The Impaler (15 page)

Markham gave the office a quick once-over and stepped out into the studio.

Billy’s Tattoo Parlor was a small, one-man operation with a large plate-glass window and an L-shaped display counter full of cheap, sterling-silver jewelry. There was a couch and a Barcalounger toward the front, and behind the counter, along with a pair of chairs and a padded table, was Canning’s equipment. None of that stuff had been touched since the day he disappeared, Dorsey had told the FBI in a stream of tears, and Markham could clearly see the marks the forensic team had made in the dust upon their initial sweep of the parlor earlier that afternoon.

He wandered about looking at the images on the walls—thousands of drawings grouped by subject matter. He paused briefly at the signs of the zodiac, then came upon the letters and symbols—the obligatory Chinese and Japanese, of course, but also Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, even Egyptian. There were countless others, too, but no Babylonian cuneiform from what he could see, and certainly no arrangement of letters that even remotely approached the markings found on Donovan and Canning.

Markham worked his way in a horseshoe around the par-
lor and came to the section devoted to photographs of Billy Canning’s work: a large, six-by-six-foot bulletin board covered in Polaroids of tattooed flesh—arms and legs and chests and backs, a couple of necks and a pair of breasts here and there. There were hundreds of them, and Markham’s eyes darted about the photos haphazardly.

Canning was good, he had to admit, and the Polaroids were obviously of some of the artist’s best work. His eyes came to rest on a large back tattoo of a pair of sword-dueling ninjas. He thought of Jackson Briggs—removed the picture and stared at it for a long time.

The superposition principle,
said the voice in his head.
The ninjas are speaking to you, telling you to look closely, telling you not to miss anything. Like that time in the martial arts studio. Briggs was coming for your head with his ninja sword. Would have lopped it off like a pineapple if you hadn’t stopped to look in the mirror.

Markham’s left shoulder began to tingle. He quickly skirted around the counter, grabbed one of the chairs, and sat down in front of the bulletin board. He let his eyes wander slowly across the collage of jumbled body parts, scanning back and forth in a manner that reminded him for some reason of Arnold Schwarzenegger in
The Terminator
. There had to be a thousand pictures, he thought, going back many years.

Markham’s eyes began to ache with fatigue. What the hell was he looking for? The writing on Donovan and Canning? Was it possible Vlad had Canning tattoo the same thing on his chest? But surely Vlad wouldn’t have been so stupid as to let him take a Polaroid of it.

He gazed down at the photo of the dueling ninjas in his hand. The size, the detail, the color—how long would it take Canning to do a tattoo like that?

Vlad kept Canning longer than the others,
Markham thought suddenly.
Almost two and a half weeks. The hair
growth. What if the autopsy comes back and says Canning was alive for most of that time? What if Vlad had his own private tattoo session with Canning before he impaled him?

Pure supposition, Markham thought—but something about the image of the faceless Vlad forcing Canning to tattoo him gnawed at his gut.

Canning’s car was found out back
, Markham said to himself.
That means he had to have driven here after he went to the convenience store. But why so late at night? A private session? Could he have been two-timing Dorsey? Whatever the case, Vlad had to have known he was coming back here that night.

Or,
the voice in his head countered,
Vlad could’ve simply been following him. Canning could’ve come back here for any number of reasons—forgot his cell phone or some-thing—and Vlad took advantage of the situation. Pretty dark back there.

But the writing on Canning and Donovan is like a tattoo. He didn’t do that to Rodriguez and Guerrera. It started with Canning.

The voice in his head was silent, and Markham stared at the photos. He would have to get Dorsey back in here to double-check if any equipment was missing. Would have to follow up with distributors on any recent orders in the Raleigh area, too. Christ, that would be a pain in the ass—just another wild-goose chase? Was he really getting that desperate?

Markham sighed and returned the photo of the dueling ninjas to the bulletin board. The guy in the picture was bald—reminded him of an album cover he’d once seen.

What was the name of the group?

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Then it came to him.

Sublime.
That was it.
Picture of some skinhead-looking dude with the group’s name tattooed across his back.

