The Impaler

Chapter 62

The General squatted down next to the dead man and snatched up his ID—“Andrew J. Schaap,” he read out loud. “Federal Bureau of c’est mieux d’oublier.”

The General took a deep breath and propped the agent’s lifeless body against the doorjamb. He felt strangely calm—his movements both his own and someone else’s as he took off his T-shirt and tied it like a tourniquet around the man’s bleeding head.

His instincts had been correct. He’d known almost immediately that this man was some kind of authority. The man looked it, sure, but the General had also seen the bulge of the gun under his jacket and the ID case in his hand as he approached from the SUV.

The General stepped to the edge of the porch and gazed out across the fields. He could see a portion of the road through the trees at the edge of his property, and he cocked his ear toward it and listened. No one was coming. No more FBI agents on their way.

At least not yet.

But how did the FBI find him? Surely, it had nothing to do with Cox—the FBI coming to his house over a fight at a college party? No, that didn’t make any sense. And the fact that the Prince had not been angry with him for fighting with Cox only proved this point. If the FBI thought Edmund Lambert was Vlad the Impaler, why would they send only one man out to capture him? That didn’t make any sense, either.

In a flash, the General was off the porch and inside the TrailBlazer. He found a laptop and some paperwork on the passenger seat and picked up the first page. Names. Lots of them. All in the Armed Forces. Edmund Lambert’s name was eighteenth on a list with a handwritten title, By City.

The General flipped and scanned some more pages and found another list, this one labeled Unit Probability/Cemetery in the same handwriting. Four names, out of order but in the same general area, were crossed off. The General read the addresses and hit the back button for the open Google Earth page on the laptop’s screen. The address on this page matched one of the addresses on the list. The General hit the back button again, and that address matched another name, too.

“Bad luck,” he said. “Not even a prime suspect. Just a name on a list created from matching up names in the cemetery to members in the Armed Forces. But how did the FBI know I was in the Army?”

Your gun, a voice answered inside his head—but the General did not believe that. He’d read just how popular the Beretta M9 was with the gangbangers in the newspaper article about Rodriguez and Guerrera. And just as the General dismissed this as a possibility, the voice in his head spoke again.

It appears from the names and the order in which the FBI agent was following them that he was trying to give structure to the randomness of his suspect pool.

“Yes, it does.”

That means the FBI has only recently begun exploring the military angle—a fact proved further by this man coming out here all alone.

“No,” the General said, gazing over his shoulder and out the TrailBlazer’s back window. “No one seems too worried about Agent Schaap just yet.”

The General considered this and wondered if the FBI even knew Special Agent Schaap was out here. He felt in his gut that there was still time, that there was no need to panic, and that, even if others in the FBI had copies of these lists, they might not know exactly in what order this man Schaap was questioning the men on them.

“But surely the FBI will come looking for this man,” the General said. “It’s only a matter of time before they track him here. His cell phone, a LoJack in his car or something.”

No, the General thought. He couldn’t stick around the farmhouse forever.

However, the voice in his head said, the doorway can now be repaired. The stars have smiled upon you and brought a doorway—well, right to your doorstep!

With a surge of joy, the General gathered up the FBI agent’s belongings and dashed from the SUV into the house. He dumped everything on the kitchen table and then dragged the FBI agent’s corpse into the parlor—fished out his keys and set his body against the fireplace. He paused only briefly to look at himself in the mirror above the mantel. The gauze on his chest was soaked with blood, but the General felt no pain—only a tingling sensation, which he took as a sign that the doorway was already beginning to heal.

Yes, he thought, everything was back on track. The equation would be balanced again. And in a blur of excitement, the General was back outside.

First he rinsed off the blood on the porch with a garden hose. The he ran across the yard and into the old horse barn, where he started up his van and drove it around to the back of the house. He dashed back to the front yard and moved the TrailBlazer into the horse barn. The FBI would come for their man eventually, the General knew; would search his property and find everything—the TrailBlazer, the body, not to mention the reeducation chamber, the Throne Room, and all his equipment in the cellar.

But when would they come? That was the question.

The General suspected the FBI agent’s laptop would give him a better idea.

He locked the barn doors from the outside and quickly surveyed his property as he ran back toward the house. No, the FBI wasn’t looking for Andrew J. Schaap just yet. Indeed, the way things looked from the outside of his house, no one would be able to tell that the FBI agent had ever been there.

However, all that mattered to the General now was how things should look on the inside of his house when Andrew J. Schaap’s friends finally came a-calling.

Chapter 63

Markham awoke around 5:15 in the evening—would’ve kept on sleeping, in fact, had his mother not knocked on his bedroom door and told him supper was ready.

“Well, it’s going to be breakfast for you,” she added. “Steak and eggs, so call it what you want.”

“Steak,” Markham said to himself when she was gone. “Go figure.”

He lay there for a long time staring up at the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars that his father had pasted on the ceiling when he was a child. But rather than think of the Impaler, Markham’s stomach growled in anticipation of the meal waiting for him downstairs.

He was starving. But even more so, he was amazed he’d slept almost the entire day. He remembered waking only a couple of times to pee, but the heaviness behind his eyes always dragged him back to his bedroom. And the fact that his parents had left him alone meant he must’ve been snoring up a storm.

He thought of Michelle; how, in the middle of the night, she used to tap him lightly on his shoulder to make him roll over. But she never complained about his snoring—never once—and only shook her head and smiled at him in the morning as if he’d done something stupid the night before.

God, he missed her.

Indeed, after the execution Markham felt as if he missed her more than ever. He’d planned on traveling to Mystic on Saturday to visit her grave, but decided once he was back in his bedroom that he would do so early Sunday morning before he left for Raleigh. The cemetery was only about twenty minutes from his parents’ house, but curiously, he didn’t want to leave his old bedroom. It seemed to ease his pain, seemed to gas him into a deep and cleansing sleep broken only by glimpses of consciousness in which he swore he was a boy again—the sunlight streaming in around the window shade from a time long before he knew his wife and her killer even existed.

Markham showered and shaved and arrived at the kitchen table dressed in jeans and a faded University of Connecticut sweatshirt that he had found in his dresser drawer. His parents greeted him with looks of both concern and relief, but Markham knew neither of them would mention anything about the execution. It was a mutual understanding among the three of them that went back as long as he could remember. They never asked what was bothering him; seemed to accept that their son, even as a child, would talk to them only if he wanted to. And true to form, Sam Markham rarely did.

“Looks like you’ve been burning the candle at both ends, Sammy,” his father said, holding up his newspaper. “This fella they’re calling Vlad the Impaler—he’s the reason you’re on assignment in Raleigh, I take it?”

A former Navy man and retired real estate investor, Peter Markham had a somewhat gruff, no-nonsense