The Impaler

by Gregory Funaro

  Markham said nothing.

  “I’ve already made the arrangements for you to be there,” Gates said, handing him a brown cardboard envelope. “There’s a copy of his last letter in there on top of the Donovan file. Your in-laws faxed it to the Tampa Office by mistake.”

  Markham looked down at the elastic-banded packet. It felt heavy. Cold. Like a stone tablet.

  “I’m sorry about the timing,” Gates said. “But if there’s anything I can do, you know where to reach me.”

  “Thank you,” Markham said, and boarded the plane.

  ***

  Alone in the cabin, Markham stared down at the brown cardboard envelope. The loud drone of the plane’s turbo-props set him on edge. He made a quick body scan—cataloged his breathing and the tension in his forearms and toes. Suddenly, the plane throttled forward, and Markham told his body to melt into his seat. He felt himself relax immediately, and by the time the plane began its ascent, he decided he was in a better frame of mind to analyze the situation objectively.

  The date for Stokes’s execution had been set for almost two months: a vague point of light on the horizon to which Markham neither looked forward nor dreaded as it drew closer. He’d always planned on being present in support of Michelle’s family, but personally had no desire to see Elmer Stokes ever again. He’d seen enough death in his ten years with the Bureau to know that no closure would come of it.

  At least not for him. At least not that way.

  Before he killed Michelle Markham, Elmer Stokes had been known up and down the East Coast as a charming singer of traditional sea shanty songs. He’d been performing for the summer at Mystic Seaport when he spotted the pretty, twenty-six-year-old “scientist lady” and her friends taking water samples from the harbor. In his confession, Stokes told police that he followed them back to the aquarium, where he waited for Michelle in his car. He said he’d only wanted to “get a feel for her” and see where she lived. However, later that evening, when he spied Michelle leaving the aquarium alone, the man who called himself the “Smiling Shanty Man” could not resist taking her right then and there.

  Stokes told police that he wore a ski mask—said he “pulled a pistol on the bitch” and tried to push her in his car. But Michelle Markham fought back—kicked him in the balls and bit him hard on the forearm. She also tore off his ski mask, and Stokes said it was then he panicked—said he “shot the bitch twice in the coconut” with his .38 Special and fled. Two days later another performer at the seaport spotted the bite marks on his arm and called the police. They found the ski mask and the .38 in Stokes’s car. He confessed to everything, and the authorities eventually tied him to nine rapes in four states going back over a decade.

  The fact that his wife had been the Smiling Shanty Man’s only murder was of little consolation to Sam Markham, who discovered her lying dead in the Mystic Aquarium parking lot after she failed to return home that evening—his happy two-year marriage, his idyllic life in the sleepy little town of Mystic all shattered in the blink of an eye. It took him a year to pass through the wake of his wife’s death, the waves of which brought him straight to the shores of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Gates was right, Markham thought as the plane leveled off. The superposition principle. It was how he caught Jackson Briggs, the man the press called the “Sarasota Stran-gler.” And so Markham knew the only justice for Elmer Stokes lay in the superposition principle, too. After all, there was no way a Neanderthal like Stokes could ever comprehend the totality of his crimes unless he experienced what his victims experienced. And just like Michelle, the bastard would come out on the other side with two bullets in his head, courtesy of Sam Markham himself.

  Markham often fantasized about killing Elmer Stokes. Usually, he substituted himself for Jackson Briggs and Stokes for the Sarasota Strangler’s victims. What Briggs did to his little old ladies would be perfect for Elmer Stokes, and Markham himself wouldn’t even have to touch the filthy son of a bitch when all was said and done. That Markham so enjoyed these fantasies of playing Jackson Briggs was what bothered him the most—a mixture of elation and shame as he stared down in his mind at the Smiling Shanty Man’s violated corpse. Briggs didn’t finish off his little old ladies with bullets, but in order for the superposition principle to work—

  But of course, none of that could ever happen.

