The Impaler

by Gregory Funaro

  Markham set the tracing and the BlackBerry on his desk—leaned on his elbows and rubbed his forehead, thinking. “Those lips and the crescent moon,” he said finally. “When I was sitting there in the theater it was as if something was speaking to me, too. I can’t explain it, Schaap, but I don’t think those lips are finished speaking to Vlad either.”

  “The ‘I’ in ‘I have returned,’ you mean? A figure literally speaking to Vlad from the stars? Like in the drag theater?”

  “That’s what I think, yes.”

  “But Vlad didn’t start writing on his victims until Canning.”

  “Right. And the writing was different on Donovan—the phrase written over and over again and then washed off—which means Vlad is still evolving. Perhaps his pattern on the ground is evolving, too. Maybe the three stars in the logo are a starting point off of which he plans to build a bigger picture. I also wonder if he didn’t know what he was doing yet with Rodriguez and Guerrera. Or maybe his plans got screwed up and he didn’t have time to impale them alive.”

  “The gunshots you mean?”

  “That’s right. Vlad held on to Rodriguez and Guerrera for about forty-eight hours. He held on to Donovan and Canning for longer. We know for sure that Donovan died from the impaling itself, but I’m willing to bet Canning did, too. They were also murdered one at a time and put on display individually, unlike the Hispanics. It’s why I now have a feeling that Rodriguez was the prize all along—at Angel’s—and Guer-rera showed up unexpectedly. Vlad had to improvise.”

  “Rodriguez and Guerrera were lovers, you think?”

  “I don’t know. We might never know unless we can tie them together.”

  Just then an agent poked his head into Markham’s office. Joe Connelly was his name—a big, rough-voiced guy with whom Markham had talked about the Red Sox the week be- fore. Markham was happy for some reason to find out that Big Joe was a Sox fan, even though he himself had never given a rat’s ass about baseball.

  “Kid’s stuff is starting to come in,” Big Joe said. “I’ll leave everything in the conference room before the first batch goes out to Quantico.”

  “Thanks,” Markham said. “Come on, Schaap, let’s take a look.”

  Schaap followed Markham into the conference room. Spread out on the table were the remains of Jose Rodriguez’s act—the shoebox and its contents that Markham had seen earlier, all tagged and placed inside clear plastic bags—as well as a large wig on a Styrofoam head and a CD in a plastic case. They had also been tagged and bagged.

  Markham and Schaap each put on a pair of rubber gloves.

  “So,” Schaap said, holding up the plastic bag containing the wig. “He called himself Ricky Martinez when he wore this shit?”

  “No,” Markham said, fingering the other items. “Angel said his stage name was something else—something Spanish.”

  “Here it is,” Schaap said. “A piece of masking tape underneath the wig on the forehead. Leona Bonita, it says. I don’t speak Spanish, but I know the word bonita means beautiful, right? Remember that Madonna song, “La Isla Bonita?” Song used to get on my fucking nerves—” Schaap stopped.

  It was Markham. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost.

  “What is it, Sam?”

  “Leona Bonita,” he said. “It means beautiful lion.”

  “So?”

  “Leo the lion is one of the constellations that return to the nighttime sky in the spring. It’s also one of the constellations that would’ve passed through the Hispanics’ sight lines on the night they were left in the cemetery.”

  “You think there might be a connection there, too? Because Rodriguez called himself Leona Bonita?”

  “The crescent-moon visual, the stars at the club, and then the beautiful lion literally singing beneath them—maybe that’s why Vlad didn’t bother writing the messages on him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe Vlad saw him as part of the message—perhaps the most important part. The figure speaking to him in the stars—the lips with the microphone beside the crescent moon—they could represent to Vlad the mouth of Leo the lion.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “And if Vlad thought it was Leo speaking to him through Rodriguez, he would have no need to write on Rodriguez because the kid was part of the message itself.”

  “That would mean that Vlad was also communicating to Leo via the impalement of Rodriguez and Guerrera. Sending some kind of message like, ‘Look at me, Ma’—some kind of human sacrifice, maybe?”

  “Yes.”

  “But if Vlad is sacrificing his victims to Leo, to whom does the ‘I’ in ‘I have returned’ refer? Vlad or the constellation?”

  “Perhaps both.”

  “You mean he sees himself as Leo?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps he’s speaking to Leo on behalf of someone or something else; perhaps he is challenging the constellation. Whatever his reason, I know Vlad wants the figure in the stars to see his victims impaled—either Leo, whatever that constellation represents to him, or something else connected to it.”

  “A god or some mythological figure?”

  “Perhaps something like that, yes—that is, if I’m right about Leo to begin with.”

  “But the impalement,” Schaap said. “How the hell does that connect to the constellation Leo?”

  “I don’t know, Schaap,” Markham said. “I haven’t got that part figured out; could be spinning my wheels again.”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “But I know in my gut that it began with Rodriguez at the drag theater, and then somehow Guerrera got into the mix. It also began at the cemetery, the first murder site. Perhaps there’s something there I missed. Something that—”

  Markham stopped, furrowed his brow for a moment, then suddenly bolted from the room—peeled off his rubber gloves and tossed them onto the floor as he dashed back into his office. He put on his Windbreaker.

