The only thing that marred the interior was an open package of beef jerky shoved down into the area where the windshield met the dashboard.
“Hain’t finished that one yet,” he said, seeing her stare at it. He turned to look at her and smiled wide, showing off a pair of gums wholly devoid of teeth. “Nice thing about jerky is, it starts hard but if you keep it in your mouth long enough it loosens up. I bought about three packs for the ride up here and I hain’t had to eat one other thing the whole way.”
Caxton’s mouth opened, but she couldn’t seem to get any words to come out.
“I did try to warn you,” Raleigh said from the backseat.
Chapter 7.
For the rest of the ride to Harrisburg they made little more than small talk. Caxton was anxious to start interviewing the Arkeleys, but she needed to get them alone in controlled environments where she could record what they said and where she could think clearly enough to work out the questions that were worth asking. The pickup wasn’t built for a smooth ride—she felt every bump in the road and especially every pothole—and it was all she could do to ask the one question that bothered her the most.
“Raleigh,” she said, “your mother. She wasn’t at the funeral.”
The girl sighed deeply. “No. I begged and begged with her, but she wasn’t interested. She said she didn’t care to share any memories of Dad, not with strangers. Especially if Vesta Polder was there.”
Caxton frowned. “They know each other?”
“From way back. Mom introduced Dad to the Polders a very, very long time ago. That was back when we lived in State College. Then maybe ten years ago Mom and Vesta had some kind of falling-out. At least, they haven’t been in the same place together since and neither of them seems to want to change that. I don’t really know the details. Sorry.”
Caxton had always been possessed of a certain morbid curiosity concerning Arkeley’s wife, Astarte. She had never met the woman, nor seen so much as a picture of her. Arkeley had rarely mentioned her and never provided even cursory information about her background. Caxton believed she still resided in Bellefonte but didn’t know for sure.
“I’d really like to talk to her. Can you call her for me?”
Raleigh gave her a polite but negating smile. “I can…try.”
“Okay,” Caxton said, feeling a headache come on. “Can you give me her number, so I can call her?”
The girl nodded and recited the digits from memory. Caxton fed them into her cell phone and then pushed the call button. The phone on the other end rang again and again without going to voice mail or even an answering machine. Eventually Caxton ended the call.
It wasn’t very much farther to Harrisburg, to the state police headquarters. Caxton made an appointment to speak with Raleigh, then got out of the truck and headed into the building.
Her destination was a room in the basement. It had at one time been a classroom where rookie troopers had studied the finer points of interrogation and collar processing. There were no windows in the underground room, but it did have a pair of wall-length whiteboards and a couple dozen adult-sized desks, which Caxton had found useful. It also held a bookshelf that Caxton had bought for herself and installed near the door. The bookshelf held mostly three-ring binders full of photocopied documents—every police report on vampire activity, every news account they could find, and the very few scientific papers written on vampires. On top of the bookshelf sat a laptop that got spotty Wi-Fi reception down in the basement. They were still waiting for funding to get everything digitized and put into a searchable database. Most of the SSU’s funding went to keeping the tip line open and paying Caxton’s and Glauer’s meager salaries. Next to the bookshelf stood three enormous metal filing cabinets that were still mostly empty but were meant to hold transcripts from the tip line and Caxton’s own detailed reports.
At the far end of the room Glauer was there already, writing on the whiteboards.
He had bought a coffee box at Dunkin’ Donuts and had a sleeve of cups ready to go. He offered a cup to Caxton, but the trooper got her caffeine mostly from diet soda. There was a machine upstairs that sold it, but she didn’t have time to run up and get one. The meeting was just about to start.
She sat on the edge of a desk near the whiteboards and greeted each member of the SSU as they came in. Glauer was the only other full-time member of the unit, but there were a dozen or so other cops who attended the briefings and were always on call if she needed them. The SSU was a joint task force operation, encompassing multiple jurisdictions. Some of its members were state troopers like herself, members of the area response team (the PSP’s equivalent of a SWAT squad) or troopers from the Bureau of Investigation. They came in first—most likely they were in the headquarters building already, just killing time before lunch. Later came some local cops from various boroughs, a lot of them from Gettysburg. Some were survivors from the vampire massacre there. Other local cops came from as far afield as Pittsburgh, Philly, and even Erie. These were regular cops who were looking to log a little overtime and they served as her eyes and ears in those distant cities. They looked half distracted, as if they had better things to do elsewhere, but they came, and that was what mattered. The last person to enter the room was a man in a black suit with a red tie. He had a small badge affixed to his lapel—a star inside a circle. The first time she’d ever seen one of those had been the first night she met Arkeley.
“Deputy Marshal Fetlock,” he said, introducing himself to Glauer. He was maybe fifty years old, but he still had raven black hair swept back from a high forehead. His sideburns had gone gray, but they were cut so short that you could barely tell. “Just here for a backgrounder,” he said.
Caxton was not surprised to see him there, though she had not invited him. The man was a U.S. Marshal, just like Arkeley had once been. Long before he had become a vampire Arkeley had retired from that service, but she knew that Fetlock and his superiors were taking an active interest in her investigation. If Arkeley started tearing people up it would look bad for the Marshals, so they had good reason to help her if they could.
She got started once Fetlock sat down, a cup of lukewarm coffee untouched on the floor next to him.
She introduced herself to the new faces and thanked everyone for coming while they took out their PDAs and their spiral notebooks. Then she got right to business.
On the whiteboard Glauer had taped up a number of photographs and drawn lines connecting various actors in the investigation. “Those of you who have been here before will notice something new,” she said, using a dry erase marker to indicate a section of whiteboard labeled VAMPIRE PATTERN #2.
Underneath was a picture of Kenneth Rexroth. It looked like a mug shot. Next to his name Glauer had written IN CUSTODY. Below the picture were two crosses with names next to them that she didn’t recognize. She knew who they must be, though—the night watchman and the janitor that Rexroth had killed. She thought about the janitor’s severed arm for a second, then got control of herself and went on.
“Last night I investigated a report of vampire activity in a self-storage facility in Mechanicsburg. It turned out to be a waste of time. The subject, one Kenneth Rexroth, address unknown, other aliases unknown, turned out to be a normal human being made up to look like a vampire. A copycat. He’d had no exposure to vampires before except through the media. I took him in without much of a fight and I’m considering this pattern closed for now, but we wanted to make sure people were aware this sort of thing is happening. Dumb kids. Bored kids, who think vampires are cool. We’ve had reports of this before, but this one ended in two fatalities. I don’t want to see this anymore—frankly, I don’t have time for it.