  Markham gazed out the window into the gray-white fog, the wispy patches of green and brown breaking through the low-lying clouds like memories sent up from the world below. He thought about Michelle’s parents, who in the eleven years since their daughter’s murder had enrolled themselves in Connecticut’s restorative justice program. Markham knew they had met with Stokes via a mediator at least twice, but had corresponded with him many times. He understood his in-laws’ need for closure, but never understood why they always forwarded the Neanderthal’s letters to him.

  Even worse, he never understood why he always read them.

  He opened the brown cardboard envelope and removed the files. On top was the letter from Stokes, along with a printout from CNN.com about the pending execution—only Connecticut’s second after nearly forty-five years of rehabilitative bliss. Markham crumpled the news article into a ball and tossed it on the empty seat across the aisle. But as always he read the letter.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Keefe. This letter here is going to be the last one I send most likely I think. It is going to be the shortest one to I think because all I have to say is I just want to thank you for meeting with me all them times, and that I am sorry again for what I done to your daughter. I diserve to die for doing that to her, and may be for what I did to them other ladys to. I hope you knowing that I want to die because I diserve to makes all of you feel better. I know I am not going to heaven, but if I was I would apolagise to your daughter up there because I know that is where she is living now. Yours truly, Elmer Stokes.

  Markham traced his finger over the Neanderthal’s words—the childlike print, the poor grammar, the refusal to call Michelle by her name.

  The name Stokes is one letter in the alphabet away from Stoker, a voice whispered in his mind. What are the chances of that? Is there a connection here, Sammy boy? Is something in the collective consciousness bringing you and Vlad the Impaler together?

  Markham crumpled Stokes’s letter into a ball and tossed it onto the seat with the discarded CNN article. Then he opened the Donovan file.

  Gates had placed the UV close-up of Randall Donovan’s torso on top of some preliminary research, including a brief biography of Vlad the Third, Prince of Wallachia—more commonly known as Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Dracula.

  Thought these might be of interest to you, Gates had scrawled along the margin of the first page.

  Vlad the Impaler, Markham read, scanning quickly. Prince of Wallachia, the area known today as Romania. The Romanian surname of Draculea means “Son of Dracul.” Vlad’s father’s title was Vlad Dracul the Second, or Vlad the Dragon. His son, Vlad the Third, earned the moniker Tepes after his death. Tepes is the Romanian for “Impaler”—de-rived from his preferred method of executing his enemies. Vlad Dracula was born in 1431, and had three separate reigns from 1448 to 1476. A member of the Order of the Dragon, he was a fervent and violent defender of Wallachia against the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Known today for his exceptionally cruel punishments and as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

  “The Ottoman Empire,” Markham whispered. “Modern-day Turkey. The Ottoman Turks conquered in the name of Islam and adopted Arabic as their official language. Is that what you’re getting at, Alan?”

  Yes, replied the unit chief in Markham’s mind. Look on the next page.

  Markham obliged and quickly read through some background on the Ottoman Turkish language—the heavy Arabic borrowings, the Persian phonological mutations, the three major social variants. It all meant nothing to him, didn’t register in his gut as important, and he flipped to the next page—information on the symbol for Isl
am.

  “Interesting,” Markham said, reading. “It wasn’t until the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 that they officially adopted the crescent moon and star as their symbol. Around the same time Vlad began his reign.”

  Another connection to the crescent moon, Gates said in his mind.

  Markham read on—discovered that many Muslims today reject the crescent moon and star as a pagan symbol, especially in the Middle East, where the Islamic faith traditionally has had no symbol.

  “I have returned,” Markham whispered.

  To defend against Islam? Which would mean then that the Arabic and the other Middle Eastern scripts are a message to the Muslim community. But why Rodriguez and Guerrera? Why Donovan? What’s the Islamic connection there, and why didn’t you write anything in Romanian, Vlad?

  Markham flipped to the next page.