Nineties music. Tattoos.

Markham didn’t understand nineties music—felt disconnected from it—and didn’t understand the ninties tattoo craze, either. Every stockbroker with his tribal band, every sorority girl with her “tramp stamp” sticking to the seat of her BMW.

Tramp stamp. That had been Michelle’s bon mot.

Markham smiled.

He can see her now, on the beach, rising naked from the surf like Botticelli’s Venus—her skin pristine and glistening in the sun, her hips swaying as she walks toward him.

“Where’s your clamshell, Venus?” he asks. He is naked, too, lying on the sand. Michelle kneels over him and kisses his lips. She tastes salty.

“I think it’s an oyster shell,” she says, and reaches behind him and clicks on an old-school-style boom box
—
Blue Öys-ter Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

“That’s right,” he says, then kisses her again. “Seventies and eighties all the way, baby. That’s where we belong. Another world. Another time.”

“I miss you,” she whispers.

“I miss you, too.”

A wave of sadness passed through him, and he opened his eyes.

He sat there well into the night, adrift on an ocean of tattooed flesh and feeling more lost than ever.

Wednesday, April 12

It was still raining, and Markham spent the morning at the Resident Agency updating Sentinel and studying the Rodriguez and Guerrera file. The FBI had already questioned Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez about a possible connection between their son and Randall Donovan, but not about Billy Canning. Markham had insisted on handling the Rodriguezes himself. He felt he should be the one to inform them their son had been murdered by a serial killer, but more important, felt he should be the one to ask them about their son’s sexuality.

Of course, there had been nothing in the case file to indicate that the young man might have been a homosexual. However, Markham needed to exclude that possibility for himself before he could move forward with the victim profile. He also felt he had a good bead on the Hispanic culture from his stint in Tampa—and unless the Rodriguezes were an unusually enlightened family of Catholics, he had a feel-
ing they wouldn’t take kindly to an implication their son might have been gay.

It was a slim possibility, Markham thought; but nonetheless, that line of questioning needed to be handled delicately. He decided Mrs. Rodriguez would be the best bet—would be the most receptive to him—but still he needed to catch her alone, while her husband was at work. The case file said she had a part-time job in the mornings, which meant she would be home this afternoon when the kids got back from school.

Besides, Markham wanted to determine for himself if Mrs. Rodriguez might be hiding something—not just from him, but also from her husband.

Markham drove first to the Rodriguezes’ old apartment in Fox Run—got a sense of the layout and gazed up through the rain at the large streetlights that peppered the parking lots. They looked out of place, an afterthought in the rundown, gang-infested neighborhood, but told Markham the property would’ve been well lit at night. Moreover, the apartment complex had too many balconies. It was raining on the night Rodriguez disappeared, but there still would’ve been a lot of people around to see the killer waiting. And there was only one entrance in and out of the place—too risky for Vlad to take him here.

Then there was the bus stop and the walk home. Not the safest area, but still well lit and well traveled. At the very least, someone would have heard the gunshots.

But the bus stop on the other end? That mysterious place from where Jose Rodriguez was really travelling on Wednesday and Saturday nights? Well, that was the big question, wasn’t it?

The police figured out early on that Rodriguez’s waitering
job was bogus, but had since been unable to pin down exactly where he’d been coming from on the night he was shot. On the other hand, there was a strong possibility that one of the restaurant owners was lying; his employees could be lying, too, for fear of getting involved and being deported. That’s what bothered Sam Markham the most: that he couldn’t rule out the possibility that perhaps Jose Rodriguez might have been telling the truth all along.

But Alex Guerrera had gone somewhere on Saturday night, too. He hadn’t been seen by his roommates since the night before and had asked to use the car they shared but then canceled at the last minute. Odd, they thought, but that’s all they could tell the police. No knowledge of a connection to
MS
-13 or any of the other Latino gangs that had sprung up in the area. There was nothing there, Markham felt instinctively, but he would talk to the cousin and track down the roommates if he got desperate.

