The Impaler (26 page)

Markham reached the mobile stairs unit and checked his watch—
2:07 p.m.
He was seven minutes late for his flight.
Late—period
, he thought. Yes, the clock was certainly ticking. The crescent moon would hit around May 3rd, which meant the Impaler would go looking for his next victim any time now if he already hadn’t. In fact, there would be
two
crescent moons in May, the second on the 31st.

Oh yes,
Markham said to himself.
The merry month of May will be the Impaler’s busiest month yet.

But would he go hunting again on West Hargett Street? And furthermore, where would he display his next victim if the FBI didn’t stop him in time? That was the question.

It was Dr. Underhill who offered the best answer.

“The military connection makes a lot of sense,” he said at the end of the teleconference. “But in addition to checking out the patient records, you may want to look at specific units that identify themselves with lions or other big cats, perhaps even winged creatures like eagles and hawks. After all, Nergal was not only the god of war—the ultimate soldier, if you will—but also a lion with wings.”

“Do you think we should narrow down our suspect pool further by focusing on servicemen whose birthdays fall under the sign of Leo?” Markham asked. “Identification with a destiny written in the stars?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Underhill replied. “But maybe our boy is mapping out his own sign, his own identity on the ground. Given the nature of the sacrifices, the theory of a servant, a sort of Leo Minor helping to resurrect the god makes the most sense to me. And if that is in fact the case, maybe the Starlight Theater visual was the starting point for a picture on the ground that mimics his military insignia—a creature or something with which he identifies. Just a hunch.”

A good hunch
, Markham had thought, but as constellations were by their very nature subjective in their rendering, with only three stars to build off it would be impossible to match up the Starlight Theater schematic with the military insignias.

Markham climbed onto the plane and said hello to the flight attendant. No FBI plane today, but there were only a handful of passengers making the trip with him on the charter flight to Connecticut. He found a seat over the wing, stowed his carry-on, and sat down by the window. The flight attendant closed the hatch and came by to make sure he’d fastened his seat belt. He hadn’t, and she smiled and pointed to remind him.

Attractive
, Markham thought, even though he’d never been a fan of blondes, and wondered if she was the type of
woman who would ask him about the plaque above his bedroom door. She smiled again at him as she strapped herself into the seat by the cockpit, and Markham decided she wasn’t.

Waiting.

More than anything else about his job Sam Markham hated the waiting. And as he stared past the flight attendant into the open cockpit, he imagined the days ahead of him tumbling out in a series of big black numbers.

The news conference had gone well, he thought. That was a plus. The FBI would now be able to work quietly behind the scenes while the media chewed on the phony Vlad angle. And it would only be a matter of time before Geraldo and Nancy Grace and all the others would start throwing around the gay-bashing theories, too. But that wouldn’t bother the Impaler. No, Markham thought, the Impaler wouldn’t give two shits about what the public thought as long as Nergal was happy.

The plane started to move and he punched open his e-mail on his BlackBerry. Alan Gates had already gotten the ball rolling with the three soldiers who’d been brought up on smuggling charges at the beginning of Iraq War. Markham had received the e-mail on the way to the airport. He read it again.

Markham felt his stomach turn. Did the Impaler hold Canning hostage so he could tattoo him? Was that why he
abducted him in the first place? If so, that meant there were more leads to follow: the thefts or purchases of tattoo equipment in the—

Stick to what you know,
said the voice in his head.
You’ve got your hands full as it is, Sammy boy.

This was true. Schaap had already come back with a working list of military units and ranked them according to their assignments in Iraq, as well as by their associated in-signias and mascots. There were plenty of lions, of course, but a bunch of hybrid animals, too: the winged soaring black panther of the 82nd Airborne’s 3rd Combat Brigade out of Fort Bragg, the fishtailed lion of the 8th Marines Regiment out of Camp Lejeune, the Screaming Eagle of Fort Campbell’s 101st Airborne. So many that Markham had never heard of; so many that his head felt as if it was spinning when he left the Resident Agency.

The flight attendant motioned for him to turn off his BlackBerry. He did and closed his eyes. Perhaps it was good that he was getting away. There was nothing he could do now but wait. No one else for him to question until all the data came back and he could get some boots on the ground. Besides, he needed to sleep; needed to clear his mind and come back fresh with a new perspective.

Yes,
said the voice in his head.
A nice little vacation to see your wife’s killer get pumped full of chemicals. Now that’s what I call fun in the sun!

The plane stopped again and Markham opened his eyes, slipped his hand under the seat in front of him and removed some papers from his briefcase. He read them.

The plane started down the runway; and by the time it lifted off, Markham’s eyelids had grown heavy—the urge to sleep overpowering him as the plane climbed higher and higher.

