The Impaler sm-2

by Gregory Funaro

  It was Tracy Donovan. He recognized her blond hair and the trendy pink tracksuit from the countless family photos he’d sifted through the week before.

  Markham parked his TrailBlazer at the end of a line of cars. There’d be no calling hours for Randall Donovan this week, Schaap had told him—only a small, private funeral for the lawyer’s family and closest friends. That was smart, Markham thought. The scumbags this guy dealt with, who knows who might show up?

  Markham felt beneath the seats for his umbrella—he was sure he’d brought one—and when he didn’t find it, he exited the TrailBlazer with his briefcase over his head, ran across the soggy lawn, and bounded up the steps to the porch. Tracy Donovan didn’t move, didn’t even draw from her cigarette, but only tracked him with her eyes as if his presence was inevitable to her.

  “All those movies,” she said finally. “I never asked myself why the FBI always shows up unannounced. You have that look about you. Like the others. Unannounced.”

  Markham pegged her to be in her mid-thirties; knew from her pictures that she had been quite attractive before her husband’s disappearance—athletic, blond, blue-eyed with nice skin. But now she looked old and haggard; her dry hair pulled back like bundled straw, her face pale and blotchy with hollow red eyes.

  The ashtray beside her was overflowing with cigarette butts.

  “Forgive me, ma’am,” Markham said. He shook off his briefcase and showed his ID, gave her the standard intro, and was invited to sit down. The rain was blowing from behind the house, the porch entirely dry.

  “The children are inside,” she said. “They’re old enough to know what’s going on, so I’ll ask you like I asked the others to keep your voice down. The reporters—were there any outside the front gate?”

  “No. They’re still bothering you?”

  “Since day one. But we’ve got our cameras on them, too. There’s one by the gate, hidden in the topiaries. I bet you didn’t see that now, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I take it my sister only let you in because she could tell you weren’t one of them. She doesn’t bother me with all that anymore. Been everything to me and the kids during all this. You’ve read those stories they printed about Randy? Calling him dirty and corrupt; lying down with dogs and getting up with fleas—that kind of thing?”

  “Yes, I did. And I’m sorry that your family has to go through this. Truly, I am.”

  Tracy Donovan snuffed her cigarette and lit another. Markham noticed the blisters between her index and middle fingers. She’d been letting the cigarettes burn down to her skin—intentionally or unintentionally, he wasn’t sure.

  “You know,” she exhaled, “Randy came from nothing. He grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, in a working-class district made up of Italians mostly—all of them suspicious of anyone who didn’t have a vowel at the end of his name. There was this kid who used to pick on Randy in elementary school. Some punk from a broken home who didn’t make it past the eighth grade. Made my husband’s life miserable. Long story short, this guy grows up to be a small-time hood, gets busted on a narcotics rap, and is looking at twenty years minimum. But as fate would have it, guess who ends up being his attorney all those years later? That’s right. Randy’s first case with the public defender’s office. Scumbag didn’t remember Randy, but Randy remembered him. Most people you’d think would still hold a grudge, but not Randy. No, he did everything he could to get him a lighter sentence. Even kept tabs on him after he was paroled. That was Randy. Main thing for him was that everybody got a fair shake, no matter who you were. Didn’t read about that little story in the newspapers, now did you?”

  Markham told her about the discovery of Billy Canning—showed her his picture, explained the details of the murder, and said that it was only a matter of time before the press got wind of the story.

  “I don’t know if he’s connected to my husband, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Not exactly,” Markham said.

  “Then what?”

  “I know you’ve been questioned a lot since your husband’s disappearance, but I ’d like to ask you a few questions about your marriage. Specifically, about your sex life with your husband.”

  Tracy Donovan smiled, but Markham noticed her hand begin to tremble, the smoke rising from her cigarette in thin, white squiggles.

