The Impaler (21 page)

“And why do you accept?”

“The nine to three,” the sodomite whimpered, his tears flowing freely. “It is my destiny as written in the stars.”

The General strapped down the sodomite’s free hand and began gathering up the tattoo equipment. The sodomite screamed again to be set free, but the General ignored him. Besides, the sodomite hardly had any voice left at all. He’d been in the chair for over a week.

And despite the circumstances, even the Prince was impressed with the sodomite’s work on the doorway—or at least he seemed to be. The power of the first doorway, the
one on the throne, was already beginning to weaken by that point. The General had only allowed the sodomite’s right hand to be free and kept his Beretta pointed at his head the entire time he used his needle. That was one of the reasons the tattoo had taken so long to be completed; for even though the General was strong, his arm often grew tired from holding the gun for long stretches at a time.

The General often wondered if the police knew about the stolen tattoo equipment—older equipment, which the General had taken from a storage closet at Canning’s. He also wondered if the sodomite’s lover ever suspected his beau was having an affair at the tattoo parlor behind his back. Granted, the Prince hadn’t allowed the affair to go on long. Just long enough for the sinful sodomite to touch and kiss the doorway; just long enough for him to let his guard down and become attracted to the young man who called himself Ken Ralston.

But now, over two months later, the General understood that with the discovery of the corrupt lawyer the FBI was involved. And thus the General also understood that, now that the authorities had ditched the drug cartel connection and were calling him a serial killer—Vlad the Impaler
,
how ridiculous!—well, now things would have to be different.

No, the General would not be able to go back to West Hargett Street tonight. Instead, he would have to spend the evening in consultation with the Prince.

The rose. Cindy Smith. The cast party Friday night.

Perhaps the Prince would like the General to recruit his soldiers elsewhere?

Edmund took a deep breath. He needn’t worry about all that now, for unlike the beginning, when the General had to decode and interpret the messages from the Prince on his own, now the General could ask the Prince directly, and the Prince would answer him with his visions.

As long as the doorway remained open.

Edmund returned the rose to his book bag and sat admiring it for a long time—its stem, a long wooden stake planted in the earth; the flower itself, the scrubbed-white flesh of the next soldier.

A sign,
he heard the General whisper in his mind.
The female most certainly has given us a sign.

Markham sat at the Resident Agency conference table with a sea of paperwork stretched out before him. He had been there all day; had gone home at 2 a.m. the night before and only punched four restless hours of sleep on the clock before returning to the Resident Agency at eight.

The story broke about four hours later, and was all over the news by three that afternoon—Rodriguez and Guerrera, Donovan and Canning, all connected in their grisly, graphic glory. The FBI had learned that the groundskeeper who’d discovered Donovan in the baseball field was going to talk. He’d already made a public statement and was scheduled to appear on
Nancy Grace
that evening. Gurganus would roll soon, too, he knew. They always did.

Word had also gotten out about the writing on Canning’s chest via “a reliable source inside the investigation.” Markham thought most likely one of Sergeant Powell’s boys had been paid off, and unless the FBI didn’t deal with this information swiftly, the vultures were going to be a pain in the ass about it. Fortunately, an FBI spokesperson had tem-
porarily dodged the question during a press conference earlier that afternoon.

However, rather than seeing all the media attention as a roadblock, Markham relished the idea of getting the vultures to work for him for a change. And so the FBI decided to release an incomplete image of the writing found on Billy Canning’s torso. They would also alter the image to include a line of what they said “appeared to be Romanian.” This would satisfy the press and let them run with the Vlad angle while the FBI followed their real leads.

Their real leads
.

Markham stared down at them on the table. It had taken him, along with Schaap and their consultant in the classical studies department at NC State, over twelve hours to put it all together—feverish bouts of research and discussion broken up by long stretches of waiting while this or that theory was followed up on. This last follow-up had taken the longest of them all. Markham had been waiting to hear back for almost two hours. But that was all right, for this last follow-up was indeed going to be the
last—
the most important piece of the puzzle; the proof that all his research had not been for naught.

