His return was just beginning. Rodriguez and Guerrera, Randall Donovan. There would be more to come. Markham was sure of it, was sure that Vlad would go looking for his next victim very soon if he already hadn’t. So far the pattern looked as if he was into men; so far the pattern looked to be a murder every other month.
But somehow the latter didn’t feel right in Markham’s gut.
2006 is your comeback season, he said to himself. So where’s your calendar boy for March, Vlad? Or for January, for that matter?
Why does it have to be a boy? a voice said in his head. After all, you’ll remember Vlad was an equal-opportunity impaler.
There were only a handful of missing person reports around the Raleigh area for the last few months. Could one or maybe two of them be Vlad’s? Schaap’s team at the Resident Agency would begin looking into all that, but without bodies to go on, and without actual murder sites, they wouldn’t be able to make a thorough investigation. And what was the point? Maybe none of them had to do with Vlad. Maybe Vlad only had time to get to three. Maybe there was something about the crescent moon for February and April that he was missing.
Christ, he felt desperate.
“Tell me what you know,” Markham whispered.
But the stars only twinkled back with the eyes of Vlad himself.
There was no mercy them. None at all.
Chapter 13
The General unchained the drifter and let his naked body drop from the ceiling. He had been hanging upside down for almost a day and a half now—more than enough time for his veins to empty into the floor drain in the corner of the workroom.
The General had gutted the drifter and sawed off his head immediately upon his return to the farmhouse—sealed everything up in a garbage bag and buried it behind the old horse barn along with the remains of the first drifter. But the General hadn’t had time to fully prepare the second drifter until now. His day-life at the university and the big push toward the opening of Macbeth was taking up a lot of his time. However, all that would change once Macbeth opened on Thursday. His role would then be complete and he’d be able to focus on the most important parts of the equation.
Then again, Macbeth was part of the equation, too. A template of 9:3 or 3:1, depending on how you looked at it. Just part of the formula encoded in Elizabethan doublespeak and secret messages. Shakespeare understood the equation of 3:1 back then. Three Witches, three prophecies, three spirits—lots of threes to the one general Macbeth. But whereas Shakespeare wrote his equations on paper, the Prince wrote his in the stars
3:1 or 9:3, depending on how you looked at it.
It was right there in the stars.
The workroom had an old slop sink and spigot, to which the General’s grandfather had once upon a time attached a rubber hose. The General turned on the water and hosed off the remaining blood from the drifter’s body. And when he was clean, he dragged him to the center of the room and patted him dry with a towel. Then the General picked up the drifter’s corpse and carried it into the Throne Room.
The doorway was almost complete.
The General dressed the body in a set of white robes much like his own. He’d stolen them from the Harriot costume shop. Indeed, the Harriot theatre department had provided the General with everything he needed to accomplish his work. At first he thought he’d been drawn there because of his mother; thought he was following the path she would’ve taken had she lived. But soon after he landed the work-study job under Jennings, the General understood that he had been directed there by the Prince.
Yes, that was all part of the equation, too.
And when the drifter was ready, the General seated his headless body on the throne. The General had washed the robes and scrubbed down the throne itself with Pine-Sol, but the rotting stench of the first doorway still lingered. No matter. He had grown accustomed to it. After all, in order to be a general, one had to grow accustomed to the smell of death.
The General made the final touches on the drifter’s position—posed his hands and draped his sleeves over the arm-rests—and when he was satisfied, he slid the shelf back into place. The shelf was painted gold, too, and fit seamlessly into a slot in the back of the throne. Attached to the front of the shelf was a wooden panel onto which the General had carved a pair of doors. And once in place, the entire unit fit over the drifter’s torso like a pair of golden shoulder pads.
All the body needed now was its head.
That had been one of the messages he discovered in Macbeth—perhaps, one could argue, the most important of all the messages—but the General only recognized it a few months ago, after he was asked to design the trap for the set. The trap that opened into Hell.
Macbeth’s message about the head was actually pretty obvious if you knew what to look for. An armed Head is how the First Apparition is described—which, of course, was Shakespeare’s depiction of the Prince, the greatest of all warrior-generals. The armed Head is one of only three apparitions that actually speak to Macbeth. Thus, the General thought, it was the speaking that was most important—the High Risk/Clone Six song made that clear in the lyric, “You thought you heard me speak.” The Witches themselves speak to Macbeth in threes, but Macbeth was too stupid to understand, so anything pertaining to the actual plot of the play was of little consequence, the General thought. There were no messages in the plot. Plot was part of the smoke screen that obscured the real messages.
Yes, the messages lay in the factor of three itself. That was the equation; that was the formula as written in the stars. 9:3 or 3:1.
The armed Head then had to be the Prince as he was now—weakened, still spirit—and thus the General would need a real head to communicate with him before his return was complete.
The Second Apparition that speaks to Macbeth is described as a bloody child. That one was easy, the General thought. The bloody child was the General himself—the three to the nine or the one to the three, depending on how you wanted to look at it.