  “The police and the FBI already asked me that. And I’ll tell you what I told them. Randy would never cheat. All of you wasting your time searching for love letters, for shady dealings on his computers when you should’ve been out looking for his—”

  She stopped—took a long drag off her cigarette and exhaled slowly. “Only thing they found,” she said after a moment, “were Internet records of some porn sites. No scandalous e-mails or pictures, no evidence of an affair or shady dealings with Colombian cartels out to kill him. Nothing you wouldn’t find on any other forty-five-year-old, devoted father of two’s computer.”

  “That’s not quite what I wanted to ask you,” Markham said. “But since you brought up the investigation of your husband’s Internet activity, did the authorities mention what types of porn sites he was visiting?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did they indicate to you whether the sites were straight or gay?”

  Tracy Donovan leveled her eyes at him—raised a trembling hand to her lips and took a drag off her cigarette. The ash needed to be tapped, but she ignored it.

  “Special Agent Markham,” she began slowly. “Are you asking me if I think my husband was a closet homosexual?”

  “Billy Canning, the man we found up north, was a known homosexual. I don’t know yet about Rodriguez and Guer-rera, but we’re trying to establish a connection between the killer’s victims—a profile of the types of men Vlad likes to hunt.”

  Tracy Donovan smiled thinly.

  “It just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?” she said, her eyes beginning to well.

  “Please forgive me for the line of questioning, but so far the FBI can find nothing to tie all four of the victims together other than a loose parallel to the victims of the historical Vlad Tepes. We’re just trying to explore every avenue. Perhaps something we might have missed up front.”

  “Randy and I had quite an active sex life,” Tracy Donovan said after a moment. “At least compared to what the girls at the country club tell me about their husbands. Usually two or three times a week. There are some DVDs back at the house in his top dresser. After Amber was born, we went through a bit of a dry spell, and it was Randy who suggested that we watch the DVDs to spice things up. All guy-girl stuff with the obligatory lesbian scenes thrown in for good measure. It seemed to do the trick; he was really into them at first and always got off pretty quickly. But we hadn’t watched them in years. No need to, quite frankly. No, in the last few years Randy was, well, pretty randy, if you’ll forgive the pun. Does that satisfy you?”

  “And never once in your relationship did you ever suspect your husband might be a homosexual? Might be having an affair with another man, perhaps?”

  “Randy was very neat around the house,” she said dryly. “Was a snappy dresser and did sing the occasional show tune. He even teared up the first time he watched Disney’s Tarzan with the kids—the part where Tarzan’s ape mother dies. So I guess you’re right. A raging queen my husband was, yes.”

  Markham looked away into the rain, and Tracy Donovan took another drag from her cigarette—let the ash fall on her bosom and absently brushed it away.

  “For the record,” she said after a heavy silence. “I loved being married to Randall Donovan. He was a good husband, a good father who always made time for his family.” Her voice began to break. “He didn’t deserve what happened to him, no matter what you and the fucking press might think.”

  Another woman with blond hair stepped out onto the porch. Tracy Donovan’s sister. Markham recognized her from the photos.

  “You all right, T?” she asked. “Anything I can get you?
”

  Her sister shook her head, snuffed her cigarette into the ashtray, and stood up.

  “I have family inside,” Tracy Donovan said. “The funeral is on Saturday. All I ask is that you let us alone until then to grieve in peace.”

  She made to leave, then stopped at the front door and turned back.

  “One more thing,” she said. “If it’s your intention to slander my husband’s name in the press any further, I suggest you think twice before leveling accusations about his private life in public. Randall Donovan wasn’t the only Donovan in this family to pass the bar in North Carolina.”

  The women disappeared inside—slammed the front door loudly and left Sam Markham alone on the porch with only the rain for company.

  Chapter 21

  Markham hung up with Schaap and parked his Trail-Blazer in the loading area behind the shopping plaza. He sat there for a moment, eyes closed, listening to the rain. Schaap had just told him the results from Quantico had come back negative; no discernable correlation between the constellations and the coordinates of the murder sites. There were patterns that jibed between individual stars, but that was to be expected, Markham thought. Schaap would forward everything to their man at NC State, of course, but Markham felt in his gut that it was all just another dead end. Just like Tracy Donovan. Either she was totally clueless, he thought, or her husband was not a homosexual.

