The Impaler

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