“Then there’s the fact that the kind of gun used to kill Rodriguez and Guerrera was a nine-millimeter, the rounds from which show marking consistent with the Beretta M9. Ballistics can’t be one hundred percent sure, of course, but the M9 has been standard issue for the U.S. military since 1990. Given Raleigh’s relative proximity to both Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, it’s another connection to Iraq that I think can’t be ignored at this point.”
“I’ll take care of getting the clearance on all that,” Gates said.
“Thank you, Alan. For the rest of us, in addition to getting on Interpol and ICE, I suggest we put together a team to cover Bragg and Lejeune and begin working from there—fast-track the necessary paperwork to requisition medical records and look for servicemen in the Raleigh area who have a history of mental illness. It’s a long shot, but if you’ve got a better place to begin, I’m all ears.”
Then came the silence—all of their minds spinning, Alan Gates knew, with variations on the same theme. The fact that the Impaler might be in the military had blindsided them more than anything Markham had said that day. And for Alan Gates, it was a prospect that both saddened and terrified him: sad because he felt an unspoken kinship with the killer; terrified because he also identified with him.
He’d seen it all firsthand. Sometimes he still saw it. In the middle of the night, the dream fading, the warm wet blood on his face and hands chilling into the sweat of his nightmare. Thankfully, gone were the nights when he woke up screaming, or when Debbie had to sleep in the guest room because his tossing and turning and talking in his sleep scared her close to death. But still, the dream always returned.
Curiously, however, he never remembered the dream itself; only pieced it together afterward when he figured it had to be about the worst day of them all—the day his best friend Ronnie Blake stepped on a land mine; the day First Lieutenant Alan Gates watched him die in his arms even as he wiped from his eyes the blood and shit from Blake’s blown-out bowels.
Those were the kinds of days that made a man snap, made him come back “a tick away” as they used to say. Gates had been close, could have snapped with the best of them were it not for his faith in God. Yeah, the Old Man Upstairs had bailed him out of that one just as he had bailed him out of Nam without a scratch.
But then there were the guys who snapped in a different way. The guys who came back “normal.” The guys who never dreamed, never cried, held a steady job and golfed and banged their wives and colored Easter eggs with their kids. That is, until one day …
One day.
The doctors and the smart men with the degrees had names for that day—theories and fancy terminology that he learned at Georgetown and had to indulge over his many years with Behavioral Analysis. But in the end Alan Gates didn’t care why a man snapped; didn’t preoccupy himself with the minutia as to why one kid could grow up to be a healthy member of society after being raped repeatedly by his uncle, while another felt the need to kill little old ladies because his grandmother got him the wrong color bicycle for Christmas.
No, when it came right down to it, Alan Gates was good at what he did because he not only understood what it meant to be a tick away from his own one day, but also because he was able to wrap his mind around the kind of snap that made the one day into a string of days. Sure, he could think like the killers he hunted, but he was also able to see and feel the waves of the water in which they swam. It was the latter that separated the men from the boys. The tick of the clock that took him further, but at the same time kept him sane. It was that way for Markham, Gates knew. His tick was Elmer Stokes.
After all, thinking like a killer was one thing, but feeling like him was another.
The superposition principle.
Markham, Gates said to himself as he looked at the clock over his office door: 1 p.m. Already on his way. So much to do, so little time. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.
Gates thought about his platoon in Vietnam, and in his head he ran through the names and faces of those who’d made it and those who hadn’t—of those he knew were still living, and those he knew had since died.
And then Alan Gates did something he’d never done before.
He got down on his knees and said a prayer for a killer.
Chapter 40
Cindy Smith was beyond thrilled that she had waited in front of her computer just that little bit longer before heading off to the gym.
Direct and to the point, she said to herself, reading. But at the same time mysterious. Just like the handsome soldier himself.
Cindy smiled and read the e-mail again:
Hello Cindy: Jennings doesn’t need me at the show tonight, but I’ll stop by your dressing room afterwards to pick you up for the party. I guess it’s meant to be after all. Yours truly, Edmund Lambert
“I guess it’s meant to be, after all,” Cindy said out loud for the twentieth time. “But what is meant to be? Going to the party? Or going to the party with me?”
Cindy sighed and chastised herself for not playing it cool even in private. She shut down her computer and slipped her script into her book bag.
“I’ll be home late, Mom,” she called on her way out the door. “Don’t forget the cast party is tonight.”
“Be careful,” her mother replied from the kitchen. “And no drinking and driving.”
“I know,” Cindy said. They exchanged I love yous, and then she was gone.
“I guess it’s meant to be,” Cindy said to herself as she started up her car. “Yeeess, Meester Lem-behrt. Now I have you right vehre I vahnt you.”
Chapter 41
As Markham walked across the tarmac, he felt a wave of panic pass through his stomach when he imagined how thin the FBI’s resources would be stretched in the days to come. There was the European and Middle Eastern can of worms now, not to mention the coordination of all the military records. He’d already followed up on the name Lyons itself but came up empty. He wasn’t surprised. That would’ve been too easy.
