The Impaler

“Now you need to focus,” he’d said, pulling away. “But I’ll be watching.”

It was going to be the best show yet, Cindy thought, and felt beyond ecstatic when she played over in her mind how Edmund had looked at her.

But now when he looked at her he seemed agitated. And he kept glancing at his BlackBerry as Kiernan gave them a pep talk about focus and teamwork.

“I thought he would have canceled the show,” Edmund said as Kiernan made his curtain speech. “Or at least the photo call.”

He actually seemed disappointed, Cindy thought.

“Not George Kiernan,” she said. “The show must go on. Just don’t get jealous in that part where Macbeth tries to kiss me, okay? Even though it’s George Kiernan, I’ll still try my hardest to resist.”

Edmund smiled thinly. Cindy kissed him and then ran to places for the opening scene—a silly scene, Cindy had always thought, in which the director had the Witches arrange all the characters like pieces on a chessboard. Edmund thought it was a silly scene, too, she learned at the cast party—just one of the many things they had in common. “A scene like that takes Macbeth’s fate out of his hands,” he’d said. “If only he’d read the messages correctly things wouldn’t have turned out so badly for him.”

For some reason talking like that with Edmund had turned her on.

His speech finished, Kiernan stepped back into the wings and took his place with the rest of the cast—directly opposite Cindy on the other side of the stage. He gave her a thumbs-up and she replied in kind. The audience was still murmuring as the music started and the lights dimmed, and Cindy felt as if the air were charged with electricity, as if she would explode from excitement at any moment. Yeah, she thought, in a sick way she was thrilled all this was happening.

“This is fucked up about Bradley,” whispered the actor playing Macduff.

“Yeah,” replied Jonathan, winner of the Perils of Inbreeding Award. “Maybe Vlad got him.”

“Or maybe Lambert finally finished the job.”

The two boys snickered, and Cindy told them to shut the hell up.

Yeah, even though it was Bradley Cox they were dissing, a comment like that was beyond uncalled for.

Chapter 73

Markham landed in Raleigh about twenty minutes early. As the plane taxied down the runway, he turned on his cell phone to find the text message from Andy Schaap already waiting for him.

Checking on names, the message read. Might be out of range 4 a while, but let me know when u land. Will call u when I get back to the RA l8r.

“Enough with this nonsense,” Markham said, and promptly dialed his partner’s number.

It rang only twice and then went straight into voice mail.

“I’m back,” Markham said. “Got your article about the lion’s head. Good work, and I’ll follow up at the taxidermy shop myself first thing tomorrow. There are some other things I want to discuss with you. Don’t know if you read the latest updates, but the set list from Rodriguez’s CD was uploaded into Sentinel last night. I think there might be a connection with one of the songs in particular—“Dark in the Day” by that eighties band High Risk. Only going with my gut, but I ’d like to bounce a couple of things off you. Let’s plan on dinner at the Dubliner around seven. Call me back ASAP.”

He hung up feeling on edge, but by the time he reached his TrailBlazer he was furious. It didn’t make sense, Markham thought, this frustration with his NCAVC coordinator. Perhaps he might feel better after a stop at the Resident Agency to see what Andy Schaap was up to.

Still, something was off. Something was wrong.

Markham could feel it.

Chapter 74

KISS’s “Detroit Rock City” kicked in just as the General turned off the Mustang’s ignition, and for a moment he thought he’d tripped an alarm or something. He glanced down at the BlackBerry—the name Sam Markham in bright white letters on the screen—and waited patiently for the song to stop. And when it did, the General gazed across the parking lot to the apartment building where the famous Quantico profiler was staying.

The General had reconned the Resident Agency earlier that morning; had to circle the outside lot only once to realize it was too risky to grab out Markham there. His apartment would be much better. The General had found the address on Schaap’s computer, but after he left the theater he decided to first drive back to the farmhouse to check on the progress there. Satisfied, the General switched his pickup for Bradley Cox’s Mustang and arrived at the apartment building forty-five minutes later. The General hoped Markham had gotten the e-mail he’d sent from Schaap’s BlackBerry; hoped he’d stop first at the taxidermy shop or perhaps the Resident Agency before coming home. That was important, for the General’s plan would only work if Markham got home after dark.

Of course, as with the tattoo parlor, the FBI would find nothing at the taxidermy shop. The General was always careful not to leave any fingerprints, but the idea of sending Markham on a wild-goose chase excited him. He was tempted to send him another article or a text message, but knew he could play his little game only for so long before the FBI agent caught on. Indeed, the General suspected the game might already be over when he heard the voice mail notification on the BlackBerry. After all, Markham would grow suspicious when he didn’t hear from his partner in person.

He needed to be careful. There was no room for mistakes, and time was running short. The General had seen it all in the doorway.

Andrew J. Schaap had proved invaluable. The Prince was no longer angry with the General. He couldn’t come right out and say so (as the General suspected, such communication took up too much of the doorway’s power), but the General could tell from the Prince’s visions that he had forgiven him. Of course, Edmund Lambert’s mother was nowhere to be seen, but the Prince did show him Ereshkigal. She was most certainly part of the equation now. But exactly how she fit in, the General still wasn’t sure—he could only see himself running with her across the smoking battlefields. However, in the part of his brain that he could still keep hidden from the Prince, the General felt confident that he would be able to save his mother in the end. He didn’t know where she was— there was still so much about Hell that he didn’t understand—but knew that Ereshkigal would help him. Plus, the fact that the Prince would actually expect him and Ereshkigal to be together filled him with hope. Perhaps they could conspire behind his back. Perhaps she knew where the Prince had taken his mother. Perhaps, if the General promised to restore her to her throne she could—

He was getting ahead of himself again. That kind of thinking needed to go on the back burner for now. The equation must take precedence, and there was still time to balance it. The Prince had shown him this in his visions. And if everything went according to plan, as of tomorrow more than half of the nine would be complete. After that, and once Ereshki-gal had joined with him—the General would eventually be told what to do next.

After all, eventually had always been part of the equation.

First things first, the General said to himself, and he fished out a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment. Even though George Kiernan had messed things up for him by not canceling the show, he needed to take care of business here in Raleigh first.

He’d already telephoned Doug Jennings—told him his aunt had been in a car accident and that he wouldn’t be able to make the photo call. Then he left Cindy a voice mail saying would call her once he got his aunt home from the hospital. He had only a short window before Markham would come looking for his partner along with his friends, so it was critical that he be alone for what the Prince had in store for him.

Besides, despite the scene he had laid out in Cox’s apartment, the General knew it was only a matter of time before the police began questioning people. They would question everyone and would eventually get to Edmund Lambert. In that respect, the variable of eventually would not bode well for the equation.

True, even the Prince had no idea how long it would take before the police, and then the FBI, would start trying to connect Cox’s disappearance to Vlad the Impaler. But this Sam Markham character knew the murders had nothing to do with Vlad the Impaler; and judging from the FBI’s military profile for the killer, any interaction with the