The Impaler (42 page)
He rose to his feet and started off toward the water, when suddenly he felt his BlackBerry buzzing in his pocket. He stopped and checked it. An e-mail from Schaap.
Think this has anything to do with our boy?
was all it said, but a link had been inserted into the body of the message above the words Sent from my Verizon BlackBerry. Markham clicked it—an article from the
Raleigh Sun
dated Tuesday, November 1, 2005.
By Jonathan Vaughn—Staff Writer
DURHAM—Somebody might have had their heart set on being a lion this year for Halloween, say Durham Police, who are currently investigating a break-in at Rowley’s Taxidermy Emporium.
According to Detective Charles Gray, chief investigator on the case, the robbery took place just after 3 a.m. this morning. “The thieves knew exactly what they were going for,” said Gray. “They entered at the rear of the establishment and used their vehicle to break down the door and tripped the silent alarm. Unfortunately, they made off with the lion’s head before we could get there.” Gray went on to say that no other items were reported missing, and that the owner’s safe, which was empty at the time of the robbery, remained untouched.
“That’s the worst part,” said Tom Rowley, owner of Rowley’s Taxidermy Emporium. “Of all
the things in the store, what they could hope to gain by taking old Leo is beyond me.”A family business owned and operated in the same location for over 50 years, Rowley’s Taxidermy Emporium is part taxidermy studio, part museum, and the animals inside have become old friends to both locals and curious tourists alike. Leo, a monstrous African lion’s head, had been a fixture on the wall behind Rowley’s counter since the early 1980s.
“It was one of my father’s most prized possessions,” Rowley said. “[Leo] had been in our house for years and was a gift from a friend who he served with in World War Two. It was shot on a safari back in the 1930s. These kinds of things are getting harder and harder to find, and to this day a lot of the kids used to come in here just to look at him.”
Durham Police Department spokeswoman Sh-eryl Parks said she does not believe the burglary to be related to the break-in at nearby Lynn’s Craft Store in mid-October, in which thieves made off with over $1,000 in cash. Parks, however, did advise business owners in the area to install loud alarms. “It is our experience that an audible alarm is a better deterrent than a silent alarm.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” said Tom Rowley. “It’s just sad that we live in a world where we have to worry about stuff like this.”
Markham was about to read the e-mail again when Michelle interrupted him.
No shadow-pieces in there now,
she said.
Everything so clear when you’re working; everything so alive. So what if
your work defines who you are? You might be a shell of a man, Sam Markham, but I ’d still do you in a heartbeat.
Markham laughed, swallowed the tears that threatened to follow, and powered off his BlackBerry.
Then he took his wife’s hand and strolled with her down by the river.
“Where the hell could he be?” George Kiernan muttered, glancing at his watch.
1:51 p.m.
At first he’d been furious and started his note session chewing ass as planned. But soon his fury turned to panic when the minutes ticked by and Bradley Cox still didn’t show. The rest of his cast, including Cindy Smith, had gotten off light. He had bigger fish to fry now, and that son of a bitch Cox was going to get it. Kiernan would have him thrown out of the department unless he was dead, he told the rest of the cast, and sent a pair of assistant stage managers out looking for him.
But now, almost an hour later, the director was sorry he’d said that. Yeah, now George Kiernan was really worried about the kid. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes; he was sweating badly and could hardly keep the script in his hand from shaking as the costumer finished letting out the waistband on Bradley Cox’s pants.
At 1:40 he’d resigned himself that it was going to happen, but only at 1:50 did he actually begin to believe it.
The show
must go on
, he said to himself over and over—but that
he
should have to go on in the title role of Macbeth? That was something George Kiernan would never have dreamed of in a million years. It wasn’t department policy to employ under-studies—not enough time for rehearsals, and the pool of actors was simply too small to cover even just the big roles adequately. And who wanted to get involved with parents bitching that their kid was entitled to go onstage “at least once” for all his hard work? Besides, George Kiernan couldn’t remember a student in a major role ever missing a performance while he was chair. Sure, things come up once in a while during tech week—but after a show had already opened? After it was too late to adapt and switch people around? Well, that kind of thing just didn’t happen in the Harriot University Department of Theatre and Dance.
