The Impaler (3 page)

“And Homicide has been able to keep the details of the Hispanics’ murders quiet, too?”

“For the most part. They were lucky a policeman found Rodriguez and Guerrera. Drove by the cemetery on an anonymous tip and discovered them in the adjoining field. Cemetery is in Clayton, country town about fifteen minutes south of Raleigh. Papers said the victims were found together, shot and stabbed and, I quote, ‘put on display.’ Guer-rera also had some tattoos common among the
pandilleros
.”

“Sounds similar to what’s being going on in South America,” Markham said. “The drug cartels cutting off people’s heads and skewering them on pikes, bodies propped up on stakes with warning signs around their necks.”

“Still, not a real public interest piece,” Gates said. “Low-income, Hispanic immigrants from the projects. Story received barely a byline and quickly died down. Wasn’t so easy with the lawyer. He was found by a groundskeeper who needed a little convincing to keep his mouth shut. But he’ll talk eventually. They always do.”

“And you’re saying this lawyer—I’m sorry, what’s his name again?”

“Donovan. Randall Donovan.

“Donovan. They found him displayed exactly like Rodriguez and Guerrera?”

“For the most part, yes. Impaled with a wooden stake through the rectum, exit wound here at the base of the neck, just under the collarbone. Only difference, the Hispanics’ heads were tied to their stakes across their faces. Donovan’s head was tied to his stake at his neck. He was found in a baseball field; Rodriguez and Guerrera outside the cemetery walls. Willow Brook is the cemetery’s name.”

“May I see Donovan’s file?”

Gates slid the file across the table and Markham opened it. The first page was an eight-by-ten photograph of the crime scene: Randall Donovan’s naked, lifeless body skewered about a foot off the ground. His eyes were open, his neck lashed to the stake with a thin black cord—but his neck
appeared to be broken, his head arched unnaturally backwards, giving him the appearance that he was screaming up at the sky. Donovan’s killer had also left on the lawyer’s glasses. Markham made a mental note of it, quickly studied the series of close-ups, and then turned to the victim profile.

“Criminal defense attorney,” Markham said, reading, flipping. “Forty-five years old, married, father of two. Runs with some loveable characters, I see. This was the guy who got that mobster off last year? Raymond Galotti, Junior, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“He also represented Ernesto Morales on the trafficking and obstruction-of-justice rap. I read about that in the papers. The Bureau’s evidence was overwhelming, but Donovan got him a nice plea deal. Will do only a few years.”

“Donovan saved the Colombian’s family from being deported, too.”

“I didn’t know the Colombians were using MS-13 on the interstate level. Didn’t think the gang was organized or dependable enough for that kind of thing.”

“They’re not. An operation like Morales’s, the distribution from Miami all the way to DC, would be too high-maintenance for MS-13. Still a lot of territorial infighting, and the Colombians don’t trust them. Keep all the big-money stuff close to the vest.”

“But a hit like Donovan is right up their alley, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” said Gates. “But the Colombian connection to MS-13 in Raleigh is all but nonexistent. They’re actually in competition with them, at least on the lower-level stuff. Rise of the new Honduran drug lords and that kind of thing.”

“But what does this have to do with BAU? This isn’t our fight.”

Gates turned from the window and loosened his tie.
Q&A
is over
, Markham thought. Yes, any second now his boss would adjust his glasses, would push the silver wire up on his nose and then gently straighten the arms. It was Alan Gates’s “tell,” Markham discovered many years ago—his signal that he was getting down to business. He used to do the same thing in his lectures at the Academy. Back then, the naïve trainee secretly wished to play the unit chief in poker; wanted to see if the old man would tip his hand as he so often did in class. However, over the years, Markham began to suspect that Gates was fully aware of his tell, and would probably sucker the shirt off his back.

And sure enough, when his boss began fiddling with his specs, Markham suddenly felt anxious. As if Gates had just put him in for all his chips.

“Rodriguez and Guerrera,” Gates began, “were both shot in the head. Close range, same nine-millimeter handgun.”

“Ballistics report?”

“Originally from Homicide, but turned up nothing. The state medical examiner reported that the Hispanics had been dead before they were skewered. Donovan, however, was not.”