  Markham opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and made a dash for the back door of the tattoo parlor—BILLY’S, someone had written on it in black Magic Marker. Driving through the parking lot, he’d noticed a Chinese restaurant at the opposite end of the shopping plaza. He could smell it now through the rain, and promised himself he’d get something to eat there later. He was starving, hadn’t eaten a thing all day—

  Anything but beef teriyaki, said a voice in his head. You’ve had enough skewered meat to last you a lifetime, eh Sammy boy?

  Markham sighed and inserted the key into the lock. It was sticky, and he had to turn it a couple of times before the door finally gave. He stepped inside, felt for the light switch, and flicked it. He was in the back office. Homicide had removed all the business records and some other evidence the month before, but turned everything over (including the key) to the FBI upon the positive ID from Canning’s lover. The business records were scarce, but Schaap’s team would take care of the follow-up. That part of the investigation wouldn’t take long. There simply wasn’t much to look at.

  Markham gave the office a quick once-over and stepped out into the studio.

  Billy’s Tattoo Parlor was a small, one-man operation with a large plate-glass window and an L-shaped display counter full of cheap, sterling-silver jewelry. There was a couch and a Barcalounger toward the front, and behind the counter, along with a pair of chairs and a padded table, was Canning’s equipment. None of that stuff had been touched since the day he disappeared, Dorsey had told the FBI in a stream of tears, and Markham could clearly see the marks the forensic team had made in the dust upon their initial sweep of the parlor earlier that afternoon.

  He wandered about looking at the images on the walls—thousands of drawings grouped by subject matter. He paused briefly at the signs of the zodiac, then came upon the letters and symbols—the obligatory Chinese and Japanese, of course, but also Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, even Egyptian. There were countless others, too, but no Babylonian cuneiform from what he could see, and certainly no arrangement of letters that even remotely approached the markings found on Donovan and Canning.

  Markham worked his way in a horseshoe around the par- lor and came to the section devoted to photographs of Billy Canning’s work: a large, six-by-six-foot bulletin board covered in Polaroids of tattooed flesh—arms and legs and chests and backs, a couple of necks and a pair of breasts here and there. There were hundreds of them, and Markham’s eyes darted about the photos haphazardly.

  Canning was good, he had to admit, and the Polaroids were obviously of some of the artist’s best work. His eyes came to rest on a large back tattoo of a pair of sword-dueling ninjas. He thought of Jackson Briggs—removed the picture and stared at it for a long time.

  The superposition principle, said the voice in his head. The ninjas are speaking to you, telling you to look closely, telling you not to miss anything. Like that time in the martial arts studio. Briggs was coming for your head with his ninja sword. Would have lopped it off like a pineapple if you hadn’t stopped to look in the mirror.

  Markham’s left shoulder began to tingle. He quickly skirted around the counter, grabbed one of the chairs, and sat down in front of the bulletin board. He let his eyes wander slowly across the collage of jumbled body parts, scanning back and forth in a manner that reminded him for some reason of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. There had to be a thousand pictures, he thought, going back many years.

  Markham’s eyes began to ache with fatigue. What the hell was he looking for? The writing on Donovan and Canning? Was it possible Vlad had Canning tattoo the same thing on his chest? But surely Vlad wouldn’t have been so stupid as to let him take a Polaroid of it.

  He gazed down at the photo of the dueling ninjas in his hand. The size, the detail, the color—how long would it take Canning to do a tattoo like that?

  Vlad kept Canning longer than the others, Markham thought suddenly. Almost two and a half weeks. The hair growth. What if the autopsy comes back and says Canning was alive for most of that time? What if Vlad had his own private tattoo session with Canning before he impaled him?

  Pure supposition, Markham thought—but something about the image of the faceless Vlad forcing Canning to tattoo him gnawed at his gut.

