The General breathed deeply. The dentist’s chair and the floor were clean now, and the room smelled refreshingly of Pine-Sol.
“Your body is the doorway,” the General said along with the Clone Six lead singer. And then the chorus kicked in.
The cover version was slightly different from the original, but the message was the same—always the same, always part of the equation. Just as it had been long before his mother died.
The General often thought about his mother, but never about his father. He knew him only from a yearbook photo that his mother sometimes showed him before bedtime. “All right,” she’d say. “You can kiss your father good night.” The General could no longer remember what his father looked liked; only blurry rows of black squares that smelled in his mind like perfume and old paper. His mother kept the yearbook hidden underneath a loose floorboard in her bedroom, and made the boy promise never to tell his grandfather she had it. And the boy kept his promise.
For even as a boy, the General
Smiling, the General walked from the reeducation chamber, down the darkened hallway, and entered into the last of the cellar’s three rooms: the Throne Room.
The General dropped to his knees and bowed his head.
The Throne Room was the smallest but most sacred room in the house. It had once served as his grandmother’s pickling closet, but was now empty except for a large wooden throne at the far end. The General had constructed the throne himself out of pine—it had to be light enough to carry, that was part of the equation, too— and the softness of the wood made it easier for him to carve the intricate designs that adorned the arms and legs and back. He also painted the throne gold and illuminated it with a single spotlight hung from above. The General had stolen the spotlight during his day-life, but unlike the belt sander and other tools he’d taken from his place of employment, his boss never missed it.
“I shall return, my Prince,” the General whispered, but the figure on the throne did not respond. That was all right. The General hadn’t expected the Prince to respond. Not today. Not for a few days, perhaps, or at least until the General fulfilled the next part of the equation.
9:3 or 3:1 was the proper ratio, the equation that held the key to the formula.
The Prince understood the equation. And although he was demanding, he also understood that his General had worked hard to keep the formula in balance—knew that it was time for him to rest. After all, the Prince was a general, too. The supreme general, a general spelled G-E-N-E-R-A-L in big capital letters—the most fearful of them all, in fact. “The Raging Prince,” his soldiers used to call him on the battlefield; sometimes, “the Furious One.”
The General rose to his feet, bowed perfunctorily, and turned off the spotlight. He climbed the cellar stairs in the dark, emerged into the kitchen, and locked the door behind him. He was hungry, but would wait until lunchtime. He had learned to resist temptation; needed to stick to his diet and keep his muscles lean. No more cheeseburgers. General’s orders. That had been the hardest sacrifice of them all. He really missed the cheeseburgers.
Then again, war was all about sacrifice, wasn’t it? At the very least, war was not meant to be easy. Even for the greatest generals. Nonetheless, the General felt confident in his mission. He’d been preparing for it for two years now; could see the results of his hard work in the sinews of his muscular physique; could feel his growing strength in the ease with which he lifted the heavy loads during his day-life.
And the Prince had rewarded him for all his hard work, had promoted him to second in command. A general, too. A warrior-priest who served only the Prince.
Then again, the General was born to serve. And hadn’t the Prince been grooming him for this mission nearly all his life?
The General made his way quickly from the kitchen, through the hallway, and up the stairs to his bedroom. He was going to be late today, and would have to work doubly hard to keep up the appearance of his day-life. But that was all right; the Prince would allow him a respite before the big push toward May. Yes, now that he had laid the groundwork for the Prince’s return, everything would come together much more rapidly in the weeks to come.
Everything would have to if the equation was correct.
And the General was sure the equation was correct.
Chapter 4
“The appeal from Stokes’s mother was denied,” Gates said. He stood with Markham on the tarmac, at the bottom of the mobile stairs unit that led up to the FBI plane. “Connecticut Supreme Court struck down her request to postpone his execution. Found that Stokes was entirely competent to drop the appeals process on his own behalf. The execution will proceed as planned a week from Saturday. He wants to die, Sam.”
Markham said nothing.
“I’ve already made the arrangements for you to be there,” Gates said, handing him a brown cardboard envelope. “There’s a copy of his last letter in there on top of the Donovan file. Your in-laws faxed it to the Tampa Office by mistake.”
Markham looked down at the elastic-banded packet. It felt heavy. Cold. Like a stone tablet.
“I’m sorry about the timing,” Gates said. “But if there’s anything I can do, you know where to reach me.”
“Thank you,” Markham said, and boarded the plane.
Alone in the cabin, Markham stared down at the brown cardboard envelope. The loud drone of the plane’s turbo-props set him on edge. He made a quick body scan—cataloged his breathing and the tension in his forearms and toes. Suddenly, the plane throttled forward, and Markham told his body to melt into his seat. He felt himself relax immediately, and by the time the plane began its ascent, he decided he was in a better frame of mind to analyze the situation objectively.
The date for Stokes’s execution had been set for almost two months: a vague point of light on the horizon to which Markham neither looked forward nor dreaded as it drew closer. He’d always planned on being present in support of Michelle’s family, but personally had no desire to see Elmer Stokes ever again. He’d seen enough death in his ten years with the Bureau to know that no closure would come of it.
At least not for him. At least not
Before he killed Michelle Markham, Elmer Stokes had been known up and down the East Coast as a charming singer of traditional sea shanty songs. He’d been performing for the summer at Mystic Seaport when he spotted the pretty, twenty-six-year-old “scientist lady” and her friends taking water samples from the harbor. In his confession, Stokes told police that he followed them back to the aquarium, where he waited for Michelle in his car. He said he’d only wanted to “get a feel for her” and see where she lived. However, later that evening, when he spied Michelle leaving the aquarium alone, the man who called himself the “Smiling Shanty Man” could not resist taking her right then and there.
Stokes told police that he wore a ski mask—said he “pulled a pistol on the bitch” and tried to push her in his car. But Michelle Markham fought back—kicked him in the balls and bit him hard on the forearm. She also tore off his ski mask, and Stokes said it was then he panicked—said he “shot the bitch twice in the coconut” with his .38 Special and fled. Two days later another performer at the seaport spotted the bite marks on his arm and called the police. They found the ski mask and the .38 in Stokes’s car. He confessed to everything, and the authorities eventually tied him to nine rapes in four states going back over a decade.
The fact that his wife had been the Smiling Shanty Man’s only murder was of little consolation to Sam Markham, who discovered her lying dead in the Mystic Aquarium parking lot after she failed to return home that evening—his happy two-year marriage, his idyllic life in the sleepy little town of Mystic all shattered in the blink of an eye. It took him a year to pass through the wake of his wife’s death, the waves of which brought him straight to the shores of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