It had stopped raining by the time he reached the Rodriguez family’s new home thirty minutes later. The apartment complex was located in North Raleigh; typical three-floor multi-unit built in the early seventies, complete with a sign at the entrance that advertised
LU URY RENTALS
in faded letters and a missing
x
. The property had some nice tree coverage, was definitely no Fox Run—working-class, some Section 8—but Markham could tell from the cars that it was on its way down.

He drove to a building at the rear of the complex, parked in a space beside an old Malibu and emerged to find two Hispanic boys staring down at him from a second-floor balcony. The older one (Markham pegged him to be about fifteen) was leaning over the railing smoking; the younger (short, twelve or thirteen) had been fiddling with an iPod and stood up as he approached.

The complex was strangely quiet, Markham thought; only the sound of the wind in the pine trees. He looked up at the building number; watched the boys out of the corner of his eye, and pretended he was unsure he had the right place. Judging from the layout, he guessed that the balcony with the boys was most likely the balcony for the Rodriguez family’s new apartment; the taller boy, most likely Diego.

“You looking for something,
jefe
?” asked the taller boy. Markham smiled and gazed up at the streetlights. “If you’re looking for your boyfriend, you ain’t gonna find him up there. Unless he’s a bird.”

The younger boy laughed and Markham turned back to them—produced his cred case from underneath his Wind-breaker and flipped open his ID. He held it up by his face and smiled as wide as he could.

“Looks like you get to be my boyfriend today,” he said. “FBI. Came a long way to ask you out, Diego Rodriguez.”

The taller boy swallowed hard, took a final drag off his cigarette, and flicked it from the balcony. He disappeared inside. The younger boy followed, calling out to someone in Spanish.

Markham mounted the stairs and quickly reached the apartment door—was about to knock when he heard the security chain rattle inside and the dead bolt unlock. The door opened slightly, and a Hispanic woman squeezed her face through the crack.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said in a thick accent. “My brother and my husband is working. Only me and the children right now.”

“I’m Special Agent Sam Markham,” he said, holding up his cred case. “FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. Are you Mrs. Rodriguez?”

“No. She my brother’s wife. They all working now they live here.”

“I see,” Markham said. “I’d like to ask Diego a few questions.”

“He in trouble again?”

“No, ma’am. It’s about Jose.”

The woman hesitated, pulled back from the doorway, and whispered in Spanish to someone inside. “I’m not going to make trouble for you,” Markham said. “Just send Diego out, and I promise I won’t come in. I’ll wait over here.”

He crossed to the stairs, leaned against the railing, and slipped his hands in his pockets. The Hispanic woman watched him for a moment, then closed the door. Markham waited, and soon became uncomfortable as he felt the presence of people looking at him through the peepholes of the surrounding apartments.

Finally, Diego Rodriguez emerged from the apartment. He was dressed in an oversized black T-shirt and a black baseball cap—tags still on and cocked to the side. He eyed Markham up and down and shuffled over, postured himself against the opposite wall and hooked his thumbs in his pockets.

Markham glanced quickly at the boy’s fingernails; saw that they were cut neat and clean against his baggy knockoff jeans.
Scared mama’s boy,
he thought, and knew at once that Diego Rodriguez would turn out all right.

“What time’ll your parents be home?” Markham asked.

“They both working,” Diego mumbled. “Six, six-thirty. Maybe seven.”

“You know why I want to talk to you?”

Diego shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know how much TV you watch,” Markham said, “but your brother’s murder has been turned over to the FBI now. You know what that means?” Diego said nothing. “Means now we have more people trying to figure out who killed him. Means now I have to ask you some questions like the police did so I get my facts straight.”

“I didn’t talk to Jose that much, and I don’t know nothing more now than what I already told Five-O. Only interested in us again cuz of that lawyer that got smoked. They asked my father some questions about Colombians and gangs and drugs and shit. Shit is wack is what I’m saying. Me and Jose, we wasn’t down with that. I told y’all that from the beginning, but no one wants to listen cuz some fool says the
pandilleros
done it. I don’t know nothing ’bout that shit ’cept Jose was straight-up.”