The Impaler

methodically, the students parting before him like the Red Sea.

“That’s right, come on, you little bitch,” said Cox, stumbling drunkenly. “Six of us against one of you—gonna fuck you up good ’n tight, soldier boy.”

Although Cindy remained on the opposite end of the deck, she had no trouble seeing what happened next.

Banquo and another senior bailed immediately—jumped over the railing and ran before Edmund could reach them—and thus only three of Cox’s constituents backed him up in the end.

Edmund floored them with a flurry of punches and kicks as Cox stumbled past him with a wild haymaker. Cox had been the first to swing—Cindy saw that clearly—but it took him too long to recover from his missed punch; and by the time he turned back, Edmund met him square in the face with a head butt.

Cox howled in pain—the blood gushing from his nose and onto his T-shirt like water from a faucet. Cindy felt as if her stomach was filled with cement; and time seemed to slow down. Cheering and screams, someone shouting, “Call 911!” while someone else (Amy Pratt, Cindy thought) shouted, “Let them fight!”—the sounds, the people, the light from the tiki torches swirling all around her in a haze.

And then suddenly there was Bradley Cox—his bloody, sobbing face presented before her in a sleeper hold.

“Apologize to her, Bradley,” Edmund whispered in his ear.

“Fuck you,” Cox spat—whimpering, struggling. “I can’t fucking br—”

“Apologize,” Edmund said again, squeezing harder.

Cox squealed in pain.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m sorry, okay? Now let me go you fuck—”

Edmund’s grip tightened, and Cindy heard him whisper something in Cox’s ear that she could not make out— something that sounded like French—and then Cox dropped to the deck, semiconscious, babbling incoherently in spurts of spitting blood.

“He’s dead!” someone shouted, while another cried out, “Good night, Irene!”

But when Cox quickly came to—when he looked around, dazed, and asked for a beer—the crowd of students applauded.

“Serves you assholes right!” one girl yelled; “Woo-hoo!” and “Way to go, Lambert!” cheered some of the guys.

“Come on, Cindy,” Edmund said, taking her hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

Cindy followed him through the crowd—the smiling faces, the cheering and pats on their backs whizzing past her like a dream. She saw two of the boys Edmund had floored, both of them still on the deck holding their stomachs and moaning. But when a pretty girl Cindy didn’t know reached out and touched Edmund’s arm like he was a rock star, incredibly, Cindy felt a wave of jealousy.

Edmund led Cindy out through the gate and across the front lawn. Cindy thought she heard Amy Pratt call out from the house, “Don’t leave, Edmund!” but could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything anymore. And only when she found herself in the passenger seat of Edmund Lambert’s pickup, only when she realized that they’d come to a stop in the Harriot Theater parking lot, did the reality of what had just happened finally begin to sink in.

“I guess we gave them something to talk about,” Edmund said after a long silence—sincerely, without the slightest hint of irony. “I’m sorry if I ruined our date, but those guys shouldn’t talk that way about—”

Before she could second-guess herself, Cindy leaned in and kissed him.

The pickup’s cabin seemed to swirl around her as she melted into his arms—a voice in the back of her head whispering, Finally, Cindy. Finally.

Chapter 56

Markham sat in the cramped witness gallery staring not into the execution chamber, but at the back of his hand. A security guard had stamped it with ink that glowed under black light. “No glow, no go,” was all he’d said. Markham wasn’t even sure what the stamp read, could see no trace of it in the harshness of the fluorescent lights, and felt his throat tighten when he thought of the bizarre coincidence, of his connection with Randall Donovan.

I have returned, I have returned, I have returned.

They had taken his wallet, his keys, and his BlackBerry and gave him a yellow WITNESS badge to wear around his neck. They also ran a handheld metal detector up and down his body. “You can only take in your watch,” the security guard had said. “To mark the time, if you’d like.”

“To help with the sense of closure,” Markham knew his in-laws would say.

He had hardly spoken to them since his arrival in Connecticut late that afternoon. They had all gathered first at his childhood home in Waterford—Michelle’s parents, her brother, a cousin with whom she’d been close growing up—but even before they arrived Markham felt as if he didn’t belong there. His parents still kept his old bedroom as it had been when he was in high school, but the idea of grabbing a nap before Michelle’s family arrived had seemed inappropriate to him, as if he didn’t belong in there, either.

And so Markham had passed the time quietly with his mother and father in the den until the people started filtering in. They would all wait there, ludicrously snacking on “heavy hors d’oeuvres” as his mother called them and making small talk until the appointed time. Markham tried not to think about the Impaler; tried to play his part and convince himself as well as the others that somehow the death of Elmer Stokes would bring closure to his wife’s murder. But soon he found himself alone on the back porch, sipping a glass of red wine as the futility of it all grew heavier and heavier around him.

And now, in the witness gallery, there was only his hand and the invisible glow in the dark stamp that gave him permission to watch.

Permission, Markham said to himself over and over again. A stamp of approval from the gods that now is the time to bear witness to the sacrifice.

Markham and the others had arrived at the prison just after midnight. They waited in a holding area where the warden briefed them on procedure and protocol, and then were escorted into the narrow witness gallery.

“You’ve all met with the prison psychologist,” the warden had said, “so you know you must remain seated on the risers at all times. No excessive or loud talking is permitted, and no emotional outbursts of any kind will be tolerated. Not even from immediate family members. Any such behavior will result in your being promptly removed from the witness gallery. After the execution is completed, we will wait ap- proximately thirty seconds for you to view the motionless remains.”

And now, staring at the back of his hand, Markham wondered if the Impaler would also see the connection between the invisible writing and Randall Donovan. He gazed from his hand through the one-way glass and into the execution chamber; could see from his vantage point the windows that connected the other three galleries surrounding it. Behind one of them, he knew, sat Elmer Stokes’s mother; behind another were the press and “official” state witnesses. Markham didn’t know who was behind the fourth window. The guards? he thought. You mean the GODS, a voice countered with a heavy New England accent. And then in his mind a blanket of stars, the universe, and an image of himself in the execution chamber looking out the window as if it was a porthole on a spaceship. Markham knew what was waiting for him out there in space: the SWAT teams keeping the crowds both for and against Stokes’s execution in line; and farther out, back in Raleigh, the crowds of faceless servicemen, one of whom he was sure was his man.

Elmer Stokes was escorted into the execution chamber at exactly 1 a.m. He had grown thinner since the last time Markham saw him—balder, too—but still wore his hair square in a buzz cut. Markham thought Stokes seemed genuinely at peace with it all; seemed happy to “finally pay back the lady’s parents,” as he had said in his final statement earlier that afternoon. Markham knew Stokes had requested steak for his final meal, and he had to force himself to stop searching for meaning in it—the hidden message encoded in the transposed letter “e” that made a steak into a stake.

Elmer begins with E! shouted a voice in his head, and Markham felt his brain squirm in his skull—his thoughts a jumbled mess of nonsense and fatigue. He closed his eyes; and mercifully, when