The Impaler

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 circumstances 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