“Here it is,” Schaap said, entering. “I got one of the boys preparing the JPEG scan as we speak.”

He handed Markham a copy of a black-and-white photograph.

Markham studied it for an entire minute without speaking.

“I’ll call Alan Gates,” he said finally.

But he did not move.

No, for the moment Sam Markham was content to just sit there gaping, unable to believe his eyes.

The General stepped into the farmhouse, set the alarm, and checked his watch. If the second act had started on time, he thought, Macbeth was about to get his head cut off. The General thought this fitting, as he himself was about to consult the Prince’s head in the Throne Room.

All part of the equation. Everything connected.

The General was happy to finally be home. True, the young man named Edmund had only stayed to watch the trap open for Duncan’s descent into Hell, but still it had seemed like a long time. Jennings had stopped by to see how things were going and told Edmund to go home; said he was a good worker and gave him a key to the tool closet—“for the summer theater season,” he added.

This sat well with Edmund Lambert, even though he would soon have no more need for the tool closet. In fact, he would be
long gone
by the time summer theater began. After all, it was during the summer that the Prince was prophe-sized to return—as in the old days, in the burning sun of noontime, bringing war and pestilence and destruction with the deadly harvest of the summer solstice.

And the Prince’s army would return with him; would be waiting by the doorway, ready to serve and pave the way for what was to come.

But someone would be waiting for the General, too. And once he was able to pass through the doorway, they would be together again. In this world or that? Well, the General wasn’t sure.

The General smiled and went upstairs, undressed in the bathroom, and stepped into the shower. And as he scrubbed off the remains of his day-life, his mind soon wandered to the young woman named Cindy Smith.

He turned up the water as hot as it would go and stood there watching as it reddened the flesh beneath the large tattoo on his chest and stomach. And when the doorway became numb with the pain, he closed his eyes and imagined Cindy Smith in her spirit costume, rising up from the trap and stepping through his flesh from the depths of Hell. He opened his eyes and gazed down at the doorway, half expecting to see her there with him in the shower, and saw instead that he had grown erect.

He would need to consult the Prince about all this; would need to look for her in his visions, in the flashes of images and sounds. He hoped he would find her there, and began to wonder if the she wasn’t part of the equation, too.

Alan Gates had been dreaming about pigs when the telephone startled him awake. The clunky old ringer was set on high, but his wife kept on snoring. She was used to it; had always been a heavy sleeper, but had been conditioned over the course of their thirty-five-year marriage to snore through her husband’s occasional late-night interruptions.

It was all part of being married to “the life,” just one of the many sacrifices that Debbie Gates had made for her husband over the years. And in all that time, he never once took her for granted; still thanked God every night for his blessings even as he thought it was only a matter time before the Old Man Upstairs pulled the rug out from under his feet—just as He’d done to so many others in his line of work.

A deeply religious man, Alan Gates had indeed been blessed over the last forty years. Had come out unscathed from two tours in Vietnam and quickly made his way up through the ranks of the FBI in the seventies and early eighties. He could’ve long ago been promoted to director if he’d gunned for it; could have retired by now, too. But the unit chief slot at Quantico was where his heart was; and when he
thought about it, he considered himself as much a part of the Behavioral Analysis Unit as the glass and steel and brick in which it was housed.

However, the fact that his wife had learned over the years to sleep through his late-night telephone calls always made him feel uneasy—even more so now that the kids were moved out and married. Heaven forbid if he was away on a case and needed to get in touch with her. Heaven forbid if there was ever an emergency. And if the Old Man were to decide that it was finally time to pull that rug out, Gates was sure He’d do it while he was away and Debbie was asleep—a fire or some other tragedy in which, if only she’d woken up, she could’ve been saved.

Something like that would be most in line with the Old Man’s MO, for over the years Gates had come to the conclusion that not only did God have a sick sense of humor but also that He judged a man’s character by how well he could take a joke.

