only did the General understand the pictures and sounds, when the doorway was fresh, the Prince’s “voice” blocked out all other thoughts from his mind.
Back in the present, sitting there in his truck, Edmund Lambert recalled what the Prince had told the General on that night. And even now he felt silly for having worried so. He should’ve known right away that Leona Bonita and the other sodomite were part of the message itself. They already understood the 9:3, the 3:1. Yes, they would be waiting at the doorway when the Prince called them into service; they would recognize him at once and embrace their destiny.
Edmund Lambert exited his pickup and headed for the rear of the building, cut through the small breezeway that connected the theater to the academic buildings, and hurried down the steps that brought him past the large bulkhead for the props cellar. He smiled. It was there that he’d found the dentist’s chair last semester—from an old production of
Edmund continued on to the electrics shop door, slipped his key into the lock, and paused briefly as he remembered what the General did to Rodriguez and Guerrera. True, their sacrifice lacked the ceremony befitting his role as a warrior-priest—no need for his robes or the strobe light; no need for the songs like with the corrupt attorney and the adulterous, body-profaning sodomite—but still, the General enjoyed his time with them.
His only regret was that they never got to meet the Prince.
But they would meet him soon enough, Edmund said to himself as he entered the electrics shop. The others, too. And all of them would be waiting for him by the doorway when he called them to service.
However, Edmund knew the Prince’s enemies would be waiting for him, too. They would see him coming from the sky and try to thwart his return. But the General and the Prince weren’t too worried about them. No, the Prince wanted his enemies to see him coming; for the Prince was worshipped, and worship gave him strength. And that was something his enemies did not have.
The cemetery.
It began there. His enemies understood the sacrifice as part of the 9, but the cemetery was important to the General, too—part of the 1 or the 3, depending on how you looked at it.
Yes, Edmund thought as he sat down in front of the electrics shop computer. The cemetery proved to all of them that the Prince had an ally to be feared.
One who had given up everything.
One who was worthy of a second in command.
But most importantly, one who would be rewarded for all his hard work.
Chapter 27
Willow Brook Cemetery was large for Johnston County. It sat on roughly six acres surrounded by lush farmland, and contained family plots dating back to the late 1800s. Markham knew the cemetery’s namesake brook lay somewhere behind the copse of willow trees to the south, but he could never hear it babbling during his nighttime visits. He’d also read somewhere that the adjoining field had been purchased by the county, which planned on expanding the cemetery along its eastern border.
The stormy skies looked purplish by the time Markham arrived at the cemetery’s western entrance. He drove past it about a hundred yards and turned right onto the narrow country road that ran parallel to the northern edge of the property. He followed the low fieldstone wall until it banked south again, upon which he parked his SUV at the corner and immediately made for the field. Now he ran along the eastern wall. The grass was high—his shoes, the cuffs of his trousers instantly soaked—but he made good time; covered the two hundred yards like an Olympic sprinter and stopped at the spot where Rodriguez and Guerrera had been impaled.
Markham had been to the cemetery only once during the daytime, but had been able to determine the victims’ exact location by the pattern of stonework behind them in the crime scene photographs. First thing he’d done the week before was to wedge a bike reflector in the wall to help him find his position at night—he’d forgotten to retrieve it on his last visit—and thus pried the reflector loose and hopped over the wall.
It was raining harder now, the cloudy skies flirting with nightfall, and Markham patted his inside jacket pocket to make sure he’d remembered his Maglite. He had, but he hoped he wouldn’t be at the cemetery long enough to need it. He stuck the reflector between the stones on the inside of the wall and began walking back and forth among the gravestones in twenty-yard lengths, row by row—one eye on the gravestones, the other on the reflector.
He found what he was looking for on his third pass: a small, inconspicuous headstone about four rows back and facing west.
It bore the name of LYONS.
“So that’s why you didn’t write on Rodriguez and Guer-rera,” Markham whispered. “Whoever is in the sky watching you didn’t need your messages to understand.”
Suddenly, the ring of his BlackBerry startled him. He answered it.
“Hello?”
“It’s Schaap.”
“Go ahead.”
“The forensics team finished its sweep of the alley behind Angel’s.”
“And?”
“They found the shells, Sam. Under the Dumpster, two of them, nine millimeter. Same caliber as the bullets the ME pulled from Rodriguez and Guerrera. All we need now is the ballistics test to make it official.”
“Then that’s where it happened,” Markham said. “Rodriguez and Guerrera were lovers. They had to be. Vlad killed them together in the alley—but he was careless.”
“Safe to say then that Vlad is hunting homosexuals?”
“The evidence would seem to point that way.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I missed something here at the cemetery,” Markham said after a moment. “There’s a headstone with the name of Lyons directly west from the spot at which Rodriguez and Guerrera were impaled.”
“Holy shit. And Rodriguez calling himself the beautiful lion, that means—”
“Yes. We were right about Rodriguez being part of the message itself—about Vlad not needing to write on him and Guerrera.”
“Then what’s bothering you?”
“I’m thinking that if I missed this here, I might have missed something else, too.”
“But the headstone is only meaningful now because you know of the connection to Leo—because you know what to look for.”
“Right,” Markham said, walking. “That’s why I need to get back to Donovan’s.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. I need to figure out for sure how the lawyer fits into the picture. Now tell me, did you find out anything yet about the constellation?”
“Only stuff about the physical layout of Leo itself—major stars and whatnot. Been busy with the forensics team, the evidence collection.”
“I understand, go ahead.”
“Well, there are basically two visualizations of the constellation Leo, both of which contain the same base stars. The traditional version, the one you were using, consists of nine stars with a triangular-shaped body and a sickle-shaped head. However, a more recent visualization, by H. A. Rey, alters and expands the constellation’s traditional shape into fifteen stars and depicts the lion figure walking.”
“H. A. Rey? The same guy who wrote the
“Very good, Mr. Former English Teacher. Rey published a book in the fifties in which he came up with more concrete, almost cartoonlike visualizations of the traditional constellations by adding stars or connecting them in different patterns.”
“Let’s go with the nine-star version for now. Older and more recognizable. Anything on how it might relate to
