter in the shadows out front of one of the rooms. Just the ember at the tip of a cigar. Angus smiled at her out of the darkness and waved her over. He had dragged two chairs from his room and put them in front of his door. He had a bottle of Malibu rum and a two-?liter bottle of Coke to mix it with. He handed her a motel glass as she sat down. “Figgered we could talk out here, if you’re amenable, and if you ain’t, that’s too bad,” he told her with a smile. “They won’t let me smoke in the room here.”
“That’s fine,” she said, drawing a digital audio recorder out of one pocket. “Do you mind if I record our conversation?”
“Naw,” he said.
She started the recorder and tried to clear her head. Tried to think of what to ask first. Glauer had always told her she should start with a joke, to ease the tension inherent in a police interview, but she didn’t know any jokes. She knew a little bit about small talk. “Angus and Jameson,” she said, to break the ice. “Are those old family names?”
Angus chuckled. “You want to know about our family? Well, the only fancy thing we ever could afford was those names. I suppose when you’re poorer than dirt, you take the best you can get, and names are for free. Our father named us both. Now, he was a character. Longlegs Arkeley, they used to call my pop, ’cause he always ran away the police got too close. He was what you call a man who enjoyed life to the full. Which means he was a man who enjoyed his whiskey, fine cigars, and young women. Had us when he was in his seventies, and lived to be a hundred and one, and his last girlfriend came to the funeral. Now, our mother, Fae, she was from old North Carolina hill women for seven generations, what they call down there a witchbilly. She could curdle milk in the pan, if she wanted, and she had an evil eye that could take paint off the side of a Cadillac, but she died young. Most like from trying to keep up with Longlegs Arkeley’s two sons.”
“Your father didn’t like the police. Interesting. Was he a bootlegger?” Caxton asked. She thought Jameson might have mentioned that once.
Angus nodded. “Yes’m. For a while it looked like young Jameson was goin’ that way too, toward a life on the wrong side of the law. He and I were real hellions in our prime. Got up to some pretty creative mischief ’cause there was a solid lack of aught else to do where we were brought up.”
“Where was that?”
Angus shook his head. “Didn’t have a proper name. A length of North Carolina that didn’t get electricity till the sixties, if that tells you something. We called it Bald Hill, but you won’t find that on any map.”
Caxton smiled. “It’s funny. I never thought of him as a country boy.”
Angus scratched his chin. “That’s understandable, since he weren’t. He got out quick as he could. Tried learning his daddy’s trade, but then one time when the law did catch old Longlegs—it weren’t the first time, or the last—Jameson came to his ma and told her he wanted to move away. Said he had saw the light and he wanted to go be a copper himself, ’cause they always won in the end. Old Fae she just grinned ear to ear, and gave him forty dollars she kept in an old pomade tin, and sent him off to police school in Raleigh-?Durham. Far as I know he never went back to Bald Hill again. He was a patrol cop in town for a while, but that didn’t suit him either, so he studied up for some big examination and got himself a job with the federales.”