And the Third Apparition? A child crowned with a tree in his hand? That one was easy to decipher, too. That was the Prince holding the tree of life. That was the Prince resurrected.
After all, it was the words of Shakespeare’s Third Apparition that convinced the General that he had read the messages correctly.
Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are.
Be lion-mettled …
Yes, everything was clear if you understood the equation. The General had known for a long time that the body was the doorway, but once he understood that he needed a head for the Prince to speak, the only question that remained was, “Whose head?”
The answer came to him almost immediately.
And now, months later, as he placed the Prince’s head atop the shelf and stepped back to admire the completion of the doorway, the General cracked a smile when he remembered the first time the Prince spoke to him.
But there was little time for nostalgia.
The doorway was now open again.
It was time for the Prince to speak.
But more important, it was time for the General to listen.
Chapter 14
The reason Otis Gurganus always got the big bucks wasn’t because his family owned some of the best hunting grounds in North Carolina, but because he prepared long in advance. In the spring, usually five months to the day before bow season began in September. Oh yeah, the monsters—the fourteen-pointers and bigger—didn’t get that way by being stupid.
Sure, you had to know your enemy; had to know the lay of the land and the habits of the deer that lived there. But for Otis Gurganus, it all came down to preseason scouting: finding out food sources and watering holes; setting up a stand in the trees just the right distance from their bedding areas; getting settled at least a couple of hours before sundown or sunup. Commonsense stuff, but a delicate operation nonetheless. He knew from experience that the biggest bucks bedded alone and came out looking for food later th
an the others. Yeah, nowadays, he didn’t waste his time with anything less than a twelve-pointer with a twenty-eight-inch spread; always left the smaller ones for other hunters to keep the kill stats for his lodge high.
Gurganus hunted with a bow. Nowadays, he thought, the big bucks, the record breakers, would only get bagged with a bow. They weren’t stupid enough to stick around or congregate with other deer once they started hearing gunshots. Gurganus was still the record holder for the biggest buck bagged in North Carolina: a behemoth of a twenty-two-pointer that he nailed broadside from twenty-five yards just after his thirtieth birthday. That was almost ten years ago, but Gurganus knew his next and biggest buck was close; might even bag him this coming season if he was lucky.
The hunter stepped out of his pickup truck, flicked on his night-vision goggles, and headed out into the woods. He had been using the NVGs now for years and almost creamed his pants two Christmases ago when his wife gave him the newfangled GPS calculator. Wasn’t a cheap gift, either. Cost his wife over four hundred dollars, and cost him almost a whole week of nonstop boning her. But Gurganus never really got the hang of the GPS calculator until the following summer, when he started documenting deer activity and plotting it on his son’s computer. It paid off in spades for him this past season, even though he didn’t bag his next record breaker.
Tonight, however, he didn’t carry along his GPS calculator. No, on this, the first night of his preseason scouting, all the hunter had with him were his NVGs and his .45-caliber Sig Sauer. You couldn’t be too careful all alone in the woods at night; never know when you might come across something unfriendly, a rogue bear from the western part of the state or a pack of hungry coyotes.
But Otis Gurganus didn’t plan on using his gun tonight. No, tonight was all about listening; about sitting up in last season’s stands and getting a sense of movement. He had not been out in his woods for over three months now, but he would not kill any deer with his bow until September. Just like everybody else.
Yeah, Otis Gurganus always played by the rules.
The stand was only about three hundred yards into the woods and was situated at the edge of a large clearing that the hunter knew would be peppered with spring clover. And he made good time—got there at exactly 3:30 a.m. and had settled himself comfortably in the tree five minutes later. He’d not heard any deer running away from him while stealing through the woods; hadn’t seen them with his night vision, either. But that didn’t mean they weren’t around—especially the big bucks, who never gave up their positions unless they were sure they’d been spotted.
Gurganus hadn’t been in his stand long when his NVGs picked up something strange. The goggles were only rated for detail to about a hundred yards, but, whatever the thing was, the hunter could tell it was closer than that—just at the opposite edge of the clearing. It looked like an oddly shaped tree trunk, but for some reason Gurganus couldn’t take his eyes off it. Had it been closer to the season, had he dumped a pile of corn in the clearing to attract the deer as he’d done when he shot his record breaker ten years ago, well, he might’ve waited until after daylight before climbing down to investigate.
But tonight, so early in the off-season, with the woods so still and no sign of any deer activity at all, Otis Gurganus’s curiosity got the better of him. And in no time he was back down the tree and heading across the clearing. He’d traveled only a few yards when his goggles finally registered what he’d been unable to put together from his stand. The sight of it stopped him dead in his tracks.
The oddly shaped tree looked like a man—a skinny green man leaning against a pole.
“Hey!” Gurganus called out impulsively. “This is private property!”
No response—only the sound of his own voice disappearing into the woods—and suddenly he felt his cheeks go hot; felt a flash of anger in his stomach as he reached down for his Sig Sauer and began running across the field.
