The Impaler (11 page)

Hank heard the car coming long before it reached him. It was quiet on 301. Only a handful of people were traveling at this hour, and all of them had passed by Hank Biehn without a second look. Fine with him. Wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of sticking out his thumb for any of them anyway. Paranoid motherfuckers.

Maybe that’s why, when he sensed the car slowing down behind him, he looked up from the road and stumbled a bit. Fucking old factory nerves.

“You need a ride, sir?” the driver asked. He’d rolled down the passenger side window, but Hank couldn’t make out his face in the dark. Chevy van, 1970s, not a lot of light coming from the dash. “Heading down the Interstate way if you’d like a lift.”

“I sure would,” said Hank, approaching the door. “That’s real kind of you, mister.” He could see the man more clearly now—just a kid, mid-twenties and pretty built from the look of the arms on the steering wheel. Spoke with a heavy Southern drawl, too; all-American good ol’ boy from the looks of it.

Hank pulled the door handle.

“Passenger door doesn’t work,” he said. “You gotta swing around back.”

“Gotchya.”

Maybe the booze had dulled his instincts over the years; maybe he’d been domesticated too long and gone all Pollyanna and shit, but Hank Biehn didn’t give his good fortune a second thought as he skirted around to the rear of the van.

“It’s unlocked,” the kid called, and Hank opened the door. “Just leave your stuff back there and come on up front. Need a hand?”

“No, no, I got it,” Hank said, hoisting his duffel bag inside. He climbed up after it, and was surprised to find the back of the van completely empty—just the grooved metal bed and the shell of the outer walls.

But what Hank Biehn didn’t notice was the strong smell of Pine-Sol and the subtle yet palpable scent of rotten meat underneath.

Oh no, his old factory nerves were simply too shot to pick up on
that.

What a good kid,
Hank said to himself.
And here I am just thinking how the world’s gone to shit
.
Weasel, your luck is changing!

“You gotta make sure you slam that door tight,” the kid said. “Latch doesn’t work like it used to. Dang old-school Chevys.”

“I heard that,” Hank said. He was on all fours now, his back toward the driver as he pulled the door shut. It seemed to latch fine. But when he turned around again, he gasped when he discovered the driver was almost on top of him.

“What the—?”

“Your body is the doorway,” the kid said.

Then he raised his gun and fired.

Sam Markham stepped into his office on Monday morning feeling tired and helpless—like a dog that had been chasing its tail for days. He’d grown to despise this place—cramped, bare, with no windows and a single fluorescent light that fluttered sporadically above his head. He thought about the plaque in his bedroom back in Virginia, and was sorry he didn’t bring it with him to hang over this, the gates of his own private hell.

Markham sat at his desk and turned on his computer—took a swig of coffee and replayed the last four days in his mind. It was all a blur to him, a soupy mishmash of dead ends and frustration. None of his leads had paid off—the interviews with the families, the Internet and library investigations, the connections between the victims, the ties to Islam and the lunar visuals. The forensic analysis turned out to be a wash, too—no leads on the materials, nothing new via Donovan. But worst of all, the FBI labs had come back with
nothing
on Jose Rodriguez. That’s right,
no writing at all
had been found on him anywhere. Markham hadn’t expected that.

Rodriguez was supposed to be reburied sometime today, and Donovan’s funeral had been officially scheduled for Saturday. The same day as Elmer Stokes’s execution.

His computer ready, Markham sighed and logged into Sentinel, the FBI’s latest version of its case-management database. The Sentinel system had been active for less than a year, and Markham had to admit that it was better than the old Trilogy System—or “Tragedy System,” as the SAs used to call it—but still he thought of it as an untrustworthy logistical pain in the ass.

Markham signed into the Sentinel file for Vlad. An agent from the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) had finally entered the information about the killer’s shoes: Merrell Stormfront Gore-Tex XCRs. Even weight distribution. Slight wear. 2004 model.

“You like to hike, Vlad?” Markham said out loud. “Or did you buy the Merrells because they’re quiet on pavement?”

I have returned.

Markham signed out of Sentinel and clicked on a desktop icon he’d labeled as STARS. A Web site called Your Sky opened immediately. A physics professor at NC State had turned him on to the site, which enabled visitors to plug in coordinates, dates, and times to see what the stars looked like on any given night going back to the year 0. It had taken Markham hours of scrolling and clicking to get the hang of it; but over the last couple of days he’d become nothing short of obsessed.

“You messing with those star charts again, Captain Kirk?” Schaap said, leaning against the doorjamb. Markham nodded. “Anything new?”

“Spinning my wheels,” Markham said. “Hundreds of individual stars that could’ve traveled across the Hispanics’ field of vision during the time frame in which they were displayed. Bunch of constellations, too; never heard of most of them.”

“What about the signs of the zodiac?”

“Looks like there are only four that would’ve passed over the eastern horizon: Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, and Leo. And that’s if the Hispanics were looking directly east.”

“Any connection to the historical Vlad?”

“None that I can see just yet. Most scholars agree that Vlad Tepes was born sometime in November or December of 1431, which would have made his astrological sign a Scorpio, Sagittarius, or a Capricorn.”

“What about individual stars?”

“No specific stars have historically been associated with the symbol of Islam, but our astronomy consultant at NC State is working on tying one to Vlad.”

Schaap was quiet, looking at the floor.

“I feel the same way,” Markham said after a moment.

“What’s that?”

“That I’m wasting my time. That I’m off on trying to find the star to go with the Islamic crescent; that maybe I’m off on the whole Vlad the Impaler angle, too.”

“But if not Vlad, then who has returned?”

“I don’t know,” Markham said, turning back to his computer. “But whoever he is, I guarantee you he’s laughing at us.”

The day had been a waste, and later that evening, Markham found himself sitting atop the low fieldstone wall that surrounded the Willow Brook Cemetery. It was his sixth night in North Carolina, but only his third at the cemetery. He’d gotten lucky with the weather—nothing but clear skies since his arrival, which allowed him to divvy up his evenings between the two crime scenes. But as he looked toward the east, in his mind he told the stars he would not be coming back.

They answered him as they usually did—in apathetic
cricket-speak; all seeing, all knowing, and with a twinkle in their eyes that said,
“Who cares?”

But Markham was not bothered tonight by their indifference. His mind had already shifted to Vlad the Impaler.

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.

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 …

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?”