  Impalement has been an institutionalized method of torture and execution for thousands of years, dating as far back as the tenth century BCE in the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations of Assyria and Babylonia. Throughout history, however, the fundamentals of impalement have remained the same.

  The practice involves a person being pierced with a long stake—most often through the rectum, sides, or mouth—and can be modified to prolong or quicken death. To prolong death, an incision is made between the genitalia and the rectum, and a stake with a blunt end is inserted, then manipulated through the thorax to avoid damage to the internal organs. Hence, the victim suffers excruciating pain for an extended period of time as he slowly bleeds to death internally. For a quicker death, a sharp pointed stake is inserted into the rectum or vagina with the intention of piercing the internal organs.

  In both cases, it is desirable for the stake to emerge from the body between the clavicle and the sternum, upon which the stake is most often set under the mandible to prevent the body from sliding. Typically, the stake is then hoisted vertically and inserted into the ground. Thus suspended, the impaled person dies an agonizing death that can take anywhere from a few seconds to three days. Sometimes the stake is installed upright after partial impalement, whereupon the combination of gravity and the victim’s own struggles completes the process.

  Markham closed his eyes—felt his stomach knot and his buttocks tighten when he thought about what Randall Donovan must have suffered.

  “But what were they supposed to look at, Vlad?” Mark- ham asked out loud. “The little crossbar so the body won’t slide; the heads tied to their stakes. The whole setup could be more about what they are supposed to see rather than what we are.”

  But the angles of sight, Alan Gates replied in his mind. The different directions, they wouldn’t be looking at the crescent moon.

  There’s the rub.

  Markham read on.

  Throughout history, impalement has been used as a quick and efficient method of execution during wartime, as shown in the accompanying Neo-Assyrian reliefs depicting the impalement of Judeans. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of the Persian king Darius the Great’s impalement of thousands of Babylonians. The ancient Romans not only impaled their enemies but also their own soldiers in extreme cases of cowardice and treachery.

  Used throughout Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages (and in some regions, like Ottoman Turkey, well into the nineteenth century) perhaps the most infamous instance of institutionalized impalement is that associated with the reign of Vlad the Third (Vlad Dracula), Prince of Wallachia, who came to be known as Vlad the Impaler. Some historians estimate that, during his lifetime, Vlad the Third impaled not only thousands of his country’s enemies (mostly Ottoman Turks) but also hundreds of his own people, including rival members of the Wallachian aristocracy, unmarried girls who lost their virginity, thieves (some of them children), adulterous wives, and homosexuals.

  Maybe it’s not just about the Muslims then, Markham thought. Maybe Vlad is once again expanding his repertoire among his own people. The lawyer could be seen as a thief. Dirty, dishonest. Also the possibility that he defended someone of Islamic faith—need to look into that. And Rodriguez and Guerrera? Maybe Vlad thought they were gang members. Dirty drug dealers. Washing them clean. Sending a message. A moral message.

  Markham looked at his watch and registered somewhere that he’d be arriving in Raleigh in twenty minutes. His head felt heavy, his brain swimming in a soup of data as the Vlad the Impaler tie-in became clearer.

  But something was off. He could feel it.

  It’s that little bit about the Romanian, isn’t it? Gates asked in his mind. Why didn’t Vlad leave his message in Romanian? Or at least in English. Wouldn’t that make sense if Vlad was “expanding his repertoire” among his own people?

  Maybe he thought we’d get the message anyway. After all, we did, didn’t we?

  Gates was silent, and Markham turned back to the UV close-up of Donovan’s torso—the evenly spaced, meticulously drawn pink letters.

  “You kept him tied down for a while,” he whispered. “But how’d you get him to sit so still? Was Donovan dead or unconscious when you wrote on him?”

  I have returned, a voice answered in his mind. I have returned, I have returned, I have returned.

  Markham closed his eyes and sank uncomfortably into the drone of the turboprops—into the low hollow hum of not knowing where to begin.