But as he drew closer and the skinny green man became clearer, Otis Gurganus’s fury quickly turned to terror. The skinny green man was not leaning against the pole. No, the pole was running up through the middle of his body—through his ass and out his shoulder! His legs were missing below the knees—made him look as if he was floating in the trees—and somewhere in the back of Otis Gurganus’s mind flashed a clip from some zombie movie he’d seen as a kid back in the eighties.
The skinny green man smiled back at him—mouth open, teeth bared, the lips pulled back or missing altogether. Someone had tied the guy’s head to the pole so that he appeared to be gazing down and to his left. His eye sockets, however, were empty; his eyeballs and his nose gone. Breakfast for crows, Gurganus thought in numb horror.
His heart was pounding wildly now; and standing there, staring up at the shriveled corpse not five feet away from him, Otis Gurganus suddenly felt a hot wetness running down the inside of his thigh. He registered it absently, as if it were happening to someone else. And years later, when he would tell this story to his grandchildren, more than coming upon a dead body all alone in the middle of the woods, the old man would swear that what really made him piss his pants was the glowing white symbols on the trespasser’s rotting torso.
Chapter 15
He is on a spaceship that looks like his bed at his parents’ house—is speeding through a ceiling of pasted plastic stars toward a fuzzy planet in the distance. He is almost there now—feels as if he can reach out and touch the yellow glow-in-the-dark circle through the windshield.
Then a message flashes on the console. The fuel gauge— STUPID FUCK! it says in bright orange letters—and he understands.
“This is the wrong planet!” he says, panicking. “I’ll have to switch to impulse power!” He flicks some switches and presses some buttons when suddenly another message starts flashing—this time across the windshield:
DEFLECTOR SHIELDS DOWN—COME ON, BALBOA!
“I’m going to burn up on entry!” he says as the theme from Rocky comes over the loudspeaker. The cabin is on fire and a heavy sinking feeling overpowers him as the flames lick up at his elbows. “Mayday! Mayday!” he wants to say, but the com-link is gone and the controls come off in his hands. I’m not going to make it, he thinks, and all at once his burning spaceship brightens … into the light of his bedside lamp—the theme from Rocky blaring away from his BlackBerry on the nightstand.
He’d fallen asleep while working.
Groggily, Markham reached for his BlackBerry, but his fingers weren’t awake yet and he knocked it to the floor. He lay there for a moment, unsure of where he was until the missed-call ding brought him back to life—pissed him off and rolled him over. He found his laptop on the bed beside him; wiped off the screen saver and saw the time in the lower right hand corner: 7:15 a.m.
The ding of a voice mail came from somewhere on the floor to his left, and suddenly he realized he couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about. Only a vague sense of anxiety and bright yellow helplessness.
Then the ring of the landline startled him. He answered it.
“Hello?”
“It’s Schaap.”
“Jesus, what—”
“I’m on my way to your apartment now. Get dressed and meet me out front as soon as you can.”
“What’s going on?”
“They found another body. Out in the boonies about fifty miles northeast of Raleigh. Bird’s already being puddle-jumped from Fort Bragg as we speak. We go airborne in twenty minutes.”
Chapter 16
In no time a black Bell Huey II had whisked Markham and his team from a nearby heliport, sped them through the North Carolina skies at 120 knots, and touched them down in Otis Gurganus’s field just after 9:00 a.m. A storm was almost upon them, and the pilot had warned that the landing would be tight—ended up having to circle the small clearing twice to accommodate for the wind and to allow time for the state police helicopter to clear out.
During the flight, Schaap brought Markham up to date on what the FBI knew so far: the circum
stances surrounding the discovery of the body, the preliminary time line of the murder, the similarities to the other victims, and the length of time the body had been exposed to the elements. They had a good idea who the guy was—had already laid some groundwork in conjunction with the missing person reports from February—but Markham didn’t need any database to tell him that the victim had been out in the woods since the first crescent moon of March.
From the air, he’d not been able to see him; only the blue tarp and the half-dozen or so state troopers surrounding it. And once they were on the ground, as the FBI agents approached from the Huey, the troopers, like children in a schoolyard, formed a curtain in front of the crime scene—held down their hats against the wind from the propellers and stared back defiantly, as if to say, “Red Rover, Red Rover, don’t you dare come over!”
“Who’s in charge here?” Schaap hollered.
“I am,” a voice hollered back, and a tall man with a red face and a lump of chew beneath his lower lip stepped forward. “Sergeant Powell,” he added. “You boys got your fingers deep in this one, don’t you?”
Markham and Schaap held up their ID badges, introduced themselves, and thanked the state troopers as the Huey’s propellers winded to a stop. The forensic team sprang into action, and the line of state troopers reluctantly broke apart.
Sergeant Powell looked annoyed.
“I’ve already secured the site, goddammit,” he said. “Fucker’s been out here for over a month it looks like. You boys ain’t gonna find nothing that the animals ain’t already dragged away.”
“You’ve established a perimeter on the nearest access roads?” Schaap asked.
“How the hell you think we got in here?”
The Impaler Page 9