Gates fumbled for the receiver and squinted at his bedside clock.
11:17 p.m.

“Yes?”

“Alan? It’s Sam.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sorry to bother you so late, but I’m here with Andy Schaap at the RA in Raleigh. We’ve found something. Something we need to get moving on right away.”

“Give it to me.”

Gates listened carefully as his number-one agent explained his theory. And when Markham was finished, Gates hung up and lay in bed staring up at the ceiling. His wife had slept through the entire conversation—had already started snoring full force again by the time he donned his bathrobe and closed the bedroom door gently behind him.

He would make his telephone calls downstairs in his study, but would first make a pot of coffee to clear his head.
The necessary arrangements wouldn’t take much time. He could be back in bed in less than half an hour if he wanted. But Alan Gates decided it would be better if he remained in his study. After all, there was no way he was going to fall back to sleep now.

Not after what Sam Markham had just told him.

Cindy Smith hated that she enjoyed getting bigger applause than Bradley Cox—actually despised that diva side of her personality—but at the same time wasn’t about to lie to herself and pretend it didn’t matter. It did.
Oh, how it did!
And when the audience began their standing ovation on
her
bow; when their applause died down ever so slightly for her costar—
slightly, yes,
Cindy thought,
but noticeable enough that even Bradley’s parents had to hear
—the young actress felt as if her heart would burst with pride.

But when she looked toward the wings and saw that Edmund Lambert was nowhere to be found, Cindy felt her heart deflate. She was sure he would’ve been there watching, applauding, smiling—especially after what had passed between them just before intermission.

“Thank you for the flower,” he said, catching her in the stairwell on the way back down to her dressing room.

“Thank you for looking out for me,” Cindy replied.

Then, a long silence in which she saw the corner of Edmund’s mouth turn up, his eyes narrowing as if he was studying her. Cindy felt her cheeks go hot, felt as if an elec-
tric generator had been turned on in the stairwell—the low hum of a charged circuit suddenly connecting them at their chests. He wanted to kiss her. She just knew it. And oh God how badly she wanted to kiss him back!

“You’re very special,” he said finally, his steel-blue eyes locked with hers in that way that made her retinas tingle. “I never realized just how special until tonight.”

Then he smiled and was out the stage door.

Cindy felt as if she were on fire; made her way back to her dressing room and changed into her next costume with the hum of the electric generator never leaving her. It powered her all through the second act. And even before she took her bow, she knew her performance had been a triumph.

But now, as the lights dimmed and the cast left the stage to resounding applause, Cindy’s victory felt curiously hollow. She was on autopilot, it seemed, and caught herself paying only half attention to George Kiernan as she searched for Edmund among the crowd outside her dressing room. He never showed. And when Amy Pratt asked her to join the rest of the cast downtown for a beer and some cheese fries, Cindy politely declined and drove back to her house feeling more alone than she had in a long time.

She lay awake well into the night, straddling the thrill, the satisfaction of her bravura performance along with the hollow disappointment that Edmund Lambert hadn’t returned to the theater after she saw him leave. She had a crush on him. A bad one. And her awareness of how deeply his absence affected her only made matters worse.

Had she misread his signals? Had she come on too strong with the rose? Perhaps she was overreacting—being “melodramatic” as her mother would say. After all, there had to be a simple explanation, hadn’t there?

Nonetheless, Cindy still felt the electric circuit she had closed with him humming quietly beneath her thoughts. And
once again she found herself sitting in front of her computer. She didn’t bother with her Facebook page, but instead went straight for Google Earth and typed in the address she’d found in the campus directory. A couple more clicks and Cindy zoomed in the satellite imagery as close as it would go. She went back and forth between plus and minus until she was satisfied, but still the photo was grainy and un-clear—a blurry white square at the end of a long dirt road; some smaller squares surrounded by clumps of trees and patches of green farmland.