“You mean he was impaled alive?”

“Yes. They found his body early Sunday morning; had deep ligature marks around his wrists, his ankles, and across his waist as if he’d been strapped down. However, the state medical examiner found nothing near his mouth or on his face to indicate he’d been gagged. Killer wasn’t worried about anyone hearing him scream. He’d been dead for almost four days before he turned up in center field.”

Markham was silent.

“Homicide still doesn’t know where Rodriguez and Guerrera were shot. Rodriguez was reported missing by his parents the day after he disappeared, but no one said anything about Guerrera until the authorities found him. Prints
turned up a match in IAFIS. Both lived in the Fox Run apartment complex in the southeast part of town.”

“And their bodies? Discovered in the same general area as Donovan’s?”

“No. The two crime scenes are in rural areas on opposite sides of Raleigh, neither site near Fox Run. Rodriguez and Guerrera had both been dead for about forty-eight hours and appear to have been shot at roughly the same time. MS-13 activity has picked up recently in the Fox Run area, but it looks as if Rodriguez was not associated with the gang or any of its enemies. Guerrera, on the other hand, is known to have been a member of a low-level gang back in Mexico. Can’t tie him to anything here. Problem is, we can’t tie Rodriguez and Guerrera to each other, either.”

“I’m sure Raleigh has their informants. What’s the word on the street?”

“Nothing. No chatter at all about any gang connections.”

“What about Donovan?”

“Only thing we know for sure is that he was taken from outside his home in Cary, next town over from Raleigh. Happened late Saturday night, a week and a day before he turned up dead. He’d just returned from a fund-raiser downtown. Wife and kids asleep. No blood, no sign of a struggle, keys to his fancy Peugeot found in the driveway. ME said the back of his head showed blunt-force trauma. Killer used chloroform on him, too.”

“You said killer. How do you know there was only one?”

“There’s a wall of hedges separating Donovan’s property from his neighbor’s. Forensics found a set of fresh footprints in the surrounding mulch. Same tread, only one set, size twelve. Matched a group of partials from the baseball field. Forensics is working on tracking down the shoe model.”

“And where the Hispanics were found?”

“Again one set, same tread partial. Looks like our boy uses a posthole digger. Kicks up a lot of dirt, doesn’t seem too concerned about covering his tracks.”

“May I see the file on Rodriguez and Guerrera?”

Gates slid it across the table.

Jose Rodriguez, age seventeen, born in Honduras; Alex Guerrera, age twenty-seven, originally from Mexico. Rodriguez: legal, clean, high-school senior. Guerrera: illegal, back and forth across the border at least twice, and a bit of a record—gang activity in Mexico, petty theft, misdemeanor drug possession in the States. Nothing hardcore, however, and appeared to have gone straight; had a wife and three kids back in Mexico, worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in downtown Raleigh, and sent the money home every month.

Markham removed a photo of the victims: naked, side by side, impaled like Donovan, heads fastened to their stakes with the same thin black cord. However, unlike Donovan, the cord was tied tightly across their cheeks, causing their vacant, open eyes to stare straight ahead and giving their faces a strange, squished expression that reminded Mark-ham of Sylvester Stallone getting his face slow-motion punched in
Rocky
.

“Other than his record,” Gates said, “Guerrera is a bit of a mystery. Hadn’t been in Raleigh very long; was living with a cousin and two other men, illegals, all of them sending their pay back to families in Mexico, all ruled out as suspects. Guerrera’s cousin is still there, but the other two men have taken off. Raleigh PD has turned it over to ICE.”

“Looks like the Rodriguez kid was a straight arrow,” Markham said, reading. “Good grades in school, planned on attending community college for computers, it says.”

“He also had a part-time job at Best Buy and told the family he worked Wednesday and Saturday nights at a Mexican restaurant downtown. Raleigh PD followed up, found
that the restaurant job was bogus. No record of him anywhere. Left open the possibility of the drug connection. Checked the kid’s cell phone bill and saw a number of calls from prepaid, untraceable calling cards. All that’s pretty standard for the drug dealers nowadays, but they couldn’t prove anything. Regardless, looks like whatever the kid was into on Saturday nights got him killed.”