  “Where are you going?” Schaap asked, running after him.

  “Back to the cemetery. Meantime, you begin with Leo. Dig up everything you can about the astrological sign and its origins, its history and its place in different cultures and whatnot.”

  “The writing you mean?” Schaap asked. “Those cultures represented by the Arabic and the Egyptian and shit?”

  “Yes. There’s got to be a link to the constellation there, as well as a possible link to the impalements.”

  “But why are you going back to the cemetery?

  “I think I missed something. Something so obvious I should be taken out back and shot.”

  “What?”

  “Another message,” Markham said.

  And then he was gone.

  Chapter 26

  Now he was Edmund Lambert again.

  He pulled his pickup into the Harriot Theater parking lot and turned off the ignition. He sat there for a long time just watching the rain drizzle down the windshield. He would need to watch the final dress rehearsal of Macbeth tonight; would also have to be there tomorrow night before the opening to make sure the trap was working smoothly. But then that was it. Finally, the General would be free again to conscript the next soldier into service—soldiers, he had to keep reminding himself. Yes, in order to balance the equation, he owed the Prince two of them.

  That would make things 6:2—or 3:1, depending on how you wanted to look at it.

  He had begun with the tattoo artist—the sinful sodomite named Canning. The General thought the Prince wanted him to be the first, for the sodomite named Canning had seen the last of the doorways with his own eyes, had even been allowed to touch it—to run his fingers over it and kiss it.

  But on the night the General followed Canning to Angel’s, when the show began and the Spanish drag queen appeared on the stage looking so much like a lion, the General was overcome with a feeling similar to his anointing in Iraq; felt as if his whole body had collapsed into itself, just like the day on which he was officially chosen to become the Prince’s second in
command.

  And then there was the song; the song that the boy sang and prowled about to on the stage—yes, the General thought, the Prince was speaking to him as in the old days!

  “How could you think, I ’d let you get away?

  When I came out of the darkness, and told you who you are.”

  But still the General needed to be sure. And so he consulted the Prince in the Throne Room and was pleased to learn that he had read the messages correctly. And once he began stalking the boy, once he discovered that all the drag queens used the back entrance, he knew what needed to be done.

  The end of the month drew closer, and on the night before the drag show, the General pulled up his van to the old plank-board fence that separated the nightclub’s alleyway from the parking lot of an empty warehouse. He loosened one of the fence boards, slipped through the opening, and decided the space behind the Dumpster would be the best place from which to strike.

  The following night, everything seemed at first to go according to plan. The General tailed the drag queen’s bus as he had done many times and waited in the parking lot behind the club; stood listening on the opposite side of the fence and got into place behind the Dumpster when he heard the applause inside. It started to rain, but the General only smiled. Divine providence, he thought, for the rain would keep any potential witnesses inside.

  However, about twenty minutes later, when the General saw the young sodomite come out of the club with a stranger, all at once he began to panic. The men were arguing in Spanish. The General couldn’t understand everything they were saying, but heard the word dinero thrown back and forth a few times. He’d picked up enough Spanish in the Army to know that dinero meant money—but the men kept getting louder, until finally the stranger forced the drag queen to his knees and unzipped his fly.

  The General watched and listened as the drag queen took the stranger in his mouth, and in a rush of adrenaline he suddenly felt his plan slipping away. He’d have to kill them both if he was to take the drag queen tonight—he might not get another chance before it was too late—but the stranger was not part of the equation! Taking him also might throw off the 9:3 and ruin everything!

  Then, without thinking, the General felt himself being propelled out from behind the Dumpster. He fired in quick succession—Thhhwhip! Thhhwhip!—dropping the two men with a silenced bullet to each of their heads before they even saw him.

  The rain was coming down hard now, and the General quickly dragged the bodies through the hole in the fence and loaded them onto the plastic tarp in the back of his van. The chloroform he had made from a recipe on the Internet, the rope and the pipe he had stolen from Harriot—all of it was useless to him now! And once he was safely out of the city, he became fearful that he screwed up the Prince’s plan beyond repair, for even though the Prince loved his second in command above all others, he did not tolerate failure from anyone.

  He shouldn’t have brought the gun. That had been his mistake.

  The General was almost in tears by the time he got back to the farmhouse. He pulled the van around back, unlocked the bulkhead to the cellar, and dragged the tarp containing the bodies down the stairs and into the reeducation chamber.

  The General then rushed into the Throne Room—threw himself on the floor and punched himself again and again in the face until his eyes watered and the blood began to trickle from his nose. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” he cried.

  But the first drifter had only been on the throne for a week—had hardly begun to smell at all—and the Prince’s voice came through the doorway loud and clear.

  The General listened carefully for a long time—closed his eyes and allowed the Prince’s voice to penetrate his entire body. That was how the General had to listen: with his entire body. For the Prince’s voice was not a voice at all; instead, he spoke to the General in flashes of pictures and sounds that scrolled through the General’s mind like TV channels being changed with a remote control. The General assumed it had been that way for all the warrior-priests—those chosen few who had been allowed access through the doorway. And not only did the General understand the pictures and sounds, when the doorway was fresh, the Prince’s “voice” blocked out all other thoughts from his mind.