Markham reached the mobile stairs unit and checked his watch—2:07 p.m. He was seven minutes late for his flight. Late—period, he thought. Yes, the clock was certainly ticking. The crescent moon would hit around May 3rd, which meant the Impaler would go looking for his next victim any time now if he already hadn’t. In fact, there would be two crescent moons in May, the second on the 31st.
Oh yes, Markham said to himself. The merry month of May will be the Impaler’s busiest month yet.
But would he go hunting again on West Hargett Street? And furthermore, where would he display his next victim if the FBI didn’t stop him in time? That was the question.
It was Dr. Underhill who offered the best answer.
“The military connection makes a lot of sense,” he said at the end of the teleconference. “But in addition to checking out the patient records, you may want to look at specific units that identify themselves with lions or other big cats, perhaps even winged creatures like eagles and hawks. After all, Nergal was not only the god of war—the ultimate soldier, if you will—but also a lion with wings.”
“Do you think we should narrow down our suspect pool further by focusing on servicemen whose birthdays fall under the sign of Leo?” Markham asked. “Identification with a destiny written in the stars?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Underhill replied. “But maybe our boy is mapping out his own sign, his own identity on the ground. Given the nature of the sacrifices, the theory of a servant, a sort of Leo Minor helping to resurrect the god makes the most sense to me. And if that is in fact the case, maybe the Starlight Theater visual was the starting point for a picture on the ground that mimics his military insignia—a creature or something with which he identifies. Just a hunch.”
A good hunch, Markham had thought, but as constellations were by their very nature subjective in their rendering, with only three stars to build off it would be impossible to match up the Starlight Theater schematic with the military insignias.
Markham climbed onto the
plane and said hello to the flight attendant. No FBI plane today, but there were only a handful of passengers making the trip with him on the charter flight to Connecticut. He found a seat over the wing, stowed his carry-on, and sat down by the window. The flight attendant closed the hatch and came by to make sure he’d fastened his seat belt. He hadn’t, and she smiled and pointed to remind him.
Attractive, Markham thought, even though he’d never been a fan of blondes, and wondered if she was the type of woman who would ask him about the plaque above his bedroom door. She smiled again at him as she strapped herself into the seat by the cockpit, and Markham decided she wasn’t.
Waiting.
More than anything else about his job Sam Markham hated the waiting. And as he stared past the flight attendant into the open cockpit, he imagined the days ahead of him tumbling out in a series of big black numbers.
The news conference had gone well, he thought. That was a plus. The FBI would now be able to work quietly behind the scenes while the media chewed on the phony Vlad angle. And it would only be a matter of time before Geraldo and Nancy Grace and all the others would start throwing around the gay-bashing theories, too. But that wouldn’t bother the Impaler. No, Markham thought, the Impaler wouldn’t give two shits about what the public thought as long as Nergal was happy.
The plane started to move and he punched open his e-mail on his BlackBerry. Alan Gates had already gotten the ball rolling with the three soldiers who’d been brought up on smuggling charges at the beginning of Iraq War. Markham had received the e-mail on the way to the airport. He read it again.
I got their names. Two are presently serving their third tours in Iraq, while the other has been confirmed to be living in Seattle. I got a man with him now. None of them are our boy, but they may know something. Good work today.—AG
PS: The preliminary autopsy report just came back on Canning. Looks like our boy kept him alive for a couple of weeks before he skewered him.
Markham felt his stomach turn. Did the Impaler hold Canning hostage so he could tattoo him? Was that why he abducted him in the first place? If so, that meant there were more leads to follow: the thefts or purchases of tattoo equipment in the—
Stick to what you know, said the voice in his head. You’ve got your hands full as it is, Sammy boy.
This was true. Schaap had already come back with a working list of military units and ranked them according to their assignments in Iraq, as well as by their associated in-signias and mascots. There were plenty of lions, of course, but a bunch of hybrid animals, too: the winged soaring black panther of the 82nd Airborne’s 3rd Combat Brigade out of Fort Bragg, the fishtailed lion of the 8th Marines Regiment out of Camp Lejeune, the Screaming Eagle of Fort Campbell’s 101st Airborne. So many that Markham had never heard of; so many that his head felt as if it was spinning when he left the Resident Agency.
The flight attendant motioned for him to turn off his BlackBerry. He did and closed his eyes. Perhaps it was good that he was getting away. There was nothing he could do now but wait. No one else for him to question until all the data came back and he could get some boots on the ground. Besides, he needed to sleep; needed to clear his mind and come back fresh with a new perspective.
Yes, said the voice in his head. A nice little vacation to see your wife’s killer get pumped full of chemicals. Now that’s what I call fun in the sun!
The plane stopped again and Markham opened his eyes, slipped his hand under the seat in front of him and removed some papers from his briefcase. He read them.
An examination of how the god Nergal transitioned over the centuries from a solar deity to the lord of the Underworld (as well as his association with the planet Mars) cannot be explained without an examination of his relationship to Ereshkigal, the Babylonian goddess of the Underworld.