“What about the kid’s brother?” Markham asked. “Says here Rodriguez has a sister, eleven, and a brother, fifteen. About the time the gangs usually start recruiting, isn’t it?”

“Nothing there. Family, the kids are devastated; parents moved them out of Fox Run to live in another apartment complex in North Raleigh. All dead ends since the beginning of March. Of course, Raleigh’s abandoned the MS-13 theory now that it’s been turned over to us, but who knows what will happen if the media gets wind of the similarities between the crime scenes.”

“What about the possible link between Donovan and the Hispanics exclusive of outside entities?”

“That’s being explored, yes, but nothing so far.”

Markham scanned through the Donovan file again.

“You’ll find what you’re looking for at the end,” Gates said.

The FBI forensics report. Alan Gates knew him well; knew that his former student would look next for the real reason why his boss had decided to pay him this early-morning visit—the answer to Markham’s
“Why me?”

“The field office in Charlotte’s got a good team,” Mark-ham said at last, reading. “And I’ve heard of Andy Schaap—used to be one of the best forensic specialists around until the restructuring went down and he took the supervisory position in Charlotte. State medical examiner’s got a decent setup, where Schaap’s been working so far. ME’s preliminary report shows no physical evidence. No semen or saliva,
no trace DNA; nothing left by the killer except—is this right?
Comet
residue?”

“Yes. Looks like our boy scrubbed the lawyer clean. Sound like a hit to you?”

“And the others? State ME find anything on them?”

“No Comet residue, no. Killer just shot and impaled them, but it looks like he did scrub them clean. ME found traces of water in their ear canals.”

“Covering his tracks?”

“Maybe.”

“But a bit too cliché, too simple if we’re speaking metaphorically of dirty drug dealers and a dirty lawyer—the Comet, the cleaning. You wouldn’t be here if you thought it was that easy a read, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t. The killer wasn’t concerned about using Comet on Rodriguez and Guerrera. Might not have been important until Donovan; might have done something different to him that needed attending to.”

“Developing his MO, you think? Evolving?”

“I think so, yes.”

“The bodies—were they facing in the same direction?”

“Good question, but no. Rodriguez and Guerrera faced due east; Donovan, his body turned west, his head tilted back at almost a ninety-degree angle. The killer attaches a crossbar at groin level so the bodies won’t slide.”

“Then he’s a planner. It’s about more than just the violence of the impalement. The aesthetic is important, too. The display.”

“And the head tilted backwards?” asked Gates. “The glasses, the eyes open?”

“Textbook. The victim is supposed to see something and understand. However, the victims’ sight lines, the directions are different. Rodriguez and Guerrera, the cord across their faces, their eyes looking almost due east; Donovan’s body to
the west, the cord around his neck, his head arched back looking up at the sky.”

“Right.”

“Our boy drops them off at night; has to have a van or a large truck. Might be a moon freak. Do the disappearance dates correspond with the new moon?”

“No, different visuals on the nights the victims were last seen. However, on the nights they were found, there was a crescent moon. Could be a textbook lunar pattern; seen it many times before. Most recently, in that long-haul-trucker case—”

“The crescent moon,” Markham said suddenly. “Isn’t that the symbol for Islam? A star inside a crescent moon?”

“That’s right.”

“Could he possibly be imitating Vlad the Impaler? The Romanian prince who was the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
?”

“I’m glad to see you’re still up on your history,” Gates said, smiling. “And that was my first thought even before I made the crescent-moon connection. After all, before Stoker immortalized him in
Dracula,
the historical Vlad was known as one of the great defenders against the spread of Islam during the Middle Ages. Definitely the cruelest, as his moniker would imply.”

“And the victims?” Markham asked. “Any Islamic connection?”

“None that we can see so far, but we’re looking into it.”

Markham was silent, thinking.

“Then again,” Gates said, “we could be totally off base. Everything happening toward the end of the month could indicate something with calendars, but why the displays in February and April and not March? Might all be just a coincidence.”

“You wouldn’t be here if you thought that.”

Gates shrugged and smiled, his eyebrows arching like a pair of thick, white caterpillars. Markham flipped again through the Donovan file, the forensics report.