  Back in the present, sitting there in his truck, Edmund Lambert recalled what the Prince had told the General on that night. And even now he felt silly for having worried so. He should’ve known right away that Leona Bonita and the other sodomite were part of the message itself. They already understood the 9:3, the 3:1. Yes, they would be waiting at the doorway when the Prince called them into service; they would recognize him at once and embrace their destiny.

  Edmund Lambert exited his pickup and headed for the rear of the building, cut through the small breezeway that connected the theater to the academic buildings, and hurried down the steps that brought him past the large bulkhead for the props cellar. He smiled. It was there that he’d found the dentist’s chair last semester—from an old production of Little Shop of Horrors, someone had told him. Jennings still hadn’t missed it, and the General had since modified the lever mechanism and outfitted the lower half with leg brackets constructed from scrap metal he’d stolen from the scene shop.

  Edmund continued on to the electrics shop door, slipped his key into the lock, and paused briefly as he remembered what the General did to Rodriguez and Guerrera. True, their sacrifice lacked the ceremony befitting his role as a warrior-priest—no need for his robes or the strobe light; no need for the songs like with the corrupt attorney and the adulterous, body-profaning sodomite—but still, the General enjoyed his time with them.

  His only regret was that they never got to meet the Prince.

  But they would meet him soon enough, Edmund said to himself as he entered the electrics shop. The others, too. And all of them would be waiting for him by the doorway when he called them to service.

  However, Edmund knew the Prince’s enemies would be waiting for him, too. They would see him coming from the sky and try to thwart his return. But the General and the Prince weren’t too worried about them. No, the Prince wanted his enemies to see him coming; for the Prince was worshipped, and worship gave him strength. And that was something his enemies did not have.

  The cemetery.

  It began there. His enemies understood the sacrifice as part of the 9, but the cemetery was important to the General, too—part of the 1 or the 3, depending on how you looked at it.

  Yes, Edmund thought as he sat down in front of the electrics shop computer. The cemetery proved to all of them that the Prince had an ally to be feared.

  One who had given up everything.

  One who was worthy of a second in command.

  But most importantly, one who would be rewarded for all his hard work.

  Chapter 27

  Willow Brook Cemetery was large for Johnston County. It sat on roughly six acres surrounded by lush farmland, and contained family plots dating back to the late 1800s. Markham knew the cemetery’s namesake brook lay somewhere behind the copse of willow trees to the south, but he could never hear it babbling during his nighttime visits. He’d also read somewhere that the adjoining field had been purchased by the county, which planned on expanding the cemetery along its eastern border.

  The stormy skies looked purplish by the time Markham arrived at the cemetery’s western entrance. He drove past it about a hundred yards and turned right onto the narrow country road that ran parallel to the northern edge of the property. He followed the low fieldstone wall until it banked south again, upon which he parked his SUV at the corner and immediately made for the field. Now he ran along the eastern wall. The grass was high—his shoes, the cuffs of his trousers instantly soaked—but he made good time; covered the two hundred yards like an Olympic sprinter and stopped at the spot where Rodriguez and Guerrera had been impaled.

  Markham had been to the cemetery only once during the daytime, but had been able to determine the victims’ exact location by the pattern of stonework beh
ind them in the crime scene photographs. First thing he’d done the week before was to wedge a bike reflector in the wall to help him find his position at night—he’d forgotten to retrieve it on his last visit—and thus pried the reflector loose and hopped over the wall.

  It was raining harder now, the cloudy skies flirting with nightfall, and Markham patted his inside jacket pocket to make sure he’d remembered his Maglite. He had, but he hoped he wouldn’t be at the cemetery long enough to need it. He stuck the reflector between the stones on the inside of the wall and began walking back and forth among the gravestones in twenty-yard lengths, row by row—one eye on the gravestones, the other on the reflector.

  He found what he was looking for on his third pass: a small, inconspicuous headstone about four rows back and facing west.

  It bore the name of LYONS.

  “So that’s why you didn’t write on Rodriguez and Guer-rera,” Markham whispered. “Whoever is in the sky watching you didn’t need your messages to understand.”

  Suddenly, the ring of his BlackBerry startled him. He answered it.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Schaap.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The forensics team finished its sweep of the alley behind Angel’s.”

  “And?”

  “They found the shells, Sam. Under the Dumpster, two of them, nine millimeter. Same caliber as the bullets the ME pulled from Rodriguez and Guerrera. All we need now is the ballistics test to make it official.”

  “Then that’s where it happened,” Markham said. “Rodriguez and Guerrera were lovers. They had to be. Vlad killed them together in the alley—but he was careless.”

  “Safe to say then that Vlad is hunting homosexuals?”

  “The evidence would seem to point that way.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I missed something here at the cemetery,” Markham said after a moment. “There’s a headstone with the name of Lyons directly west from the spot at which Rodriguez and Guerrera were impaled.”