The love story of Nergal and Ereshkigal is unique in that it takes place in Irkalla, the Mesopotamian Land of the Dead. Two different versions of the myth exist—the first discovered in Tel El-Amarna, Egypt, dates from around the fifteenth century BCE and contains roughly 90 lines of text; the second, much longer version (approx. 750 lines) dates from seventh century BCE and was found on the site of the ancient Assyrian city of Sultantepe.
In the first version, Nergal descends to the Underworld with an army of demons, rapes Ereshkigal and seizes her throne, then remains there to rule as king. In the later tradition, Nergal seems to make two trips to the Underworld, and instead of an army of demons, he takes down a special throne that will protect him from being seized by ghosts. Ereshkigal then seduces Ner-gal by showing him a glimpse of her body while taking a bath, and the two then fall into a passionate love affair. Otherwise, the basic story lines are the same.
In both versions, the celestial gods hold a banquet, and since Ereshkigal is the queen of the Underworld, cosmic law dictates that she cannot journey to the heavens to join them. She sends an envoy to fetch her portion, and Nergal, god of war and pestilence, is rude to him. The other gods deem that Nergal must be punished by Ereshkigal for the insult. Nergal descends to the Underworld, overpowers Ereshkigal, and the two fall in love. Thus, the chief difference between the two versions is that in the first, Nergal comes to the throne by violence. In the second, the conflict leads to a love affair.
A significant portion of the Nergal and Ereshkigal myth is missing from both the Tel El-Amarna and the Sultantepe versions. However, as mentioned earlier, not only do we have what appears to be the mythological record of how the god Nergal went from becoming a solar deity to the lord of the Underworld, we also have a cultural record that expresses views about human sexuality, as well as Neo-Babylonian and Late Assyrian relationships between men and women.
Let’s examine the …
The plane started down the runway; and by the time it lifted off, Markham’s eyelids had grown heavy—the urge to sleep overpowering him as the plane climbed higher and higher.
The thoughts, the images that flickered before his eyes were of the lion-headed god Nergal—but the lion god is also Elmer Stokes, complete with a buzz cut and a dirty white T-shirt as he chases Michelle through the parking lot of the Mystic Aquarium.
Markham runs after them in the darkness, around a maze of corners and through pools of light cast down from street-lamps. Then the flash of a giant bathtub, up ahead in the distance, and the lion god and Michelle disappear.
There is only the parking lot now and the silhouettes of thousands of impaled bodies stretching out toward a fiery horizon. He can hear Michelle speaking somewhere behind him—“Would you like something to drink, ma’am?”—but he tells her to go on without him.
He does not wish to leave—not today, not when he is so close—and lets the images and the low humming of the plane’s engines, the Babylonian spirits, carry him forward to the temple at Kutha. He can see it in the distance, no, behind him—where is it?
He sits down on the asphalt, his back against something hard—Michelle’s car? He turns around to look and discovers that he is alone on an obsidian ocean—in a rowboat be- neath a stormy sky. He searches for the shore but cannot find it.
No, now there is only the Impaler—up ahead in the distance, seated Indian style on the water and moving away quickly, silently, leaving no trace of wake behind him.
He feels himself sinking, but doesn’t resist. The sky and the ocean are one now, heavy and sinking with him as the curtain of sleep descends—as the Impaler’s wings unfold from his back and lift him high into the air … higher and higher, smaller and smaller until the both of them disappear like smoke into the seamless black.
PART III
INTERSECTING
Chapter 42
Annie Lambert loved her son Edmund more than anything in the world, but sometimes even she couldn’t help pinching his nipple and twisting it until he screamed—when he was a poop head, sure, but especially when he called himself “Eddie.”
His grandfather had been behind that; even went so far as to teach the boy to write E-D-D-I-E in ca
pital letters, hyphens and all, in the dirt when the boy was five years old. Her son’s name was Edmund—Edmund, Edmund, Edmund!
And besides, Edmund knew better, too. He’d been writing his name the right way since he was three years old, and Annie vowed that she would twist little Edmund’s nipple until the boy learned to obey her and only her.
True, Annie Lambert had given her son the name Edmund primarily as a dig at the old man. A private joke with herself, really, and she never thought in a million years that her father would find out Edmund was a character in Shakespeare—let alone a bastard one at that. But Claude Lambert did find out. How? Well, Annie never worked up the courage to ask him.
As with everything else, however, Claude Lambert didn’t get mad or act any different toward his daughter than he had all her life. Quiet, cold, uninterested. No, the old man only got even. As he always did. Through other people.
Yes, teaching her son to write his name E-D-D-I-E was par for the course for old Claude Lambert. Just like the cookie crumbs on the settee in the parlor, the spilled bottle of her mother’s perfume, the blueberry stains on her pillowcase from a stolen pie on Thanksgiving.
When she was about six or seven, Annie Lambert thought a ghost had suddenly moved in with them, and would swear up and down that it wasn’t she who took the lipstick. “It was the ghost, Mama!” she would scream as her mother whipped her naked behind with her cat-o’-nine-tails. And then, when she was a little older, for many years she thought it was her brother James who’d been framing her, and would sometimes hide behind the furniture in an attempt to catch him breaking the handle off a china cup or stealing a piece of her mother’s jewelry.
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