But it
had
happened. And as George Kiernan caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he decided then and there that the department’s understudy policy would have to change.
“There’s no one at his apartment,” the stage manager said, rushing into the dressing room out of breath. “The landlord got us in. There were some clothes on the bed, but his cell phone was gone and the dead bolt locks from the outside. His car is gone, too—looks like he just took off.”
“Christ almighty,” Kiernan muttered, his mind spinning.
Sure,
he thought,
Cox was a bit of a snake—a bit of a pussy, too—but just bailing on them after a shaky performance?
That didn’t seem right.
“We called the police,” the stage manager continued. “Under the circumstances, they said there’s nothing they can do unless he’s gone for twenty-four hours. And then a family member has to—”
“All right, all right,” Kiernan said. “Tell the cast I’ll be going on for him script-in-hand—no, tell them all to meet me backstage left. I’ll break the news to them myself. Also,
notify everybody on headset that I’ll be making a curtain speech before the show begins. When I’m clear, just call everything else as you normally do.”
The stage manager just stood there, frightened.
“Don’t worry,” Kiernan said, winking. “We’ll get through it.”
The stage manager nodded and was off.
Kiernan took another deep breath and asked the costumer if he could have a moment alone. She left, and the director sat down at the dressing table, thumbing absently through the script given to him by Cindy Smith. She’d already written down all of Cox’s blocking in the scenes with Lady Macbeth, and Kiernan figured he could remember the rest of it from his own promptbook, which was too thick, too heavy to carry around onstage.
He studied his face in the mirror—felt his breathing level off and his heart slow down. And when the announcement from the stage manager came over the intercom, the director calmly walked out of Bradley Cox’s dressing room and stood in the wings before his cast like a general.
Cindy held Edmund Lambert’s hand as Kiernan laid out the battle plan for the matinee. With the absence of Cox, she’d grown nervous, but at the same time was beyond excited at being so close to Edmund—especially since he’d been waiting for her outside her dressing room when she arrived at the theater. They’d spoken to one another only briefly, but kissed long enough for her to know that everything was all right again.
“Now you need to focus,” he’d said, pulling away. “But I’ll be watching.”
It was going to be the best show yet, Cindy thought, and felt beyond ecstatic when she played over in her mind how Edmund had looked at her.
But now when he looked at her he seemed agitated. And he kept glancing at his BlackBerry as Kiernan gave them a pep talk about focus and teamwork.
“I thought he would have canceled the show,” Edmund said as Kiernan made his curtain speech. “Or at least the photo call.”
He actually seemed disappointed, Cindy thought.
“Not George Kiernan,” she said. “The show must go on. Just don’t get jealous in that part where Macbeth tries to kiss me, okay? Even though it’s George Kiernan, I’ll still try my hardest to resist.”
Edmund smiled thinly. Cindy kissed him and then ran to places for the opening scene—a silly scene, Cindy had always thought, in which the director had the Witches arrange all the characters like pieces on a chessboard. Edmund thought it was a silly scene, too, she learned at the cast party—just one of the many things they had in common. “A scene like that takes Macbeth’s fate out of his hands,” he’d said. “If only he’d read the messages correctly things wouldn’t have turned out so badly for him.”
For some reason talking like that with Edmund had turned her on.
His speech finished, Kiernan stepped back into the wings and took his place with the rest of the cast—directly opposite Cindy on the other side of the stage. He gave her a thumbs-up and she replied in kind. The audience was still murmuring as the music started and the lights dimmed, and Cindy felt as if the air were charged with electricity, as if she would explode from excitement at any moment. Yeah, she thought, in a sick way she was thrilled all this was happening.
“This is fucked up about Bradley,” whispered the actor playing Macduff.