  Canning’s car was found out back, Markham said to himself. That means he had to have driven here after he went to the convenience store. But why so late at night? A private session? Could he have been two-timing Dorsey? Whatever the case, Vlad had to have known he was coming back here that night.

  Or, the voice in his head countered, Vlad could’ve simply been following him. Canning could’ve come back here for any number of reasons—forgot his cell phone or some-thing—and Vlad took advantage of the situation. Pretty dark back there.

  But the writing on Canning and Donovan is like a tattoo. He didn’t do that to Rodriguez and Guerrera. It started with Canning.

  The voice in his head was silent, and Markham stared at the photos. He would have to get Dorsey back in here to double-check if any equipment was missing. Would have to follow up with distributors on any recent orders in the Raleigh area, too. Christ, that would be a pain in the ass—just another wild-goose chase? Was he really getting that desperate?

  Markham sighed and returned the photo of the dueling ninjas to the bulletin board. The guy in the picture was bald—reminded him of an album cover he’d once seen.

  What was the name of the group?

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Then it came to him.

  Sublime. That was it. Picture of some skinhead-looking dude with the group’s name tattooed across his back.

  Nineties music. Tattoos.

  Markham didn’t understand nineties music—felt disconnected from it—and didn’t understand the ninties tattoo craze, either. Every stockbroker with his tribal band, every sorority girl with her “tramp stamp” sticking to the seat of her BMW.

  Tramp stamp. That had been Michelle’s bon mot.

  Markham smiled.

  He can see her now, on the beach, rising naked from the surf like Botticelli’s Venus—her skin pristine and glistening in the sun, her hips swaying as she walks toward him.

  “Where’s your clamshell, Venus?” he asks. He is naked, too, lying on the sand. Michelle kneels over him and kisses his lips. She tastes salty.

  “I think it’s an oyster shell,” she says, and reaches behind him and clicks on an old-school-style boom box—Blue Öys-ter Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

  “That’s right,” he says, then kisses her again. “Seventies and eighties all the way, baby. That’s
where we belong. Another world. Another time.”

  “I miss you,” she whispers.

  “I miss you, too.”

  A wave of sadness passed through him, and he opened his eyes.

  He sat there well into the night, adrift on an ocean of tattooed flesh and feeling more lost than ever.

  Chapter 22

  Wednesday, April 12

  It was still raining, and Markham spent the morning at the Resident Agency updating Sentinel and studying the Rodriguez and Guerrera file. The FBI had already questioned Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez about a possible connection between their son and Randall Donovan, but not about Billy Canning. Markham had insisted on handling the Rodriguezes himself. He felt he should be the one to inform them their son had been murdered by a serial killer, but more important, felt he should be the one to ask them about their son’s sexuality.

  Of course, there had been nothing in the case file to indicate that the young man might have been a homosexual. However, Markham needed to exclude that possibility for himself before he could move forward with the victim profile. He also felt he had a good bead on the Hispanic culture from his stint in Tampa—and unless the Rodriguezes were an unusually enlightened family of Catholics, he had a feel- ing they wouldn’t take kindly to an implication their son might have been gay.

  It was a slim possibility, Markham thought; but nonetheless, that line of questioning needed to be handled delicately. He decided Mrs. Rodriguez would be the best bet—would be the most receptive to him—but still he needed to catch her alone, while her husband was at work. The case file said she had a part-time job in the mornings, which meant she would be home this afternoon when the kids got back from school.

  Besides, Markham wanted to determine for himself if Mrs. Rodriguez might be hiding something—not just from him, but also from her husband.

  Markham drove first to the Rodriguezes’ old apartment in Fox Run—got a sense of the layout and gazed up through the rain at the large streetlights that peppered the parking lots. They looked out of place, an afterthought in the rundown, gang-infested neighborhood, but told Markham the property would’ve been well lit at night. Moreover, the apartment complex had too many balconies. It was raining on the night Rodriguez disappeared, but there still would’ve been a lot of people around to see the killer waiting. And there was only one entrance in and out of the place—too risky for Vlad to take him here.