  Chapter 5

  Marla Rodriguez still missed her big brother very much. It had been over two months since the police found him and that other man in the field near the cemetery. And as Marla waited with the other children to see Father Banigas, the pretty eleven-year-old wondered if Jose could see her up through the church floor.

  She knew, of course, that if her brother had been in Heaven he most certainly would have been able to see her sitting there in her bright yellow sweatshirt. But Marla wasn’t sure how things worked down there with the Devil; didn’t think that even he had the power to see into God’s house. And the fact that Jose might not be able to see what she was up to made her sad; for even though her parents had assured her that Jose was in Heaven, Marla Rodriguez knew for a fact that her big brother was stuck in Hell.

  “No te preocupes, Jose,” she whispered to the floor. “I’ll take care of it for you.”

  Marla felt stupid that she hadn’t come up with the idea herself, felt guilty and sad that it had taken her so long to fix things. Deep down she knew Jose would forgive her. True, it had probably been really hard for him to reach her dreams all the way from Hell, especially since there wasn’t much room in them now with all the worries filling up her head—Papa and Mama always crying, the move to the other side of Raleigh, the new school, the new catechism class, and the new church—not to mention all the space taken up in her head from missing him! Oh yes, sometimes Marla’s head felt even more crowded than the place they’d moved into; it had way more worries than her uncle’s two-bedroom apartment had people. Nine altogether—people, not worries—well, ten, if you counted her cousins’ cat Paco.

  Marla didn’t like her cousins very much, and she certainly didn’t like having to sleep on the floor with her brother in the same room as Mama and Papa. But Marla had to admit that she liked living with Paco, who always slept on her pillow even though Diego was right there beside her. Marla could tell that Paco didn’t like Diego very much; and even though Marla didn’t like Diego very much, either, she still felt guilty for wishing sometimes that he’d gotten killed instead of Jose.

  I must remember to tell Father Banigas that, too, Marla thought. But I bet if Father Banigas ever met Diego, he wouldn’t like him, either.

  Whereas everybody used to like Jose, it seemed to Marla that the only person who liked Diego was Hector, the oldest of her three cousins. Hector was thirteen, two years younger than Diego, and Marla could tell that Hector thought Diego was el mejor because he could freestyle faster than anyone. Her other two cousins were just little boys and too young to give a crap about Diego’s flow, but even Marla had to admit that sometimes Diego’s rapping was pretty cool�
�but that didn’t change the fact that she didn’t like him! No, her big brother Jose had never called her names or pinched her arm when he wanted to use the iPod the three of them had shared back in their old apartment.

  However, after Jose died, as soon as her family moved into their cousins’ apartment, her father bought Marla her own iPod and stuck Diego with the old one. She hadn’t expected that, even though her father had picked up another job in addition to his one as a janitor at the Crabtree Mall. Marla had heard him and her mother arguing about the iPod late at night, but at least Papa wasn’t crying anymore before he fell asleep. Marla could never tell her Papa that the iPod didn’t make her stop crying, though—didn’t make her like her cousins or their apartment any better, either. But at least Marla could admit that things were quieter outside now: no cars revving up and down the parking lot; no bottles clinking and gangbanging pandilleros yelling at each other late at night. And best of all, there were no gunshots to wake her up from her dreams of Jose.

  “You can ask God for an iPod when you get to Heaven, Jose,” Marla whispered to the floor, and the boy sitting next to her elbowed her.

  “Silencio, chalada,” he said. “You’ll get us in trouble with Sister Esperanza.”

  Marla elbowed him back, and the boy let out a squeal that made Sister Esperanza get up from her seat across the aisle. All the children froze, but when Sister Esperanza passed by Marla without a word, it suddenly occurred to her that maybe the reason Jose was finally able to speak to her in her dreams was because it was so much quieter now at her cousins’.

  That had to be it! Yes, maybe there was something good about living there, after all. For even though Marla would never be able to ride in the car Jose had been saving up for while working at Best Buy, she would much rather just be able to talk with him like they used to when he was alive.