“Yeah,” replied Jonathan, winner of the Perils of Inbreeding Award. “Maybe Vlad got him.”
“Or maybe Lambert finally finished the job.”
The two boys snickered, and Cindy told them to shut the hell up.
Yeah, even though it was Bradley Cox they were dissing, a comment like that was beyond uncalled for.
Markham landed in Raleigh about twenty minutes early. As the plane taxied down the runway, he turned on his cell phone to find the text message from Andy Schaap already waiting for him.
Checking on names, the message read. Might be out of range 4 a while, but let me know when u land. Will call u when I get back to the RA l8r.
“Enough with this nonsense,” Markham said, and promptly dialed his partner’s number.
It rang only twice and then went straight into voice mail.
“I’m back,” Markham said. “Got your article about the lion’s head. Good work, and I’ll follow up at the taxidermy shop myself first thing tomorrow. There are some other things I want to discuss with you. Don’t know if you read the latest updates, but the set list from Rodriguez’s CD was uploaded into Sentinel last night. I think there might be a connection with one of the songs in particular—“Dark in the Day” by that eighties band High Risk. Only going with my gut, but I ’d like to bounce a couple of things off you. Let’s
plan on dinner at the Dubliner around seven. Call me back ASAP.”
He hung up feeling on edge, but by the time he reached his TrailBlazer he was furious. It didn’t make sense, Markham thought, this frustration with his NCAVC coordinator. Perhaps he might feel better after a stop at the Resident Agency to see what Andy Schaap was up to.
Still, something was off. Something was wrong.
Markham could feel it.
KISS’s “Detroit Rock City” kicked in just as the General turned off the Mustang’s ignition, and for a moment he thought he’d tripped an alarm or something. He glanced down at the BlackBerry—the name Sam Markham in bright white letters on the screen—and waited patiently for the song to stop. And when it did, the General gazed across the parking lot to the apartment building where the famous Quantico profiler was staying.
The General had reconned the Resident Agency earlier that morning; had to circle the outside lot only once to realize it was too risky to grab out Markham there. His apartment would be much better. The General had found the address on Schaap’s computer, but after he left the theater he decided to first drive back to the farmhouse to check on the progress there. Satisfied, the General switched his pickup for Bradley Cox’s Mustang and arrived at the apartment building forty-five minutes later. The General hoped Markham had gotten the e-mail he’d sent from Schaap’s BlackBerry; hoped he’d stop first at the taxidermy shop or perhaps the
Resident Agency before coming home. That was important, for the General’s plan would only work if Markham got home after dark.
Of course, as with the tattoo parlor, the FBI would find nothing at the taxidermy shop. The General was always careful not to leave any fingerprints, but the idea of sending Markham on a wild-goose chase excited him. He was tempted to send him another article or a text message, but knew he could play his little game only for so long before the FBI agent caught on. Indeed, the General suspected the game might already be over when he heard the voice mail notification on the BlackBerry. After all, Markham would grow suspicious when he didn’t hear from his partner in person.
He needed to be careful. There was no room for mistakes, and time was running short. The General had seen it all in the doorway.
Andrew J. Schaap had proved invaluable. The Prince was no longer angry with the General. He couldn’t come right out and say so (as the General suspected, such communication took up too much of the doorway’s power), but the General could tell from the Prince’s visions that he had forgiven him. Of course, Edmund Lambert’s mother was nowhere to be seen, but the Prince
did
show him Ereshkigal. She was most certainly part of the equation now. But exactly how she fit in, the General still wasn’t sure—he could only see himself running with her across the smoking battlefields. However, in the part of his brain that he could still keep hidden from the Prince, the General felt confident that he would be able to save his mother in the end. He didn’t know where she was—there was still so much about Hell that he didn’t understand—but knew that Ereshkigal would help him. Plus, the fact that the Prince would actually expect him and Ereshkigal to be together filled him with hope. Perhaps they
could conspire behind his back. Perhaps she knew where the Prince had taken his mother. Perhaps, if the General promised to restore her to her throne she could—