The thoughts, the images that flickered before his eyes were of the lion-headed god Nergal—but the lion god
is also Elmer Stokes, complete with a buzz cut and a dirty white T-shirt as he chases Michelle through the parking lot of the Mystic Aquarium.

Markham runs after them in the darkness, around a maze of corners and through pools of light cast down from street-lamps. Then the flash of a giant bathtub, up ahead in the distance, and the lion god and Michelle disappear.

There is only the parking lot now and the silhouettes of thousands of impaled bodies stretching out toward a fiery horizon. He can hear Michelle speaking somewhere behind him—“Would you like something to drink, ma’am?”—but he tells her to go on without him.

He does not wish to leave—not today, not when he is so close—and lets the images and the low humming of the plane’s engines, the Babylonian spirits, carry him forward to the temple at Kutha. He can see it in the distance, no, behind him—where is it?

He sits down on the asphalt, his back against something hard—Michelle’s car? He turns around to look and discovers that he is alone on an obsidian ocean—in a rowboat be-
neath a stormy sky. He searches for the shore but cannot find it.

No, now there is only the Impaler—up ahead in the distance, seated Indian style on the water and moving away quickly, silently, leaving no trace of wake behind him.

He feels himself sinking, but doesn’t resist. The sky and the ocean are one now, heavy and sinking with him as the curtain of sleep descends—as the Impaler’s wings unfold from his back and lift him high into the air … higher and higher, smaller and smaller until the both of them disappear like smoke into the seamless black.

Annie Lambert loved her son Edmund more than anything in the world, but sometimes even she couldn’t help pinching his nipple and twisting it until he screamed—when he was a poop head, sure, but especially when he called himself “Eddie.”

His grandfather had been behind
that
; even went so far as to teach the boy to write E-D-D-I-E in capital letters, hyphens and all, in the dirt when the boy was five years old. Her son’s name was Edmund—
Edmund, Edmund, Edmund!

And besides, Edmund knew better, too. He’d been writing his name the right way since he was three years old, and Annie vowed that she would twist little Edmund’s nipple until the boy learned to obey her and
only
her.

True, Annie Lambert had given her son the name Edmund primarily as a dig at the old man. A private joke with herself, really, and she never thought in a million years that her father would find out Edmund was a character in Shakespeare—let alone a bastard one at that. But Claude Lambert
did
find out. How? Well, Annie never worked up the courage to ask him.

As with everything else, however, Claude Lambert didn’t get mad or act any different toward his daughter than he had all her life. Quiet, cold, uninterested. No, the old man only got
even
. As he always did. Through other people.

Yes, teaching her son to write his name E-D-D-I-E was par for the course for old Claude Lambert. Just like the cookie crumbs on the settee in the parlor, the spilled bottle of her mother’s perfume, the blueberry stains on her pillowcase from a stolen pie on Thanksgiving.

When she was about six or seven, Annie Lambert thought a ghost had suddenly moved in with them, and would swear up and down that it wasn’t she who took the lipstick. “It was the ghost, Mama!” she would scream as her mother whipped her naked behind with her cat-o’-nine-tails. And then, when she was a little older, for many years she thought it was her brother James who’d been framing her, and would sometimes hide behind the furniture in an attempt to catch him breaking the handle off a china cup or stealing a piece of her mother’s jewelry.

She never caught him—never caught anybody, for that matter—and often felt as if she were going crazy in that old house—as if the rooms were all crooked and the back of her head was about to crack open. Sometimes she’d hear a high ringing in her ears and she’d bang her head against the wall to make it stop. And a couple of times she got so upset that she took her father’s straight razor and carved the word
“NO”
into her arm. Things settled down for a few months after that. No little mishaps around the Lambert household for which she got blamed. But then something would happen and the cycle would begin all over again until Annie hurt herself bad enough to make it stop.

Then one day without warning, when she was about twelve or so,
everything
stopped—the bad things, the blaming, the beatings, the banging her head and the cutting. And only years later—just before Edmund was born—when she
saw the nod her father gave her brother when they read the guilty verdict at the trial, did something click inside her head. She couldn’t explain it, even to herself; only that, after all those years, she knew deep down that it had been her father behind the frame game all along.

Annie Lambert never understood why her father didn’t love her, or why he didn’t even like her just a little. But when it came right down to it she had to admit that she didn’t like him much, either. Claude Lambert was older than most of the fathers in Wilson; was a widower of forty with no children when he met Annie’s mother at the bowling alley. She was only twenty-three, and Annie calculated (when she was old enough to do such things) that her mother and father must have tried to have children for about three years before Annie was born. Her mother told Annie flat out when she was nine that her father had wanted a son. Luckily, she said, they’d a quicker time of it with James, who came along a year after Annie. “And that was that,” her mother said.